The most significant aspect of folk music is that it is represented by a sub-culture who carries it forward into subsequent generations.

The other vital importance is that it reach people on a simple and straightforward level and impel them to want to participate in it.

If people don't want to be a part of it, then it really doesn't qualify as folk music. There is the human element which is part of it that has to do with identification. Alan Lomax called it a "security blanket" because it was recognized by a community or sub-group that felt comforted and unified by it.

I think that the impelling aspect of folk music is that it somehow leaps off the page of a songbook or from the mouth of a singer and says "sing me" to enough people. The deal with pop music is that it requires a production value to make the song happen. Folk music doesn't need that. The song's "got legs" and it will perpetuate itself in spite of itself.

There are songs that have traveled through the ages and are recognized because they live in variants with themes that are universal. They are songs that are in motion and not frozen to a copyright or a specific manner of doing them.

All you have to do is look at any particular folk song and it will make itself clear from its history. Streets of Laredo has its antecedents in The Unfortunate Rake and there are clear routes of travel from Ireland to the US cowboy. St. James Hospital is another variant of this song. "When it's chittlin' cookin' time in Cheatham County" uses a tune that becomes a vehicle for the St. James Infirmary lyric which is a variant of what we are talking about. I use this as an example to indicate the history of a folk song in its travels which defines it pretty well I think.

Are there songs being written today that will become folk songs tomorrow? We'll see if we stick around long enough.

Frank Hamilton