May 28th, 2008
The fading of “folk music”
The late 1950s and early 60s saw a huge upswing in popularity of so-called “folk music” that was as popular as 50s rock n roll. And then the Beatles came along and folk music, at least for many baby boomers, got incorporated into rock bands and solo artists
(think: Bob Dylan, Beatles Rubber Soul, the Byrds, and so on). There was folk music from the 60s, stuff Peter, Paul and Mary would sing, or Pete Seeger or Phil Ochs, or Buffy Ste Marie, and that group, but then there is are old folks songs I sang as a child: “Skip to my Lou” “Three Bind Mice” “Frere Jacques” “The Inky Dinky Spider” or “Koombaya” and the myriad of Stephen Foster songs.
“The Inky Dinky Spider” talked about and finally sung by Pat and Patrick
I bring this up because after polling some young musicians in my classes, it is clear that this legacy of folk music that I thought “everyone” knew, is fading. If they don’t know this music, do you think the late teenagers and early twenty-ers know this stuff? I suspect not.
There is another layer to the folk music popularity in the early 1960s: pop musicians in the 50s were rarely personalities, or philosophers. They were kinda cool, but not really. They were wholesome, opinionated bohemians that embraced the guitar as the instrumental spokesman of their music. It was the transition from folk music into the rock music of the 1960s when the baby boom generation itself became “cool” and ultimately became jaded. (That is the best word I can think of. Jaded here means the loss of innocence.) The bleeding edge of this transition was Dylan’s move from his acoustic guitar to the electric guitar, a shift that infuriated many. [Listen to Dylan's performance at the 1965 Newport Music Festival "Maggie's Farm." At the end you'll hear many screaming in protest. The dream was over.]
This suspicion was confirmed after a lunch with some Ethnomusicologists (including Tony and Mike Seeger) who agreed that folk music — or whatever it is called these days — is fading from public knowledge. Even in our music major classes, my students have never heard the American folk tune “Billy Boy.”
Young people today are still cool, but I am happy to speculate that the pendulum is slowly swinging back, and I predict an age of sincere teenagers who are not jaded, is just around the corner.
The grunge movement was, in a way, a neo-folk language, but it was filled with psychotic types, so you had the surface of folk music, manifested by psychologically eccentric individuals (Kurt Cobain…).
There is a lot of terrific music from that era that needs to be revisited, or covered by some modern day Mendelssohn who will discover just how brilliant Woody Guthrie was.
I put down these random thoughts because I see a need to pass this music on to future students and audiences.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:22 am
The last ten years has brought me many moments of sad, nostalgic astonishment, the Mount Rushmores of my youth crumbling slowly but surely before my very eyes. I’ve seen works of great prominence slip quietly below the surface to obscurity. “All is vanity”… I start to wonder, should my time be spent trying to hold on, like a miser, to all the gold of the past, or should I spend my time finding some way to appreciate all these new and strange things coming up over the advancing horizon (which is not always so easy for me at this time,I have to work at it)? Is cultural memory inherent at a naturally sufficient level in humankind, or does it need amplification and definition provided by the likes of myself, and might that very act distort the history?
I like your point about grunge being a neo-folk, I had never thought about it like that but it feels very possible. And thanks for returning the Inky-dinky spider to my current top-ten, now I will be quietly be singing it to myself all day (with small, hidden hand gestures so people won’t think I am too crazy). Perhaps people with children tend to get doses of this stuff still.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
There is still a lot of folk music sleeping under the surface. I play a lot of (often empty) coffee houses, and many of the younger musicians I meet sing Dylan covers. Many sing their own political songs. What seems to be missing is the familiarity with a shared repertoire of popular folk songs.
I like this: “Young people today are still cool, but I am happy to speculate that the pendulum is slowly swinging back, and I predict an age of sincere teenagers who are not jaded, is just around the corner.” I hope it is true. There are a few pop musicians - Ben Harper and Jack Johnson for example - who seem to have awareness of and respect for the folk tradition.
Very nice blog…
May 29th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Interesting take on Folk music. There seem to be a lot of misconceptions and the history might be getting lost. One ray of light is the discovery of Woody Guthrie performing live, which we can hear for the first time on an album called “The Live Wire,” which came from a wire recording. Check out our Songfacts interview with Guthrie’s granddaughter for a better explanation:
http://www.songfacts.com/int/2008/03/anna-canoni-woody-guthrie.html
July 9th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Although the Byrds did not like being labeled, their early albums contained bona fide folk music, mostly from the mind and pen of Bob Dylan and which when blended with “a Beatle beat” produced the highly popular genre - folk-rock. It was this hybrid rock’n'roll creation that echoed, fueled and sounded much of the protest music of the 1960’s. Following a long tradition of folk troubadors, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds has kept the folk tradition alive almost singlehandedly with his “Folk Den” project. For the past decade he has been recording and preseving folk music in an archive in Texas, at the rate of 1 song a month. You can visit Roger’s Folk Den and hear some of your favorite folk music played in 12-string style and with one of the most distinctive voices in popular music.
July 9th, 2008 at 9:34 am
http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden-wp/