Subject: RE: 1954 and All That - defining folk music
From:
Don Firth
Date: 09 Apr 09 - 03:45 PM
I'm not quite sure what a "designated folk context" consists of. I have sung what I thought were folk songs in living rooms, and for audiences in meeting rooms, at banquets, in classrooms, in gymnasiums, in the lounge in one of the women's residence halls at Seattle University, in Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium, in a ballroom at the University of Washington Student Union Building, in another ballroom in the Edmond Meany Hotel, at a meeting of retired airline stewardesses, in parks, on the deck of the schooner Wawona, on a dock at the Port of Everett, in a library auditorium, several times in a church parish house and a couple of times in the church itself. Oh, also in the Boeing Airplane Company lunchroom. I once sang in a strip club in San Francisco. I didn't know it was a strip club when they hired me, and I didn't go over all that well; the customers weren't there to hear folk songs.
Did any of these qualify as a "designated folk context?" I can't say that I heard anyone declare any such designation at any of these places. . . . Perhaps what I sang were not folk songs at all. If not, what were they?
Is it the context that defines the songs sung there as folk songs? Or is it the folk songs that define the venue as a folk context?
(. . . chicken—> egg—> chicken—> egg—> chicken—> egg. . . .)
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Having just read the 1954 definition for the eleventy-fourteenth time, I find that I am in agreement with it. Works for me.
My bookshelves contain many song books, including the collections of Sharp, the Lomaxes, Carl Sandburg, Evelyn Kendrick Wells, Richard Chase, MacEdward Leach, and many others, along with songbooks consisting of songs recorded by well-known and not so well-known singers (Joan Baez, Peggy Seeger, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Tom Glaser, et al). I didn't just learn songs from these books, I read the texts as well, texts written by collectors of folk songs, scholars in the field, ethnomusicologists. In addition, I studied at the University of Washington with Dr. David C. Fowler, a ballad scholar and author of A Literary History of the Popular Ballad and several other books. In the early 1960s, I attended the Berkeley Folk Festivals, where I attended workshops with luminaries in the field, performers such as Almeda Riddle, Jean Redpath, Joan Baez, Sam Hinton, Mike Seeger, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl and scholars and collectors such as Archie Green, Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger, and often had opportunities for informal conversations with them. So I'm coming at this with a bit more behind me than the liner notes on my record collection.
And I have passed on what I have learned as a performer, a teacher, and as a participant in workshops.
As far as definitions and word usage is concerned, if I want to know the meaning of a term in physics, I ask a physicist. If I want to know the meaning of a medical term, I ask a doctor. I may be funny that way, but I find that sort of thing helps me avoid talking a lot of nonsense.
But—be that as it may.
Where do I fit in all of this? Do I regard myself as a "folk singer?" Not really, for a number of reasons. I am urban-born and raised and most of the music I heard as I grew up was on the radio, and ran the gamut from "Your Hit Parade" to "Grand Ole Opry" to "The Metropolitan Opera" and back around again, including, from time to time, a few folk songs (Burl Ives' radio program in the 1940s, "The Wayfaring Stranger" and Alan Lomax's folk music programs on "American School of the Air"). I did not learn songs at my grandmother's knee. Although I had no singing ambitions really, when I was in my late teens, I took some singing lesson, largely because some of my friends did (one of them went on to sing in Broadway musicals, and two went into opera).
My up close introduction to folk music occurred shortly after I entered the University of Washington (majoring in English Literature with ambitions of becoming a writer) and met several people who were into folk music, sang, played the guitar, etc. One of these was Sandy Paton, a fine singer who is currently the head of Folk-Legacy Records. Determining early on that I would like to make a career for myself as a singer of folk songs and ballads, I began learning songs at a great rate, took more voice lessons, and supplemented the folk guitar I learned from Walt Robertson by taking classic guitar lessons.
Soon I started getting paid to sing. I did some programs about folk music on educational television, then began singing regularly in the clubs and coffeehouses that were beginning to open, did concerts, folk festivals, more television. . . .
I am a performer. An entertainer. Simply put, I am a singer-guitarist whose repertoire consists primarily (but not exclusively) of traditional folk songs and ballads. I am also something of a ballad scholar, because I find this knowledge aids me immeasurably in my ability to perform these songs and, avoiding the tendency to deliver a ten minute lecture by way of introducing a three minute song, I find that my audiences do appreciate learning something about backgrounds of the songs.
I sing these songs, not because they are "folk" or "traditional," I sing them because, for various reasons, I like them. I like to sing them and I like to hear others sing them, and I find that enough people, both "folkies" and "non-folkies, " like them sufficiently well for me to have made at least a marginal living by singing them.
My quibble with the desire of some people to broaden the definition of "folk" (and some people want to do it to "traditional" also) to include anything they want to include, along with songs they have written themselves, first, renders the word essentially meaningless, and second, it strikes me as a disingenuous attempt to imply that the songs they have written have characteristics and qualities which they may or may not have and tries to stamp them with an imprimatur that they have not yet earned. It is misleading, and rather than increasing the "folk community," this practice can drive away people when they expect to hear something in line with the 1954 definition and find that what they are being offered instead is something quite different.
And it can give a false impression of what I, or other singers like me, actually sing. If someone hears that I sing "folk songs," then under the impression that I'm a singer-songwriter, they may stay away, when, in actuality, I sing the kind of songs they like. Or it may draw people to a performance only to hear me sing a bunch of hoary old ballads instead of hearing new songs, penned by myself, that they expected to hear.
I believe in truth in packaging. If clubs who advertise themselves as "folk clubs" were to adopt different words ("traditional folk" and "contemporary folk" for example), or at least make some attempt to make clarify what actually goes on there, it might alleviate all those cuts and bruises that occur at the door when people dashing for the exit collide with people coming in.
Just a modest suggestion.
Frankly, it makes little difference to me. As long as there are friends who like to get together to sing and listen to the same kind of songs that I like to sing and listen to, and as long as there are enough people around who want to come and hear me when I perform because they know what I do and know what to expect, then I'm fine.
Don Firth
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