Folk music is still very much alive and kicking

As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition’ I say, count me in. It’s a challenging subject, not often trodden with aplomb. I wasn’t even dissuaded when the first line on the inner jacket — ‘This is the first ever book about song collectors…’ — caused me to wonder what those multiple volumes cluttering up my groaning shelves were.

Michael Church could have started with Mary Beth Hamilton’s admirable study of blues collectors, In Search of the Blues (2007), an excellent template. Instead, the five-book checklists at the end of all 27 chapters of Musics Lost and Found contain few of the books I would have expected to see, given that enticing subtitle and the (mostly 20th-century) collectors Church has cherry-picked to exemplify what is a somewhat tendentious thesis: ‘We may be seeing folk music’s “end of history”.