Folk music is of profound importance, as I have argued at length. I won’t repeat the arguments I’ve advanced elsewhere, but it’s worth briefly considering one of the philosophical genealogies that makes folk music especially vital today.
There is something (relevant to the importance of folk music) that many people don’t understand about modernity. Modernity itself is a cultural superstructure, and this cultural superstructure is deeply paradoxical in that it operates to de-culture those who live under its spell. Modernity uproots and then unroots its victims, leaving them severed from received sources of meaning and adrift in a cultural vacuum, whilst claiming that it’s emancipated them from the tyranny of roots. This, as many will know, is ultimately the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau, principally via his two most influential works, The Social Contract and Emile, advanced a view that had been bubbling under the surface throughout the so-called scientific revolution and early Enlightenment of the previous century. This view held that man could become free insofar as he was unshackled from authoritative direction and moral restraints. Discarding the accumulated culture and wisdom-depository of his civilisation, man could create a new world of negative liberties based upon a weird admixture of romantic primitivism and technology-dependence. Ultimately, by being emancipated from his inherited civilisation, man would no longer be prevented from becoming—as we children of Rousseau would say today—his ‘authentic self.’
Until modernity, it had been the shared assumption of our civilisation that man became free by being inducted into his civilisational inheritance, incrementally initiated into his society’s moral web of relations, and trained in the habits to so participate—all by which his personhood would unfold. By such a process, man was liberated from the slavery of ignorance and appetite. Rousseau, by turning this process on its head in his popular and readable output, took the amassing assumptions of modernity that were entertained only by an elite cognoscenti and scattered them among the populations of the West. The results have been what the early traditionalists—especially Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre—predicted they would be: social uprootedness, moral enslavement, and civilisational fatigue.
We live in the final chapter of the process of civilisational decay that is modernity, and whatever is coming to replace modernity will likely be much worse: a combination of arbitrary authoritarianism and hyper-technologized totalitarianism, severed from any overriding conception of the good in relation to a coherent account of human nature. So, what can we do?
I write the following answer without flippancy and with sincerity: we can listen to folk music.
Folk music, real folk music—not the folk-pop produced by the goliath industry that’s all but replaced musical creativity—offers its listeners a pathway of initiation back into the stories, sentiments, and preoccupations of our ancestors. A tradition that’s continued by local bands that play midweek in small-town pubs, folk music is deep culture, if not high culture. There are many ways to break the spell of modernity over one’s life, to begin the process of recovering one’s civilisational inheritance—so as to be possessed by it—but I want to recommend folk music as one that is particularly accessible and enjoyable.
To those who opt for the ‘Burkean contract’—namely that of a cultural trust between the dead, the living, and the unborn—few among the great conservers of the folk music tradition have rendered such a generous service as Shirley Collins. And whilst I doubt that she would like to be numbered among those in the counter-revolution, that’s nonetheless where she stands by virtue of her innumerable achievements on behalf of our cultural inheritance. Indeed, occasionally she comes out with statements that support this assessment: “If the countries lose their identity and music,” she recently said, “it’s just going to be so bland and so boring everywhere.” Amen.
As a young lady, Collins had an extraordinary, evocative voice that recollected the centuries of cultural experience and transmitted them, like an echo down the ages, to our modern-day ears. She knows, as well, that this is what she was doing, as she commented in one interview from 2015:
Singing English folk songs is as crucial to me as walking the Sussex landscape, where the footprints of our ancestors are everywhere. When I sing, I feel past generations standing behind me—and I hope I’m a conduit for them—those farm labourers and their wives who kept the songs going for us. The songs are social history and their beauty and power undeniable.
In the late 1950s, at age twenty-four, Collins travelled across the Atlantic by boat in order to hear and record the songs of the Bible Belt, journeying across Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. (While there, she befriended the then-unknown hill country blues singer, Mississippi Fred McDowell.) Later, she recalled how she had a particularly frightening encounter with a free-church pastor who denounced her for having what he deemed hair too short for a woman—she only just escaped the angry mob that was soon whipped up.
In the 1960s, she became a totemic figure of the English folk revival. But later, at age forty-three, she stopped singing and vanished from the stage. Her then husband, Ashley Hutchings (of Fairport Convention), who instrumentally accompanied her on stage each evening, had begun an affair with an actress. The woman in question, who wanted Collins out of the picture, took to attending their concerts and standing at the front of the audience, often wearing his jumper, seemingly in an attempt to crush Collins’ spirit. It worked. Each night, as her heart increasingly broke, so her voice began to fail. She recalls how sometimes she would open her mouth to sing and nothing would sound out, so full of grief was she.
There’s no doubt that there was something numinous about the songs of Shirley Collins: still today, those old recordings transport the listener into the enchanted worldview of our ancestors. As my family and I drive through the surrounding countryside on our various errands, we often listen to Hares on the Mountain, the Cambridgeshire May Carol, the tragic Barbara Allen, The Tailor and the Mouse (my children’s favourite), The Bonny Irish Boy, Sweet England, Dearest Dear, Love is Pleasin’, and others. Perhaps my favourites, however, are from the extraordinary 1971 “No Roses” album that came out of Collins’ team-up with Albion Country Band, especially Murder of Maria Marten and The White Hare.
Each of these songs tells a tale and invites the listener into the narrative. Murder of Maria Marten, for example, tells the story of a Suffolk molecatcher’s daughter who was murdered in 1827 by her lover, William Corder, in a remote barn where he shot her with a pistol. Her body was discovered after Maria’s ghost purportedly appeared to her stepmother and disclosed the location of her corpse. When the place of which the ghost spoke was searched, the decomposing body was found. Corder’s green handkerchief was around her neck, which was likely used to strangle her after she was shot through the abdomen.
After Corder was hanged for his crime, his body was cut down and mutilated, and then exposed to the public, with 5,000 people queuing to view the maimed cadaver. The case fascinated the nation for many years, with evermore rumours emerging out of the hullabaloo, and with great interest paid to the spooky aspects of the account. Plays of the story were put on, and its various tellings evolved into much valued cautionary tales. By 1908, folk singer Joseph Taylor—someone especially respected by the 1960s folk revivalists—was recording old songs about the murder. (I knew none of this until I listened to Collins’ song and was keen to discover more.)
Some of the songs Collins sung went back to the 15th century, many of which she, alongside only a few others, kept alive—like the lovely Cherry Tree Carol, a relic of pre-Reformation English popular devotion to the Holy Family. Her portfolio offers an incredible cultural education. So, if you hadn’t heard of Shirley Collins until reading this article, well, I suppose all I can say is: you’re welcome.
Collins, as I said, disappeared, leaving behind a treasury of folk songs. She can be credited with preventing many these songs from being lost to the national consciousness entirely. Her retreat from the stage happened in 1978, after two decades of reminding us that our history ought not to be repudiated but cherished. Then, she tried to re-emerge four years later, only to find that singing these songs was still too painful—she simply couldn’t do it. Soon, she wasn’t even able to sing them alone at home anymore. As she subsequently said, “Really, I’d lost who I was.” Thereafter, she withdrew into shadows altogether, and it turns out that she spent the following years mostly working in an Oxfam charity shop.
In 2016, after nearly four decades of silence, Shirley Collins reappeared. She released a whole album, entitled Lodestar. She has since brought out another album, Heart’s Ease, in 2020, and continues to sing and perform, now at age eighty-seven. Her voice is very different to that of her earlier life. It’s more limited and lower (she has joked that she sounds like Tom Waits). Her singing, though, is rich, melancholic, and possesses a certain confidence that only comes with age. The lyrics of some these albums’ songs are centuries old, and many focus on the topic with which so much of her music has engaged throughout her entire broken career: death.
Collins’ songs have played a considerable role in my journey into the spiritual heart of deep England. Her music can be appreciated by anyone, but I think it’s of especial importance to those who have a share in the Sceptred Isle (which, of course, is half the world). The gifts she’s given to us by her guardianship of England’s old folk songs should also be seen as an invitation to all peoples to recover their own folk music traditions. There is no universal folk music, just as there is no universal common culture. The notion of universal common culture is a rationalistic fiction, to which ‘pop music’ clings like a parasite—which is why it’s so devoid of meaning. Folk music, then, is always particular, and thus an afront to the grey, abstract, globalist, ‘post-historical,’ spectral menace that is modernity.
To return to my opening theme, I am of the firm conviction that you cannot be free if you do not know yourself, and your self is not an isolated thing, but subsists as a personal force unfolding historically out of a community. Put simply: no sense of history and no sense of place = no knowledge of self. We must break Rousseau’s spell, and this is no small task. You must begin somewhere, though. So, my initial suggestion is to make a cup of tea, open a window, and put on some Shirley Collins.
