The launch of the BBC Radio Ballad in 1958 capitalized on the contemporaneous revival of American folk music, thus generating greater intrigue into folk music as a global phenomenon. A key binding figure between British and American music cultures of this era was the Texas-born ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Lomax spent the first third of his life documenting distinct Southern folk music cultures alongside his father, John A. Lomax. The Lomax family’s preservations of Southern folk music were inherently flawed – they would often “[dilute] the harsher ‘folk’ elements, including any impenetrable native dialect” (Bottomley 608) to make their recordings more appealing to majority white audiences. The Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song still collected the Lomax family’s field work, a step toward building Alan Lomax’s concept of an “‘international “vox humana”‘ or common voice through which everyone could hear the rest of the world singing” (Bottomley 608). Lomax stepped closer to this goal as a staff member of the famous Rockefeller-backed Radio Research Project.
The close allyship between Britain and the United States during World War II soon led to increased collaboration in the form of radio network crossovers. Lomax worked on Transatlantic Call: People to People, a co-produced series from the BBC and CBS that alternated between sharing accounts of American and British living. Lomax’s work of the mid-1940s also involved the creation of ballad operas, a precursor to the Radio Ballad that took the form of a folk opera. As his transnational network in the music industry expanded, Lomax met the three co-founders of the BBC Radio Ballad – the UK-born Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, and the US-born Peggy Seeger – on three different occasions. In fact, he helped bring the trio together throughout the early to mid-1950s.
Therefore, the BBC Radio Ballad furthered a legacy of British and American radio partnership, one that relied on a bicultural episteme to inform how its creators represented a breadth of musical genres. The cross-pollination of musical cultures, such as “the burgeoning transatlantic nexus of folksong, Trad jazz, and skiffle” (Cole 368) in The Ballad of John Axon (the first episode), is part of what allowed the series to thrive upon its first release.
Just like the Lomax family field work, not all representations of musical cultures in the BBC Radio Ballad were anywhere near “perfect.” Folklorist Steve Winick noted how in The Ballad of John Axon, “when a driver reports that one of the best drivers he knows is from Jamaica, a faux-calypso number is inserted that is pretty clearly written by a middle-class Brit” (Winick 1).
To provide a greater sense of the transnational prevalence of the BBC Radio Ballad‘s musical genres before and after the program’s popularity, I created two Google Books Ngram Viewer visuals – one focused on Britain and one focused on the United States. I used the five genres “folk music,” “trad jazz,” “calypso,” “skiffle,” and “sea shanty” as the key terms for each query. I narrowed the timeline between 1900 to 2022.
As seen above, the first graph automatically excluded “British calypso” and “British sea shanty,” and the second graph automatically excluded “American trad jazz.” I was expecting “British sea shanty” to appear on the graph – a key reason why it may not have appeared could be the many alternative spellings of “shanty” (“chantey,” “chanty”).
Unsurprisingly, “folk music” remained near the top of each Ngram graph. Given that folk music is a naturally poetic art form, the suggestion of the continued popularity of the genre in both British and American literary cultures is well founded. What surprised me was how the relative frequency of “British folk music” grew gradually over time, while the relative frequency of “American folk music” peaked shortly after 1940, the era of the American folk music revival. I decided to construct two additional Ngram graphs to investigate whether or not the nomenclature of the genre for each nation had an impact on the results.
Interestingly, “folk song” echoes a similar pattern as “folk music.” Near the late 1950s, “British folk song” does briefly dominate “British folk music” in terms of relative frequency, but on the whole, “folk music” remains a more common term than “folk song” across both nations. Therefore, the fact that “folk song” does not fully overcome “folk music” suggests that the results of this study were not greatly impacted by these differences in musical nomenclature.