Ross Cole, The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), ISBN: 978-0-52038-373-9 (cloth).

Twenty years ago, I remember reading and reviewing, revelling in and even raving about, a then new and rather wonderful musical history by the US academic Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. As I began my present engagement with Ross Cole’s The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination, I felt as if I was encountering a historic summary of similar scale and ambition, even if the material seemed to be almost the antithesis of the earlier Gendron overview: not a critical contemplation of the flashing blade of the fresh and novel and the groundbreaking, rather an analysis of the role of those wielding the solid shield of history, defending the bedrock of the past from the menacing tremors – spiritual and aesthetic, economic and social – of the present. Such extendedmusings on those diametrically different forces at play on the popular music that would become a central pillar in our entertainment, leisure, and pleasure in the twentieth century are both fascinating and vital: those powerful strands woven between, let us say, the rise of Impressionism and the explosion of punk and hip hop a hundred years later. They would feed our understanding of issues of high and low culture, our assessment of the manufactured and authentic, our consideration of mass production and mass consumption, the place of radical art, developing technology and invention, and the vernacular creativity of the grassroots and those fierce debates about authenticity and contrivance that have peppered the well-spiced academic gumbo of the modern and postmodern West. Cole’s book, a developed version of his doctoral submission, considers a focused few decades in Anglo-America – from the 1870s to the 1930s, broadly speaking – and their relationship to folk culture – song and dance, though principally song – and how the meanings of the rustic past in both Britain (particularly parts of England) and the United States were adopted and adapted to suit the political positions of largelymiddle-class and educated thinkers who identified, within the practices of the previous centuries, an inspirational font so powerful and intriguing that they could tap into its waters to feed ideas across the breadth of the political spectrum, a compelling concept at a time when the extreme wings of left and right