Hippy Chick, Bee-dubya-ell has it essentially right. The way I heard the story, it was Big Bill Broonzy. Someone asked him if a song he had just sung was a folk song. He is alleged to have answered, "It must be! I've never heard it sung by a horse!" Whenever the question "just what is a folk song, anyway?" comes up, almost invariably someone quotes a variation of the "Horse Theory." This is not helpful at all. It defines nothing. According to the Horse Theory, Wotan's Farewell from Richard Wagner's Die Walküre has to be considered a "folk song" because it's sung by an operatic bass-baritone portraying Wotan, a Norse god, not by Brünnhilde's horse.

The Horse Theory is usually quoted by someone who has just written a song and wants it to be considered a "folk song." Or who likes to be considered a folk singer, but who prefers to sing songs by Jacques Brel rather than the kind of songs and ballads that Francis James Child and Alan Lomax were talking about.

The first person to ever use the term "folk song" was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), a German philosopher and collector of volkslieder (folk songs). He was referring to songs of the rural peasant class. In this modern world, which has become more urbanized and which we like to think of as "classless" despite the mind-boggling spread between the richest and the poorest, it makes people uncomfortable to think that there might still be such a thing as a peasant class. When many poor people live in the cities and try to keep body and soul together by scrubbing toilets and flipping burgers (preferably not the same person and not in that order), we don't like to acknowledge that we may still have what might be considered a peasant class. It embarrasses people. It embarrasses governments. Thus volk has slowly morphed into "just plain folks," which we like to apply to everybody, including people with annual incomes that exceed the GNP of a medium-sized country. And the term "folk singer" got pried loose from traditional singers of traditional songs and got stuck on any singer who sings fairly simple, strophic songs to the accompaniment of a portable musical instrument, especially if they write the songs themselves and like to call themselves "folk singers." And especially if they've recorded a CD and music stores opt to put it in the "folk music" bin.

So these days you can call just about anything "folk music and just about anyone a "folk singer." If anyone wants to argue with you, just quote the Horse Theory.

End of weary sigh. . . .

Don Firth