You called?

No, but they have to sing and play as part of their everyday lives, not as a specialised activity or hobby.

As you might have noticed me saying elsewhere...


If recording technology were somehow abolished next week, a 22nd-century collector might well pick up local variants of Blowin' in the Wind and Mr Tambourine Man. But we'll never know: Dylan isn't music of the people, Dylan's a recording artist. Traditional and folk-transmitted music survives here and there - football chants, playground rhymes, some hymns and carols - but there's really no music that's of the people in the sense of living and developing among ordinary people in the course of their lives. The ubiquity of broadcast and recorded music changed everything.

That's a real break in the history of music, and a very recent one. Traditional music - folk music, as far as I'm concerned - is all about reaching back before that break and finding out what people used to do for music, before they could all listen to the same thing at the flick of a switch.

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"Streets of London", say, isn't a folk song and never will be. The problem is that there's a single, readily-available answer to the question: "what should that sound like?" We know the right melody, the right chords and the right words, and if we want to know how it all fits together we can listen to the writer singing it. That's a huge change from the conditions that existed as recently as a hundred years ago. Oral transmission, as a primary route for handing songs along, is essentially dead; the universal availability of recorded and broadcast music killed it. Oral transmission within the community of folkies goes on to a small extent, but that's not a community so much as an optional, part-time network that's selected itself around a specialist activity. It's a fantastic activity and an important network, but it's not a community

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The uniformity imposed by mechanical reproduction has been eroding the diversity of the oral tradition for a long time, going back to pianolas and mass-produced parlour songbooks. Ironically, the oral tradition finally gave up the ghost (in this country at least) at around the same time the Revival was really getting going.


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Do you sing while you work? Do your workmates? Do you sing at home to relax? When your friends or family want some music of an evening, do they suggest having a few songs?

The oral tradition - and the 1954 definition - is about communities and societies where people can, by and large, answer Yes to all four. Those conditions may still obtain in some parts of the world, but they certainly don't in Britain or the US. Folkies pass songs along, but that doesn't make us a community.

*** and finally... ***

Live music made by ordinary people without making a big deal of it - because it's what you do, because it passes the time, because everyone's got a song in them - has basically died out in this society. Live music made by enthusiastic amateurs (and a few enthusiastic professionals) is great - I'm well into it, without any loathing whatever - but we're not the folk, and any new music we make is never going to be folk music.