Another Time and Place: A Brief Study of the Folk Music Revival

From the INTRODUCTION: The folk revival was a one off in music history and represents a time in which the once localised and home-grown sounds of the folk canon came to be found among the most popular musical trends of the day. At a commercial level, acoustic troubadours and well-polished trios and quartets topped the charts and dominated mainstream airwaves and primetime television slots, while elsewhere folk clubs and city squares bustled and brimmed with amateurs and enthusiasts of all descriptions. “From California to the New York Island,” folk music boomed, a process paralleled in Canada and across the Atlantic Ocean, where a similar European music renaissance was underway, most notably in the UK, creating a movement with tangible and considerable links to the scene in the US. Although the peak-period of this “boom” was relatively brief, the revival itself evolved, reinvented and spanned several decades, with far-reaching reverberations which continue to be felt (and heard) to this very day. Inspired by the music, informed by the literature and the reflections of those who were there, this project is linked by key themes and events which were significant to the development of the era, and while it makes no claim to be a complete account, it does, I hope, offer some degree of insight into the extraordinary period fondly remembered as the folk music revival.