The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #112597 Message #2385636
Posted By: glueman
10-Jul-08 - 09:25 AM
Thread Name: Does it matter what music is called?
Subject: RE: Does it matter what music is called?
1954 definitions are held so dearly because they support the illusion that the tradition is under threat. If you want to make something precious beyond its normal currency tell people its under attack. They'll rush to support it in a way that suggesting folk's simply been ignored and drifted from popularity would never do.
If it was under threat, the horse had already bolted; the fox was shot by 1954. There is enough 'hard copy' of traditional music and recording available that it will never disappear so that leaves the idea that folk music is a cultural-historical artefact that should be foisted upon school children and others in a similar way to industrial archeology, a separate sealed diegesis about the old days divorced from context.
What appears to have happened is the core concerns of folk - acoustic music of intimate scale about disenfranchisement and/or locality - has survived in rude good health free of the distraction of attribution and academic formuli.
My taste doesn't run to Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel (or even Steeleye Span come to that) and I wouldn't visit places that included their songs as 'folk' but their music is more widely spoken of as such than that defined by 1954 advocates.
A new word, or words would be handy but the onus is now on traditionalists to prove committee defined nomenclature under the weight of popular assimilation.