After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s passion — I am none the wiser as to why folk song collectors assumed that a man singing in a pub for free drinks in, say, 1890 or 1920 was de facto a folk singer? A singer of folk songs, yes. A folk singer, maybe not. Such men were ‘professional’ singers of popular songs. They sung what people wished to hear, for recompense: a pint.
If a collector was lucky — and they often weren’t — he might hear on a particular evening the weal and woe and muck and mire of ‘auld ballets’, but they would be buried amid what the 19th-century ballad editor Francis James Child called ‘a veritable dunghill’ of broadside ballads and music-hall pastiches.
The original collectors knew this. According to the godfather of English folk song, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, ‘the songs sung by old topers in public houses were of one sort; those sung by milkmaids were of another’. That quotation does not appear in Roud’s door-stopper of a history, even though it is referenced in a book to which he recently contributed a foreword (Martin Graebe’s As I Walked Out).
These are not facetious concerns. As Roud duly demonstrates, the vast majority of what we know about English folk song is based on the activities of a motley crew of late Victorian and Edwardian collectors, who seem to have done most of their collecting down the pub or by mail — two places where they were unlikely to trip over illiterate knitters in the sun. Here is a gaping hole at the heart of modern folk song scholarship — the world the indefatigable Roud inhabits, having been scampering down that hole for a decade and a half, keen to carry on digging.
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