“The Hand-Loom Weavers’ Lament” is an attack on the new factory owners and the loss of a market for traditional skills and independence. On the other hand, some broadsides celebrated factory life and factory towns, such as “Oldham Workshops.” Musician and folklorist A. L. Lloyd (1967) describes the legitimate “industrial folk song” as “the kind of vernacular songs made by workers themselves directly out of their own experience, expressing their own interests and aspirations, and incidentally passed on among themselves mainly by oral means” (p. 317). He includes “The Poor Cotton Weaver,” “Poverty Knock,” and “The Coal-Owner and the Pitman’s Wife” as examples in this category. There were also numerous professionally written music-hall songs dealing with workers’ lives, which, while not initially folk songs, could eventually be considered of a vernacular nature. Joe Wilson’s “The Strike” falls into this category, dealing with the work stoppage in 1871 to obtain a nine-hour day in the Tyneside.
Throughout the nineteenth century traditional ballads and folk songs circulated through the British Isles, some passed along through family and community oraltraditions, others by way of published books,songsters, and broadsides. In addition, there were a growing number of urban, industrial, and maritime songs that would become part of the folk legacy that stretched through the twentieth century. Street literature, in the form of broadsides, flourished in urban areas. Ballads and songs had long captured personal feelings, violence, and tragedies, such as “The Golden Vanity” and “The Sheffield Apprentice,” but had begun to take on more contemporary stories about common people by the early nineteenth century, often sprinkled with humorous passages. Traditional singers focused on a song’s words, while broadside sellers performed for a crowd in order to attract buyers, who were often young people looking for romance or adventure. Communities and trade unions had their own bards, who crafted verse for various occasions.
On the eve ofthe twentieth century there existed a rich and ever-expanding legacy of ballads and folksongs in the British Isles, performed locally and increasingly collected by scholars and interested antiquarians, who formed the Folk-Song Society in 1898 to promote future collecting and publications.
Folk Songs: Collectors and Fans
