One of the reasons I fell in love with folk music, when I was a young sprat, is that it clarified what Bob D called "a way to be in the world" -- or, more precisely it provided a huge wealth of answers to the question of how others had chosen to be in the world, what they had faced and how they had faced it.

This was a rich vein for someone just coming awake in life and wondering how to best deal with the confusions and contradictions that seemed so prevalent. It was a newly post-industrial age. Electronics was a primitive art, the TV had only recently been commercialized, stereos still used tubes, and people thought Charlie Chaplin was really onto something. Beats were into the dharma way and conservatives were promoting "Plastics". The notion of integrity was not much discussed, but the grownups wondered if America had lost its sense of national purpose. The Boomer Generation, waiting in the wings still, was beginning to growl and talk to itself about the cognitive dissonance in post-war America. In other words, there was a lot one could be confused about, and hearing the voices of distant generations and other countries through folk music was a great help in getting a sense of what it really meant to be a human being walking about on the earth, with or without the blessing of the DAR.

Now, forty or fifty years later, I still find it to be the case. The trials of existence in this country are different but no less trying. The burdens of adulthood are a bit greater than the confusions of adolescence, but the patterns more familiar and less bewildering. But there's plenty of opportunity out there to get dismayed, depressed, resentful or just feeling lost. For those moments, nothing serves as well as going to the wall and taking down the dreadnought, and remembering the misadventures of Barb'ry Ellen, Pretty Boy Floyd, poor Jesse James, Lord Lovell, John Henry or John Hardy, or a thousand others. Maybe it is not so much their stories, any more, as the warmth of the Brazilian rosewood back against my chest, humming out the runs and making space oscillate to the richness of good chords. Maybe it is the reminder, drawn from so many old and new stories, that there are certain constants in the human equation that persist in spite of rhetoric, politics or transient tribulations.

Whatever the reason, I find that spending ten minutes with the Union Maid or Fayre Eleanor, Flaherty's Drake or Tim Finnegan or Patrick Spencer is the very tonic I need, and falling back on the music never fails me.

And I would not be surprised to hear that others had a similar remedy for tough moments.


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