Who are "the folk" in folk music? This book traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period of industrialization from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary range of scholarship, The Folk examines the political dimensions of a recurrent longing for folk culture and how it was called upon for radical and reactionary ends at the apex of empire. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, nationality, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Ross Cole provides us with a biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination, and the archaeology of a landscape directing flows of global populism to this day.
The Folk Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination
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Reviews
"A gracefully written compelling account of the relationship between music and ideological constructions of ‘the folk’ in the UK and the US. A confident and illuminating book."—Sarah Hill, author of San Francisco and the Long 60s"With rich measures of eloquence and criticism, passion and witness, Ross Cole asks us to listen again to the songs of the folk, not because they were nostalgically lost to an imagined past, but rather because they still voice the imperative of lived-in worlds, past, present, and future."—Philip V. Bohlman, co-author with Johann Gottfried Herder of Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism