Investigates the creative and commercial processes that enabled engagement between popular music and politics in seventeenth-century England.


This book focuses on a pivotal moment in Britain's long history of interaction between popular song and political power. The period from the 1590s to the 1690s saw the first iteration of a specialised and dynamic commercial popular music industry - focusing on the production of new songs, cheaply printed on single sheets at a scale never seen before, distributed across the three kingdoms and activated by a network of trade-related balladsingers. The industry created a widely shared 'mainstream' of popular musical tastes. This rapid expansion and extensive social and geographical reach of a culturally influential popular music industry coincided with Britain's revolutionary century, a concurrence which not only spurred an ever-growing appetite for politically-inflected songs but also amplified the trade's ability to influence public politics.


The book presents critical new evidence and fresh methodological approaches that make it possible to understand how, why and at whose behest commercial ballads became powerful interlocutors between governors and governed in seventeenth-century Britain. It reenvisions the working communities and practices that constituted the seventeenth-century's popular music trades, and argues that politically-inflected ballads must be understood as constituents of a fast-moving and taste-driven commercial market for new popular song. It investigates the creative and commercial processes that enabled engagement between popular music and politics, and closely examines the motivations of those who chose to produce and perform political ballads in the teeth of regulation, repression and violent retribution by a raft of authorities.