Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 11:15 AM

I can feel the quicksand quiver beneath my feet, and really don't want to get sucked in to this, but...

"we still have such notions as the Folk Process and a more Collective / Anonymous view of a Tradition which has reached us via very specific and highly specialised individuals."

1. The 'Folk Process' is demonstrable. Take a look at Bronson.

2. Nobody's believed in 'collective composition' for decades.

3. 'Anonymity' is simply the fact, except in a few rare cases.

4. All the evidence suggests that singing in communities of a hundred and more years ago was very widespread and not restricted to 'specialised individuals'.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 10:53 AM

Sorry Al ~~ but rubbish. Donovan, 1965 onwards. Folk club movement in major cities ~ London, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh (cont p 94) from 1953-4 onwards. Record shops (Colletts &c) opening to cater for it.

Then Dylan, Donovan ··· pffuuit: there went the folk movement, in came the confusion.

Enumerate, please, the 'benefits' rubricated in your last para, of the term having been hijacked for profit by those who have no interest in folk music, but find the bandying of the term can be profitable.

I have never forgotten my disgust with my dear friend Fred Woods, my editor at Folk Review, when he once failed to spike an interview with some stupid 'contemp folk' female who made quite a fair living in [what had become of] the clubs, but actually said "I can't stand all that 'traditional' stuff". He was actually quite shamefaced when I pointed out the anomaly to him, & agreed he should just have paid off the interviewer, who had done the job for which he had been commissioned, but refrained from printing the piece.

Nothing personal against you here, Al, as I am sure you will appreciate; but I feel you were inaccurately harsh to Gavin's perfectly fair point.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 10:46 AM

Its like those people who keep saying 'why can't we go back to when gay meant frolic-ing around?'

Answer: because there weren't that many people frolic-ing around in the first place, and someone had a better use for it.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 10:46 AM

MtheGM

I wonder why he didn't just google for himself, as I did for him, and save us all from another of THESE!... AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

You don't have to read the thread do you?

Idiot

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 10:38 AM

'In the meantime, perhaps some of the folks who mount the barricades on the other side of the discussion might for a moment reflect that on this side we're saddened by the loss of a word that describes something we're enthusiastic about. Perhaps they could feel just a little sympathy before they start shouting again...'

In what way have you lost out?

Pre-Donovan there were no great amount of folk clubs. Virtually no folkmusic record shops. No folk degrees. Sod all.

Then folk became a huge artistic movement which captured the imagination of half the planet.

For sharing the term 'folkmusic' with coarse spirits like myself, you have many benefits. And yet you continally bellyache about it, and snipe at everything that isn't fit for the groves of academia Folkmusic For Nice People 101.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Gavin A
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 09:56 AM

The 1954 definition is just fine, in itself, and I would prefer to be able to use it this way because it's clear and precise, and a useful concept.

The problem is that for most people the 'f' word long ago lost it's original meaning through the process of semantic change - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

For some of us, at least, it's a damned inconvenience that the 'f' word is now so unclear: these days it often just means 'what happens in clubs and festivals' or 'anything performed by players of the acoustic guitar'. At that level it's just a label...

My guess is those of us who are interested in the areas that the 'f' word used to stand for had better get over the fact that most people no longer understand it in the way they do, and simply stop using it except among friends.

In the meantime, perhaps some of the folks who mount the barricades on the other side of the discussion might for a moment reflect that on this side we're saddened by the loss of a word that describes something we're enthusiastic about. Perhaps they could feel just a little sympathy before they start shouting again...

Gavin

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 08:55 AM

What the OP feared has happened ~~ all he did was to ask, what was the 1954 definition he kept reading about here, which I endeavoured to answer for him; and that he hoped this wouldn't degenerate into another of *those* threads ~~ which is sure as hell what it has done.

I wonder why he didn't just google for himself, as I did for him, and save us all from another of THESE!... AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 08:46 AM

Thanks for clearing that up Al, I would never have guessed that it was you ;-)
Since we are bringing A.L.Lloyd into this discussion I will repeat that I like his quote:- that to define a folk song is as easy as determining the exact point where dawn breaks and night turns into day.
Anyone who has driven home following a twelve hour nightshift will know exactly what he is talking about.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 08:13 AM

Well, no, Al. Have you not grasped that in the era of the Bullingdon club the middle class are as powerless as the working class - but do not yet realise it?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: harmonic miner
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 08:05 AM

Folk music is the same as

-World music. Music that originates in a world.
-Country music. Music that originates in a country.
-Popular music. Music that a lot of people like.
-Traditional music. Music that is part of a tradition (Death Metal is a tradtion).

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 08:05 AM

That was me, and I should learn to shut up.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:57 AM

'The Tradition is an illusion of the process of Collection, by which these things were frozen at the point of their collection - dead in the specimen jar!'

Yup! So get used to it. The BBC2 specials about the particularly unmemorable. The Arts Council Grants for the unoriginal celebrating the not particularly talented in the first place. The endless plaudits for dreary buggers you would cross the street to avoid.

Because the collectors are from the class with all the political power in this country and all the tags of intellectual respectability.

Mao said political power came out of the end of a gun. In this country, it comes out of the srseholes of the middleclasses endlessly jabbering rudely about working class music being worthless, and asserting their own superiority.

Just reading Mezz Mezzrow's autobiography and his struggles to exist whilst creating the jazz that he loved. Face it, if you're an artist - you're an outlaw. If you want to be an artist embrace that as best you can. If you want a place in folk music, get one of those degrees and become a star of festivals, or run an arts centre.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Bounty Hound
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:54 AM

Desi C: works for me, folk music is the music of the people, all human life is there!

John

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:47 AM

To me

Well that just sums it up, Greg, does it not?

Otherwise, I'm not proposing an analytical tool, just pointing out that the 1954 Definition doesn't actually say anything that can't be applied to any musical genre on the planet - the Wild Rover, Lady Gaga, Richard Thompson and Beethoven et al. In this sense it is too all embracing. Can all music truly be Folk? Well, if ends up getting played in a Folk Club it can, which is maybe the only place where we find a more conservative reading of the 1954 Definition comes in useful because the 1954 Definition doesn't mention musical genre at all. So, come one come all really...

The category then becomes so broad as to be useful.

Shouldn't that be useless? In which case I both agree and disagree at the same time. As I said elsewhere Folk is a broad church that somehow must include ALLoyd's Folk of Music of Yugoslavia and Gary and Vera Aspey's Seeing Double. Both are Folk albums, both are on Topic, and yet both are about as far away from each other in terms of musical genre as you could wish to get.

Go figure.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: greg stephens
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:33 AM

The 1954 definition seems a pretty good basis to me, though obviously it's not written in stone and brought down from the mountain. SA's efforts however are circular and carry no information, so appear useless to me as an analytical tool.
The 1954 text attempts to define characteristics of one vast body of music which appears to be somewhat different from other vast bodies of music in the world. It uses the word "folk" when it refers to that body of music. I find that quite a useful thing; it is in no way helped by lots of other people trying to use the same term "folk" to apply to their own particular favourite type of music which does not share the chacteristics referred to in the 1954 (attempted) definition. The category then becomes so broad as to be useful. To those people I would say (as did Bert Lloyd), invent a new word for your new all-embracing category.
To me, many of the various versions of the Wild Rover I have heard are a product of a folk tradition. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, Richard Thompson's Beeswing and Beethoven's 6th, are not products of a folk tradition.(though of course variants of any these might become so). So I find the distinction usefu, and, where not useful, interesting.
Others, of course, may not.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Desi C
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:29 AM

I read somewhere once Folk defined as 'Music of the people and the times, and of the times and the people of those times' The older I get I think Folk is not really defineable and I'm satisfied with that

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:12 AM

I do not want any undeserved credit, thank you. The definition I posted above was not *my* precis, Sweeney: I made its source, a writer in a Canadian folk magazine which I found, as I stated, simply by googling, perfectly clear on my post. All I did was copy & paste.

Best

~M~

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 07:05 AM

many of the songs written by tommy armstrong... are now part of the tradition.

Tommy Armstrong songs are always Tommy Armstrong songs - they are traditional because of the idiom in which they were written and which Tommy Armstrong was a master of.

Otherwise it's worth pondering to what extent The Tradition is an illusion of the process of Collection, by which these things were frozen at the point of their collection - dead in the specimen jar!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 06:58 AM

Compare and contrast

Seems odd that the evidences for such creativity are everywhere in the old songs and yet we still have such notions as the Folk Process and a more Collective / Anonymous view of a Tradition which has reached us via very specific and highly specialised individuals. Song carriers? Tradition bearers? Contrast and compare? Go figure!

All music is creative at its core; and all communities feature supremely individuals empowed by what has gone before. In this sense (say) Miles Davis is just as much a tradition bearer as Davie Stewart, and well I remember Sun Ra in his twilight years essaying Fletcher Henderson charts from his wheelchair to drive home the importance of that self-same sense of Roots and Tradition to the younger members of both his band and audience.

This is how music works - and Folk Music (as far as it can be said to exist at all) is no different - only in how the evidences have been spun to create an illusion that persists to this day, hence the religiosity, and the righteousness, and the fundamentalism that stands in stark contrast to the reality of the music as it's enjoyed by Folkies the world over. The Tradition of Popular Song is alive and well 10,000 years down the line - many different branches, many different trees, many different forests, none of them quite the same as any other but they're all growing in the same way. And what way is that if it isn't Traditional?

*

On the evidences of a folk club we went to last night (a heaving singer's night at Gregson Lane nr Preston) I still stick to my Folk as Flotsam theory - i.e. that Folk is more about context than it is about content; hell, they were even singing along to I Don't Like Mondays and amongst maybe two or three token Trad songs was Whiskey in the Jar played with guitar and bodhran but sourced from Thin Lizzie. So one one level you have your creative reformers and songwriters, and on another you have your rank and file singers happy to whatever they like. As in Folk, as in any music really...

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: The Sandman
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 06:51 AM

asa usual there is an element[but only an element] of truth in what SA says many early folk song collectors ignored industrial song, however many of the songs written by tommy armstrong, and many other mining and industrial songs, are now part of the tradition.
so how did they become part of the tradition if nobody collected them?
to play devils advocate, agriculture is now considered an industry as is fishing, so perhaps the early collectors did collec t industrial songs , but only from specific areas

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 05:46 AM

Compare and contrast:

1954:
"...the creative impulse of the individual or the group"

SA:
"To the Folklorists of old it was the rural peasantry who were entirely innocent of the significance of what they did ...pure and passive carriers..."

??????????

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 05:25 AM

Thing is with the 1954 Definition - even Michael's precis - is that there's not a single type of music it doesn't cover. The whole concept of FOLK is predicated on a complete myth i.e that there is a branch of humanity (i.e The Folk) who are somehow different from everyone else. To the Folklorists of old it was the rural peasantry who were entirely innocent of the significance of what they did in terms of cultural process, continuity and tradition on account of their lack of formal education. They were its pure and passive carriers - the unwitting media through whom this stuff flowed from pagan times to the present. Thus the whole notion of FOLK is a grotesque paternalistic fantasy - just read The Imagined Village to see how depressingly true that was, and is still today, if anyone can accept the 1954 Definition as having any more relevance than the Horse Definition which is at least ironical* rather than canonical.

Folk is just another style of music - a multiplicity of styles, genres, artists, bands, labels, venues etc. - however so twisted by nature of this thing we can The Revival, without which of course...

S O'P

* Okay, the usage is complex & far from straightforward, but I use it here to rhyme which canonical AND because it features a lot in the scripts of Whatever Happened to... The Likely Lads as a feature of North Eastern English dialect of which another thread recently enquired as to its autonomous linguistic status.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 25 Mar 11 - 12:34 AM

I think MtheGM gave a good, sensible answer. If that's the 1954 definition, I like it. It's not overly puristic, snobby, elitist, or posh - and yet it doesn't sell out to navel-gazing singer-songwriters.
Thank you, Michael.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 11:13 PM

I can see now we're reverting to the pre 1954 definition. in which case I demand a recount, and reclassification as a folksinger - as opposed to a navel gazing, snigger snogger - a definition, I was never comfortable with.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Amos
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 11:05 PM

Folk are people whose primary sense of self is as individual humans rather than as some office, accomplishment, or category of existence.

A

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: saulgoldie
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 10:27 PM

"And we're OFF!!!"

And all I said was...

Saul

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Don Firth
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 10:06 PM

And we're OFF!!!

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 09:59 PM

Folklore sounds about right. Otherwise - 1954? Don't believe a word of it! Folk is just another style of music; a whole bunch of styles actually. As for Folk Arts, well that's a made-up term as well. All Arts are Folk Arts - I ain't never seen no horse pimp a ride / knit a jumper / tell a story / throw a pot / make a macrame owl / carve a love spoon / make a set of Northumbrian smallpipes / decorate a Christmas Tree / break dance / morris dance / do a Cubist still-life / get a tattoo / crochet a tea-cosy / get crafty with bendy straws etc etc.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 06:13 PM

It has however an obvious connection with our understanding of other folk arts.

Incidentally a creative use of Google will find my listings and explanations of it on this site. And Gg's obfuscations.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: GUEST,glueman
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 05:03 PM

Debates rage around what the terminology actually means, i.e. continuity, creative, community, form, etc, etc. If it were written in today's post-structuralist (and post everything else) world it would probably read differently (or have a list of footnotes, caveats, interdictions and case studies).

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: olddude
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 01:01 PM

Well according to the "Folk Sucks" thread going on it has something to do with poo :-)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 11:44 AM

Folk Song Definition

In 1954 the International Folk Music Council defined folk music as "the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (1) continuity which links the present with the past; (2) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (3) selection by the community which determines the form or forms in which the music survives."
The International Council also stressed the fact that the term folk music, which includes folk songs, can be "applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and subsequently has been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community." Present-day collectors use the term as all-inclusive, covering many varieties of music of the common people.

{Copied from article by Isabelle Mills found by googling}

~Michael~

Subject: Folklore: Folk, 1954 definition?
From: saulgoldie
Date: 24 Mar 11 - 10:52 AM

OK, I have seen this reference now three or four times in recent threads. Whatthehell izza "1954 definition" of "folk music?" And I am decidedly NOT trolling for another 500 posts "What is Folk Music" thread.

Saul