Roots revival

A roots revival (folk revival) is a trend which includes young performers popularizing the traditional musical styles of their ancestors. Often, roots revivals include an addition of newly composed songs with socially and politically aware lyrics, as well as a general modernization of the folk sound.

The term roots revival is vague, and may not always refer to identical events. Characteristics associated with a roots revival include:

With such a vague and variable definition, roots revival could be seen as referring to the creation of any kind of pop music industry, though there are countries with well-developed pop traditions that have not had a period referred to as a roots revival (such as Jamaica, India, Cuba and Kenya). For example, homogenized pop has long had its fans in most every country in the world, but many of these nations have created their own indigenous pop styles out of folk music; this process could be called a roots revival, though in some cases the folk musics in question were still widespread and did not need to be revived.

The first folk revival was an academic movement to transcribe and record traditional British songs during the late 19th and early 20th century. Pioneers of this movement were the Harvard professor Francis James Child (1825–96), compiler of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–92), Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Frank Kidson (1855–1926), Lucy Broadwood (1858–1939), and Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954). The Folk Song Society was founded in 1898 to promote this new endeavour. A major figure in this movement was Cecil Sharp who was the most influential on the repertoire of subsequent performers and defining the nature of folk song. His lectures and other publications attempted to define a musical tradition that was rural in origin, oral in transmission and communal in nature.

A second wave of revival that was orientated around culture and entertainment began in the 1930s and 1940s in America and in Britain in the 1940s. During the Great Depression, folk music styles were disseminated around the country, as Delta blues masters, itinerant honky tonk singers, and Latino and Cajun musicians spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The growth of the recording industry in the same period was also important; higher potential profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters, and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that musical fads, such as Hawaiian slack-key guitar, never died out completely, since a broad range of rhythms, instruments, and vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate popular genres.

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