The Imagined Village was a folk music project founded by Simon Emmerson of the Afro Celt Sound System. It was intended to produce modern folk music that represented modern multiculturalism in the United Kingdom and as such, featured musicians from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The name of the project came from the 1993 book The Imagined Village by Georgina Boyes. An exploration of the present folk music revival, which traces the history of English folk songs and dances. The author argues that the existence of a folk revival is a direct and urgent response to a cultural crisis caused by the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. The project started in 2004, and led to the release of an eponymous album in 2007 by a collective of artists on Real World Records. Some of the tracks on it are modern re-interpretations of traditional folk songs.
Every age re-invents the past to its own fancy. When Edwardian song collector Cecil Sharp roamed England, he imagined the country’s history as a rural idyll, filled with flower meadows and genial shepherds, even though the songs he found were frequently about poverty, death and fornication with faeries. Later, when the rock generation embraced the folk tradition, it was precisely these sexual and supernatural elements that appealed to singers and players like Anne Briggs, Fairport Convention and Robert Plant. Albion became, as it was to William Blake, a land of mystery and wonder. Later, in the 1980s, with acts like Billy Bragg, The Levellers and The Pogues, folk became a defiant snub to an authoritarian government.
The resurgence of folk in the new century, a hundred years after Cecil Sharp became riveted by the sight of Morris dancers, remains a work in progress. Already, though, new times are finding fresh resonance within folk’s age-old contours. The music’s darker strains, its murder ballads and pirate yarns, have been pulled to the fore – witness the recent Rogue’s Gallery project – while in an age of corporate governance, the fact that folk is not ‘owned’ by anybody is cheering.
Folk has also become an inevitable part of the current search for English identity. That’s English as opposed to British, for once Wales and Scotland had reclaimed their flags and history – a process accelerated by an Eighties government largely elected by England that rode roughshod across the lands across the border – it was only a matter of time before the St. George’s flag superseded the Union Jack.
But what is Englishness? That question has already provoked a swathe of books, mostly by Tory diehards – Roger Scruton’s England, An Elegy and Peter Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain for example – though Billy Bragg’s The Progressive Patriot has recently joined the fray, arguing, like Orwell before him, that patriotism is not necessarily the refuge of rascals. Bragg’s point is that there is a distinctly English tradition that belongs not to royalists and imperialists, but to the people, a tradition that runs from The Diggers to The Clash.
It is in this context that Simon Emmerson’s The Imagined Village arrives. The project – for once that over-worked term is appropriate – reflects Simon’s passions as both musician and cultural activist. Gathering together an array of brilliant and challenging voices, and setting them in a musical framework that honours the past while updating it with breathtaking confidence, The Imagined Village is arguably the most ambitious re-invention of the English folk tradition since Fairport Convention’ Liege and Lief. ‘It’s a record that, in the time-honoured way of folk, is about sex and death,’ says Simon,’ but it’s also about honouring England’s own distinctive traditions.’
