ALFRED WILLIAMS UPPER THAMES FOLK SONG: an obscure variant on a byway of
knowledge which appears self-articulating. From an unexpected dawning in 1914,
these elements conjoin as subject and object with, after their fashion, apocalyptic
effect, creating a before of rustic toilers (who chanced to sing) and a truculent,
questing autodidact who partly shared their decaying world, and an after of meaning
and value occluded as much as clarified in the shibboleth 'folk'. The condition of
the singers-their occupation, literacy, mobility-is explored from official record,
and correlated to 'folk' song through a pondering of transmission. The consciousness
of the self-anointed chronicler, variously apprenticed but musically unformed,
is examined in private document and printed pronouncement. Knowledge extends
through biographical particularity, specifics of the variety of the song (sung) corpus, a
drawing together of the Alfredian documentary Nachlass. In that his predilections are
parochial, his equipping pre-eminently literary and moral, Williams is at once aligned
with 'his' district and its denizens, and egregiously removed from the melodico-verbal
artefact which would, in the course of peregrine pedallings, become undesignedly the
object of his attentions. The construction is heroically achieved, but results from an
amalgam of postulate militating again§\:any cogent reconciling of components, such
that the cardinal constituent remains, finally, prosthetic. Unaccustomed as he was to
faltering in his prodigious stride,'folk' song rather finds him out (as it must find us
all out): in this sense he serves as the baroque emblem of allegories of disaffection. A
neglected figure of the early folk song movement steps from the shadows. Far from
self-articulating, his negotiations offer the spectacle of heterogeneous musical materials
only problematically peculiar to an in specific locale, mediated in the affiliations
and alienations of a fractured self.