If you take an interest in folk, blues and other traditional styles of guitar music, you may have encountered a puzzling phenomenon when you try to understand where the styles come from. You can trace them back easily enough to the pre-war years of the 1930s and maybe a little before. But all too often, as one delves back further into the past, the trail becomes harder to follow…
Part of the reason is that the deepest roots of modern music derive from folk song, which was passed down orally from mother to daughter, from father to son. During England’s industrial revolution, many of these centuries-old musical traditions died out, as people moved from field to factory and the pattern of their lives changed utterly.
