began the Ballads and Blues Club in 1953. These clubs were usually urban in location, but the songs sung in them often hearkened back to a rural pre-industrial past. In many ways this was the adoption of abandoned popular music by the middle classes. By the mid-1960s there were probably over 300 folk clubs in Britain, providing an important circuit for acts that performed traditional songs and tunes acoustically, where they could sustain a living by playing to a small but committed audience. This meant that there were, by the later 1960s, a group of performers with musical skill and knowledge of a wide variety of traditional songs and tunes. A number of groups who were part of the folk revival experimented with electrification in the mid-1960s. These included the unrecorded efforts of Sweeney's Men from Ireland, the jazz folk group Pentangle, who moved from purely acoustic instrumentation to introducing electric guitar on their later albums, Eclection, who released one album in 1968, and the Strawbs who developed from a bluegrass band into a "progressive Byrds" band by 1967. However, none provided a sustained or much emulated effort in this direction. Also products of the folk club circuit were Sandy Denny who joined Fairport Convention as a singer in 1968 and Dave Swarbrick, a fiddle player and session musician who reacted positively to the electric music he encountered while working with Fairport in 1969. The result was an extended interpretation of the song "A Sailor's Life", which was released on their album Unhalfbricking. This encounter sparked the interest of Ashley Hutchings who began research in the English Folk Dance and Song Society's library; the result was the band's seminal Liege & Lief (1969) which combined traditional songs and tunes with some written by members of the band in a similar style, all played on a combination of electric instruments including Swarbrick's amplified fiddle, setting the template for British folk rock. Heyday 1969–76 The rapid expansion of British folk rock that followed in the wake of Liege & Lief in the 1970s came mainly from three sources. First were existing folk performers who now ‘electrified’, including Mr. Fox, formed around the acoustic duo Bob and Carole Pegg, and Pentangle, who having previously recorded largely without electrification, produced a fourth album of entirely traditional material, Cruel Sister, in 1970, performed very much in the British folk rock mould. Similarly, Swarbrick's former playing