Abstract
Do‘folk musicians’(whatever they are) think about what they are trying to do when they perform in ways different to those of ‘pop musicians’, ‘rock musicians’ or ‘classical musicians’? In other words, is there such a thing as a ‘folk aesthetic’, and can it be identified through the musical performances they give? (Such an implicit identification is always more satisfactory than any explicit one since it is harder to falsify.) After contextualizing the relationship between English folk and popular musics over the past few decades, this paper will argue that such an aesthetic can be identified, through a judicious combination of the analysis of recordings and written accounts, and it will proceed to do so. It will also argue, and demonstrate, that such an aesthetic has begun to mutate over the most recent decade, and suggest a possible consequence of such a mutation.