Origins in a Dutch television show in 1972 Though the merging of folk and rock music came from several sources, it is widely regarded that the success of "
The House of the Rising Sun" by British band
the Animals in 1964 was a catalyst, prompting
Bob Dylan to
go electric. In the same year,
the Beatles began incorporating overt folk influences into their music, most noticeably on the song "
I'm a Loser" from their
Beatles for Sale album. The Beatles and other
British Invasion bands, in turn, influenced the Californian band
the Byrds, who began playing folk-influenced material and
Bob Dylan compositions with rock instrumentation. The Beatles' late 1965 album,
Rubber Soul, contained a number of songs influenced by the American folk rock boom, such as "
Nowhere Man" and "
If I Needed Someone". During this period, a number of electric bands began to play rock versions of folk songs and folk musicians used electric musical instruments to play their own songs, including Dylan at the
Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965. Folk rock became an important genre among emerging English bands, particularly those in the London club scene towards the end of the 1960s. The
skiffle movement, to which many English musicians, including the Beatles, owed their origins as performers, meant that they were already familiar with American folk music As they emulated the guitar and drum based format that had crystallised as the norm for rock music, these groups often turned to American folk and folk rock as the focus of their sound and inspiration. Among these groups from 1967 were
Fairport Convention, who had enjoyed some modest mainstream success with three albums of material that was largely American in origin or style, before a radical change of direction in 1969 with their album
Liege & Lief, which came out of the encounter between American inspired folk rock and the products of the English
folk revival. The first English folk music revival had seen a huge effort to record and archive traditional English music by figures such as
Cecil Sharp and
Vaughan Williams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second revival in the period after the
Second World War, built on this work and followed a similar movement in America, to which it was connected by individuals like
Alan Lomax, who had fled to England in the era of
McCarthyism. Like the American revival, it was often overtly left wing in its politics, but, led by such figures as
Ewan MacColl and
A. L. Lloyd from the early 1950s, it also attempted to produce a distinctively English music that was an alternative to the American dominance of
popular culture, which was, as they saw it, displacing the traditional music of an increasingly urbanised and industrialised working class. Most important among their responses were the foundation of
folk clubs in major towns, starting with London where MacColl began the Ballads and Blues Club in 1953. These clubs were usually urban in location, but the songs sung in them often hearkened back to a rural pre-industrial past. In many ways this was the adoption of abandoned popular music by the middle classes. By the mid-1960s there were probably over 300 folk clubs in Britain, providing an important circuit for acts that performed traditional songs and tunes acoustically, where they could sustain a living by playing to a small but committed audience. This meant that there were, by the later 1960s, a group of performers with musical skill and knowledge of a wide variety of traditional songs and tunes. A number of groups who were part of the folk revival experimented with electrification in the mid-1960s. These included the unrecorded efforts of
Sweeney's Men from Ireland, the jazz folk group
Pentangle, who moved from purely acoustic instrumentation to introducing electric guitar on their later albums,
Eclection, who released one album in 1968, and the
Strawbs who developed from a bluegrass band into a "progressive Byrds" band by 1967. However, none provided a sustained or much emulated effort in this direction. Also products of the folk club circuit were
Sandy Denny who joined Fairport Convention as a singer in 1968 and
Dave Swarbrick, a fiddle player and session musician who reacted positively to the electric music he encountered while working with Fairport in 1969. The result was an extended interpretation of the song "
A Sailor's Life", which was released on their album
Unhalfbricking. This encounter sparked the interest of
Ashley Hutchings who began research in the
English Folk Dance and Song Society's library; the result was the band's seminal
Liege & Lief (1969) which combined traditional songs and tunes with some written by members of the band in a similar style, all played on a combination of electric instruments including Swarbrick's amplified fiddle, setting the template for British folk rock.
Heyday 1969–76 The rapid expansion of British folk rock that followed in the wake of
Liege & Lief in the 1970s came mainly from three sources. First were existing folk performers who now 'electrified', including
Mr. Fox, formed around the acoustic duo Bob and Carole Pegg, and Pentangle, who having previously recorded largely without electrification, produced a fourth album of entirely traditional material,
Cruel Sister, in 1970, performed very much in the British folk rock mould. Similarly, Swarbrick's former playing partner,
Martin Carthy, joined
Steeleye Span in 1971 to the astonishment of many in the folk music world.
Five Hand Reel, a band formed out of the remnants of Spencer's Feat, proved to be one of the more successful and influential folk rock bands. Releasing four albums with Topic/RCA records, they were popular in Europe, where they gave most of their performances. Unlike the 'English' genre of folk tunes prevalent in the other popular bands, Five Hand Reel performed Scots and Irish songs and won
Melody Makers "Folk Album of the Year" in 1975. Second were groupings created directly by the members or former members of Fairport Convention, which can be seen as the nexus from which a family of organisations or performers emerged. Sandy Denny's short-lived group
Fotheringay was one of these and Steeleye Span was another, the latter formed as a traditionally focussed, but essentially electric outfit, by Ashley Hutchings after his departure from Fairport in late 1969. He left Steeleye Span after three albums and eventually formed
the Albion Country Band, later the Albion Band, which broke up in 2002. The Albion Band in turn spawned one of the most musically talented British folk rock groups of the 1980s
Home Service, whose third album
Alright Jack (1985) is often seen as representing another artistic highpoint for the genre. A much smaller group of English bands were formed in emulation of existing folk rock bands. Most often the model seems to have been Steeleye Span, as it was for the Cambridge group
Spriguns of Tolgus, the Northumbrian band
Hedgehog Pie and the
Oyster Band, who started as the unpromising
Fiddler's Dram in 1978. Fiddler's Dram were often dismissed as "one hit wonders" for their single "Day Trip to Bangor", which peaked at no 3 in the UK and for their clear status as "Steeleye Span soundalikes". What was remarkable is that they proved to have a singer-songwriter of genuine talent in
Cathy Lesurf, and after she had left for the Albion Band in 1980 the remaining members regrouped as the Oyster Band (latterly Oysterband), an increasingly heavy and politically aware folk rock unit who produced some of the best work in the genre in the 1980s and 1990s, merging into the developing folk punk and independent scenes.
Decline and survival 1977–85 For a time electric folk threatened to break through to the mainstream, peaking in the early-to-mid-1970s when Steeleye Span had a Christmas Top 20 hit single ("Gaudete") in 1973 and another Top 5 hit in 1975 ("
All Around My Hat"). The album of the same name was their most commercially successful, reaching no. 5 in the UK album chart in the same year. By comparison Fairport Convention released few singles and made very little impact on the British charts, although their albums sold well in the early 1970s.
Liege & Lief reached no. 17 in 1969 and a later album,
Angel Delight made the Top 10 in 1971. Most of their career, from that point until they initially disbanded in 1979, was one of declining profile and sales. The same was generally true of other electric folk outfits. The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time to either abandon the genre or fight a losing struggle for survival. The reason is often said to be the rise of
punk rock, which reached a peak in 1977. It changed the ethos of popular music, overturning certainties about musicianship and songwriting and had no greater target than the old fashioned folk musicians of the preceding generation. All popular music trends have a generational problem as their audiences grow and might not be replaced, but for folk rock the discontinuity was very acute. One result was a further hybridisation with the development of
folk punk among younger acts in the later 1970s, some of which, like
the Pogues and
The Levellers, achieved some mainstream success. The early 1980s were the nadir of electric folk, when, in contrast to the mid-1970s only the Albion Band (with the associated Home Service) and the Oysterband remained as major exponents of the genre and this was perhaps their least productive period, although in part, at least, this was due to lack of major record company interest in the genre. Folk-rock has never been a major revenue earner for record companies, even in its 1970s heyday. As a consequence of this lack of interest the three Home Service albums released between 1984 and 1986 came out on three different independent labels (Jigsaw, Coda and Making Waves), which further dented their commercial prospects.
Resurgence 1985–present In the later 1980s, things began to look much more positive for the genre. Despite formally disbanding in 1979, Fairport Convention staged what were initially called "reunion" concerts annually from 1980, which eventually evolved into the
Cropredy Festival ("Fairport's Cropredy Convention") which remains (in 2022) a mainstay of the U.K. summer festival calendar and regularly attracts up to 20,000 attendees, by no means all of whom are Fairport Convention fans. When the band reformed in 1985 they were able to embark on increasingly lengthy and successful tours and produce a series of highly regarded albums. The reason for this recording revival was partly because they abandoned the mainstream record business, instead focusing on growing their own audience and producing records independently on their own labels (
Woodworm and
Matty Grooves), ironically a development which the punk and post-punk era had helped to accelerate. The Albion Band survived initially by becoming involved in theatre productions and, from 1993, by downsizing to a smaller acoustic outfit that could play the still extensive network of folk clubs and other smaller venues. This move was also significant in indicating the way in which electric folk personnel had become assimilated into the folk revival. Almost all the members of Fairport Convention have toured the folk club circuit solo or in smaller units and the line up at Cropredy includes as many acoustic acts as electric. In 1980, Steeleye Span's
Sails of Silver took a decisive move away from traditional songs. It was a commercial failure and their last album for six years as they became a part-time touring band. However, in 1986 they produced
Back in Line and since then, despite several line-up changes, they have continued to perform and have recorded eight more albums. Some bands like Stone Angel and
Jack the Lad, who had disbanded in the 1970s, had reformed and resumed a recording or touring career.
Impact on English rock music Hard rock and progressive rock bands such as
Led Zeppelin and
Jethro Tull incorporated elements of folk music in their music, though they are not considered part of the folk rock movement. Led Zeppelin had shared a stage with Fairport Convention at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in 1970.
Robert Plant and
Jimmy Page's interest in the genre was first evident in the recording of "
Gallows Pole" a traditional ballad on
Led Zeppelin III (1970), which stands out among their usual output of blues orientated rock. At this time they also wrote the ballad "
Poor Tom" which would surface on
Coda (1982). It is more subtly manifested in their most famous album
Led Zeppelin IV (1971), which contained elements of both American folk rock and English electric folk on '
Stairway to Heaven' and most obviously on '
The Battle of Evermore', on which
Sandy Denny had the distinction of being the only person ever to be invited to do guest vocals on a Led Zeppelin album. These influences would also appear on later albums, but reduced as the band returned to a hard rock sound from
Presence (1976) onwards. As Led Zeppelin moved away from electric folk, another long term survivor of the
British blues movement, Jethro Tull, began to move towards it.
Ian Anderson had produced Steeleye Span's album
Now We Are Six in 1974 and first demonstrated a clear interest in more traditional sounds on
Minstrel in the Gallery (1975), but it was in 1977 with the release of
Songs from the Wood (1977) that Anderson took the band into electric folk territory. All the songs on the album focused on rural life and, in addition to the normal electronic instruments and flute of the band, used mandolin, lute and a pipe organ. Two tracks, 'Hunting Girl' and particularly 'Velvet Green' followed the form of erotic folk
ballads, much suited to Anderson's song writing interests. Two more albums followed in a similar vein:
Heavy Horses (1978) and
Stormwatch (1979) to form a loose folk rock trilogy, before Anderson moved into more electronic territory at the beginning of the 1980s. Ironically it was at this point that
Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention would be the first of several members of that band to join Jethro Tull.
Electric and progressive folk Progressive folk developed in Britain in the mid-1960s partly as an attempt to elevate the artistic quality of the folk genre, but also as a response to diverse influences, often combining acoustic folk instruments with
jazz,
blues and
world music. As a result, it was already established in Britain, albeit a difficult to define and varied subgenre, before the advent of electric folk at the end of the 1960s. It can be seen as including performers such as
Donovan,
the Incredible String Band,
Pentangle,
Strawbs,
Nick Drake,
Roy Harper,
John Martyn and the original
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Some of this, particularly the Incredible String Band, has been seen as developing into the further subgenre of psych or
psychedelic folk. The advent of electric folk had profound effects on this developing strand of the folk genre. First, many existing acts, having avoided the American model of folk rock electrification from about 1965 now adopted it, most obviously Pentangle, Strawbs and acoustic duo Tyrannosaurus Rex which became the electric combo T-Rex. It also pushed progressive folk towards more traditional material. Acoustic performers
Dando Shaft and
Amazing Blondel, both beginning about this time, are examples of this trend. Examples of bands that remained firmly on the border between progressive folk and progressive rock are the short lived
Comus and, more successfully,
Renaissance, who combined folk and rock with elements of
classical music. While progressive folk as a genre continued into the late 1960s, it was overshadowed by electric folk and progressive rock, arguably, later to emerge in a new form. ==Derivatives==