Quotes from Rob Young

Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: 'The mother of folklore is poverty.'3

During a long heart-to-heart talk, as they ramble through the country lanes near Bredon Hill, his father muses upon the old meaning of 'pagan' – 'belonging to the village'. 'The village is sneered at as something petty. Petty it can be. Yet it works – the scale is human. People can relate there. Man may yet, in the nick of time, revolt, and save himself. Revolt from the monolith; come back to the village.' He

Softley's first album, Songs for Swingin' Survivors (Columbia), produced by Donovan's management team of Peter Eden and Geoff Stephens, is one of the three great solo folk albums released in Britain in 1965, alongside Bert Jansch's second, It Don't Bother Me, and John Renbourn.

Holst's astringent orchestral piece Egdon Heath, completed shortly after visiting Hardy, captures the novelist's eerie atmospheres and weight of foreclosing tragedy.

Such moments – the first glimmer of dawn sunbeams, lengthening shadows, star-glitter permeating the darkening sky, 'a perilous pagan enchantment haunting the midsummer forest'3 – saturate the music of Arnold Bax, the principal figure in what is sometimes referred to as the Celtic Twilight movement in British music, when the land without music was transformed into a sonorous Neverland.

Britain's contribution includes Bantock's choral ballet The Great God Pan (1920) and Pagan Symphony (completed 1927), both painting fantastical sound pictures of frisky nymphs and satyrs, and brimming with the energy of eternal delight.

The Young Tradition (1966) and its successor, So Cheerfully Round (1967), both released on Transatlantic, are rustic tapestries of ballads, carols and street cries from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a parade of serving-maids, poachers, fishermen, cunning foxes, bold dragoons, pretty ploughboys and hungry children.

The Watersons, Frost and Fire (1965); The Young Tradition, So Cheerfully Round (1967); Peter Bellamy, Merlin's Isle of Gramarye (1972).

Shortly afterwards, at Cambridge, he noticed a medieval crumhorn hanging on the wall at a friend's digs and began to seek out – and teach himself to play – examples of every type of instrument that time had consigned to oblivion: crumhorns, sackbuts, sorduns, shawms, rebecs, tabors, viols, citole, organetto, racketts and chalumeaux, and all the senior and junior members of the recorder family.

John Renbourn, Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & Ye Grene Knyghte (1968); Shirley Collins, The Power of the True Love Knot (1968); Shirley and Dolly Collins, Anthems in Eden (1969). The Early Music movement as we know it today began in practice

Munrow hated hearing pre-Romantic music sung with operatic vibrato, for example, and pioneered the use of vocalists whose voices didn't wobble.

On 1970's The Lady and the Unicorn he applied his filigree technique to a procession of courtly dance tunes from across medieval Europe, including an old English tune, 'Trotto', and an Italian one, 'Saltarello', given a folk-drone feel by Renbourn's use of an unusual tuning and double-tracked with a sitar.

He continued to dip into pavans, galliards and other sounds of the Middle Ages on records like The Hermit (1976), The Enchanted Garden (1980) and The Nine Maidens (1985).

The unconscious music of the folk has all the marks of fine art; that it is wholly free from the taint of manufacture, the canker of artificiality; that it is transparently pure and truthful, simple and direct in its utterance.

Anthems in Eden

They repeated the trick on Love, Death and the Lady (1970).

Renbourn recorded his great second LP Another Monday in the makeshift studio at Bill Leader's Camden Town flat.

was the intimation that fresh pastures beckoned. Jansch's Jack Orion

Harry Cox of Great Yarmouth, who went on to become a celebrated face of the traditional folk revival, recording more than 200 songs and appearing frequently on television until his death in 1971.

The mourning of late summer as it reaches its autumnal tipping point; the pining for faded youth or lost love; the elegy for the fallen in war; otherworldly dimensions glimpsed but not touched; and the yearning for a distant home: British music is uniquely attuned to these moments and sentiments, for it is finally this sense of loss, of achievement slipping away like sand in a glass, that is at the heart of the British experience over the course of the twentieth century.

Kibbo Kift, an organisation which taught young men outdoor survival skills with a neo-pagan twist.

In 1939 Grierson moved across the Atlantic and established the National Film Board of Canada, an organisation renowned for its nature, industrial and public-information output.7

The more experimental GPO alumnus Humphrey Jennings expunged voice-over altogether in favour of an associative flow of images. Jennings was a prime mover in the 1930s Mass Observation project, a census of national consciousness recording the fleeting thoughts of thousands of British citizens on a huge range of subjects, including motorists' gestures and shouts, beard-trimming styles and the 'cult of the aspidistra'.

The ritual nature of 'John Barleycorn', 'Jolly Old Hawk' and 'The Derby Ram', and the sacrificial elements and destructive energy in 'The Cutty Wren', for example, he suspected derived from witch cults, frequently breeding grounds of rebellion and non-conformity.