Graeme Smith

Graeme Smith is a post graduate student of ethnomusicology at Monash University and has been a performer in the second folk revival.

MAKING FOLK MUSIC

Long study of folklore and folklorists has convinced me that there never were any folk, except in the minds of the bourgeoisie. The entire field is a grim fairy tale. By an act of magical naming, all the peasantries and technologically primitive people of the world can be turned to 'folk'.

Charles Keil.'

The Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment has recently released a directory of Commonwealth resources and activities entit­led Folklife and the Australian Government, and at present the Policy Co-ordination Branch of that Department is developing policy relating to 'folklife'.^The scope of 'folklife' in this guide is very broad, ranging from Aboriginal culture, through various forms of Anglo-Australian oral folklore — sayings, yarns, songs and so on, and in fact including the Australian language, accents and dialects — to the cultural activities of non-English speaking groups. The terms 'folk arts', 'folk crafts', 'folk architecture', 'folk customs', 'folk poetry'and 'folk music' all appear in the document with no suggestion that the meaning of these terms is in any way less than self-evident, in either the range of practices referred to or the social place ascribed to them.

'Folk' has always been a term applied by one group of people to another, usually distant from them in time or social status, generally to give value and legitimacy to cultural practices which have previously been ignored or regarded as vulgar by the cultural elites. It is a term which attributes value to lower class cultural practices, but in so doing it shapes them in particular ways. In this essay I want to look at the Australian folk revival and its shaping of that genre of music

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which is now generally known as Australian folk music, although recently out of recognition of non-English speaking cultures it may be referred to as Anglo-Australian or Anglo-Celtic-Australian music. This genre was largely defined by left-wing cultural activists in the 1950s who drew on ideas developed in earlier folk revivals in England and America to assert the existence of an Australian folk song. This assertion was part of the left's preoccupation with nationalism at the time, its search for something distinctive in the Australian character and experience which could sustain its hopes for a more socially just Australia in an increasingly conservative political world.

The term folk has always been closely linked to the discourse of nationalism, first emerging with German Romanticism as intel­lectuals like Herder sought among the lower classes for a distinctive culture which could be seen to embody the essential features of the emerging German nation. It is a consensual term, used to assert a unity of national experience over and above class and regional dif­ferences; the Hungarian musicologist Janos Marothy has argued that folklore studies were born from the bourgeoisie's need to construct a nation in the face of increasing polarisation between the proletariat and bourgeoisie.̂

Under the influence of German studies of the Volk, the term folklore was introduced into English in 1846, in an attempt to regularise what was then called the study of Popular Antiquities. The term folk music became current about forty years later, but interest in English folk music among folklorists was not strong until the English Folksong Movement of the turn of the century.

The theorist of this movement, Cecil Sharp, was influenced by the marginal position of English composition in relation to German com­position and the growth of German imperial power in the late nineteenth century, and was looking for the unconscious and racially authentic expression of a pre-urban peasant class in the material he collected. His fantasies about this class had little to do with the material conditions of life of his informants, and guided his selection of both informants and types of songs and the way he presented his material. Though founded on very shaky evidence, Sharp's ideas have been extremely influential on the development of thinking about folklore in the English speaking world.''

The next important revival of interest in folk music in the English speaking world was the People's Songs Movement of the USA in the 1930s and 1940s. This was a movement of left-wing singers and collectors which started as a musical expression of the radical populist politics of the Popular Front phase of communist politics and had considerable influence on the Australian folk revival of the 1950s. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Communist Party and the left in general had little interest in folksong, regarding it generally as a back­ward musical form. In 1934 an American communist music critic could write:

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Not all folk-tunes are suitable for the revolutionary movement. Many of them are complacent, melancholy, defeatist — originally intended to make slaves endure their lot — pretty, but not the stuff for a militant proletariat to feed upon.'

With the institution in 1934 of the Popular Front in international communist strategy. Communist Parties were called to co-operate with left-wing reformist parties, such as labour parties, in the fight against fascism. As Communist Parties around the world began em­phasising the themes of national identity and national history, and playing down the importance of class differences, the idea of the folk again came to the fore.

Communist intellectuals participated enthusiastically in the growing interest in American culture and folklore, and were able to find within it expressions of an autonomous workers' culture. This change in attitude is clearly seen in the writings of the then radical musicologist Charles Seeger. In 1934, a few months before the incep­tion of the Popular Front policy, he wrote in 'On Proletarian Music', 'Needless to say, the proletariat has not produced any music of its own as such'. Several years later, after some experience as Deputy Director of the Federal Music Project of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, he was enthusing in the same journal about native American music as the way forward for contemporary composition, and talking of the musical richness of the American people and the incorporation of its folk music traditions within the labour movement.'

Uatil the 1950s there was almost no awareness of any comparable folk music or song traditions in Australia. Wendy Lowenstein has noted that when she and Ian Turner set up the Victorian Folklore Society in 1955 they knew exactly three Australian folk songs: 'Click go the Shears', 'The Wild Colonial Boy' and 'Botany Bay'. Australian folk music as we know it today had scarcely any public currency.' A few collections had been published prior to the 1950s, beginning with Banjo Patterson's Old Bush Songs (1905), assembled from responses to a request published in the Bulletin. It included vernacular poetry as well as texts clearly intended for singing, but until the 1940s little interest was shown in the music the songs were performed to, or in the social context and style of performance. By the middle of the twenti­eth century active performance of traditional music was fairly rare in Australia; there were still individuals who remembered songs from around the turn of the century, but the style of singing had fallen out of use, even among those who came from the social and occupational groups which were actively creating the old bush songs but two generations ago. When, in the 1940s, interest began to develop in traditional Australian songs, the form was already of historic rather than current significance.

The first conscious collecting of this material as Australian folk song, and the noting of words and texts in conjunction, was by Dr

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Percy Jones in the middle 1940s. Jones's article, 'Australia's Folk Songs', published in 1946 in a Catholic quarterly, was probably the first article to discuss this song genre as folk music, though he is little interested in the social context of the songs and is content to see them as belonging to an earlier rural Australia: 'The easy going nature of the people and the timelessness of the country can be heard in these droll lilting tunes of the early Australian ballads.'*

In 1950 Vance Palmer and Margaret Sutherland issued a collection of thirteen songs remembered by Palmer and associates.' Though Palmer had lived much of his life in the country the significance of an indigenous music did not interest him until then, and he may have been influenced by Jones's work. The melodies in this collection are described as having been 'restored' by Sutherland, but comparison with later field recordings shows substantial differences in melodic style and detail.'" The next song publication was the 'Bandicoot Ballads' by Ron Edwards and John Manifold, and like Palmer's, the songs in this collection were also initially drawn from the memories of the compilers."

The published collections of Palmer and Edwards and Manifold contained a total of twenty-one songs and were the extent of the published folk song repertoire in Australia in 1953. In South Australia Russel Ward was researching the social history of the nineteenth century working class, and was collecting some song texts as historical evidence. John Meredith, another young radical from a rural background, had started searching for tunes to the old bush ballads. About the same time other individuals like Edgar Waters and Alan Scott were also beginning to gather together remembered tunes and texts to bush ballads. The idea of an Australian folk song had become firmly established.

All of these individuals were inspired by ideals of cultural national­ism and radicalism, and most were members of the Communist Party. But they did not yet form a movement. It was not until the staging in 1953 of Reedy River by the New Theatre that the isolated activities of these individuals were transformed into a social movement asserting and defining Australian folk music. After this Australian folk song was wholeheartedly embraced by the left.

The New Theatre was closely linked with the Communist Party of Australia, though not all of the people associated with it were mem­bers of the Communist Party. In 1953 Dick Diamond, in association with other members of the company, began to assemble a musical play based around the Queensland shearers strike of 1891. They used the songs from the Palmer and Sutherland collection, though they were denied access to material Percy Jones had collected, no doubt because of the company's overt political identification. The resulting play. Reedy River, was interspersed with songs and dances suggestive of the period, a couple of which were contemporary compositions. It probably owed a certain amount to the current Rodgers and Ham-

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merstein musical 'Oklahoma', a folksy celebration with quite different musical style and political intent. In theme and setting Reedy River looked backwards to the historical roots of the Australian labour movement, and the incorporation of music into the play suggested a unified working class culture of which this radicalism was part. Its particular mix of nostalgia and radicalism struck a responsive note with a large number of people, and the production was a resounding and somewhat unexpected success, inspiring the establishment of music groups to continue to play music from the show, and the for­mation of folk music and bush music clubs in both Sydney and Melbourne. Collecting activity increased and recordings of Australian folk songs were produced, including one important recording of traditional singers.

Why was the left so receptive to the idea of an Australian folk music at this time?

The Comintern's change to a Popular Front policy in 1934 had similar consequences in Australia to those already mentioned in relation to the American People's Songs Movement. From ideas of a revolutionary proletarian culture forging the weapons of class struggle. Communist Party cultural policy came to stress consensual, populist notions of culture, and emphasis on national traditions came to pervade all communist discussions of art.

After a position of considerable influence during the war, supported by the Russian alliance and drawing in thousands of new members, the Communist Party of Australia was a party besieged in the cold war atmosphere of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1951 Menzies only just lost the referendum to ban the Communist Party, and its membership had shrunk from its war-time peak of 23,000 to 6,000. Throughout the cold war, the right used the language of national unity to define the communists as treasonous, a potential fifth column inside a united Australia. The communists, on the other hand, proclaimed them­selves to be the true inheritors of the Australian tradition. Their 1951 programme announced itself as an 'Australian Path to Socialism', opening with a nostalgic reference to the nineteenth century 'Aust­ralia of which our poets sung'. And just as the conservative attack stressed the unity of Australia against a small treasonous faction of communists, the Communist Party was able to condense the Austral­ian bourgeoisie to '50 monopolist families in Collins House', against whom the whole of the Australian people could be arrayed.

The cultural implications of this extreme populism can be seen in J. D. Blake's article from the Communist Review of 1951, 'Folk Culture and the People's Movement'. '̂ In this article the key enemy of the Australian people is American imperialism and its cultural propaganda. Blake criticises 'cheap degrading literature, ideological filth from Hollywood and drooling songs churned out day by day by

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the imperialists'. These are criticised not just for overtly reactionary content and lack of realism, but also for 'introducing the spirit of cosmopolitanism'. Blake finds comfort in 'an important characteristic of the Australian people . . . that they love their country', and he urges party artists to develop the people's 'folk-pride and strength'. The concept of a folk culture is accepted here without any con­sideration of its relationship to conflict in the nation or to class and is clear heir to the ideas of Herder and the German Romantics.

As its nationalism became more insistent, the Communist Party was able to embrace more unreservedly the ideas of radical nationalism which had been espoused by Vance Palmer and others since the 1920s. In the 1950s the greatest threat to the possibility of a radical Australian culture was seen to be American mass culture. The rapid change in the face of popular culture after the war and the access of the broad mass of the people to these new forms disturbed con­servative and radical critics alike. Docker describes the Communist Party's reaction to comic books, and stresses that the communists' opposition was not very different from that of conservative or religious critics. '̂

Docker argues that the radical nationalist arguments of this time were anti-working class. By standing so strongly against the undeni­able popularity of the newly available mass cultural forms, radicals were in danger of cutting themselves off from 'a popular urban culture that the working class had made its own'. While not wanting to agree completely with Docker's argument that urban popular culture becomes a distinctly working class culture merely by use, I think he is right to point to the serious failure of radical nationalists of the 1950s to discuss popular culture in any terms other than those of corruption and alien influences on the one hand, and a pure national tradition on the other.

The left's failure to consider contemporary popular culture seri­ously was part of its much larger failure to come to terms with the contemporary working class. The growing power of right wing Catholics within the ALP and the union movement, the increasing affluence of the working class, and the influx of postwar migrants, many from the 'peoples democracies', had changed the political and social face of the Australian working class. Just when the hostility of the international and domestic political climate was increasing, the class for whom they were fighting seemed to be deserting them. Politi­cally besieged, the Communist Party, and many on the left generally, turned to an image of a working class which was free from cultural imperialism, suburban affluence and Catholic and European anti-communism. This defensiveness, as much as any positive affirmation of Australian culture, inspired the popularity of Australian folk song on the left.

It also shaped the way the genre was defined. The participants in Australia's first folk song revival constructed a musical genre, giving

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meaning to certain musical practices by placing them within a cultural framework and asserting their social and historical significance. Such a process is not unique to the construction of folk music as a genre, for all musical genres are socially defined and such definition always takes place in relation to other musical forms. To say what Australian folk music was involved saying what it was not, the ascription of meaning involved the drawing of boundaries; and one thing it was not was con­temporary Australian country music.

Country music, originally known as hillbilly music, first became popular in Australia in the early 1930s with the release and radio play of the recordings of early American performers such as Vernon Dalhart and Jimmy Rodgers. It had an immediate impact upon rural listeners around Australia, particularly on small dairy farmers, who made up a large proportion of Australian farmers. When Australians started performing in this style from the late 1930s they played both copies of American songs and self-composed material. Some of this held fairly closely to American models, but much drew upon other musical genres, including the sung bush ballad and nineteenth cen­tury popular song. Indeed some early Australian country music recor­dings were of old bush songs, performed in hillbilly style with guitar accompaniment. While the American origin of Australian country and western music is undeniable, the Australian performers and song­writers were also drawing on just those musical traditions which the folk song revivalists were now struggling to preserve.'''

Rural Australia's enthusiastic response to country and western music was by no means unique. The first American recordings of hillbilly music were intended merely to tap the potential of poor Southern whites as a record market, but the genre quickly spread beyond this enclave, becoming popular among rural and urban lower class groups in many countries, and it has generally retained this popularity. It is tempting to speculate whether this working class popularity arose from a vague recognition of the origins of the music, or was a response to its narrative and emotional strategies, but whatever its origins, it has been accompanied by a complementary rejection by metropolitan, educated, middle class taste. While such taste has been able to define Afro-American music as serious, its reac­tion to country and western forms has ranged from patronising dismissal to disgust.

In rural Australia the genre seemed able to express the conditions of social existence, no matter how imported the musical model may have seemed to others less involved. When performers and enthusi­asts asserted the Australianness of Australian country music they were not merely privileging the rural experience as the true basis of the Australian character. Rather, their claim was grounded in the range of social experience and musical skills and styles which were

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available to particular groups of Australians. The folk song revival­ists, despite being brought into contact with country music through their informants and the musical environment of the day, refused this classification of it as an Australian form of music, and it thus remained outside their field of interests.

The relationship between the new country songs and earlier musical styles can be seen in a song recorded in 1946 by David Kirk-patrick, the nineteen year old son of a Northern New South Wales dairy farmer. The song, 'When the Rain Tumbles Down in July', is about the disastrous flood which afflicted his home area that year. The singer went on to establish himself under the performing name of Slim Dusty, Australia's most important country music performer — indeed, one of the most successful Australian recording artists in any musical genre.

This was the singer's first recorded song, and the tightness of its narrative organisation and the ease of the setting make it a remarkable work. If it is difficult to detect the influence of other musical genres in this example, this is partly due to the class-based rigidity with which Australian country music has subsequently been defined. But the tune clearly draws upon a familiarity with Anglo-Irish ballad melodic forms. Example 1 is Slim Dusty's 'When the Rain Tumbles Down in July', example 2 the melody of an Irish comic song from the north of Ireland about dog fighting called 'Champion he was a Dandy', and example 3 the well-known Botany Bay tune."

Slim Dusty's tune, while the most formally complex of the three melodies, is based around two melodic phrases which are repeated with modified endings. Only the last phrase is built of significantly different material. The two basic melodic phrases are typical of the contrasting melodic material from which the tunes of Anglo-Irish ballads are constructed, commonly within an ABBA melodic form. Such 'come-all-ye' tunes were the basic coin of bush ballad settings, and indeed of many vernacular song forms of the nineteenth century from cowboy and Canadian backwoodsmen songs to north-eastern English miners' songs. Slim Dusty's tune is an elaboration of such a form. The two tunes given here, 'Champion he was a Dandy' and 'Botany Bay', use almost identical melodic material within a somewhat simpler formal framework and with less variation between repetitions.

By the 1950s, the popularity of Australian country music had reached a peak, yet it was almost totally disregarded by urban radio stations. Similarly, the urban-based folk song revival movement ignored its existence and could see no relationship between it and the failing historical genre which they were determined to rescue. They merely saw in country music the American cultural penetration they loathed and feared, and it is ironic that here was a contemporary form close to the myth of organic musical expression which they espoused. It is not, however, surprising. The concept of folk emerges from the

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im^j=k2~^i^^^-j fd i4-^ozy^ Lei ine ujii- dcr iiotili (o ilic hoiiioMcud. W:JV mil liiillicr on llicic l<> KUIH

1 A ^ -

i^m^^ww^mj^ir^wmm By u gully in llond kt rnc lingur lien ilic

1 r

o o suiisliiiii: lijb tldwtT

6 -

4^:fiy=gg-S:gf"f jT 'T r r 1 f̂ 'r ̂ '̂ J <^ Wlicic llie l>>g:i lUEiglc up oil lliL' creek lieil jrid clouds veil the old noillicrri sky

=f ̂ i ^ ^ i i-^rj^mii^iii^^ unci llie euule move hack finni llie lowlunds. when llie lain lunibles down in July

l;!xaniple 1: 'When ihc Rain Tumbles Down in July'

l^fi^y^s^fi^lnj 1/r.lrrr I MUL^'y Oh my iiunic il is Michael Mc- Cuilliy I cmiie rrom llie couiilry of Down

I'J J hcl Willi M lducKI ' l-laln'ily

Example 2: 'Champion he was a Dandy'

lli.ll itic Inillcint; k-uuld iiniiilci llu-

Taic- well lo i.lil l j lg lanjr . i l t- vei^ ' I'aic- well l.i my luiii cull! as well

i"aie- well u> (lie well kmiwii OIJ Hai- ley wliere I oiiec used lo ein siicli a Swell

Example 3: 'Botany Bay'

Musical Examples: Note the occurence of melodic phrase types A and B in all three tunes.

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vast differences of cultural power between one group and another, and what presents itself as a preservation or revival is really the ex­propriation of a cultural act. Active contemporary lower class musical practices, such as country and western music of the 1950s, do not easily submit to the massive mystification which 'folk' requires.

We should not see this blindness to the significance of country and western music as the folk song revival's lack of scholarly precision. Folk song scholars have often been criticised for ears which failed to note the subtleties of alien musical systems, for sensibilities which expurgated sexual texts and so on. But such criticisms, implying as they do the possibility of transparent cultural mediation, are misleading. Not only are all musical genres socially constructed, but folk music, as should be clear by now, has always been a particularly politicised musical genre.

The achievements of the folk song revival of the 1950s are usually seen in songs collected and published, performances and recordings produced, and the general public promotion of this material. But ultimately, more important than all of these activities was the demar­cation of a genre. This defining occurred within particular social ideologies and historical circumstances and has determined the way in which individual items and musical forms have since been heard. The ideas we now have about Australian folk music are a direct result of this activity, as is our general perception of it as a self-evident musical genre.

But though a group can be dominant in the definition of a musical genre, once defined the genre enters the public domain to become the site of competing social interests and open to the imposition of new meanings. I now want to trace briefly the further developments in the concept of the folk since the 1950s.

The first folk song revival lasted till about 1963. The second revival, based in coffee-houses and clubs, attracted a young middle class urban population, half a generation younger than the earlier revivalists. There was a considerable social distance between the older bush music clubs and the newer folk clubs. The radical nationalism of the older activists was generally seen as irrelevant by the new en­thusiasts, and performance replaced preservation as the focus of the movement. The new clubs and performance venues built up a core of semi-professional performers who were much more musically com­mitted than the activists of the 1950s. Models of both musical style and performance context were largely borrowed from Britain and America, and, as in other areas of Australian popular music in the mid-1960s, young emigrants from the British Isles dominated."

With this second revival the mythologised and historicised bearers of a 'folk culture' give way in importance to performers of an established gehre, who themselves assume the mantle of the legitimate bearers of a specific, though not clearly defined, relation-

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ship between art and community. The idea of the folk no longer sim­ply refers to past social experience but comes to express an ideal of a community which is socially authentic and organically related with its cultural forms and its past. As folk music took its place as an established, if minor, popular music form in the English speaking world, folk could become one of the terms in a public debate about the relationship between popular and mass culture. In this it was not limited to the underwriting of 'folk song' as culturally authentic, but was given more general applications.

One of the few people to have written seriously about con­temporary popular music, Simon Frith, argues that during the Wood­stock era the mythology of folk was taken over by the rock music ideologists of Rolling Stone to assert the difference between counter-cultural rock and commercial pop."Counter-cultural rock was seen to emerge from a closeness of experience between performer and audience in comparison with the imposed, alienated musical forms of commercial pop. The idea of folk music as the music of a community has thus become an important, if obfuscating, part of the sense of possible relationships between popular cultural forms, their audiences and their producers.

As would be expected, the concept of folk continues to be used vigorously by the folk song revival movement itself. In spite of its decline over the last decade, to many of its staunch adherents the revival movement has become 'the folk community', and finally the 'folk' itself There is an historical irony here: as this taste group becomes smaller and more inward looking, it is able, through its unity, to define itself in more universalist terms. At the same time, the historicist definition of the folk still holds its place in the discourse of Australian nationalism, and the folk song revival movement can in­voke this to seek recognition from a Labor government whose last claim to radicalism is in the vigour of its nationalist rhetoric.

The folk music revival has been a fluctuating popular musical movement, drawing upon collected traditional song from Australia, Britain and America for its material or inspiration, and a host of mythologies of community, national significance and cultural im­portance for its self-image. It has provided a focus for considerable creative achievements by dedicated musicians, developing ways of incorporating diverse popular musical styles into new social and musical contexts. But throughout the political protest movement of the 1960s, and the alternative youth culture of the early 1970s, the folk song revival maintained a social vitality and creative impetus which has diminished today. The last generation of enthusiasts and performers from the late 1960s do not seem to be attracting a younger group, and the scene has that ageing character reminiscent of jazz clubs some years ago. However, in another irony of history, many of these older enthusiasts, now with professional or semi-managerial occupations, are discovering ways of gaining a powerful voice in

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lobbying government authorities. So when the folk revival movement is at its lowest ebb creatively, it has suddenly gained a strong public voice.

As has been argued above, folk music is not an analytical description, but a legacy of a series of historical practices: various interventions of cultural elites upon selected lower class musical genres. Alongside folk stands the concept popular.

In a paper on the conflicting interests for the funding of music, the Music Board of the Australia Council had the following attitude to popular music:

Popular Music: It is reported that the first two records made by the rock group Men at Work grossed $130 million. This is over thirteen times the annual grants budget of the Music Board. On the face of it, there can be no rationale for subsidy of an industry which can bring such enormous finan­cial rewards. This is basically the Music Board's position.

However, keeping in mind that popular music of various kinds is really the folk music of our day, occupying the musical interests of the great majority of the population, the Board has felt it incumbent upon itself to look below the surface of all this success. This process is just begun.'*

This Music Board document shows an almost total unawareness of the complexity of popular music. It stresses that the pop music industry was 'in some ways fairly brutal . . . and aspiring musicians need to pass through the bath of fire in Australia if only to be able to survive an international scene where no quarter will be given'. One wonders how a Board of the Australia Council, whose primary reason for existence is to enable art forms in Australia to achieve some in­dependence from international markets, can make such a statement unless it feels that popular music is by its very nature quite unsuitable for assistance. However, one possible reason for assistance has been noticed by the Board. They have read Rolling Stone, and know that popular music is really 'the folk music of our day'. The mere involve­ment of a large number of Australians with popular music does not seem significant in itself; only on the basis of the 'folkness' of popular music might it warrant some support.

Cultural elites who spend so much mental energy on the justification of specific art forms occasionally have to reshuffle the hierarchies of taste and seriousness. Thus what was once trivial or vulgar can become historically significant or meaningful as the political context of a cultural world shifts. It is within this cultural discourse that the folk have existed. If, as Keil maintains, the bourgeoisie have always needed the folk, so too have other groups in less powerful social positions who want to redraw a cultural map. The term can be taken up by diverse interest groups. The Music Board of the Australia Council, confused and hesitant before the universe of popular music forms which swims before its classically focussed eyes, sees it as a way of accommodating these forms. To the Department of

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Arts, Heritage and the Environment it is both an expression of the new nationalism of Australian right wing social democracy and a con­venient way to avoid any real attempt to develop a socially informed aesthetic.

As Tim Rowse pointed out in a recent Meanjin (2/1985), a demo­cratic cultural policy needs to recognise the legitimacy of a pluralism of cultural forms. "One step in this is to examine, and I would argue, ultimately to reject, such terms as folk which, by assigning a preeminence to certain cultural forms at the expense of others, legitimise the process of the construction of aesthetic hierarchies which merely disguise relations of cultural power.

Notes ' Charles Keil, 'Who needs "the ?oVi."l\ Journal of the Folklore Institute,

Vol.15, No.3 (1978), p.263. ^ Folklife and the Australian Government: A Guide to Commonwealth Activi­

ties and Resources (Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1985).

^ Janos Marothy, Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletarian (Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, 1974), pp.132, 257-8.

* Cecil Sharp, English Folksong, Some Conclusions {Mcthutn, London, 1954 [1907]). For commentary upon the first English Folksong revival, see Dave Marker, 'May Cecil Sharp be Praised?', History Workshop No. 14 (1982), pp.44-62, and Vic Gammon, 'Folksong Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1^42-\9H\History Workshop, No.lO (1980).

' Carl Sands, 'A Program for Proletarian Composers', Daily Worker (New York, 16 January 1934), p.5.

' Charles Seeger, 'On Proletarian Music', Modern Music, Vol.11, No.3 (1934), p. 122, and 'Grass Roots for American Composers', Modern Music, Vol.16, No.3 (1939), pp.143-9.

' Wendy Lowenstein, Editorial,/4ws/ra//fl/j Tradition, No. 37 (1975). ' Percy Jones, 'Australia's Folk Songs', Twentieth Century: An Australian

Quarterly Review, Vol.1, No.l (1946), p.41. ' Vance Palmer and Margaret Sutherland, Old Australian Bush Ballads

(Allen & Co., Melbourne, 1950.) '"For correspondence between Sutherland and Edwards concerning

Sutherland's 'restoration', see Ron Edwards, The Big Book of Australian Folk Song (Rigby, Adelaide, 1976), p.414.

" Ron Edwards and John Manifold, Bandicoot Ballads (Rams Skull Press, Melbourne, 1951-5).

'̂ J. D. Blake, 'Folk Culture and the People's Movement', Communist Review, No.l 16 (Aug. 1951), p.872-5.

" John Docker, 'Culture, Society and the Communist Party', in Ann Cur-thoys and John Merritt, Australia's First Cold War, 1945-1953, Vol. I (George Allen & Uawin, Sydney, 1984), pp.183-212.

'* See Eric Watson, Country Music in Australia (Rodeo Productions, Eastlake, 1975).

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" Musical transcriptions: 'When the Rain Tumbles Down in July', from The Best of Slim Dusty (Columbia-EMI OSX-7807); 'Champion he was a Dandy', from Bob Davenport and theMarsden Rattlers (Trailer LER 3008); 'Botany Bay', from Edwards, op.cit., p.39.

" Laurence Zion, 'Pop Music and Australian Culture. Some Consider­ations', MelbourneHistoricalJournalNo. 14, pp. 18-33.

" Simon Frith, ' 'The magic that can set you free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community', Popular Music I (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

" Draft Paper No. 2. The Problem of Allocation of Music Board Funds Between Competing Uses, Music Board, Australia Council (1984).

" Tim Rowse, 'Doing Away With Ordinary People', Meanjin, Vol.44, No.2 (1985), pp.161-169

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