Why Football Chants are the Real Folk Music of Britain
No names, no royalties, just thousands united in song
"Football chants are the one surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition."
— Martin Carthy
Coming from one of Britain's most respected traditional musicians, this observation cuts to the heart of a curious paradox in our cultural landscape. While the word "folk" has become increasingly associated with individual singer-songwriters performing to seated audiences in hushed venues, the genuine folk tradition - music created collectively by communities, owned by no one, shaped by everyone - thrives every Saturday on the terraces of Britain.
There's something profoundly ironic about our modern conception of folk music. Visit any folk festival and you'll encounter stages dominated by named artists, their personal stories carefully curated, their songs copyrighted and credited. We've transformed "folk", a word that fundamentally means "of the people", into yet another genre of individual artistic expression. Meanwhile, in stadiums across the country, the authentic folk process continues unabated, anonymous and vital as ever.
The history of football chanting reveals just how organic this tradition is. The earliest recorded football chant dates to 1887, a war cry following the Scottish Cup final. By the 1890s, fans were already appropriating and transforming popular songs - Sheffield United supporters adapted the music hall favourite "Rowdy Dowdy Boys," while Southampton fans developed their distinctive "Yi! Yi! Yi!" cry. Norwich City's "On the Ball, City," dating from the 1890s and still sung today, holds the distinction of being the world's oldest football song in continuous use.
What's interesting about these early adaptations is their complete anonymity. We don't know who first put football words to these melodies. No individual claimed authorship, no royalties were paid. The songs emerged from the collective, shaped by thousands of voices, belonging to everyone and no one simultaneously. This is folk tradition in its purest form - communal creation where individual contribution dissolves into shared ownership.
Even when a known composer attempted to enter this tradition, it failed. Sir Edward Elgar, the celebrated composer and Wolverhampton Wanderers fan, wrote "He Banged the Leather for Goal" in 1898 in honour of striker Billy Malpass. Despite Elgar's fame, the song never caught on with the terraces. Perhaps it was too authored, too individual. Real terrace chants need that quality of seeming to have always existed, of belonging to the crowd rather than coming from it.
The 1960s brought revolution to British terraces, but crucially, not through any individual's innovation. The transformation came from collective discovery. As fans watched the 1962 and 1966 World Cups on television, they witnessed South American and Italian supporters creating walls of sound through passionate collective singing. British crowds, traditionally more reserved, began their own experiments. Liverpool's Kop led the way, adapting Beatles songs and chart hits; "Let's Go" by The Routers became a rhythmic clapping chant, "We Shall Not Be Moved" was transformed into a declaration of support.
But here's the crucial point: we don't know which individuals started these adaptations. They spread not through recording contracts or media promotion, but through the ancient method of oral transmission. Visiting fans heard them, remembered them, carried them home, adapted them further. Each iteration might add subtle variations - a word changed here, a rhythm adjusted there, but no individual claimed ownership. The chants belonged to everyone who sang them.
This process exemplifies what Carthy recognised as genuine folk tradition. Unlike modern folk clubs where performers introduce songs with detailed backstories ("I wrote this after my grandmother died," or "This came to me while walking in the Lake District"), terrace chants emerge without attribution. When thousands sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at Anfield, they're not celebrating Rodgers and Hammerstein or even Gerry and the Pacemakers. They're participating in a living tradition that has transformed a Broadway show tune into something far more profound; a communal expression of identity and solidarity.
The mechanics of chant creation reveal how radically this differs from our contemporary understanding of folk music. New chants rarely emerge from deliberate composition. Instead, someone in the crowd tries new words to a familiar tune. If it resonates, others join in, and within minutes thousands might be singing something that didn't exist moments before. There's no copyright, no attribution, no individual recognition sought or given. The best chants seem to emerge from the collective unconscious fully formed.
Compare this to the modern folk circuit, where individual authorship is paramount. Every song has a known writer, every performance a credited interpreter. The contemporary folk scene, for all its merits, operates on the same principles as any other genre of performed music - artists create, audiences consume. The relationship is fundamentally transactional, even when the setting is intimate and the material traditional.
This isn't to romanticise football culture, which has produced its share of offensive and hateful chants. But even these darker examples demonstrate the double-edged nature of genuine folk tradition; it reflects communities as they are, not as we might wish them to be. The racist chants that plagued football in the 1970s and 80s revealed uncomfortable truths about British society that no individual songwriter would have articulated so baldly.
Yet for every chant born of hatred, others celebrate pure collective joy. The transformation of melodies across cultures shows folk process at its most creative. "Moliendo Café," a Venezuelan song about coffee plantations, became an Argentine stadium anthem in the 1970s, mutated into Italy's "Dale Cavese," and eventually emerged as Liverpool's "Allez Allez Allez" in 2018. No committees oversaw these transformations, no arrangers were credited. The songs evolved through pure collective creativity.
Modern technology has accelerated this process without fundamentally changing its nature. When Iceland's hypnotic Viking Thunder Clap went viral during Euro 2016, it spread globally within days. But again, it's not attributed to any individual creator. It's simply "what Iceland fans do," adopted and adapted worldwide.
Perhaps this is why terrace chanting remains so powerful in an age of algorithmic individualisation. While we increasingly consume culture in isolation - personal playlists, individual screens, customised feeds - the terraces demand collective participation. You cannot chant alone. The practice only exists in its communal expression. It's folk tradition as our ancestors would have understood it: not the product of gifted individuals performed for appreciative audiences, but the voice of the tribe itself.
The contemporary folk scene often speaks of preserving tradition, and indeed, many folk clubs do valuable work maintaining old songs and passing on musical heritage. But in their focus on individual performers and personal interpretation, they've perhaps preserved the form while losing something essential about the function. Folk music wasn't originally about watching talented individuals interpret traditional material, it was about communities creating and sharing culture collectively.
The paradox is complete: our truest folk tradition doesn't happen in folk clubs but in football grounds, created not by folk musicians but by people who've probably never thought of themselves as part of any musical tradition at all. Yet every time thousands unite to sing songs no individual owns, they participate in one of humanity's oldest cultural practices - the collective creation of meaning through shared voice.
Long may it continue, this anonymous, communal, genuinely folk tradition. In a world increasingly dominated by branded experiences and individual achievement, the terraces remain a space where culture belongs to everyone and no one, where the best songs seem to have always existed, and where raising your voice means joining something larger than yourself. That's not just football culture, that's folk culture in its truest, most democratic form.
