Few listeners under forty would immediately associate English folk music with A.L. Lloyd, yet as a performer, song collector, and arranger he ranks among the most influential British figures of the twentieth century in that field, often viewed as his country's counterpart to the Weavers' Lee Hays or Pete Seeger.
Albert Lancaster "Bert" Lloyd entered the world in London early in the 1900s as the child of an East Anglian fisherman. Although he absorbed many traditional pieces from both parents, especially his father, his serious engagement with folk material began only after he moved to Australia during the 1920s. There he spent nine years largely occupied with sheepminding while gathering numerous bush ballads. Subsequent seafaring experiences added still more songs to his repertoire. By 1935 he had returned to England carrying roughly five hundred collected items and a lasting commitment to the idiom. Two years later he joined a whaling expedition bound for Antarctica, acquiring additional sea shanties en route. Back on shore he heard a BBC broadcast concerning American unemployment, proposed an analogous program, and was promptly hired as a scriptwriter and reporter.
His first major publication, The Singing Englishman: An Introduction to Folk Song, appeared in 1944 and constituted the initial substantial study of English folk song in nearly four decades. An unexpected victory at the National Folk Singing Contest in 1947 launched his own performing career. Five years later he issued the anthology Come All Ye Bold Miners, even while remaining active in radio through the Ballads and Blues series, which featured Big Bill Broonzy, Alan Lomax, Jean Ritchie, and Ewan MacColl and initiated a sustained collaboration with the last of these. Lloyd's earliest recordings, dating from the 78 rpm period, included "The Banks of the Condamine" and "Bold Jack Donahue" on the Topic label; the long-playing format arrived in the 1950s via joint albums with MacColl produced for the Radio Ballads series.
In 1956 he appeared on screen as the shantyman performing in the tavern where Ishmael signs aboard the Pequod in John Huston's film adaptation of Moby Dick. Extensive concert work across England, together with frequent radio and television engagements, established him as one of the nation's foremost authorities on folk song and dance. Throughout the decade he also captured field recordings of traditional singers from Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania, many of which Topic subsequently released. His most enduring editorial achievement came through his partnership with composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) on The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, issued in 1959 and destined to become the field's best-selling reference work, with fifty thousand copies in print by the 1980s.
By the early 1960s Lloyd served as mentor to an entire cohort of younger performers, issuing Topic recordings accompanied by Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, Anne Briggs, and Frankie Armstrong while his publications supplied Carthy, Swarbrick, and their later associates in Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span with much of their core material. Carthy in particular extended Lloyd's research, always citing him prominently. The older singer's own discs encompassed drinking songs, sea shanties, labor pieces, and the full spectrum of material gathered from Australia to Antarctica and back.
Lloyd's performances were devoted to maintaining the genuine vocal practices of folk song within its original contexts. His delivery remained rugged and straightforward, employing language that was direct and unexpurgated, free of the sentimental revisions common in more commercial folk and shanty releases. Roughly forty years senior to most of the artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s, his singing evokes an earlier era than the work of Martin Carthy, Bob Dylan, or even Woody Guthrie, and stands at a considerable remove from the approaches of Steeleye Span or Fairport Convention.
