British Folk Music Revival – From Cecil Sharp to Today’s Scene

Music |

7 November 2026

The British folk music revival is the name for two main waves of activity that brought traditional song and dance back into public life: a first revival of collectors between roughly 1890 and 1920, and a second, performer-led revival after 1945 that built the folk club circuit and led to folk rock. Both waves are documented by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which grew out of the collectors’ societies and still runs Cecil Sharp House in London. The music they rescued is still being sung, recorded and reworked by new artists in 2026.

The revival at a glance

First revival (about 1890 to 1920): collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote down songs and tunes from rural singers.
Key institutions: the Folk-Song Society (founded 1898) and the English Folk Dance Society (founded 1911) merged in 1932 to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society, with Vaughan Williams as its first president.
Second revival (about 1945 to 1969): singers including Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd turned the collected repertoire into a living, often political, performance tradition, centred on folk clubs.
Folk rock: in 1969 Fairport Convention recorded an album built entirely on traditional material and songs written in that style.
Today: a broad scene of festivals, clubs, labels and artists, from long-running events in Cambridge and Cropredy to younger performers reworking old ballads.

The online overview of the British folk revival traces collecting back further still, to printed collections such as John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651) and Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). The word “revival” therefore describes renewed bursts of interest rather than a single starting point.

The first revival and the song collectors

The first revival concentrated on transcribing songs from remaining traditional performers before, as the collectors saw it, they disappeared. The Folk-Song Society was founded in 1898; its early members included Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood and Frank Kidson, according to the EFDSS history timeline.

Cecil Sharp, a music teacher, became the best-known figure. His biography records that he first became aware of English folk music in 1899, when he saw the Headington Quarry Morris dancers near Oxford. In August 1903, staying with his friend the Reverend Charles Marson in Hambridge, Somerset, he heard the gardener John England sing “The Seeds of Love”. The EFDSS timeline gives 1903 as the year Sharp collected his first folk songs in Somerset and the year Vaughan Williams also began collecting. Sharp went on to gather more than four thousand songs in South-West England and, with his assistant Maud Karpeles, in the southern Appalachian mountains of the United States. His notebooks and manuscripts are catalogued as the Cecil James Sharp Collection at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Sharp published Folk Songs from Somerset in five volumes between 1904 and 1909 and founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911. In 1906 the Board of Education sanctioned the teaching of folk songs in schools. The collectors’ work also fed directly into composition: Vaughan Williams used folk material in works such as the Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 and the English Folk Song Suite (1923), and Percy Grainger and George Butterworth drew on their own field discoveries.

A contested legacy

The first revival has its critics. The historian David Harker, among others, has argued that the collectors romanticised rural life, ignored urban and industrial song, including music hall and work songs, and bowdlerised texts. Most collectors also preferred pen and paper to recording equipment, even though Grainger experimented with phonograph recordings from 1905, so many details of performance style were lost. Those criticisms sit alongside the plain fact that thousands of songs survive in print and manuscript because the collectors wrote them down.

The second revival and the folk clubs

After the First World War the nationalist impulse behind collecting faded, and American popular music grew dominant in Britain. In 1932 the two societies merged into the EFDSS, and in 1930 Cecil Sharp House had opened in Camden Town as a memorial to Sharp, who died in 1924.

The second revival had a different character. Its leading figures, the Salford-born Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd, were both involved in trade unionism and socialist politics, and where Sharp had looked to the countryside, Lloyd in particular championed industrial work songs and sea shanties. The BBC Home Service programme As I Roved Out, built on field recordings made by Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis between 1952 and 1958, brought traditional singers to a national audience. Source singers such as Sam Larner, Harry Cox and Walter Pardon were admired by the new generation, and in Scotland Hamish Henderson and Calum McLean recorded singers including Jeannie Robertson.

The skiffle craze of 1956 to 1958 sent many young people towards acoustic music. MacColl began the Ballads and Blues Club in London in 1953, and by the mid-1960s there were probably more than 300 folk clubs in Britain, as the revival overview notes. Some clubs set out booking policies, ranging from “anything which entertains” to “stick to your own culture”, meaning British singers should not copy American styles. The club circuit supported performers such as the Copper Family, the Watersons, Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Jean Redpath and Dick Gaughan.

Topic Records, founded in 1939 as an offshoot of the Workers’ Music Association, became the movement’s record label. It became independent in 1960, and the 1963 compilation The Iron Muse put it on a secure footing. Topic still issues traditional and contemporary folk from the British Isles, with recent releases and reissues from artists including Martin Simpson and Dick Gaughan (checked October 2026).

Radio ballads and documentary song

One of the most original products of the second revival came from radio. The radio ballad was created in 1958 by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the BBC producer Charles Parker. It combined songs, instrumental music, sound effects and, most importantly, the recorded voices of the people the programme was about, at a time when radio documentaries normally used actors or prepared scripts.

The trio made eight radio ballads for the BBC between 1958 and 1964, starting with The Ballad of John Axon, about an engine driver who died trying to stop a runaway freight train. Others covered the men who built the M1 motorway (Song of a Road, 1959), the herring fishing fleets (Singing the Fishing, 1960), coal miners (The Big Hewer, 1961) and Travellers (The Travelling People, 1964). Singing the Fishing won the Prix Italia for radio documentary in 1960. All eight were released on LP by Argo Records and later on CD by Topic.

Electric folk and the late 1960s

By the late 1960s some musicians were pushing the tradition in new directions. Guitarists Davy Graham, Martin Carthy, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch developed the fingerstyle approach often called “folk baroque”, and Jansch and Renbourn formed Pentangle with Jacqui McShee, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox in 1967.

The decisive moment for folk rock came from Fairport Convention, formed in 1967 by Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings and Shaun Frater, who was soon replaced by Martin Lamble. Their album Liege & Lief (1969) was the band’s first record on which every song was either adapted from traditional British and Celtic material, such as “Matty Groves” and “Tam Lin”, or written in a similar style. Sandy Denny sang lead, and Dave Swarbrick and Dave Mattacks joined as full members. Hutchings left before release and went on to co-found Steeleye Span.

Fairport still exist, and their own festival, Fairport’s Cropredy Convention in Oxfordshire, has announced dates of 12 to 14 August 2027 (checked October 2026).

Who is carrying the tradition now

The revival’s own veterans remain active. Shirley Collins, born in Hastings in 1935, withdrew from music in the late 1970s after developing dysphonia, returned to performing in 2014 and released Lodestar in 2016, her first album in 38 years. Her official site describes Archangel Hill as her third album for Domino, a collection of songs “most from traditional sources”.

Among younger artists, Sam Lee has collected songs from Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller communities, and was an apprentice to the Scottish Traveller singer Stanley Robertson, nephew of Jeannie Robertson, until Robertson’s death in 2009. Lee’s debut album Ground of Its Own was shortlisted for the 2012 Mercury Prize, and he founded The Nest Collective, an independent non-profit that runs campfire clubs, ceilidhs and folk events in London.

Stick in the Wheel, a band with roots in working-class East London built around vocalist Nicola Kearey and producer Ian Carter, set traditional songs against sparse accompaniment, handclaps and electronic textures; their album A Thousand Pokes was released in October 2024. In Scotland, Karine Polwart works across song, theatre, radio and writing, with an emphasis on place, hidden histories and folklore.

The Dublin band Lankum belong to the Irish tradition rather than the British one, but they are a regular presence on British stages. Their 2023 album False Lankum was nominated for the Mercury Prize.

Where to hear folk music in Britain

Festivals remain the easiest way in. The Cambridge Folk Festival has run since 1965 and is organised by Cambridge City Council. For 2027 it plans events across the city through July, finishing with the main weekend at Cherry Hinton Hall on 1 August 2027; first-tier full festival tickets were listed from £170 (checked October 2026). Readers in the area will find more local listings on Cambridge Society.

For year-round activity, the EFDSS programmes gigs, classes, dances and talks at Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent’s Park Road, London NW1, and its Vaughan Williams Memorial Library holds the society’s archive. Local folk clubs still meet in pubs, halls and arts centres across the country; their listings change often, so check a club’s own page or social media before travelling.