Lindsay/Two Bold Singermen and the English Folk Revival, 4. The First Folk Revival

The first folk revival took place around the turn of the twentieth century, when collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger and Lucy Broadwood took to their bicycles to travel around the English countryside gathering songs and tunes from what they perceived to be a dying culture. This chapter briefly discusses the revival in broad terms before concentrating on folk song collection in Norfolk – where Kate Lee and Ralph Vaughan Williams were collecting around 1900. Neither Harry or Sam came to the collectors’ attention in the revival’s first years, but other Norfolk singers proved to be a fruitful source of music and song.