Traditional folk music is like a river and keeps flowing. The tradition in music can be
conveyed in a variety of ways. One way is exposure to the cultural practitioners. The conditions for the existence of this music remain in the interest of those who understand and attempt to recreate it. The basic idea of folk music is still that people get together
to sing it and share it regardless of its commercial value as a performance art.

Folk music has always been a "pastiche" in that any musical isolated form borrows from
and antecedent. 1920's jazz informs the Piedmont blues pickers. Old time string band music informs Bluegrass. The Irish, Scottish, British traditions of unaccompanied singing
is found in Appalachia. There is no folk music. Classical, pop, jazz etc. has always informed folk music and vise-versa.

When folk music becomes a "museum piece" it is because it is frozen into a performance art piece for an audience that expects it. It has no longer entered the river.

There is a difference between historical understanding and re-interpretation and re-enactment which usually turns out to be wrong since unless you are transported to
the time of the music, you really don't know how it was done. Recordings are only
a small window of that experience.

Folk music is always transformed. It has a cultural base but is changed to adapt to
new environmental situations. Hence, Barbara Allen finds herself walking the "highway" home instead of the cowpath.

Living traditions are often not identified by the uninitiated who are not folklorists.
1954 is not a starting point for any particular attitude regarding "what is folk".
Who is to really say what the "vast majority of folk fans" embrace?

A living tradition means that there is an interest in furtherance of this tradition.
The "museum piece" concept is inimical to the folk process. Sam Hinton put it succinctly.
A printed folk song is like a photograph of a bird in flight.

Folk music traditions are not dead but survive underground in various forms although
they may not be recognizable to many. They are not associated with coffee house venues or staged concerts but whenever a lullaby to a child is sung, folk songs tend to survive.

Folk music is inimical to musical correctness as well. The approach to classic anthropology has always been to study and secure a knowledge of a culture from
the outside looking in rather than to be a part of it. This is akin to taking a picture
rather than receiving the subject in the "flesh". Pop music is not folk. It is predicated
on the business of music however some pop music becomes folk through assimilation.
"Old Dan Tucker" or "Angeline the Baker" finds its way into folk culture through the people who retain the songs and them. This is an important ingredient
in assessing folk music. Hence, Schubert songs become integrated into German folk music. "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" travels from Mozart into a myriad of forms such as the children's "A.B.C." song.

Songwriting is not necessarily folk music because some songs have not been processed
by acceptance into a folk community. What is this community? It exists outside of
most people's perceived recognition of it. It may be going through mutations and variations today and perhaps the music that groups of people are singing today away from the commercial music business of the so-called "singer-songwriter" might be
the folk music of tomorrow.

In order to discover folk music, it is important to rid ourselves of a rigid definition of
what we associate as being folk music. It may include perhaps "rap" on the streets or
"do-wop" being changed or singers deciding that certain changes in songs should be
changed to fit new times and different environments. It might be a cross-pollination
of music from different countries (acculturation).

I think to really understand what folk music is, we have to free ourselves from the
restriction of our perceptions based on what others who don't know it think it is.

Frank Hamilton