Well ~ upon returning to Mudcat after the long holiday weekend, I am pleased to see that "Chords in Folk" has finally gone off to thread heaven. Perhaps this discussion will be a bit saner.

I am of the school of thought that believes harmony is a very basic component in the universal language that is music. Why is it that the human ear and the human mind senses certain feelings in association with particular combinations of sounds whose frequencies are related to each other in certain well-defined mathematical ratios? (E.g., minor third vs major third.) This seems to be something built into our DNA, or whatever ~ a very basic and mysterious aspect of the way we have evolved/been created.

While I will gladly admit that not every song necessarily benefits from chordal accompaniment, most do; and while I certainly recognize that there is never only one possible harmonic arrangement for any given tune/air/song, the available alternatives are fairly limited, assuming that the object is to create a series of sounds that will "feel" coherent to the listener.

(Parenthetically, referring back to the controversies explored in "Chords in Folk," I would argue that even in musical traditions of unaccompanied vocals, such as sean nos, there are "implied" harmonies. The vocabulary of vocal flourishes or trills (or whatever you call 'em) within a given tradition consist of sets of notes that constitute chords, expressed as arpeggios because the human voice does not normally produced multiple notes simultaneously. There are different sets of such notes ~ scales or apreggios ~ characteristic of different folk genres: one for Irish/Celtic music, another for soul/gospel, etc.)

A couple of my favorite chord progressions, associated with particular folksongs, come to mind. In both cases, a mid-20th-century "folk revival" artist took a traditional song and sang it against an unconventional and unexpected chord progression ~ not the simple 2- or 3-chord sequence that any halfway-musically-literate person could easily find. These arrangements might well be characteristic of the recent era from which they come, a time when "folk music" had necessarily become more self-conscious than in earlier days, and when folk musicians almost universally played "chordal" instruments like the guitar and thus tended to think in therms of chords.

One is Dave Van Ronk's "House of the Rising Sun," for which he famously gets little credit except from the few insiders aware of the story: Dave comes up with a highly original and very dramatic chordal setting for this old tune, and Bob Dylan promptly "steals" it to record on his first album before Dave has a chance to put it on record. Whenever DVR plays the song to a halfway-knowledgable folk audience, he is met with the response "hey, you're playing that Dylan song," and soon drops the song from his repertoire. A few years later, Eric Burdon and the Animals score a worldwide hit using that same chord progression, and it's Dylan's turn to drop the song in response to cries of "hey, you're playng that Animals song."

I think that, of all Dave Van Ronk's great accomplishments, that one little sequence of chords, so dramatic and so memorable, may be his single most important and most lasting act of musical creation. And, or course, he never made a dime off it! (That, I suppose, marks his accomplishment as true folk music...)

The other song whose chord arrangement I find especially notable is Bob Coltman's setting of "I Know You Rider." He heard a collector's tape (Lomax?) of an unaccompanied singer performing a 16-bar blues, and came up with an original and very exciting arrangement quite different from the "normal," expected, blues chords. For details see this great old Mudcat thread:

thread.cfm?threadid=40592

(I'd recommend reading the whole thread, but for a quicker summary you could read only the posts from "GUEST Bob Coltman.")