Subject: RE: Does it matter what music is called?
From:
Don Firth
Date: 11 Jul 08 - 05:54 PM
I am motivated, so this is a long screed. Be forewarned!
No, Ron, I am not missing the point and I am not wearing blinders. I see the issue perfectly clearly, certainly as clearly as you do.
I'm not exactly new to folk music, and shortly after I first became interested in it, I took it seriously enough to take courses at the University of Washington from Prof. David C. Fowler, who has written books on medieval scholars and on balladry. And when I had the opportunity, I attended workshops with or had informal discussions with such people as ethnomusicologists Archie Green, Roger Abrahams, and, in 1964, with Charles Seeger. I have written papers on folk songs and ballads, and I was co-host on a series of television programs, "Ballads and Books," on KCTS Channel 9 in Seattle, funded by the Seattle Public Library.
In the course of my perambulations, I've had the privilege of meeting and talking with a substantial number of well-known singers, from Almeda Riddle to Mance Lipscomb to Ewan MacColl to Richard Dyer-Bennet to Marais and Miranda to a couple of members of The Brothers Four. A fairly broad spectrum of approaches, all the way from people born and raised in the tradition to a quartet of singing fraternity brothers.
I did not just learn the songs I sing from Kingston Trio records, and my knowledge of the field goes a bit deeper than merely reading the notes on the backs of record jackets.
I have an abiding love and respect for the material itself, and I have devoted my life to studying it, learning it, and presenting it. Many songs have historical roots, and historical importance. And this is an integral part of traditional songs.
I have been performing actively (and professionally) since the mid-1950s. I do not call myself a "folk singer" (nor, for that matter, a "folksinger"). I call myself a "singer-guitarist." And I sing a wide variety of songs, not just traditional songs limited to a particular region or nationality. I am urban-born and I come to this material by choice. I have had musical training, and I identify with the idea that I am an art singer, not a folk singer. Whenever I adopt an accent or regional mannerisms, it is more in the nature of acting than any attempt to convince my audience that I'm authentically from a given area or background. And my audiences know this.
I make certain that my audiences know what they're getting.
Often, during the early 1960s, while singing in clubs and coffeehouses, I would get requests for songs like "They Call the Wind Mariah" and "Try to Remember," undoubtedly because they had been recorded by the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four. When responding to these requests, I would mention that "Mariah" was from the Broadway musical, "Paint Your Wagon," and "Try to Remember" was from "The Fantasticks," a long-running off-Broadway musical. Just to avoid confusion and to indicate that these were not really folk songs as some may have assumed. And when I sing songs like Richard Dyer-Bennet's setting of "So We'll Go No More a Roving," I identify it as a poem by Lord Byron; likewise, "Down by the Salley Gardens" as a musical setting of a W. B. Yeats poem.
I make no qualitative distinctions between traditional folk songs and the products of singer-songwriters. At least some singer-songwriters. Tom Paxton, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, for example, have all written excellent songs, some of which I sing myself. I do not recall that any of these people insisted on calling their songs "folk songs." I do make qualitative distinctions between individual songs, whether they be traditional songs (not all of which appeal to me) and composed songs (some of which are very good indeed and I may chose to sing them, and some of which are just bloody awful).
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In 1966, the Seattle Folklore Society was founded. It was made plain from the very beginning that, as far as sponsoring concerts was concerned, the organization would present traditional singers only. This meant singers who had grown up in the folk tradition. Jean Ritchie, yes. Joan Baez, no. And that, of course, ruled out singers such as myself. I must admit to having been a bit miffed, and I thought it was more than just a bit draconian, but I could see where they were coming from. Okay, so be it.
Subsequently, the SFS started the Northwest Folklife Festival over the Memorial Day weekend. But if they were going to have any participants at all, they had to back off from their "traditional only" policy and allow urban-born singers of traditional songs. It drew singers from all over the United States and Canada. The festivals became massive. Thousands of singers, dancers, musicians, and hundreds of thousands of people attended. And although none of the participants in the early festivals were paid, they soon began hiring well-known singers. One year, they brought in Elizabeth Cotton. That was consistent with their initial policy. A couple of years later, they brought in Emmylou Harris. I've always regarded her more as Country than folk. It was not long before—
Well, let's put it this way: early one afternoon when I arrived at the festival, the first thing that assaulted my ears was a garage band doing "Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Earl, Earl. . . ." There were several thousand people scheduled to perform on various stages around the Seattle Center grounds (all passed by the SFS board), not counting an army of buskers. Singers of traditional songs on the official schedule? There were only about a dozen of us. Several dozen others had submitted tapes, but had not been accepted. Those few who had been approved were crammed into the meeting rooms up in the northwest corner of the Center grounds.
Last year, Jeff Warner, son of song collectors and folklorists Frank and Anne Warner, was appearing on the West Coast, and contacted the Seattle Folklore Society to see if they would sponsor a concert by him. He was asked, "What songs have you written?" He responded that he did not write songs, he sang traditional material." The SFS then responded that they were not interested. "Singer-songwriters only."
At the same time, for the past several years, Victory Music has been running open mikes at various venues in this area. Singer-songwriters only. No traditional songs.
Except, of course, many of the singer-songwriters, both at the festivals and at the open mikes, introduce their songs with such comments as "This is a folk song I wrote a about month ago. . . ."
And whereas the songs of singer-songwriters such as Tom Paxton and Townes Van Zandt consist of lyrics and melodies that are eminently memorable and singable, the vast majority of the songs one hears at these festival stages and open mikes are pedestrian and so easily forgettable you can't recall the tune thirty seconds after the song is over.
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There is a retired chemistry professor here in this area who is avidly interested in traditional folk music and has become very active locally. In fact, he has become a real Force! Dissatisfied with the "singer-songwriter only" open mikes, he approached other potential venues and began running open mikes of his own. Then he opened his home to house concerts. When he heard of the SFS refusal to sponsor Jeff Warner, he sponsored a concert by Warner in his home.
With the hearty approval of Bob Nelson and me, he has exhumed and revitalized the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society, which was initially organized in 1953 by several people including Walt Robertson and myself. In the mid-1950s, the short-lived PNWFS succumbed to the Communist Scare through a series of circumstances that verged on the Kafkaesque, despite the fact that the organization was dedicated to collecting local folk music and folklore and presenting performances of folk activities (singers, musicians, dancers, crafts), and was completely apolitical.
With the resurrection of the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society, its original purpose has also resumed: collecting and preserving local folk music and folklore (much more difficult now than in the 1950s) and presented traditional material in concerts and performances at a number of venues locally. This sometimes involves sponsoring performers that the Seattle Folklore Society is not interested in. So it is not necessarily a matter of competition between the two societies. The PNWFS is filling a need. And the response has been very gratifying.
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Dick Greenhaus' post at 10 Jul 08 – 11:34 p.m.: "However, Gresham's Law applies. It gets harder and harder to hear traditional music at 'folk' venues. Or on 'folk' radio." Dick's comment is very much to the point.
There is a local radio station, KBCS in Bellevue, Washington (one of the three NPR affiliates I can pick up locally), whose daily program schedule includes such listings as "Lunch with Folks" from noon to 3:00 pm. (described as "a daily diet of folk and bluegrass"), "Folksound" on Tuesday evenings, and "Sunday Folks," all purporting to play folk music. In three hours of listening, if I'm lucky, I may hear maybe eight or ten actually traditional folk songs. The rest is singer-songwriter, some quite good, most very pedestrian and unmemorable.
A local NPR station used to broadcast Fiona Ritchie's "Thistle and Shamrock" on Saturday afternoons. It was one of my favorite programs and often I would tape it. It was replaced some years back by an hour of "Contemporary Folk." If I want to hear programs like "Thistle and Shamrock" now, I have to see if I can track them down, then hope I can stream them off the internet.
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On the matter of definitions and common usage: the semi-popular science-fiction television series of a couple decades back, "Battlestar Galactica" (the one with Lorne Greene – sometimes referred to by wags as "Cattlecar Galactica" or "Bonanza in Space"), apparently did not have a science advisor on the staff. Scientific sounding terminology was often incorrectly used, and if you had taken an astronomy course or two or had read a book on the subject, sometimes the "technobabble" got quite bizarre.
They consistently used the term "galaxy" to refer to a solar or planetary system, such as our own sun and attendant planets. I had acquaintances who were fans of the show who began referring to our solar system as "our galaxy." The galaxy in which our solar system resides, consisting of an estimated 200 to 400 billion stars, most of which are quite probably complete with planetary systems of their own, includes quite a bit more real estate than our solar system alone does. That became "common usage" among many "Battlestar Galactica" fans for some time, and I'm pretty sure some of those same fans still don't know the distinction long after the show went off the air.
No matter what they believed, or may still believe, that doesn't make it correct.
Had this goof actually become "common usage" generally, then astronomers and cosmologists who objected to this incorrect terminology would undoubtedly be told by some folks not to be so stuffy. Get up to date. "Take your blinders off." But that would leave the problem of what would one call the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy if the word "galaxy" now referred to a single star and its orbiting planets? You'd have to come up with a new term. And get everyone to agree to that. Much easier to just insist on correct usage it in the first place!
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I conclude my remarks on this subject by quoting Michael Cooney: Most of today's "singer-songwriters" are writing stuff that's indistinguishable from pop music. Those who become popular, in the commercial sense, usually do become pop singers. So I think that almost all of what the industry calls "folk music" these days is really just low-budget pop music. If those performers could afford it, they'd have elaborate backups and music videos, etc.
So why are all these new songs called folk songs? I think it's because there isn't another nice-sounding phrase to describe them. Calling them "folk" songs gives them an undeserved stamp of pre-approval. [Emphasis mine – DF]. Please, please, someone come up with a pretty phrase to replace "folk songs" for these singer-songwriters.
A folk song is a song that has evolved through the oral process. Someone may have written a song to start, but that wasn't really a folk song; it is the cumulative effect of all the changes on the song as it travels from person to person that make it a "folk" song. (Or a "traditional" song, as some say, in attempt to get away from the confusion; but, alas, I have heard people say they just wrote a traditional song. [Again, emphasis mine – DF]). His full article is HERE.
Beware!! I may be back!!
Don Firth
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sj
