Celtic Folk Music

As folk traditions decline, there is often a swing and a conscious effort to resuscitate them. Folk revivals also involve collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults.

The folk revival of the 1950s in Britain and America had something of this character. In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Britain, where at a Working Men's Club in the remote County Durham mining village of Tow Law he met two other seminal figures: A.L.'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who were performing folk music for the locals there.

Lloyd was a colourful figure who had travelled the world and worked at such varied occupations as sheep-shearer in Australia and shanty-man on a whaling ship. MacColl, born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life. MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs from his mother.

The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is credited with being the point at which the British roots revival began. The two colleagues went back to London where they formed the Ballads and Blues Club which eventually became renamed the Singers' Club and was possibly the first of what became known as folk clubs. It closed in 1991.

As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America. It is sometimes claimed that the earliest folk festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 1928, in Asheville, Carolina, founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

Sidmouth Festival began in 1954, and the Cambridge Folk Festival began in 1965. The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The club tents allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or 15 minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.

Brittany's Folk revival began in the 1950s with the "bagadoù" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame through Alan Stivell 's work since the mid-1960s.

In the 1970's the band Silly Wizard revived many of the old scottish and Irish folk songs and Alan Stewart wrote and performed an album of new songs in the folk tradition. 

A similar stylistic shift, without using the folk music name, has occurred with the phenomenon of Celtic music, which in many cases is based on an amalgamation of Irish traditional music, Scottish traditional music, and other traditional musics associated with lands in which Celtic languages were spoken; so Breton music and Galician music are often included in the genre.

Britain and Wales who have a similar traditional folk style are often included in the Celtic tag due to the migration of so many Scottish or Irish people to England and Wales and vice versa.

Folk bands such as Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Alan Stivell, Mr. Fox and Steeleye Span who saw the electrification of traditional musical forms as a means to reach a far wider audience, have stayed true in spirit to Celtic Roots and their efforts have been largely recognised for what they are by even the most die-hard of purists. 

Pipes, drums and fiddles usually give Celtic music its "feel" and although up tempo jigs are part of it, most people will think of Celtic music as slow and haunting as was demonstrated in the soundtrack from Celine Dion for the film Titanic.

The popular Riverdance tour with its astounding and energetic interpretions of folk dancing brought back an interest (which was never that far gone) in the tradition of folk songs that are still taught in schools and bring tears to the eyes and memories to the tongues of the older generations in Britain, Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel among others show a strong influence in their music from Celtic traditional music.

History of Folk Music - Humour