What isn't folk

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 08:25 AM

Popular is Popular on account of the conditions which determine the collectivity of the musical process, if not their corporeal realisation which must, in all cases, be down to the individual and their answerability to the wider community. If the Folk of Folk Music doesn't = humanity, then what else can it possibly mean? Both the Folk Myth and the 1954 Shibboleth depend on it! This is born, I might add, of a cultural condescension which defines the Folk Myth anyway, and to widen those parameters beyond the class-ridden assumptions of the early entirelybourgeois revival (however so redeemed by radical baby-boomers) is to turn the tables rather on a rather noxious circumstance.

So, if anyone's paltering here, Michael - well it ain't me. By regarding them as profoundly different you are missing the human essence common to both. Where they differ is in terms of idiom; both are expressions of respective musical traditions which determine what they are. The Folk Myth is the conceit that it was ever any different and that we have lost something as a consequence. I don't buy into that - I never have & I never will.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 09:18 AM

PS - If the ITCM usage of Popular was synonomous with Folk (as you appear to be suggesting) then why do they use Folk as well? Indeed, I have seen enthnomusicological dissertations on everything from Barber Shop Quartets of Hartlepool, the Village Gamelans of Sunda, the Heavy Metal Bands of Birmingham to the Hip-Hop Crews of Clapham, all of which fall under the heading of Popular in precisely the same way Child used the term. Folk is a later construct which became a genre covering an ever widening multitude of idioms and possibilities with the emphasis on self-conscious revival, conceit, puritanism, conservatism, fundamentalism, nostalgia & other such wonky contrivances. I see no harm in that myself of course; folk is my country in which I am quite happily, and wonkily, astray.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 10:26 AM

Sorry to bang on but I've just logged-in to take a stroll through my past posts and found this response to a similar point from MtheGM bacvk in January.

Subject: RE: Taking on the Big Boys? - classic big long ballads
From: S O'P - PM
Date: 12 Jan 10 - 06:49 AM

MtheGM: When Child called his collection 'The English & Scottish Popular Ballads', he certainly did not mean what would nowadays be called 'popular' [or 'pop'] songs.

Thanks, MtheGM - this actually distracted me from my more pressing concerns last night & lulled me into nice sleepy reverie in which it occurred to me that the use of Popular in both senses is exactly the same. There has been some sterling discussion on the wellsprings of the Big Boys from the - er - Big Boys (Jim, Brian et al) which has shed light on the nature of an essentially creative vernacular tradition in which ballads were wrought by virtue of an idiomatic mastery in precisely the same way pop songs are today. Jim has even suggested many ballads were, in effect, free-styled, which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, given that free-styling is often the mark of true mastery in many narrative idioms - from Hip-Hop to that of the Serbian bards.

The essential difference would appear to be one of transmission. Time was the only available recording media was Human Memory - which comes supplied with a pair of excellent stereo binaural microphones and, as is supposed, near perfect recall especially when used in a (mainly) non-technological culture where people are more creative by default - thus playback is apt to emphasise the idiosyncratic nature of the thing. In terms of sampling and remixing of existing material there is evidence enough of the sort of fluidic mastery I've been arguing for elsewhere with respect of Folk Song. This is the exact same mastery that would have been commonplace in the trades of the time, so it shouldn't surprise us that ordinary people (so-called) were making & singing these songs any more than a so-called ordinary person (such as a Susan Boyle or an Alfie Boe) can capture the hearts of millions today with what is, in essence, a natural born talent defined by the traditions of their respective cultures.

The nature of Popular Music in both senses is Idiomatically Creative - the idiom being the very wellspring of its creativity, which is the actual germ of The Tradition, determined as it is by the prevailing Zeitgeist which on one hand gives us The Ballad Tradition and on the other The Hip-Hop / Rap Tradition. Both of which are Popular Traditional Musics in precisely the same sense - but neither are Folk as both the common usage of the term and its 1954 Definition renders it essentially meaningless*. Thus whilst we might lose ourselves pondering What is Folk? - or indeed Does Folk Exist? - the nature of Popular Music remains pretty constant throughout history even unto this day - applying equally to the ballads Child included in his collection and to the music we call Pop in all its myriad forms. Both are the results of living traditions of vernacular mastery and creativity - and both are a perfect reflection of the human society in which they were / are created.

S O'P

* As indicated elsewhere the folkloric understanding of the term community has expanded to the extent that the use of the term in the 1954 Definition becomes so nebulous as to make The Horse Definition look pretty exacting by comparison. Thus Folk is either nothing or everything...

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: glueman
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 03:34 PM

"Thus Folk is either nothing or everything..."

Most thinking people reach the same conclusion sooner or later.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: mkebenn
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 05:33 PM

I play Thunder road(Mitchems), Copperhead Road, and they work IMHO. I even do Zevon's Roland, and that gets peoples attention.LOL. Mike

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Nick
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 07:53 PM

Happy Together - excellent! My favourite version of that is from the Mothers of Invention Live at the Fillmore (here - perhaps you could get everyone to do the harmonies?)

I Will Survive works well acoustically

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 06 Aug 10 - 08:39 PM

Ir an elephant a mammal? or a pachyderm? or a vertebrate? or a beast of burden? or a source of ivory? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 12:20 AM

Why, an elephant is an elephant ~~ it is not a rhinoceros or a hippo or a mouse. That is the important point within questions like this. As Bert Lloyd used to say, the donkey and the zebra have similar outlines but that doesn't make them the same animal.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: glueman
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 04:22 AM

To continue the analogies if a guy has invested heavily in rubies, sapphires and emeralds he won't want to hear they've found a quarry of them twenty feet thick. He'll say, 'ah, but the stuff we found was different. It comes from the days where rubies really were rubies, where you had to hunt down your sapphires and emeralds were something for the connoisseur'. Fact is the gems from the new mine are just as beautiful and have sat around just as long.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 04:38 AM

Thanks for that Happy Together, which wound up in conclusion of The Mothers' Groupie Routine via ex-Turtles Mark Volman & Howard Kaylan, AKA Flo & Eddie, two of the finest singers that e're walked the earth. Coincidentally, today I will be seeking out 200 Motels on DVD...

Otherwise, Michael, to explore your analogy a littke further if I may. Thing is here, they're all animals in precisely the same biological sense, mammals indeed, they're just different species. They evolve, eat, lactate, procreate in exactly the same way; they each have brains, lungs, hearts, liver, bladder, skeletons etc. and yet they remain quite different in behaviour, environment, morphology etc. Folk is just another species, or genus, of musical diversity governed by the precisely same principles that determine all other musical species which is, ironically perhaps, encapsulated in both Louis Armstrong's Equus Conundrum and Maud Karpeles' 1954 Definition: that all music is the consequence of human collective & individual creative genius and is determined entirely by its history, yet will change and be changed as it makes its way into its future. As with mammals, music is different with respect of its behaviour, morphology & environment - not it's biology. Animals evolve too; some species may even interbreed to produce new ones; some have been selectively bred to produce many of the domesatic varieties we know today, but diversity & natural selection is always they key to the thing.

Meanwhile, Richard, still waiting for that example of a music which can't be covered by the 1954 Definition - or a mammal that grows from trees perhaps?

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Mr Red
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 05:36 AM

What isn't Folk?

Discussing what is &/or isn't Folk.

You want a specific? Festivals that call themselves Folk but are too big to be supported by Folkies and need the "festival" public and hence the acts are geared more to that fraternity.
Cambridge springs to mind - since you ask.
Music festival - for sure.
Bill Wyman a folkie? Yea sure he knows his blues, but his public EXPECTS, and they get. And it won't be Folk.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Nick
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 05:53 AM

Acoustic version of Angel by Hendrix works well. I used to have a really nice version just played on an acoustic guitar but I can't remember who it was by but I could do with learning to play it.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 11:01 AM

Suibhne: Different mammals do not mate or interbreed. Bert's donkey & zebra will coexist but will not be productive together. Why? Because tho they have similarities [both mammalia], they are of different species. They are differently evolved, with different strengths and excellences, faults and disadvantages.

Thus also your classical, your pop, your rock, your folk [of which I note with interest you also used the word 'species']. They are all musics, but if you can't see where they are different in nature & in evolutionary origin [different *species* of music, to follow what you are pleased to call my analogy], then you will just have to go & commune with yourself becoz I don't honestly think anyone else will be listening.

All best as ever nevertheless ~~

~Michael~

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Nick
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 02:16 PM

>>Suibhne: Different mammals do not mate or interbreed.

That's going to come as a bit of a shock to any mules reading this thread - many will probably need to go into therapy as a result of this insensitive post that throws their ancestry into question.

From the Harvard Medical School:

"DNA studies indicate that Humans and chimpanzees carried on interbreeding for thousands, perhaps millions of years after the two species diverged.

The researchers say human evolution seems to have been much more complex than previously thought. This exchanging of genes probably helped both species survive more successfully in their environments.

Team member, Prof. D Reich says that this is just a hypothesis as it has not yet been proved. However, he said it would explain multiple features of their data. Their hypothesis is that there was an exchange of genes between our human ancestors and chimpanzees after the two species diverged.

This study was carried out at the Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. You can read about the study in the journal Nature."


Some evidence in Mudcat that it's still happening

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 02:36 PM

Highly humorous, Nick ~~ Down the garden to eat worms again time, M. & profound apologies to all mules & hinnies reading this; & to Nick's chimp ancestors.

Otherwise I think my argument holds, ya-know!

~Michael~

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Annie Lid
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 03:06 PM

What's he got against us worms?

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 03:25 PM

Nothing, Annie=Worm my dear. I have nothing against cattle or sheep either; but I still eat them...

Yum!

~Michael~

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 03:43 PM

I've no idea whose analogy it might pertain to, but until 2009 there was a Zeedonk at Colchester Zoo - reportedly a consequence of an accidental (ha! as if..) mating. Really quite the most boring bit of the zoo it was, though the critters were sweet enough.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 03:59 PM

If we take the 1954 Def. at face value (i.e. The Orthodox Usage as favoured by Richard Bridge) a good 99.9% of the music that happens in the name of Folk and is discussed here on Mudcat isn't folk at all. That sort of Folk (if we dare call it such) is an idiomatic musical genre (howewever so derivative) which must cover everything done in the name of The Revival too - including your own covers of Traditional Material which presumably you call Folk, but which fail to meet the requirements of the 1954 Definition. You can also write off the Northumbrian Bagpipe Tradition of Written Composition and the efforts of any songwriter who has been moved to write a song in the Folk Idiom (not least Peter Bellamy) and we can exclude the songs of George Bruce Thomson, Tommy Armstrong and pretty much anything Martin Carthy ever had a hand in.

Scarey stuff, eh? 99.9%? Make that 100%! As far as Actual Folk goes, all we would be left with is the theory of a music based entirely on the collected & field recorded remnants of a once thriving Oral Tradition. The EFDSS would have to drop the word Folk from its title, as would folk clubs, folk festivals, folk record labels, folk magazines, folk forums etc. etc. and all because, if followeed to the Intention of the Letter, the sort of music the 1954 Definition is describing can only occur in specific contexts all of which are now lost to us for good.

What is Folk? An extinct idiom of popular song that can only exist in a highly rarified pre-technological environment perpetuated by illiterate rural cap-doffing peasants entirely innocent of the true significances of what they did. One is reminded of Maud Karpele's assessment of Jean Ritchie as not a proper Folk Singer because she'd been to university!

What isn't Folk? Well, pretty much everything that's ever been done in the name of Folk since the first Folk Song was collected for a start.

Otherwise...      

As we have seen animals not only interbreed, they also adapt and evolve. They do not exist in isolation, rather they inhabit the same environments and prey upon one another in a symbiotic ecosystem where each species is essential to the balance of the whole. All animals evolved from a common source because of the same adaptive mechanisms common to all, hence species diversify as part of thre self-same process. As with animals, then so with music. Folk is no different to any other, and certainly not because of the condescending reactionary folkloric shite that consitutes the 1954 Definition. So there.

O'Piobaireachd

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 04:10 PM

Y'know...back in 1954 there were several definitions. And none had universal agreement. Trust me. I was there.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 04:17 PM

"Y'know...back in 1954 there were several definitions. And none had universal agreement. Trust me. I was there."

Tell us more!

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 04:53 PM

At the risk of regurgitating once again the same old dreary arguments expressed above, and incurring Jim's wrath, many words in the dictionary have multiple definitions, some of them related to each other. 'Folk' is one of those with multiple definitions. The language is constantly evolving. In 1954 most people on the scene knew even then that songs performed in a certain idiom were being accepted by the 'folk' as 'Folk'. The 1954 definition needed something more precise for academics to use. No problem. Two (at least) different but related uses of the word when applied to 'music'. As an indexer I have to make arbitrary decisions daily as to what goes into which index. If I don't do this I end up with massive unwieldy indexes. I don't expect anyone else to agree with these arbitrary decisions.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 05:03 PM

Suibhne: Thanks for reminder of Karpeles on Ritchie: one of my favourite folk anecdotes. Ranks up there with Karl Dallas interviewing Maggie Barry & asking where she learnt her great heartbreaking version of She Moved Thru The Fair that we were all singing so poignantly back then in the 1950s ~~ in her travelling?, thru her family?, or what? "Oh no," she replied; "I learned it off a gramophone record by Count John McCormack."

~Michael~

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 05:17 PM

For those now with 1954, we need to know the details of how 1954 came into being. It's important so we know that it's just a describing word and doesn't become a reified thing with it's own tentacles and eggs and stuff.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Amos
Date: 07 Aug 10 - 05:19 PM

Well, 1953 had retired, and no-one else wanted the job, and 1954 was looking for something to do....

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 08 Aug 10 - 04:27 AM

BTW - Couldn't find the 200 Motels DVD in Preston so I bought something called Frank Zappa : A Token of His Extreme which is all (?) 77 minutes of the August 1974 Mothers' TV special in a very poor quality transfer friom what looks like a 3rd genersation dub from VHS. No scene index, no menus, nothing, but at £8 I'm not complaining & the performances are absolutely riveting throughout.

Here's all ten minutes of Zappa's supreme soul-perversion Florentine Pogen from the TV special with improved sound & visuals.

Definitely not folk, but hold on a minute - let's take a closer look in the light of the 1954 Definition...

1954: Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission.

Well, obviously Zappa's music has...

1954: The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past;

Yes to that too, quite vividly so...

1954: (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group;

This is getting creepy, folks!

1954: (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.

Which is a striking component in the music of Frank Zappa even unto this day...

1954: The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music...

Evolving from rudimentary beginnings certainly but given that Folk and Popular music have been shown to be synonymous, what can this mean? And even if they're not, I'd argue such communities might have once only existed in the remotest regions of Planet Earth and the assumption that they hadn't evolved their own Popular & Art musics is a tad presumptious. On one of Bert Lloyd's Radio Three documentaries he was very fond of a recording he'd made of village girls from a remote community in the Phillipines (?) singing a song they'd composed about Jimmy Rodgers!

1954: ...and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community.

As we can see Zappa's community had certainly absorbed it, and there's no evidence of sheet music...

1954: The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged...

I've heard as many recordings of Florentine Pogen by this line-up and change is endemic in the nature of the thing; in fact, you can trace a steady evolution if you line them up chronologically...

1954: ...for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character.

Hmmmm - so there we have it folks, Zappa's music is folk after all - but then again with conditions as vague and nebulous as these, what music isn't?

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 08 Aug 10 - 06:15 PM

You make out a very strong case here, Suibhne. And yes these guidelines are vague and nebulous but I can still think of a shedload of music that doesn't fit into these descriptions.

'1954: The term CAN be applied......and it CAN likewise be applied.....' I take this statement to mean 2 extremes of a whole raft of possibilities, at one end of the scale it CAN have orginated in an unsophisticated community and at the other end it CAN be composed/commercial music that has entered oral tradition. (In my OPINION the vast majority of ENGLISH folksong falls at the latter end of the scale)

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 04:59 AM

but I can still think of a shedload of music that doesn't fit into these descriptions

I'd be interested in hearing what they are, Steve. I would also question that any human community could be considered unsophisticated, though obviously this was a requisite for genuine folklore by the early collectors, certainly up until 1954 anyway. It smacks of colonial paternalism, however so well-intentioned in its sentiment, much as Kipling gave evidence to in The Land which celebrates the God given functional status of 'the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate' which was later anathema to the Folk Scene as a whole despite (or maybe because of) its pedominately middle-class demographic. Even now its rare to meet a right-wing folkie (I know a couple, both of them working-class) despite the fact of the entire rivival being predicated on class condescension.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 05:14 AM

Simply for your interest, I am a rightie folkie & couldn't be more middle-class ~~ Cambridge graduate, long-retired senior teacher, longtime member of Institute of Journalists, member of The Groucho Club...

~Michael~

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 06:21 AM

I'm working-class with no formal academic qualifications to speak of, though I was invalided out of Durham University as a mature student on account of the Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome from which I still suffer. Generally tolerant (the people, Lord, they people etc.) I despise fundamentalism of any stripe and am inclined to objectify both political & religious opinion in favour of a wider humanism. Consequently I am a materialist with an interest in the cultural dimensions of religion and the religious dimensions of culture.

One wonders what Groucho would have made of your club, Michael? though the angelic Harpo used to drift in and out of the Algonquin as it suited him to do so, as eloquent off-screen as he was mute on it by all accounts - though it is said Zeppo could upstage the lot of them single handed at social gatherings!

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: The Sandman
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 07:03 AM

M the GM, is spot on, furthermore mules and jennets cannot reproduce, they are sterile, they live and they die without producing more mules jennets etc.
so does the crossbreeding of music die in the same way ? do we end up with a homogenous bland cumasc ,which is worse than the original genre, or do we end up with something excitingly new, probably both, depending on the musicians involved and their skill.
unfortunately Ihave heard more examples of the former than the latter, what often happens[ in my opinion] when folk music attempts to become more commercial is that its roots get weakened

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 08:32 AM

a homogenous bland cumasc

What a truly evocative turn of phrase you have, GSW! I could argue that Revival Folk is such a creature though - impotent and cross-bred, but not by some random mating, rather a more purposeful selection in the creation of a beast of burden incapable of producing further mutation. And though the parent thoroughbred is long dead, he sired a fine line in creative musical action that will endure in perpetuity just that, as living Traditional Popular Musics, none of them are of any interest to folkies who are either mired in nostalgia and over-weening mawkishness or else indulging in a seance with the residue of Traditional Song...

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: The Sandman
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 04:47 PM

cumasc is irish for blend.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 05:06 PM

It is as well! I thought it was a typo for musac. Apologies.

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Uncle Rumpo
Date: 09 Aug 10 - 07:11 PM

oops.. in the context of the metaphore

I read it as cumsac !!!???

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Uncle Rumpo
Date: 10 Aug 10 - 09:19 AM

..which is a reasonable mistake to make here at mudcat..

where so many otherwise intelligent and erudite folk

can so often talk and argue such complete bollocks.....

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: GUEST,Woozy McGuffrie
Date: 29 Dec 17 - 01:39 PM

RAMONES!

Subject: RE: What isn't folk
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 29 Dec 17 - 06:22 PM

MAYBE this, but note oral transmission, variation, selection.

If that didn't work, try this.