The Electric Muse Revisited: The Story of Folk into Rock and Beyond

I bought the original Electric Muse back in 1975 when folk-rock was at the height of it's popularity. In a way, it was becoming just another sub-genre of Rock, and the development of the music during the 50s and 60s seemed a long way back in the past. What a lot has changed since 1975! There have been 3 subsequent CD versions of the Electric Muse published since the original vinyl, all of them adding more recent tracks as well as dropping some of the original ones, and they were all worth getting. This Electric Muse is the proper however. None of the tracks duplicate those on the original, and all but a handful were recorded and published subsequent to the 1975 release. We see how the traditional music of the UK and Ireland has adapted to Punk, Electronica, and the other genres; we also see how it has adapted to different social conditions and attitudes. As with the 1975 version, this new release is accompanied by a revised version of the original book: this is purchased separately.

Good book but written at the time the revival was still going on and much more still to happen! Lacks hindsight but brilliant detail from those who were living through it.

Good early overview of the British folk rock phenomena written while the embers where still hot.

I have one of the world's largest collection of books on all forms of popular music. I don't keep all books, yet this one is a keeper. For the uninitiated, the Electric Muse offers a nice overall history of the biggest names in folk. I can imagine a young student of pop writing down names of admittedly great figures to listen to later: Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Roy Harper, Pentangle, etc. However, in my view the book seriously fails to live up to its goal of exploring the contribution of folk, or evolution of folk, to rock. By insisting on preserving some purist, and completely subjective, standard called folk, typically any sound without an electric instrument, the authors fail to fully explore the folk which by definition became integrated into rock. Once one has achieved a truly folk-rock integrative psychology, one would fail to find anything original in the Oysterband and other new artists who remain wed to some outdated conception of folk (rather than wed to how to develop the integration into new places). The folk-rock explosion that Dylan and the Byrds initiated by 1964 was already morphing within one year or two into the psychedelic revolution of the Airplane, Dead, and Love, whose folk greatly outpaced in artistry many of the artists touted in the book. The folk-rock integration taught the listeners and new artists of the 1960s that great music cannot be defined by style, but by the effect it can produce upon your soul. Without the openness to explore this folk dimension in rock, which was the announced purpose of the book, one will miss the exuberance and depth of a Tim Buckley, one of rock's greatest artists, as this book did, or fail to notice the uniqueness of a Nick Drake, also missing from this 1975 work. Can you imagine, no reference to John Fahey, Sandy Bull or Robbie Basho, three of the best of all time. I can hear the folk in the brilliant solo albums of Nico, and even the classic Velvets album she sang on, written by Lou Reed. This book completely misses the huge progressive rock output of the 1970s, which integrated folk with psychedelia, jazz and classical, never far in its sound from the passion of the Byrds. Led Zeppelin too played much homage to folk in many numbers. The updated version of the book could have explored the folk-rock immanent in the 1980s in the Go-betweens, Waterboys, Dead Can Dance, and a hundred others. In fact, today's bedroom creators are all putting together their masterpieces using Ableton and bringing them straight to the people without label or big business involvement, much as a folk singer of yore might bring her songs to students sitting on stoops in a college square. The problem in my view, as a musician, with this book's overidentifying with a style called folk, is that it fails to observe the criteria that make a work of art great. Some folk artists are geniuses, most are derivative bores. That is true of all music in any style. Failing to understand that, one fails to discuss music. History becomes a dry listing of meaningless names who are often irrelevant. Musical history is best written by a good pair of critical ears and the ability to feel moved. This book was not written by them, but that has proven frustratingly true of most of the music histories I have read. Young students of music will need to make their own obsessive lists of artists name-dropped in hosts of books such as this one until they slowly piece together their own history of who was great in any genre of music, folk or otherwise, once they have heard them. Still, as I said, this one is nonetheless a keeper.

Top deal and quality writing. It’s all there.