Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020
Mapping out the narrative of song history, from the first printed ballads of the 1520s to the global hits of streaming services.
Songs are small things: short, catchy, harmonically simple. But they are also universal, mobile, potent objects capable of uniting nations, inspiring peace or war, love or despair.
Accessible to all societies and social groups, they sit at the centre of cultural, social, and political history. Involved in everything from the rise of the working class, to nationalism, race relations, and the commodification of romantic love.
The simple song offers a transformative means of understanding the past 500 years. Songs reframe old ideas of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ cultures. Instead, they form part of a dynamic cultural ‘mainstream’ from which certain groups have sought to deviate.
The project maps out a very long, large-scale narrative of song history, from the first printed ballads of the 1520s to the global hits of streaming services. Everything from the pleasure garden to blackface minstrelsy, the revolutionary barricade to the bedrooms of disaffected teens.
It emphasises non-commercial, transhistorical forms of song, that are vital to mainstream culture but often neglected by scholars of music:
- lullabies
- playground songs
- songs of worship
- carols
- drinking songs,
- sports chants
- national anthems
- protest songs
Project activities have included:
- an international conference on ubiquitous music in early-modern England, leading to a special issue of Renaissance Studies
a conference on comic song in the long nineteenth century - an RMA Study Day on music in pubs, clubs and ’stutes
- a major collaboration with Electric Voice Theatre on the political Unitarian songwriter Eliza Flower (1803–46) including concerts in Newcastle, Harlow and London and a series of recordings
Early outputs include contributions for BBC Radio 3 and 4 – The Essay, Between the Ears, Free Thinking, Front Row, and AntiSocial.
You can read Open Access articles on the Hymn as Protest Song, and the Eighteenth-Century Mainstream, with many more pieces forthcoming.
The project will produce a major, public-facing book by PI Oskar Cox Jensen, and a PhD thesis on music in working men’s clubs from their origins to the present day by Izzy Thomas.