Industrial Folk Song

Industrial folk song is the repertory of songs made by and about industrial workers in Britain and North America — miners, mill hands, sailors of the steam age, railwaymen, fishermen of the trawler fleets. Unlike rural folk song, its subjects are the pit, the factory floor, the strike and the disaster, and much of it was written by identifiable worker-poets for broadsides, union meetings and music hall. The revival scholar *A. L. Lloyd* defined the field with his anthology "The Iron Muse" (1963), and the songs of *Ewan MacColl* and the Radio Ballads extended the tradition into the twentieth century.