Think of English folk music and maybe thoughts come to mind of villagers lamenting lost loves or sailors bellowing tales of adventure at sea.
But when the rising British folk band Shovel Dance Collective performs, its members want their listeners to think of more contemporary concerns.
At the band’s shows, the singer Mataio Austin Dean sometimes introduces “The Merry Golden Tree,” a song about a badly treated cabin boy, as a tale of “being shafted by your boss” — a scenario many office workers might relate to.
The group also performs “I Wish There Was No Prisons” and “A Hundred Stretches Hence”: probable 19th-century ditties that Alex McKenzie, who plays accordion and flute in the group, said could be thought of as pleas for prison abolition.
Many folk songs “ring very true” today, McKenzie said: “There’s a very easy thread you can draw between what ordinary people were concerned about 100, 200 years ago, or whatever, and what we’re concerned with now.”
Folk music is having a resurgence in Britain and several London-based acts, including Shovel Dance Collective and Goblin Band, have won acclaim and growing fan bases by playing old-time tunes that echo the preoccupations of today’s activist left, including trans rights and the precariousness of the gig economy.
Shovel Dance Collective’s most recent album, for instance, includes “Newcastle,” an upbeat 17th-century jig with the chorus, “Why can I not love my love? Why can my love not love me?” Jacken Elswyth, the band’s banjo player, said that because several of the group identify as queer or transgender, its fans may interpret those lyrics as being about queer romance.
Rowan Gatherer, a singer and hurdy-gurdy player in Goblin Band, said that British folk musicians had always used the genre to comment on the politics of their day: In the 1960s, for instance, England had a folk revival featuring artists like Ewan MacColl who promoted pro-labor and antiwar messages. Similarly, Gatherer said, the genre was “going through a moment” in London, where young musicians were performing ancient songs “that relate to their own experience and their own values.”
The resurgence of interest in folk music in Britain coincides with a revival of other traditions including Morris dancing, in which dancers weave around one another, waving handkerchiefs; and wassailing, where rural revelers sing to bless the year’s cider crop.
In interviews, members of Shovel Dance Collective said they had discussed what was driving the interest in traditional arts. McKenzie said it could be that young people were searching for a sense of belonging at a time when soaring rents and limited job prospects can make life feel daunting. “Everything feels so precarious,” McKenzie said, “and suddenly there’s these songs that put you in dialogue with people going back over hundreds of years. That’s a really beautiful antidote to the precarity and uncertainty.”
Shovel Dance Collective’s members had different explanations for their own attractions to folk music. Fidelma Hanrahan, the band’s harpist, said she grew up playing folk tunes in Ireland. Austin Dean, the singer, said he largely turned to the genre in his teens after discovering Marxism. (He called folk music “the organic cultural product of the proletariat.”)
To find the folk songs they perform, the bands’ members often trawl YouTube, delve into online folk music archives or scour old anthologies they find in secondhand bookstores. Politics isn’t always on their minds, however: Gatherer, of Goblin Band, said that finding catchy or emotional melodies was his priority.
Sometimes, Gatherer added, he only sees a song’s political or social relevance once the band starts playing it. Goblin Band’s last release, an EP called “Come Slack Your Horse!”, includes a version of “The Prickle Holly Bush,” a folk song about a man condemned to death whose family members refuse to pay a fee to save his life. Gatherer said that he thought the song’s lyrics spoke to the experience of some gay people who felt abandoned by their families.
It’s hard to find politics, though, in songs like “Turmut Hoer,” about turnip farming, on Goblin Band’s EP. Gatherer said that, for this reason, the band’s members were always open about their political views in interviews, at concerts and on social media, to frighten away nationalists who are drawn to folk music seeking a connection with England’s past. The band didn’t want a conservative fan base, he said.
Members of the Shovel Dance Collective debated whether old folk songs could be vehicles for even the most modern political concerns. Austin Dean, the singer, said some issues, “like A.I. taking people’s jobs,” were perhaps too contemporary — but then he corrected himself.
One of the band’s tracks is a mournful a cappella version of “Four Loom Weaver,” a song about a starving mill worker during the Industrial Revolution. “That’s all about losing work, and losing the quality of life, because of machines,” Austin Dean said. “It’s exactly the same thing, the same struggle.”
