Englishness is the final frontier of world music.' - Simon Emmerson, head man of The Imagined Village

Every age re-invents the past to its own fancy. When Edwardian song collector Cecil Sharp roamed England, he imagined the country's history as a rural idyll, filled with flower meadows and genial shepherds, even though the songs he found were frequently about poverty, death and fornication with faeries.

Later, when the rock generation embraced the folk tradition, it was precisely these sexual and supernatural elements that appealed to singers and players like Anne Briggs, Fairport Convention and Robert Plant. Albion became, as it was to William Blake, a land of mystery and wonder. Later, in the 1980s, with acts like Billy Bragg, The Levellers and The Pogues, folk became a defiant snub to an authoritarian government.

The resurgence of folk in the new century, a hundred years after Cecil Sharp became riveted by the sight of Morris dancers, remains a work in progress. Already, though, new times are finding fresh resonance within folk's age-old contours. The music's darker strains, its murder ballads and pirate yarns, have been pulled to the fore - witness the recent Rogue's Gallery project - while in an age of corporate governance, the fact that folk is not 'owned' by anybody is cheering.

Folk has also become an inevitable part of the current search for English identity. That's English as opposed to British, for once Wales and Scotland had reclaimed their flags and history - a process accelerated by an Eighties government largely elected by England that rode roughshod across the lands across the border - it was only a matter of time before the St. George's flag superseded the Union Jack.

But what is Englishness? That question has already provoked a swathe of books, mostly by Tory diehards - Roger Scruton's England, An Elegy and Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain for example - though Billy .......
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Englishness is the final frontier of world music.' - Simon Emmerson, head man of The Imagined Village

Every age re-invents the past to its own fancy. When Edwardian song collector Cecil Sharp roamed England, he imagined the country's history as a rural idyll, filled with flower meadows and genial shepherds, even though the songs he found were frequently about poverty, death and fornication with faeries.

Later, when the rock generation embraced the folk tradition, it was precisely these sexual and supernatural elements that appealed to singers and players like Anne Briggs, Fairport Convention and Robert Plant. Albion became, as it was to William Blake, a land of mystery and wonder. Later, in the 1980s, with acts like Billy Bragg, The Levellers and The Pogues, folk became a defiant snub to an authoritarian government.

The resurgence of folk in the new century, a hundred years after Cecil Sharp became riveted by the sight of Morris dancers, remains a work in progress. Already, though, new times are finding fresh resonance within folk's age-old contours. The music's darker strains, its murder ballads and pirate yarns, have been pulled to the fore - witness the recent Rogue's Gallery project - while in an age of corporate governance, the fact that folk is not 'owned' by anybody is cheering.

Folk has also become an inevitable part of the current search for English identity. That's English as opposed to British, for once Wales and Scotland had reclaimed their flags and history - a process accelerated by an Eighties government largely elected by England that rode roughshod across the lands across the border - it was only a matter of time before the St. George's flag superseded the Union Jack.

But what is Englishness? That question has already provoked a swathe of books, mostly by Tory diehards - Roger Scruton's England, An Elegy and Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain for example - though Billy .......
more