This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings.
Recent shifts in the political context have stimulated renewed interest in English identity within folk music
culture. Symbolic struggles over folk’s political significance highlight both the contested nature of English
identity and music’s semantic ambiguity, with texts being interpolated into discourses of both ethnic purity
and multiculturalism. Following research in popular music, sound studies and multimodal communication this
article explores the use of field recording to explore questions of place and Englishness in the work of
contemporary folk artists. A multimodal analysis of Stick in the Wheel’s From Here: English Folk Field
Recordings (2017) suggests that a multimodal approach
to musical texts that attends to the semantic affordances of sound recording can provide insight into folk
music’s role in debates over the nature of English identity.