Industrial folk music

Industrial folk music is a subgenre of folk music that focuses on the experiences of industrial workers. The subgenre was established with the 1963 compilation album, "The Iron Muse: A Panorama of Industrial Folk Music", a collection of songs about labor strikes, mine workers, and workplace disasters in northern England.

Emergence of subgenre

A.L. Lloyd had written in the 1965 Encyclopedia Britannica a paragraph on "Industrial Song", part his broader entry on "Folk Music". He described the genesis of this genre as song written and performed by the working class, the inheritors of the older peasant or folk songs. It became much less clear later who amongst performers and writers were working class, with workers commonly describing themselves as middle class (a term Karl Marx used for employers) and most songwriters of working class songs working outside of what was once 'industry'.

Workers' songs

The type of music that workers made about their own trades and occupations had been described much earlier in the century by John Lomax with his collection of cowboy songs and by George Korson with his collection of coal miners' songs. The traditional folklorists took many decades to count this sort of lyrical material as folk song largely because the author was often known and the songs were contemporary. After World War 2 folklorists by and large accepted these songs as folk song. Lloyd was probably not the first to use the term industrial folk song, but his own collection of British mining songs in the 1950s and 60s ("Come All Ye Bold Miners") became an instant classic, and his Iron Muse LP cited above had great influence. Pete Seeger's Folkways LP "American Industrial Ballads" (1956) was an earlier panorama of the same kind of song. in this way it's hard to not mention "Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People" by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax in the 1940s, explores workers song further. Lloyd's "Folk Song in England" (1967) concluded with a chapter titled "Industrial Folk Song".

As late as 1979 Lloyd was refining a definition of folk song in a way that would include songs from industrial workers and in a chapter in "Folk Music in School" (p10) he writes:

"I would suggest that nowadays by 'folk' we understand groups of people united by shared experience and common attitudes, skills, interests and aims. These shared attributes become elaborated, sanctioned, stabilised by the group over a period of time. Any such group, with communally shaped cultural traits arising 'from below' and fashioned by 'insiders', might be a suitable subject for folklore studies. Some of these groups may be rich in oral folklore (anecdotes, speechways, etc.) but deficient in songs; others may be specially notable for superstitions and customs. Perhaps for English society the most clearly defined of such groups are those attached to various basic industries: for example, miners with their special attitudes, customs, lore and language, song culture and such. But it will be seen that my suggestion does not rule out the possibility of regarding hitherto unexplored fields, such as the realms of students, actors, bank clerks, paratroopers, hospital nurses, as suitable territory for the folklorist to survey.

The present-day folklorist, who views the problem in its social entirety, and extends his researches into the process by whichtraditional folklore becomes adapted to the conditions of modern industrial life, has to consider the classic 'peasant' traditions as being but a part - the lower limit, if you like - of a process by which folklore becomes an urban popular affair. Indeed, as far as song is concerned, that is the present stage of folklore development: nowadays there is far greater use of the folk-song repertory and of folkloric forms of creation in our industrial towns than in the countryside."

An account of the use of song by union workers in the 1920s textile strike in the US can be found in "The Voice Of Southern Labor", Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher (2004), while the collection of essays in "The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories", Alessandro Portelli (1991), studies industrial folk song in Harlan County, Kentucky and Italy in the context of oral history. Books by Archie Green provide further insights into this area of folklore and folk song.