The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination - Hardcover
by Ross Cole (Author)
Who are "the folk" in folk music? This book traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period of industrialization from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary range of scholarship, The Folk examines the political dimensions of a recurrent longing for folk culture and how it was called upon for radical and reactionary ends at the apex of empire. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, nationality, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Ross Cole provides us with a biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination, and the archaeology of a landscape directing flows of global populism to this day.
With rich measures of eloquence and criticism, passion and witness, Ross Cole asks us to listen again to the songs of the folk, not because they were nostalgically lost to an imagined past, but rather because they still voice the imperative of lived-in worlds, past, present, and future.--Philip V. Bohlman, coauthor of Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
"A gracefully written compelling account of the relationship between music and ideological constructions of 'the folk' in the UK and the US. A confident and illuminating book."--Sarah Hill, author of San Francisco and the Long 60s "A nuanced, resourceful, and discerning study of the desire known as 'the folk.' Cole delivers a highly engaging itinerary of a concept so fundamental to modernity it points in all directions at once: bard and professor, nostalgia and revolution, soul and soil, left solidarities and the specter of fascism."--Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American RacismRoss Cole is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. His writing on a range of topics appears in leading journals including Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and ASAP/Journal.
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