As temperatures rise and ecology collapses, contemporary folk musicians are sounding the alarm. From mashups of endangered birds, to grassroots folk groups recording the devastation of bee populations, political eco-folk is growing up and down the country.
Folk is a fitting musical mouthpiece for planetary breakdown. It has a long legacy of protest and resistance, as well as affinity to land and the natural environment.
“Folk is a people’s genre, a working-class genre, having been orally transmitted over hundreds of years. There’s unsurprisingly quite a strong link to left wing politics—trade unionism, anti-war movements etc,” explains Humphrey Lloyd, a market gardener and musician who produced the folk album Stand Up Now for the Landworkers’ Alliance. Songs on the album traverse land rights, agricultural, anti-enclosure and poaching ballads.
“More recently, people have been writing songs in that tradition to do with the environmental crisis. It’s a kind of natural progression from songs about the labour movement,” he says.
Eco-folk often entails collaborations between artists, writers and movements. In recent years, nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s work has taken wing in many musical directions. Written to counter the erasure of the natural world from our vocabulary, his acclaimed book The Lost Words, co-created with illustrator Jackie Morris, has since evolved into two folk albums: Spell Songs. “The spells began being set and sung—not only as part of the Spell Songs collective, but also, for instance, by community choirs singing under trees threatened with unjust felling in Sheffield and beyond,” explains Macfarlane. “That felt like the original impulse of the project behind The Lost Words.”
Macfarlane’s written words have been read by millions, but he’s energised by the musical dynamic of his work. “Music can give new force and new reach to the written word,” he says. “It can transmute and shapeshift language into new forms, and can carry it fast into hearts and minds in ways that are hugely exciting to me.”
Macfarlane has also teamed up with folk musician Johnny Flynn to produce Lost in the Cedar Wood. It tells the epic of Gilgamesh—the destruction of a sacred cedar wood by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Although the oldest known written story, the epic of Gilgamesh has a message of ecocide at its core which resonates today, explains Macfarlane. “Here we are, deep in the Anthropocene, failing to heed that warning of what happens when the natural world is systematically stripped of its liveliness and treated purely as infinite resources,” he says. But people are hungry for more: after sell-out shows, there is a tour and another album on the way.
Robert Macfarlane is drawn to folk because it is “deep-rooted in questions of land, protest and nature; it's versed in story-telling; and the folk music traditions and practices I'm drawn to have tended to be progressive, inclusive and subversive in their visions.”
This is evident in the recordings of Spell Songs. “Protest literally finds its way into the song ‘Oak’ on the recent second Spell Songs album, Let The Light In,” he explains. “If you listen in the background, you can hear a wildtrack of a recording from one of the youth climate protests, recording just before the pandemic struck, and before the Tories started to attempt to limit rights of protest through the Police Bill.”
The environmental legacy of folk music has shifted through time. Fay Hield, a folk singer and ethnomusicologist at the University of Sheffield, traces folk’s genealogy from the “collecting and sorting” of music by people like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp and Lucy Broadwood at the turn of the 19th century. “Obviously people were singing it for hundreds of years before that,” she says, “but this was when the term folk was invented or applied to this body of music.”
Songs that were collected were predominantly those that fitted the rural idyllic idea of England, which was under threat from the Industrial Revolution. This later expanded to include miners’ and millworkers’ songs in the second folk revival around the 1960s, thanks to works being collected by socialists like Bert Lloyd. “The whole canon of traditional folk music is built on a foundation that nature is good, industry is bad,” says Hield.
Musician and folk song collector Sam Lee has been part of this contemporary musical strand invigorating engagement with nature, as well as promoting the right to roam. “Nature came way before music and any creative practice of being a musician,” he explains. “As a little kid I was running away to bits of green as much as possible. I grew up in central London, but it is not short of green places. I don’t think you need to be in big wilderness or expansive countryside to have a relationship with nature at all.” This visceral love for nature turned into teaching wilderness work, which “suddenly turned into music.”
In his work, Lee brings people back into relationships with nature—for example with the “Singing with Nightingales” live events he has hosted in the spring and early summer since 2015. These immersive experiences are held in the woods at night: a blend of live concert, fireside food and connecting with a species of bird whose number has declined by 90 per cent in the last 50 years. “Singing with nightingales is letting nature do as much of the talking as I am,” Lee explains. “It’s a piece of theatre: nature has created the set and stage and brings in the protagonist. I’m just there to guide and help tell its story.”
Lloyd sees a distinction between traditional and contemporary folk’s approach to nature. “More traditionally, when people were singing about nature in folk songs, they were talking about it in the context of their working week, like the cattle they’re having to drive or the soil they’re having to till,” he says. He thinks contemporary folk has a dreamier view of nature due to modern society’s alienation from the land. “It’s a reflection of different social patterns. People live in a different way, less connected with nature and therefore have a more romantic idea about it.”
Nonetheless, nature often acts as an anchoring feature in traditional folk music. “I love it when the traditional songs I sing mention things like trees, because it’s like the landscape has been here as long as the songs have been here,” says Hield. “If a song came from this place 200 years ago, people were singing then about the same hills I’m thinking about now. There’s something really powerful about that kind of connection.”
Whether he is singing old Irish folk songs about deforestation to John Kerry at COP26 or tramping around the woods in search of the nightingale, Lee is aware that folk can start to rebuild this lost connection to nature—as well as warn of its decline. “I’m always trying to elaborate where in old songs there’s an understanding that our ancestors once had of nature. It’s there in the associated knowledge, the allegiances and heightened perception of the natural world around them. We call it a spiritual connection, but actually they just spoke the language of nature. These songs are part of the vibration that allows us all back into the natural world.”
