Subject: RE: Does it matter what music is called?
From:
Don Firth
Date: 18 Jul 08 - 03:22 PM
"You can't blame the youth of today for the sins of the fathers/mothers/grandparents etc because it is our/your fault isn't it?"
Well, Nick, not exactly. You see, it works like this:
In the late 1950s, a trio of college boys recorded a mountain murder song they had probably learned from a, then, "obscurity label" recording (Elektra) of songs sung by a folk song collector named Frank Warner (scroll down a couple). It became a hit song. Got a lot of play on the radio (and opened a can of worms). This commercial success with a folk song inspired repetition. Within a couple of years, there were "folk" groups popping up like mushrooms. I don't need to give you a list of such groups, as I'm sure you can figure that out yourself.
There was a major problem with the songs that these people were recording. Record companies and radio stations are set up to pay royalties to the composers and/or music publishers of the songs they play on the radio. "Okay," says the radio station manager, "who do we send the royalty check to?"
"Nobody. It's a folk song. It's public domain."
There was all this potential ASCAP and BMI money floating around, and nobody to claim it.
"But— but— but we have all this money that we've got to pay somebody!"
"Oh? Oh! Well, okay—um—I guess I wrote it. . . ."
As a result of this, suddenly there were some nineteen different people at one time claiming to hold a copyright on "Darling Corey." Pick up a paperback songbook of folk songs and ballads published in the early to mid-1960s, and you'll note that there is a copyright notice at the bottom of the page for every song in it. From "Greensleeves" (no kidding!) to "Haul Away, Joe," to fourteen variations on "Turtledove," to pick a song, any song.
Since there was money—and lots of it—to be made, "folk" groups like The Brothers Four and the New Christy Minstrels began recording songs that were written for them—songs that sounded more-or-less like the folk songs they had already recorded. I knew a guy, Terry Wadsworth, who wrote several songs that were recorded by the New Christy Minstrels, one of which, as I recall, was "Don't Cry Suzanne", and since the composers of these new "folk songs," like Terry, registered a copyright, there was no danger of lawsuits over who really wrote the songs, as there had been over such songs as "Down in the Valley." So as the early 1960s progressed, these "folk" groups recorded more recently composed songs and fewer traditional songs. But they called them all "folk songs."
An interesting application of Gresham's Law.
Since Terry sang with a "folk" group (NC Minstrels) for a brief period of time, people assumed that he was a "folk singer" and the songs he wrote were "folk songs." This, despite the fact that Terry was a professional performer and songwriter, and prior to his stint with the Minstrels, he had written several do-wop-type songs for a soft-rock group called "The Fleetwoods" (no relation to Fleetwood Mac).
In the early to mid-1960s, many of the groups extant, and some individual singers (e.g. Jimmy Rodgers of "Honeycomb" fame), sang a mixture of traditional songs and songs that were written "in the folk vein," often specifically for those groups or individuals. In the public mind, all of these songs were lumped together as "folk songs." Including such songs as "They Call the Wind Mariah" and "Try to Remember," from Broadway musicals.
Then you had singers who were generally associated with folk music, such as Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, et al, writing songs and singing them—to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar. What more does a song need for the general public to consider it, even if newly written, to be a folk song? I do not recall that any of these singers referring to the songs they wrote as "folk songs." I think they knew better. But the general public, not used to the fine distinctions that ethnomusicologists and folklorists make, assumed that they were folk songs due to the style in which they were sung and by the generic term they were used to hearing for these professional entertainers and songwriters rather than the pedigrees of the songs themselves.
When performing, I always gave program notes on the backgrounds of the songs I sang ("I knew he was a folk singer because he spent ten minutes introducing a three minute song."), and whenever I sang a song that was not a folk song, such as a Yeats poem set to music, I told my audiences what it was. I also had a television series on folk music called "Ballads and Books" on my local educational channel, singing songs and ballads and talking about their backgrounds and travels.
I did the best I could, Nick, as many others did. But when the music industry itself gats involved and there is lots of money floating around just for the grabbing, provided the waters are sufficiently muddied regarding what constitutes a folk song and what does not, it gets a bit like King Canute trying to order the tides to recede.
It's not that some of these newly written songs might not eventually become folk songs. But to proclaim them to be folk songs when the ink is not even dry?
Sorry, Nick, but we tried. Many of us old geeks did the best we could.
Don Firth
P. S. By the way, one of the biggest jokes in the mockumentary movie, "A Mighty Wind," was that, of all the songs sung by these alleged folk groups in the movie, there was not one single genuine folk song in the entire movie. All of the songs were written for the movie itself.
Of course, there are those who might want to argue that point. . . .
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sj
