Who are ‘the folk’ in folk music? This book traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period of industrialization from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary range of scholarship, The Folk examines the political dimensions of a recurrent longing for folk culture and how it was called upon for radical and reactionary ends at the apex of empire. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, nationality, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Ross Cole provides us with a biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination, and the archaeology of a landscape directing flows of global populism to this day.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Lost Voices
1. Collecting Culture
Science, Technology, & Reification
2. A Geography of the Forgotten
Vernacular Music & Modernity’s Discontents
3. Utopian Community
Nostalgia from Marx to Morris
4. Difference and Belonging
On the Songs of Black Folk
5. Soul through the Soil
Cecil Sharp & the Specter of Fascism
Coda
Blood Sings: A Soundtrack for the Alt-Right
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Ross Cole is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. His writing on a range of topics appears in leading journals including Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and ASAP/Journal.
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