I think you might be forgiven for wondering if Steve Roud was partly in the business of rewriting Bert Lloyd (Lloyd and Vaughan Williams Reference Lloyd and Vaughan Williams1959 and Lloyd Reference Lloyd1967), first in Roud's New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (2012) and now in Folk Song in England. Indeed, the differences of approach taken by both experts is instructive. Lloyd, materialist and socialist as he was, is fundamentally a constructor of narrative. Roud, encyclopaedist extraordinaire – see for example the exhaustive, alphabetised guide (Roud Reference Roud2003) – is fundamentally a presenter of documented facts. While I would argue that both books and approaches are of their time, that does not entirely account for them.
Roud's book is organised in four parts. A short introduction lays out some basic definitions, but with a clear historical and historicising focus. This is followed by two chapters which chart the history of song collecting and study, and a third which looks at collecting the music (contributed by Roud's collaborator Julia Bishop, it is disappointing that the music gets almost as peremptory coverage as Lloyd gave it). Eight extended chapters then survey what we know of songs century by century, against a background of other vernacular musics of those centuries, and a final eight chapters discuss specific topics (religious singing, worksong, dialect, tradition, etc.). The century-by-century grouping is admittedly no more than an organising principle, but it works well enough. Throughout, the emphasis is on the activities (and some of the biography) of named individuals, whether writers, performers, collectors, commentators, etc. I find the book to be less concerned with folk song (whatever that is, as one seems bound to say) than with the individuals who in some way have contributed to its presence. The book's documentation is rigorous, with the material properly left to interpret itself; there's none of Lloyd's romanticism, apparent empathy or wishful thinking here, and the result is dutifully prosaic. There are naturally strengths in this approach, of course. In the coverage of West Gallery bands, for example (pp. 506ff.), Roud is zealously even-handed, and the impression left with the reader is not one of being enticed towards a particular partisan viewpoint. The same can be said for coverage of other potential controversies, while Roud warns of the dangers of over-interpretation: ‘what we have here is a classic example of a fairly widespread tendency for … “folk song”, to be used to support a wider social theory without detailed analysis of knowledge of the song evidence itself. This is not to deny the potential for song to function in oppositional scenarios … but this does not permit an assumption that it is always used in this way’ (p. 544). It is unfortunate, then, that the evidence for function and use is comparatively sparse.
There are weaknesses in Roud's approach too, though. A reader unfamiliar with the tradition might wonder whether this was music which was ever performed, or at least how that was done, for such details are not amenable to capture in verbal texts, and Roud is careful not to speculate. We do finally (i.e. at the very end of the book, where insignificant matters are normally covered) get two chapters on the mechanics of ‘the tradition’ and ‘the music’ (the latter by Julia Bishop) which do briefly address matters of performance, but a balance is markedly absent. It does not, then, present a fully rounded picture. Accurate reflection of the balance of existing documentation is not the same as accurate presentation of the balance of what matters to users, either then or now.
Other than the occasional admonition (such as quoted above), the book is largely an exercise in marshalling the historical evidence for the existence and social function of folk song. As such there is little to argue with, and as a result there is – little to argue with. That is unusual for an academic book, certainly, but then Roud's tome is aimed at the more general audience, for all its size. It seems to me odd that such an objectivising stance, and the rather dry, scholarly tone, is aimed at a mass readership, while the historical controversies are given no great weight and the author himself seems frequently transparent.
In all, and my nit-picking notwithstanding, this certainly represents a worthwhile endeavour. This is a book which will take its place beside Harker, Boyes, Lloyd, Gammon and the rest, provided one does not expect too much from it. The publisher's blurb ends with the description of ‘an absorbing and impeccably researched account that gives sonorous voice to England's musical past’. For absorbing writing, I think I'll stick with Lloyd and Boyes, while the sonority of voice finds no place here. However, as a reminder of the importance, execution and ordering of exhaustive research covering such a large temporal span, I can imagine few competitors.
