In 1944, around the time Woody Guthrie started writing “this machine kills fascists” on his acoustic guitar, English Marxist A. L. Lloyd penned his own manifesto for folk music as a radical political tool. His booklet The Singing Englishman argued folk’s history of documenting working life had been diluted in the prettified, pastoral songbooks of commercial collectors. Cataloging songs of miners, factory workers, and trade unionists, he helped revive English folk songs as the language of tough, dangerous work and left-wing politics. “They are reports from a changing society,” he declared in the 1985 documentary Bert: A Portrait of A. L. Lloyd , “based on a tradition that seems, and sounds, eternal.”

London nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective , part of a new wave of folk revivalists in England, echo Lloyd’s belief in folk’s role of documenting working life (the shovel) and providing respite from it (the dance).…