In the middle of the 20th century, a couple of things happened: first, communication technology matured and brought both urban and rural cultures from around the globe together; second, American rock and roll emerged and quickly became a global phenomenon. As people from widely disparate cultures fell in love with rock music, they inevitably began adopting it and blending it with their own local pop and folk music styles, leading to an explosion of folk-rock fusions.
In England, rock and roll took root and flourished in the 1960s, eventually coming back to the US in a slightly altered but still fundamentally rockish form; at the same time, traditional musicians from across the British Isles (notably including Ireland and Scotland) created a blend of folk and rock music that sounded like nothing Americans had heard – it certainly differed very starkly from both the country-derived psychedelic pop sounds of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the wispier, acoustic singer-songwriter stylings of folk popsters like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor.
Early British folk-rock drew on ancient ballads, dance tunes, music-hall songs, pub singalongs, and political broadsides to create a new kind of pop music that was much more rooted in Anglo-Celtic fiddle tunes than in American blues; some artists simply added drums and electric guitars to traditional dance numbers, while others wrote new songs that fused the traditions together more organically. Fairport Convention, the band that served as a jumping-off point for the solo careers of both Richard Thompson and the late Sandy Denny, is generally considered the first great British folk-rock band, but the 1960s and 1970s saw a proliferation of other fine ensembles as well, from Irish folk-pop artists like Clannad and Steeleye Span to artier, more baroque English groups like Pentangle and the Incredible String Band. The Waterson Family made albums of strictly traditional material throughout the 1960s, but Norma Watterson’s daughter Eliza Carthy has gone on to release a variety of folk-rock fusion albums. The Albion Dance Band (also known simply as the Albion Band) has focused more on dance-oriented traditional music, often with a rockish edge, and has been particularly important in preserving the Morris dance tradition and its tune repertoire.
In recent decades, more artists have emerged for whom rock seems to come first and folk second, often with thrilling results: Oysterband are famous for both delivering raucous ceilidh sets and for covering rockabilly and New Wave tunes, and have collaborated with June Tabor on two albums. The Levellers and Billy Bragg have revived explicitly political folk-rock from a distinctly British perspective, while Martin Swan’s Mouth Music project took traditional Scottish tunes and songs and put them in funky electronic settings alongside breakbeats and African samples.
Over the past several decades, the varieties of “British Isles folk-rock” have continued to evolve and proliferate, leading to a dizzying and exciting array of new (and old) music.