Green and Ancient: The Making of British Folk Rock

England’s folk tradition had survived into the 1960s largely through the efforts of collectors and revivalists—Cecil Sharp, A.L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl—who had preserved songs from rural communities and brought them to concert halls and folk clubs. The tradition was alive but contained, moving in narrow channels. When a generation of musicians who had also absorbed American rock and blues encountered it, the collision produced something unexpectedly electric in both senses.

Fairport Convention began in 1967 as a psychedelic folk rock band in the American mould, working through Joni Mitchell covers and original material. A near-fatal motorway crash in 1969, which killed drummer Martin Lamble, preceded a decisive artistic turn. The band retreated into the British tradition, emerging with Liege and Lief—an album of reworked traditional material played at rock volume with rock dynamics. It sounded like something that had always existed.

Sandy Denny was the genre’s great voice—pure, powerful, and unmistakably English in a way that resisted easy definition. Her contributions to Liege and Lief and her solo records established a model for how a contemporary singer might inhabit very old material without either flattening it into pastiche or losing their own identity in it. Pentangle, working across jazz, blues, and folk simultaneously, showed how wide the tradition could be stretched without breaking.

British folk rock understood that the oldest songs sometimes contain the newest feelings.

Steeleye Span took the folk rock synthesis in a more commercial direction, scoring genuine pop hits in the early 1970s with arrangements that were traditional in content and contemporary in production. Maddy Prior’s voice— formidable, unadorned, carrying centuries of English song culture in its grain— could sell a carol or a murder ballad equally well. The band’s willingness to meet the mainstream halfway proved an effective strategy.

Richard Thompson, who had cofounded Fairport Convention and helped create the genre, spent the following decades producing a solo body of work that is arguably its fullest flowering. His guitar playing—drawing on Celtic and Moorish scales as much as rock—gave British folk rock one of its defining sounds. His songs, bleak and brilliant in equal measure, demonstrated that the tradition could sustain original creative expression rather than merely providing source material for arrangement.

British folk rock’s legacy is a particular quality of attention to place and history. Its best music sounds rooted—in landscape, in social memory, in the specific texture of English and Scottish experience. This quality is increasingly rare in an era of globally homogenised production values. The genre’s ongoing vitality, in the work of artists from Kate Rusby to the Unthanks, suggests that there remains an audience for music that knows where it comes from.