The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #105393 Message #2170320
Posted By: GUEST,Tom Bliss
13-Oct-07 - 12:11 PM
Thread Name: Guardian calls Ani DiFranco folk singer
Subject: RE: Guardian calls Ani DiFranco folk singer
Let's try putting this another way.
It's not that the 54 definition has been stretched to include new works, styles or processes.
The 54 definition used the word ''folk' to describe a particular catalogue of material which had been created in a quite specific way. That process is now (almost) defunct, thanks to recordings and the mass media, the arrival of which has effectively closed that archive. It cannot therefore be changed or added to. It exists. We can take things out and play with them, but that's all, (though we can find more existing pre-collection material if we're very lucky).
Meanwhile a new, separate archive is being built up - all the way to Ani DiF. New songs, new traditions, new versions and adaptations. All linking back to the closed archive, but fundamentally different because of the massively different processes which have informed their making.
Rightly or wrongly the definition of the word Folk has been allowed to grow, to include BOTH these calatogues. But this does not dilute the older archive - the one they were defining in 54. And it doesn't threaten that definition, or that catalogue, or our access to that calalogue.
It's like the word Hoover.
When the success of that company's machine resulted in all suction-based floor cleaning machines being called Hoovers, it didn't mean that all the other brands had been bought by Hoover and were being made in their factory.
All that had happened was that a specific word had become a generic word.
It did mean, of course that if you really DID want to refer to a macnine actually made by the Hoover company, you had to find a new way to do so - saying Hoover was no longer specific enough.
It did Hoover no harm, neither did it damage vacuum cleaner sales for other companies.
So let's have no more of this suggestion that the change in the use of the word Folk means we now have to include post-revival versions and new works in the 54 definition.
If that's what people think is happening no wonder they get earated.