The Roots: The Island that Sang before Knowing It Sang (13th century–1950)

called "British music" that deserved special attention, there existed in the British Isles a musical tradition of more than a thousand years that had no official name, that did not need records or radio or a recording industry to survive, and that traveled by word of mouth — from mother to daughter, from tavern to tavern, from town to town — with the silent persistence of the things that people need to live.

That tradition — English folk in its broadest sense — is the invisible foundation on which everything that came after was built. The Beatles would not have existed without skiffle, and skiffle would not have existed without the medieval ballads that Cecil Sharp found in the Cotswolds at the beginning of the 20th century. The history of English music is the history of a country that has been singing without stopping for centuries, without always knowing that what it sang mattered.

Medieval Ballads: The Oral Archive

English musical folklore has its origins in medieval ballads and in the figure of the troubadour, who was the one who added melody to stories.

English medieval ballads were documents: narratives of historical events, of love tragedies, of family vendettas, of supernatural encounters with fairies and spirits, sung to simple melodies that made memorization and oral transmission easier. They were not art in the sense that the Renaissance would give to that word — they did not aspire to immortality or individual authorship. They were functional: they served to remember, to narrate, to collectively process the experiences of the community.

The name Child Ballads refers to a collection of 305 popular ballads from England and Scotland compiled by Francis James Child during the second half of the nineteenth century, published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), a work of 2,500 pages.

Among those 305 ballads is "Barbara Allen" — the story of unrequited love that ends in a double death — which was the most popular folk song in the British Isles for centuries, with hundreds of regional variants. There is "Greensleeves", whose melody is so ancient that it is mistakenly attributed to King Henry VIII. There are "Scarborough Fair" and "The Water is Wide" and "Danny Boy" — songs that the English-speaking world recognizes without necessarily knowing where they come from.

What all these ballads share is a specific poetic structure — the ballad quatrain, with alternating lines of eight and six syllables — and a way of treating the darkest themes of human experience (murder, abandonment, betrayal, death) with a narrative objectivity that makes them more unsettling, not less. The English ballad does not weep: it describes. And it is that description without moral judgment that Bob Dylan learned when he came to the Child Ballads as a young man, and that Fairport Convention reimagined in the nineteen sixties.

Victorian Parlour Music and the Music Hall

The industrial nineteenth century transformed English popular music in the same way it transformed everything else: it took people out of the countryside and brought them to the cities, dissolved the rural communities where oral tradition was passed down, and created new forms of urban entertainment for the working masses who needed leisure after twelve-hour shifts in the factories.

The music hall — the English equivalent of the French music-hall that the France series already described — was the institution that channelled that need. The first music hall venues appeared in London in the 1850s, and by the end of the nineteenth century there were thousands of them across England: spaces where audiences drank and smoked while comic singers, acrobats, illusionists and "serio-comics" performed — artists who blended humour with sentimental emotion.

Marie Lloyd — born Matilda Alice Victoria Wood in Hoxton, East London, in 1870 — was the queen of the music hall: a working-class artist who sang for the working class about the working class, with a double-edged humour that Victorian authorities found inappropriate and that audiences found a perfectly accurate description of their own lives. Her songs — "A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good", "My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)" — are chronicles of the poor urban life of Victorian London, told with the honesty of someone who had lived it.

The brass bands — the brass instrument bands that factories and mines in the north of England formed with their workers — were the other musical tradition of the industrial nineteenth century: the community music of the mining communities of Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands, which survived the disappearance of the mines and remains alive today in competitions that bring together bands from across the north of England every year.

Cecil Sharp and the Folk Revival

In the early twentieth century, a musician and folklorist named Cecil James Sharp undertook the most important project of English folk music collection in history: he travelled through the rural areas of the Cotswolds, Somerset and Appalachia — where English immigrants had carried their songs centuries earlier — recording and transcribing melodies that were on the verge of permanent disappearance.

The dance styles Sharp encountered in the Cotswolds represented a thriving tradition of music and dance that was kept alive in rural areas.

Sharp co-founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911 and published collections of folk songs that became the reference canon for the entire next generation. His work was ambivalent: on one hand he preserved melodies that would otherwise have disappeared; on the other, he chose the "pure" versions and discarded those he considered contaminated by urbanisation, constructing an idealised image of rural folk that did not completely correspond to reality.

But his legacy was real: without Sharp's collections, the English folk revival of the sixties — with Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Steeleye Span — would not have had the material on which to build.

The Classical Tradition: Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams

While Sharp was rescuing rural folk music, English composers of the classical tradition were building something different but equally important: a specifically English concert music that took folk melodies and processed them with the tools of art composition.

Edward Elgar — born in Broadheath in 1857 — was the first to produce orchestral music that sounded specifically English and not like a derivative of the German tradition: his Enigma Variations (1899) and his Pomp and Circumstance marches — of which number 1 is known throughout the world as "Land of Hope and Glory" — established the sound of English imperial solemnity.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was the composer who best synthesized folk and classical tradition: he took the melodies that Sharp had collected and processed them with the tools of Debussy and Ravel — whom he had studied under in Paris — to create an orchestral music that was simultaneously ancient and modern. His "The Lark Ascending" (1914) — the violin singing the song of the lark over the English countryside — is the classical music work most loved by the English public according to all surveys.

Gustav Holst — whose grandfather was Swedish but who was completely English in his training and in his spirit — produced in "The Planets" (1916) the most influential orchestral suite in twentieth-century English music: seven movements, each corresponding to a planet and its astrological character, which invented the sound of the symphonic epic that John Williams and Hans Zimmer would use decades later in Hollywood film scores.

The War Years and the BBC

The Second World War had a paradoxical effect on English popular music: it created it. The BBC — founded in 1922 — became during the war the institution that unified English musical taste: its programming reached every household with a radio, and what the BBC chose to broadcast defined what the English listened to.

The singer Vera Lynn — "The Forces' Sweetheart" — was the artist who most perfectly embodied the musical spirit of the war: her "We'll Meet Again" and "The White Cliffs of Dover" were the anthems of English civilian resistance, songs that promised a better future when the present meant bombings and rationing. She died in June 2020, at the age of one hundred and three.

The war also brought American jazz — with the American soldiers who arrived in England in 1942 and 1943, with their records and their ways of dancing — and the swing of the English big bands that imitated it. And in the years that followed, something more would arrive: rhythm and blues, rock and roll, the records of Chuck Berry and Little Richard that sailors brought over from America.

A generation of English teenagers would listen to them and would never be the same again.

Editorial note: Cecil Sharp found in the American Appalachians — in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina — songs that English settlers had brought with them in the seventeenth century and that had survived intact for three hundred years in the isolation of the mountains. Songs that had already vanished from oral memory in England lived on perfectly preserved on the porches of American mountain homes. The English folk tradition was kept alive in America better than in England. When Sharp brought them back home — when he published them and taught them in English schools — he was repatriating something that his own country had let go of without realising it. It is one of the most beautiful ironies in musical history: that English folk music needed to cross the Atlantic and return in order to be remembered.

Editorial selection

Top 10 of English Musical Roots

1. 1

   Barbara Allen

   traditional ballad

   The most popular folk song in the British Isles for centuries. Hundreds of regional variants. The English ballad structure in its purest form: description without judgment, death without sentimentality.

   15th–19th centuries
2. 2

   The Lark Ascending

   Ralph Vaughan Williams

   The classical music work most beloved by the English public. Folk and classical tradition in their most perfect synthesis: the lark and the English countryside transformed into violin.

   1914
3. 3

   We'll Meet Again

   Vera Lynn

   The anthem of English civil resistance during World War II. The song an entire generation sang when they did not know if they would see their loved ones again.

   1939
4. 4

   The Planets (suite)

   Gustav Holst

   The most influential English orchestral work of the 20th century. The sound of the symphonic epic that Hollywood would adopt decades later. Mars, Venus, Jupiter: the universe in music from a composer from Cheltenham.

   1916
5. 5

   Scarborough Fair

   traditional ballad

   The song that Simon & Garfunkel would bring to the world in 1966, but which has roots in the English medieval tradition. The perfect example of folk survival: passed by word of mouth for centuries before reaching the studio.

   immemorial
6. 6

   My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)

   Marie Lloyd

   The chronicle of the poor urban life of Victorian London sung with the humor of someone who has lived it. Music hall at its most honest and most popular.

   1919
7. 7

   Greensleeves

   anonymous

   The oldest melody in the English folk repertoire that the world recognizes. Wrongly attributed to King Henry VIII. Five hundred years of history in a single sixteen-bar melody.

   16th century
8. 8

   Enigma Variations

   Edward Elgar

   The first moment English orchestral music sounded specifically English. Elgar inventing the sound of British grandeur that Vaughan Williams and Holst would later develop.

   1899
9. 9

   Geordie

   Child ballad

   One of the most dramatic Child Ballads: the man condemned to the gallows and the woman who travels to London to save him. The narrative structure of the English ballad taken to its maximum dramatic tension.

   17th century
10. 10

    Brass Band Tradition

    northern bands

    The community music of the mines and factories of northern England. It survived the disappearance of the industries that created it. A sonic document of the northern working class that continues to compete every year.

    19th century–today

Next chapter — England Series: Skiffle and Beat — Lonnie Donegan, the first groups from Liverpool and London and how American rhythm and blues lit the fire that produced the Beatles.