Subject: RE: So what is 'TRADITIONAL' Folk Music ?
From:
GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 20 Oct 06 - 12:03 PM
Fantastic discussion, and goes to show that there are many workable definitions but no real boundary. Some admittedly disjointed thoughts (and please excuse any errors of detail):
Bob Dylan once referred, interestingly I thought, to being among the last to have known the "traditional people." He meant singers like Victoria Spivey and the other bluespeople he ran into, plus some he didn't, like Blind Willie McTell about whom he wrote a song.
Same goes for those of us who collected songs in the field from traditional singers half a century ago.
Dylan's presumption clearly was that we have left that traditional era forever. In terms of an un-media-mediated, non-digitally reproducible culture, that's true. But I think most people recognize that pure traditional (AKA folk, or lately "roots") music has never been pure, and thus confounds all definitions.
The fine Virginia traditional singer Horton Barker, than whom there could scarcely be anyone more traditional -- his a cappella repertoire was first and foremost Child Ballads and traditional hymns, though in some cases those hymns had known authors) found that when he wanted to pick up a guitar and sing collectors the song he courted the girls with back in the early 20th century -- the Harry Williams-Egbert Von Alstyne "San Antonio" (1907) -- they spurned it. He knew the difference of course, but wasn't much bothered by the distinction.
When Vance Randolph, than whom there can scarcely be a more traditional music collector, published his wonderful 4-volume Ozark Folk Songs (1946-50), he was forced to acknowledge quite a number of permissions from publishers for songs people sang him out of the pop songbag that had passed "into tradition" (you might want to deny the term here) between the 1880s and the 1930s. "The Baggage Coach Ahead," "Lightning Express," and other oldies were firmly set in the repertoire of street songsters even in the 1920s.
The Carter Family, now seen as at least verging on traditional though their repertoire was mixed, were in their time criticized something like rockers more recently -- as ruining and obliterating the old styles.
We know the composers of many impeccably "traditional" songs. While for example, there are a number of obviously modern, not traditional-styled campfire songs nobody knows the origin of. "I Wear My Pink Pajamas" is as fully traditional in scouting as anything you could wish. So, by the way, in the same genre, is the known-author popular ditty "I Said My Pajamas." Catchy and sometimes cute is the rule in campfire singing.
The term "traditional" almost eludes proper definition. It's often used to describe, say, "traditional" selections in the classical repertoire. "Traditional" style in advertising. Etc. Phooey. After "folk song" got swiped by singer-songwriters, "traditional" seemed like a good replacement. Now it's been swiped, and we attempt "roots." But all our terms will ultimately be swiped.
If it's traditional *style* you're talking about, then what about black songsters like Blind Willie McTell picking up recently written commercial blues novelties like "Dying Crapshooter's Blues?" Virtually every bluesman was writing his own stuff. Robert Johnson was an innovator so drastic (though his debt to Kokomo Arnold is evident) that he created one-of-a-kind blues like none ever before or since. Yet he is considered a traditional bluesman. Papa Charlie Jackson, Clarence Ashley and other medicine show musicians performed a rounded repertoire of everything their hearers might like, from traditional songs to theatrical stuff.
What about "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down?" First notable occurrence c. 1926 with Charlie Poole in NC, and Frank Hutchison in WVA. Pretty obviously not entirely a folk lyric, and that distinctive melody with its influential A7-D7-G7-C chord change may yet be traced to a pop original. Not to mention all the "folk songs" like "Lynchburg Town: and "Whoa Mule" that have roots in the minstrel shows -- some of whose songs were adaptations of earlier traditional songs ... and so on and on back to (figuratively) Adam and Eve and whatever they sang.
What about the Yugoslav cafe ballad singers studied by Lord and Parry who spontaneously recomposed traditional ballads based on a repertoire of ancient orally learned ballad tags and cliches similar to those used by Homeric singers in performing the Iliad and Odyssey? What's traditional if that's not?
Truth is, even in the backwoods during wilderness days, wagoners were bringing pop songs into the hills from urban stages, and at least some traditional singers happily learned and sang them alongside their old family songs, eventually transforming some nearly out of recognition, in a genuine folk hand-me-down process.
Some of F.J. Child's ballads were traceable to single originals with at least a presumption that authorship might be traced. Quite a few of his contemporaries' collected songs were not at all traditional, traceable to known authors. Indeed this was half the point of Sir Walter Scott's, Ritson's, Chappell's, Percy's collections, et al. We make a face and avoid the more blatant of these in favor of "Barbara Allen" and"Lord Thomas and Fair Elinore," but the two kinds stood side by side in many minds as fascinating OLD songs, valuable and interesting because they were rescued from oblivion.
The common elements in traditional, or roots song are: relatively old songs, passed down "from lip to ear," sometimes written down (19th century singers commonly kept "ballet books" full of their favorite songs, traditional or otherwise, so they wouldn't forget the words, though they trusted to their memories for the tunes, which therefore varied a good deal over time). The songs have in the past circulated in closely knit communities, sometimes isolated (backwoods, urban ethnic and everything between). They are a particular *type* of song, distinct from pop-music assumptions of any era. Thus perhaps "Knickerbocker Line" or "Pop Goes the Weasel" can never QUITE be thought a traditional song, though "Lavender Blue" and "Billy Boy," with not very dissimilar roots, may be thought so.
DT is in some ways a closely knit, if not isolated community, singing many of these very same songs, but DT's electronic. We're getting our songs from "lip to ear" in a new sense, copying lyrics off the site, sometimes changing them if we feel more comfortable with a different line or so, hearing the tunes from Mp3s, keeping our own ballet books and passing the songs along in singing gatherings and hoots and whatever you want to call them. And yet we perceive everything as different, distinct from that older world. Is that what every musical generation does? Are our traditional songs NOT traditional now because of something in the way we get them, sing them, pass them on? Or just because we're us, and our mindset is irretrievably different? Are printed folksong collections and the internet NOT a legitimate means of folk transmission? Are we just creating a museum, even for the more recent stuff?
As for currently written songs, I'd say there may turn out, in the long term, to be something too arty, too self-conscious in quite a few of them, including mine, to allow them easy survival. By contrast, I do expect that the songs to survive will be the offhand lyrics, from "Good Golly Miss Molly" to "When Will I Be Loved" to "Mockingbird Hill" -- songs that "sing themselves," rather than songs that require a fairly artificial attitude (examples might be "City of New Orleans," "Chelsea Morning" or some of Stan Rogers' songs -- undeniably beautiful, but maybe too highly wrought to make for easy singing in future generations).
In general a great many songs popular now are too dependent on arrangement, ensemble singing, studio accompaniment or stage manner to translate effectively into tradition. I'd guess a song passing into tradition needs to be simple, straightforward, fairly unaffected, and most of all **singable by one person without undue vocal or attitudinal contortions.** That means, for example, that most doo wop songs will not translate easily, unless they're also capable of being hummed to oneself and successfully sung solo.
Songs that have nothing but a single hook might make it: "Like a Virgin?" Hip hop will definitely survive as style, just as Afro-American jazz has, but how many of its songs will be easy enough to remember or perform to make it into tradition? (I'd guess that memorable individual rap rhyme lines will become traditional even as individual verses or small groups of floating verses from Afro-American spirituals and blues did.)
Which leaves us...where?
Sometimes I just say the hell with it and say as a friend of mine once did: "Folk songs are all the songs I like." Are we all folk or aren't we? Bill Broonzy's famed line "I never heard no horse sing" applies.
So, yes if you want to keep your pop songs separate. I do too, sorta ... I like "Jeepers Creepers" and "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" and "Iko Iko" (which is a folksong and a pop song both) and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and "Fever" and "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" and so on and on, but they're in a separate place for me.
I was delighted when Kate and Anna McGarrigle revived "Alice Blue Gown" though it's the farthest thing from folk -- it worked perfectly for them, and floating on the air at a folk festival it produced some of the same thrills as tradition. It was old. It made a connection with the past.
It's said "The past is a foreign country." Traditional songs, and some other oldies as well, have a magic-ship quality, transmitting like "A Beacon from Mars" -- the delight of strangeness, not unlike the delight of reading science fiction to grasp a visioned future. Sure, the present moment is all we have but we're great voyagers in other times and places. So "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" and "Me Donkey Want Water (Hold Him Joe)" and "Moscow Nights" and the incredible songs by Thomas Mapfumo that helped liberate Zimbabwe and "Froggy Went a-Courtin'" (with its backstory re Elizabeth I) and "Sheath and Knife" and "Backwater Blues" and "Rain and Snow" and so on all seem to zing the same nerve endings.
Ultimately all distinctions break down somewhere. But tradition is strangely more reliable for me than any other musical genre in producing shivers of mystery and discovery of something that is not the everyday. It's a delight being in contact with what Dylan might call the "traditional minds" in a sort of "traditional elsewhere." Many of those minds were, like our own, equally at home within and outside of tradition, but they still inform us. They have interior-decorated my imagination better than anyone else. Voyaging there, and fusing increasingly with it, is the stuff of life for me. What more could I ask?
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sj
