Folk Music Will Free Us: Exclamation Point! 19

April 28, 2022 @ 8 pm

Olivia Brownlee and Nick Thorkelson led a three-part online show on the theme “folk music will free us.”

The show began with a demonstration of how groups sing together and teach each other music. Then several musicians each performed two songs, one traditional song and one of their own devising inspired by it. Part three, a wide-ranging discussion, included a Q&A with online viewers. Here are some topics that were open for discussion:

Authenticity

Music as a living language is being lost to us. The music industry substitutes passive celebrity wor­ship for the kind of creative/communal emulation that you find in traditional music-making. The appeal of traditional music, a.k.a. “folk,” is that it is an older form of magic, so to speak, one that predates capitalism. It expresses something essential in us that contemporary systems and powers try to suppress or commodify.  

Community

“Folk music” simply means music we can make together informally. People singing pop tunes at home or at a summer camp are making folk music. At the beginning of a ceremony, a convocation to unite the assembly could be a song that reminds us of what we have in common.* An upbeat song in such a context might fall flat if the assembly isn’t feeling it, while a mournful song could be more unifying. “Folk” implies a demand for honesty as well as solidarity.  

Lonesomeness

“High lonesome” is a synonym for bluegrass music. Modal scales—neither minor nor major—which are common in Appalachian old time music and the blues (along with the Celtic and Afri­can forebears of these styles) lend themselves to feelings of inconsolable isolation. Modal also expresses a certain stoicism that can feel more comforting than the sentimentality and attitude of much contemporary pop.  

Resistance and Ecstasy

Resistance has a long association with folk. The activist folk revivals in the 1940s and 1960s de­rived much of their musical language from gospel. In the 1940s first wave, the Almanac Singers and the People’s Songs organization (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, etc.) sang inspirational songs at union rallies that substituted “union” for “gospel,” as in “It’s that union train a-comin’.” (Seeger later wrote that, by the mid-’60s, “Which Side Are You On?” was being sung all over Greenwich Village but not in a single miners’ local.)**

Is ecstasy necessary to the freedom struggle? Is ecstasy separable from faith? Nick approaches these questions as an atheist, Olivia as a Christian.

Everyday

Informal group singing is born not so much of resistance but in using the rhythms of everyday life. Songs of resistance are event-based, while sea chanties, drinking songs, love songs, death songs, dirty/sexy songs, playground songs, lullabies, and work songs (think digging/rowing/hammering songs to help people large work groups stay in rhythm with one another) are life-based.

Cultural Appropriation and Related Problematics

If folk revivals are expressions of democratic resistance, how come they flourish on college cam­puses? Can white people sing the blues? Should they even try? Satirists have had a lot of fun with middle-class people singing “I’ve been working on the railroad” or “the oppressor is trying to bring me down.”

A related issue regarding style: in the ’60s there were two competing approaches, personified by bel canto singers like Joan Baez vs. artists like Dave Van Ronk who adopted the style of the old field recordings. We think both were right, but this might be worth some discussion.  

Storytelling

The ballad is a folk genre that has in common with mass media a fascination with romance and vi­olence. An important difference, though, is that the stance in folk ballads is less judgmental.  

Singer-songwriters

Bob Dylan complained in an interview that contemporary artists in the folk vein were not conver­sant with the traditional repertoire. If “folk music” comes unmoored from the traditional rep­ertoire and the communities that created it, is it inherently shallow? And what of the converse question, the persistence of false consciousness in the old music?***  

Can we say that singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Malvina Reynolds, Merle Haggard, Billie Holi­day, Tracy Chapman, and Woody Guthrie are part of the folk tradition?  

Technology

In the internet age, what are the implications of land-association for songwriters and singers? As we grow apart from the planet, we spend a lot of time indoors looking through digital windows at other places and faraway people. This increases the danger of cultural appropriation at the same time that it allows “folk processing” to happen more easily than ever before in history—in part because of the music industry and the internet and digitization. So it’s not all bad. It’s just hard to keep up! Our best chance of enjoying it is in smaller groups. We’re all just memes after all.

Notes 

* “Ecclesiastes” is Greek for “convoker,” and it’s the name of the poet who wrote the Song of Solomon. The refrain of Song of Solomon, “All is vanity/Everything is meaningless,” reminds us that not all convocations are upbeat. “All is vanity” is from the King James version of the Bible, which is the language Nick was brought up on. The Puritans hated the King James version, says Olivia, because it substituted the word “king” for the more accurate translation, “tyrant.”

** A later appropriation of faith traditions happened when Ray Charles controversially adapted the ecstatic sounds of gospel to songs of carnal love and desire, giving birth to “soul music.” Pretty much all of the great soul singers started out in church.

*** FPTC referenced the problem of “Amazing Grace” being written by a slave trader in our “Threw the Keyhole” show. Olivia belongs to a collective, the Know Better Do Better Project, that creates alternatives to problematic old songs—she took the pentatonic scale and key from “Amazing Grace” and made a new song out of it. Another member of the group reworked “Swanee River,” a song by Stephen Foster (White) expressing emancipated Black people’s supposed nostalgia for slavery. “All the world is sad and dreary everywhere I go”—this song would end minstrel shows and leave the audience bawling.

RZA from WuTang Clan made an alternative to the minstrel song “Turkey in the Straw” to distribute to ice cream truck com­panies to play instead for free. Olivia’s friend Kat Bula made a fiddle tune of it.