Folk tales

The story of how folk turned into rock (and back again) is a classic...

"Judas!" some bright spark famously yelled at Bob Dylan as he strapped on an electric guitar during his 1966 tour of England. For the folk purists in his audience, Dylan was a heretic whose music should have remained strictly unplugged. Traditional folk music has not always enjoyed an easy relationship with rock, but where the two have met, a unique and innovative musical style has emerged.

Folk-rock has its origins in the folk revival of the early Sixties. Spearheaded by Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd, the revival movement recovered a wealth of traditional British and Irish songs for a generation raised on American rhythm and blues - Dylan included. Why so many of the songs - "Scarborough Fair", "John Barleycorn", "She Moves Through the Fair" - have remained in our collective musical consciousness is now explored on The New Electric Muse, a cornucopian 3-CD retrospective spanning almost four decades.

Folk critic Dave Laing first hit on the idea for the Electric Muse as a book in the early Seventies and, together with fellow journalists Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow and Robert Shelton, set about telling the story of folk into rock. In 1975, Transatlantic and Island jointly released a four-album set of the best available recordings from the archives. Long deleted, it is this collection which forms the basis of The New Electric Muse.

Although the new compilation remains faithful to the original narrative structure, space has sensibly been made for influential artists overlooked the first time round, such as Sweeney's Men. Laurence Aston, Transatlantic co-ordinator on the 1975 release, is the man behind the reissue: "Many of the recent developments in Celtic rock have their origins in people like the Sweeneys, and the folk rock of the late Sixties and Seventies now has enormous validity in contemporary music - this just wasn't the case 15 years ago."

The final disc takes the story up to the Nineties, highlighting the importance of pivotal figures Richard Thompson, June Tabor and Eliza Carthy, daughter of Norma Waterson (above), the first lady of folk. "Eliza is exploring the roots of folk in much the same way as people were in the Sixties," observes Dave Laing, "so it has now become the story of folk into rock into folk."

In fact, despite the legacy of a Pogues-ish punk detectable in the Oyster Band and the power-pop of Energy Orchard, the "rock" element has become meaningless in the whirl of styles that have informed this music. 1994's "Out the Gap" by Sharon Shannon, rising star of Irish traditional folk, chugs along to an arrangement by reggae producer Denis Bovell, while Davey Graham's pioneering Indian raga-style guitar sounds as fresh now as it did 30 years ago. Who is The New Electric Muse aimed at? "There's a huge audience," claims Aston. "I hope those for whom this music is timeless will enjoy it as much as the young roots fan who may be unaware of the origins of a lot of tunes they know so well. We hope to remind people who may have forgotten just how good it is." I hope the man who yelled "Judas" has a copy.

Robert Webb

The New Electric Muse is out now on Castle Communications.