Folk-lorist Finds A Revival

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32313, 3 June 1970, Page 8

Folk-lorist Finds A Revival

The phenomenon of the urban revival of oldtime, traditional or folk music is almost a universal one, certainly as far as the Englishspeaking world is concerned.

This has been a discovery of one of the greatest United Kingdom authorities on folk music, A. L. (“Bert”) Lloyd; who was brought to New Zealand to take part in the national folk festival at the Wellington Polytechnic last week-end. “This has occurred in the United States, in Britain, in Australia and in New Zealand,” he said. “It has not happened in South Africa, where the settlers of British descent were mostly alienated fhom folk traditions from the start.”

He said that in England alone there were some 600 folk-song clubs up and down the country, “mostly in the Upstairs rooms of pubs, with audiences varying from several hundreds to two or three score.” Mr Lloyd added: "Everybody thought it was just a bobby-sox craze when it started 20 years ago, but there’s no sign of it fading. In the United States it may have faded a bit, but not in England." Mr Lloyd, short, pale, iniddle-aged and rotund, needed no invitation to discuss the reason for his visit. He denied that the study and practice of folk-singing was a hobby, but admitted that with him it had started that way.

In the depression years, working on a sheep-station in Australia he had become fascinated with the old ballads, and had started a collection which now was possibly the world's most detailed. Back in England he had carried this on, expanding his studies to take in the folk-music of the Arabic, Moslem and other worlds. “Two or three weeks ago I went back to one of the Australian stations I used to work on,” he said. “It’s about 20 miles west of Condoblin, in I New South Wales. The Australian Broadcasting Commission sent a television crew with me to dog my footsteps • for two or three days. “This was not uninteresting, though it took time. The aim was to make a programme on the Australian search for identity—to look at whether the old bushwhacker mythology was applicable to our age or not.” Asked if he could analyse the Australian interest in folklore, he said: “Australians have • great -sentiment for their myth of independence and all that—and at the same time a consciousness of the fact that year by year Australian life has become more and more urbanised, complaisant on the one hand, and conformist on the other. "The. nostalgia comes from the fact that they’re looking back from a position of a certain complacency on the dashing past and wishing that they could reconstruct it.” In England, Mr Lloyd says, there has been a further development He has been specialising in collecting in the field of industrial folk-

lore—the songs of miners and i textile workers,, and those of] related industries. “We seem to have much of this that we didn’t know we had,” Mr Lloyd said. “We thought of our folklore tradition as a rural one, but in the last 20 years we’ve discovered, though we’re only scratching the surface still, that we have great riches of industrial folklore.” Mr Lloyd describes himself as a split personality. The research and scientific side keeps his family poor, he says. “So, to pull tny bankbalahce out of the red, 1 do a certain amount of singing in folk-song clubs or in concerts.” At the festival he was engaged in both capacities, giving serious talks in the afternoon and "singing for his supper” at the evening concerts.

He has written books on the music of the Americas, a collection devoted to English

and Scottish miners’ songs and ballads and a short panorama of English folksong called “The Singing Englishmen.” His most recent book, “The Folksong In England,” is “a kind of extension” of the previous work.

Apart from these he has written many articles and given many brodacasts on specific music. His immediate task on returning to England Will be the production of a 60-minute programme for the 8.8. C. “The billing will be unpopular, I’m afraid. It’s on funeral laments all over the world, from Cambodia to Ireland, and from the Orinoco to Finland.”

Unfortunately, he did not feel himself qualified to give a judgment on New Zealand [folk music. He arrived on Friday night, left by air on Monday, and had not been ihere before. But he said he was impressed with what he heard during the week-end.