Marion Henry is an associate professor of contemporary history at Paris 1–Panthéon-Sorbonne University, affiliated with the Center for the History of Contemporary Societies (CHS). Her current research focuses on the history of amateur artistic practices and leisure activities in British coal-mining regions during the 20th century. Her doctoral dissertation, defended in December 2021, is titled “Every Village Would Have a Band”: Building Community with Music. A Social and Cultural History of Brass Bands in British Coalfields, 1947–1984 (Sciences Po Paris, University of Strathclyde). This work uses the case of brass bands affiliated with the British coal mining industry to analyze the combined effects of changes in mass culture and the process of deindustrialization on working-class communities in Great Britain between 1947 and 1984.

Project statement:

While brass bands are often established as the symbol of an extinct cohesive and homogeneous British mining culture, and more generally working-class culture, which declined significantly throughout the second half of the twentieth century—being both swallowed by North-American influenced mass culture and hindered by the deindustrialisation process—this research aims at revisiting cultural studies through a renewed historiography of coalmining history in order to evince the complex relationship between the notions of ‘working-class’ and ‘popular’ cultures and to contribute to an emerging dialogue between social history and popular music studies.

Focusing on the complex musical, occupational, social, gender, and political affiliations of brass bands affiliated to the British coal industry between 1947—marking the nationalisation of the industry in a context of coal shortage—and the eve of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which led to an acceleration of the deindustrialisation process in the British coalfields, this work explores the relationship between these musical formations and the construction of a mining identity. Against the backdrop of the deindustrialisation process, which impacted the British coalfields from the late 1950s, and a progressive marginalisation of brass banding within popular culture since the interwar years, mining brass bands participated in the building of a cohesive symbolic mining identity. This project, which concentrates on miner-musician and musician-miners’ practices and trajectories, is influenced by ethnographical and sociological studies of amateur musical activities and combines the use of written archives and oral history methodology.

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