Revivals on the Edge: Northumberland and Cape Breton—A Keynote

In the mid-1980s, I began doing fieldwork in Northumberland, in the Northeast of England, interested in studying a regional musical revival. Research in Northumberland, a place that is comparatively small (although large for an English county), with a strong regional identity and a distinctive body of music, appealed to me as a way of thinking about musical revival and renewal, and I spent about a decade, on and off, doing fieldwork and historical research there. Then, nearly a decade later, I began fieldwork in Cape Breton, on the edge of North America, in eastern Canada, another regional world of music, one in which local music is burgeoning as never before. The Cape Breton situation is somewhat different—arguably, it is a revival, but, and equally arguably, it is not well described by that term. For the purposes of this essay, I will use the rubric revival to describe musicking in Northumberland and Cape Breton, and I will also refer to the widely influential American folk revival. When I speak, in this essay's title, of revivals “on the edge,” it is in two senses, one a matter of geography, the other one of scholarship. Northumberland and Cape Breton are both geographically on the margins, Northumberland a borderland, Cape Breton a comparatively isolated island on the edge of a continent. And in my discipline, the study of revivals has until recently been a marginal pursuit.