THIS again???

There are so many different opinions, and my own is so different from that of most of the rest of you, that I won't even bother to try nailing it down. (Well, not at first, anyway.)

Regardless of a given person's prejudice, er, I mean, opinion, the term "folk" music normally makes some reference to musical expression that grows (or once grew) naturally out of some culture, i.e., some community of real people, and has some relationship to a living or dead "tradition."

I find myself interested in many discussions of "folk music," including the contributions of folks whose definition is very much different from my own, because I can apply their insights to the often-very-different traditions in which I am most interested. My understanding of what some such people have to say may be entirely different from what they had intended to communicate, in cases where their idea of "folk music" is nothing at all like my own, but it often leads to extremely interesting and valid conclusions.

As a New Orleanian, I have a number of favorite grassroots musical traditions. Some involve brass instruments; others are built around electric guitars and drums, and still others feature dissonant vocal chants accompanied only by the simplest percussion instruments. And, oh yeah, then there's the sound of huge gospel choirs accompanied by pipe organs, electric pianos, and rock-style rhythm sections.

As an Irish-American, I have a degree of interest (if not expertise) in deeply "traditional" Irish folk music, where songs are unaccompanied and instrumental tunes are never sung; also in more modernized versions of music from the same tradition, often performed along with contemporaray compositions in similar styles; and even in the most vilified, commercial, Americanized, sentimentally Irish songs like those popularized by, say, Bing Crosby. And just as I entertain an interest in this very broad spectrum of Irish music, I enjoy at least as wide a variety of American folk and popular song.

Years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I applied for a position at Rolling Stone magazine as a very simon-pure enthusiast of traditional blues music. The editor who interviewed me suggested I contact one of their freelance "stringers" who fairly regularly published articles about his own various quirky musical interests; maybe I would get a better idea of how to put together something I might be able to sell to the magazine. (An actual salaried position was obviously out of the question, at least for the moment.) The guy was very friendly and very interesting, but at the time I just couldn't accept the premise for his latest project: he was intent upon promoting the idea that Dick Dale's electric "surfer" guitar sound was a valid, genuine, American folk-music genre.

Even though I had long been willing to accept electric blues guitar as part of a genuine "folk" tradition, I was unable to buy into electric surf music as anything remotely comparable.

Now that I'm much older and hopefully at least a little bit wiser, I've come to believe that my would-be writing mentor was exactly correct: for my money, now, surfer-style rock ~ and indeed all forms of live "garage-band" rock 'n' roll ~ does indeed belong to a living musical tradition. And any insights that might apply to one tradition can validly ~ and quite interestingly ~ be applied to another tradition, even one that very few people would characterize as "folk." Hell, it's usually especially interesting to apply the insights of a "folk-music" discussion to an upstart or unconventional musical tradition.