Beginners’ Guides:
English Folk Song

Folk Song

There is no solid agreement about what is and isn’t a folk song. The term was first coined in the mid 19th Century to describe the music of ‘the people’, which really just meant the songs people knew and chose to sing for their own and other’s entertainment in a world without recorded music, TV or internet – they came from all kinds of sources – professional and amateur songwriters, plays, song sheets, books and more but often people learned them from one another. When we talk about folk songs we usually mean traditional songs, often many years old, where the known authorship of the song is of far less importance to the people who choose to sing it than its content. Many folk songs began as authored, printed sources but now are of anonymous or forgotten authorship. They have often been passed from singer to singer aurally as part of a continuing oral tradition.

English Folk Song

Like folk song in Ireland and Scotland, English folk song draws on ancient ballads, popular song, songs from plays and pleasure gardens, the music hall and music composed by the people who sang it. This makes it very difficult to categorise what is and isn’t a folk song, and in the past collectors like Cecil Sharp were heavily biased toward rural material with no known authorship. This skews the picture somewhat, and it is fair to say that English folk song is drawn from a broad range of sources, linked by the common theme that the songs that have come down to us were popular within their community. Though some material deals with local and specifically English events or themes, songs popular in England were also popular in other parts of Britain and circulated aurally and by print, so there is no real separation between songs in the English language, rather this document reflects the types of folk song that might be found in England.