Entertainment vs. Folk. A false dichotomy.

I recall an incident right around 1960 when I was in The Folklore Center in Seattle. The Folklore Center sold musical instruments, mostly guitars, folk records, song books, etc. Big John, the proprietor, was playing selections from a new shipment of records he had just received and had just put an LP entitled "Americana" on the turntable. The singer was Win Stracke, a classically train bass—very rich, smooth voice. He was being accompanied by classic guitarist Richard Pick.

Odd last name for a classic guitarist, I thought. That had occurred to me some six years before, when I first started taking classic guitar lessons and the beginning guitar technique manual my teacher started me with was written by Richard Pick. I was also aware that Win Stracke, whom I had never heard sing before, was co-founder with Frank Hamilton of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.

I was standing there being impressed by the richness of Stracke's voice and thinking that Richard Pick's accompaniments might be just a little too ornate for the songs, when another fellow in the shop, a singer from the Berkeley area who had just hitch-hiked into town with his guitar, back-pack, and sleeping bag, flew into a tantrum. Shaking with anger, he pointed at the turntable and shouted:

"That man has absolutely no right to sing those songs! He's an opera singer!" [His voice dripping with contempt] "That's all wrong! People like that shouldn't be allowed to sing those songs!" And then he continued to rant for a few more moments, and when Big John just gave him the fish-eye and didn't take the record off the turntable and smash it across his knee, the guy picked up his gear and stomped out of the shop.

Win Stracke? One of the founders of the Old Town School of Folk Music? Shouldn't be allowed to sing those songs?

"Oh, dear me!" I thought. "What have I done? I, too, am a bass (though not in Win Stracke's league), and I've taken both voice lessons and classic guitar lessons. What have I done to myself!??   Oh, woe! Oh, woe!"

This guy was a really tight-assed ethnic purist. I heard him sing at a songfest a few nights later. I think he may have had a fairly nice natural singing voice, but you couldn't really tell.   He tried to imitate field recordings as closely as he could. Not very entertaining. Sort of like listening to a cat, accompanying itself on a guitar, trying to cough up a hair-ball. I'd rather listen to the field recordings.

I'd heard folk singers on the radio and on records long before I got actively interested myself. I found the songs entertaining, and often a pleasant break from a lot of the pap that was oozing through the radio speaker. Then, in 1952, I first heard Walt Robertson sing live—a concert at a place called "The Chalet" in Seattle's University District (The Chalet was a sort of pre-coffeehouse coffeehouse, if you can follow that). He sang for about two and a half or three hours to an audience of about seventy-five people and held them completely enthralled with a wide variety of songs and ballads. Sometimes he would go from one song to the next, and other times he would include "program notes" about the songs.

It was one of the most thoroughly entertaining evenings I've spent in my entire life. And I decide, "I want to do that!"

Incidentally, he didn't try to sing like a field recording. He just sang like Walt Roberson.

There is absolutely no reason that someone can't sing folk songs and still be very entertaining—or vice versa.

I have a strong academic interest in the songs I sing and when I run across a song that intrigues me enough to want to learn it and sing it, I try to find out as much about it as I can. In addition to finding the backgrounds of the songs interesting in themselves (I've learned a lot of things about a lot of things that way), I consider this to be the same sort of thing a good actor does when learning a new role. Learn as much as possible about the character you're portraying in order to make that portrayal real and convincing.

I have heard singers who obviously didn't know what the hell they were singing about, and sometimes they were quite entertaining. But not in the way they wanted to be!

If you're going to get up in front of a general audience (not just a klatch of masochistic folkies who never smile) and occupy their time—especially if you're going to charge them money for the privilege of hearing you—you'd bloody-well better be entertaining. But being entertaining does not mean that you have to take a serious song, screw around with it, and turn it into some kind of smart-ass joke just to get a cheap laugh. I heard a lot of that going on in the 1960s. You can, however, be interesting and informative. Learning something can also be a very entertaining experience.

Folk music is a very serious study. Also, folk music is great fun. It's not "either / or." It's "and."

Don Firth