Does Folk Exist?

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 01 Sep 09 - 05:09 AM

I might conclude here that there is little by way of hard evidence for the existence of Folk. Like God, and indeed Gaia, the concept is real enough for believers who accept its doctrines without question and treat those who dare question them to the sort of hysterical haranguing that typifies this thread. If Folk exists it does so as a curious sort of Cultural Fundamentalism with precious little by way of relevance to Popular Culture as a whole, which carries on regardless. The appeal of Folk will always be Highly Specialised, as any interest in a Cultural Anachronism must be. Maybe that's why I find it so very appealing...

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: GUEST,Raymond Greenoaken
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 04:46 PM

Hello –

just popped my head round the door to say that in the past two days I've followed this thread from its midsummer stirrings to its autumnal ripening, and I've found it vastly entertaining, educative and hilarious. And now everybody's flouncing off. Don' t stop, and don't start agreeing with each other, and I'll continue to eavesdrop happily and try to pick out the odd apercu I can pass off as my own.

pip pip!

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 03:25 PM

O'Piobaireachd Venerating Gaia on Fleetwood Beach, 31st August 2009 - or Old Habits Die Hard...

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 01:14 PM

Gaia will still be around when all the silly sods here have stopped arguing about folk music and shuffled off to their reward. ;-)

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 12:44 PM

Gaia says the ones who want to turn her music into a history lesson.
Does you bum look big in that asks Gaia?

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 10:27 AM

"Gaia says when she wants an opinion from someone who talks of Folk and Linnaeus in the same breath she'll ask an astrologist."

Who, exactly, was it who was supposed to be mad, 'glueman'?

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 09:34 AM

By the way Brian P, despite some silliness on my part, I found your prior post of the 30th, very interesting.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 07:32 AM

Gaia says no.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 07:27 AM

"Where in the sainted folk process is origination?"

Jesus. Yesterday I tried to approach that question in a rational and non-confrontational way (btw 'photos without names and dates' is exactly what the old songs are, Crow Sister), and in reply I get a load of half-arsed whimsy about Gaia.

Shimrod has a point. What's coming through in this thread is a point of view that:

(a) Any modern composition can be called 'folk music';

(b) Therefore 'folk music' must be no different from any other kind of music;

(c) Therefore traditional songs must have identifiable authors just like 'Blowing in the Wind' does;

(d) Therefore there can be no such thing as 'the folk process'.

Which does look like arguing backwards to deduce the 'facts' from a pre-existing conviction. Bored now. Bye.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 07:15 AM

Gaia says when she wants an opinion from someone who talks of Folk and Linnaeus in the same breath she'll ask an astrologist. Even they are right some times.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 06:52 AM

As far as folk music is concerned, Ewan MacColl was a heretic, 'glueman'. He understood what folk music was all about but his ideas just didn't/don't fit with the prevailing 'all-music-is-folk-music' orthodoxy prevailing during his lifetime and still prevailing now. Perhaps he understood that if all music is folk music then folk music DOESN'T exist!

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 06:06 AM

Gaia blames it all on Ewan MacColl. She knew he was a bad idea at the time.
She should have given the geeks death-metal instead.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 05:54 AM

Shimrod, my brain is "making it up" for me all the time, just like now. I don't experience anything that IS, only a fantasy of it, a simulacrum of what it might be. Anyway that was a pretty nonesensical post as I stated myself. But then Gaia-Sophia does make some fun receptors in the brain, and some equally fun alkaloids to neatly fit them.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 05:42 AM

"I prefer the process of imagining how things might have been or could be than attempting to determine how they are, especially as I am of the conviction that there is indeed essentially no such thing other than that which we imagine ... " 'Crow Sister'

And it's all so much easier just to make it all up, isn't it, CS? I suspect that it's also much more satisfying to the ego to dismiss the idea of others who are (inevitably!) more intelligent, insightful and observant than you and me.

While I'm here there's one other thing that's bugging me. That's the idea that if the evidence doesn't fit 'your' (and I'm not referring specifically to you, CS) preconceptions you are entitled to dismiss it, or any theory derived from it, out of hand. I had enough of that attitude whilst I was working. I worked on (consumer) product claims and was responsible for supporting those claims with scientific tests. On several occasions, when the evidence didn't support the claim, some idiot in marketing would accuse me of "doing the wrong test". It turns out that this attitude is very widespread and not just confined to the company I worked for - read Ben Goldacre's book, 'Bad Science' for example.

I glimpse this same attitude in this debate about the nature of folk music. Cecil Sharp and others had studied folk music in the field and had begun to discern some common patterns and themes. Eventually the much (and completely unjustly, in my opinion)derided 1954 definition achieved a synthesis of these ideas which much explanatory power. Nevertheless, it doesn't fit with certain people's preconceptions (or 'made-up-in-the-bath' theories) and must be ridiculed and dismissed out of hand - C. Sharp and successors 'must have done the wrong test'.

There are "such thing(s) other than that which we imagine", 'Crow Sister', whether you like it or not. And I'm also convinced that, as result of the way in which our brains are wired, the way that reality is doesn't fit with the way that we imagine it ought to be.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 05:39 AM

Gaia says you are wise Sister Daughter. The boys turn everything into Airfix kits and the Ian Allen ABC of Locomotives.
Gaia says there are no guardians to her music, only thieves. The ways to her are many but she has no priests and no creed.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 05:31 AM

More gratuitous contradiction from our dear Jim, bless his little cotton socks - but in his own archives rest assured every song is meticulously provenanced. I doubt a provenance might ever extent to cover an entire song type such as those you mention, but I'm sure you've got specific instances in the vaults there, Jim, with the name of the singer and the date of the recording and all variations duly noted.

Fatuous observation? Bollocks. It's sound historical method! When I'm raking around in car-boot sales & flee markets and even my own family archives I often pick up un-marked photographs and wonder, who are they? Where are they? When are they? If that info has been written on the back how much more meaningful the images become. All it takes is a few words: Billy Pattison, Boca Chica, Cambois, 11th September 1939...

And WTF's Gaia got to do with anything anyway? Can we leave the New-Age Ecological fantasising out of this? Music is of HUMANITY - along with motor cars, power-stations, chemical works, farming, fishing, industry, plastics, mining etc. etc. without which we wouldn't be typing our little love-letters to one another on PCs and lap-tops the world over. As a confirmed Gnostic I believe nature to be intrinsically evil, Gaia likewise - thus might I offer Blake's maxim that Where man is not, nature is barren! And I'm sure it was Huysmans who once said something like Nature might have given us the Trees, but Man, sir, Man invented the Steam Engine!.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 05:07 AM

What on earth was I rambling about last night...? No idea. I think I might just believe it though.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 31 Aug 09 - 04:10 AM

Gaia says the blanks are the Face of Garbo on which to write dreams. Gaia says her music is not a branch of the Fabian society or a jolly for musical eugenics enthusiasts.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 06:59 PM

Fragments and undisciplined pieces of art are the most wonderful. Perhaps due to the gestalt they compel us into, we have to fill the blanks. Which is a healthy thing, as it drags us into a wholeness which is mostly denied us - too many things are defined and ordered and pushes us out. As an anarchist, I can't be doing with this pinning down business. I prefer the process of imagining how things might have been or could be than attempting to determine how they are, especially as I am of the conviction that there is indeed essentially no such thing other than that which we imagine - or rather are encouraged to imagine.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 06:45 PM

"it lacks the essential context that gives the thing value."
Wonder where this leaves Barbara Allen - no provenance there but well past her 300th birthday and still going strong - or Edward, or Lord Randal, or Lord Lovel, Or Captain Wedderburn (or The Dark Eyed Sailor, for that matter).
What a fatuous observation!
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 06:40 PM

What I mean is, I experience just as much human recognition and connexion, without the formally recorded data, which while offering useful document, offers nothing more than seeds for the creative imagination in reality.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 06:33 PM

I like photo's without the names and date's.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 06:27 PM

A folk song without provenance is like an old photograph without the date, names & location written on the back; it lacks the essential context that gives the thing value.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 03:22 PM

Gaia says folk music is for everyone. Leave space says Gaia, for them what don't give two shits about the provenance but what dig the tune. Them is my children too.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 02:30 PM

Gaia is on the right track.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Goose Gander
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 02:27 PM

"Where in the sainted folk process is origination?"

For fuck's sake, the most basic discussions of the folk process acknowledge the role of individual songwriters. It's not where the song comes from but what happens to it that makes it a folk song.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 01:49 PM

Gaia says don't give her that Richard Dawkins face or this bitch will slap you up bad.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 01:47 PM

Gaia Says Relax.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 01:36 PM

Gaia says her gift to the world is genius. She spreads it among princes and paupers, the deserving and undeserving but it is her gift.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 01:21 PM

LOL!

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 01:14 PM

"and not a single Creator"

Gaia says no. She claims folk has been taken over by rationalists who have turned it into a mechanistic proliferation device and they will feel her wrath.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 01:01 PM

I humbly prostrate myself before Mr Peters's words of wisdom. There's your answer 'glueman'!

Just because we don't know whether the chicken or the egg came first doesn't mean that we abandon Darwin's Theory of Evolution and replace it with something that someone made up whilst having an afternoon nap!

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 30 Aug 09 - 12:43 PM

"Where in the sainted folk process is origination?"

This is a serious question and deserves serious thought. Ballad scholars have agonized over it for decades, and still no-one really knows. The best current guess (this from a friend of mine who knows way more about it than I do) is that the ballad form originated in 'metrical romances' (things like 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'), i.e. pieces composed by highly literate specialists for reading and recitation. Some of these may have had their basis in folk tales - as do many of the Child ballads. At some point the metrical romances acquired melodies (from where, we know not), and the sung ballad was born.

If this theory is correct, then already the compositional process is blurred. No one person sat down and composed lyrics and tune together. Even in the case of songs from the Victorian period, where a particular broadside copy may be taken as the 'original' we still have to speculate as to where the tune(s) came from, since most broadsides didn't include or specify one.

But the bigger point is that, even if we could pinpoint the original sixteenth or seventeenth-century copy of, say, 'The Elfin Knight', and find a name for its composer, we would still be confronted by scores of different versions of the ballad collected in widely scattered locations, stamped with the same basic template but departing in all kinds of exotic directions both musically and textually.

Ballads known by the name 'Scarborough Fair' in Yorkshire, 'The Elphin Knight' in Aberdeenshire, 'The Cambric Shirt' in the coalmines of Kentucky, and 'Hey Ho Sing Ivy' in Sussex are at once the same song and completely different songs. Even if there were a single originator (an unlikely proposition in the first place), the spawn of the old ballad has evolved into countless new and diverse species. The tweaking is what it's all about - just as life on Earth is about Natural Selection, and not a single Creator.

As Frank Hamilton said above:
"That's what makes it folk.
People change it."

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 04:21 PM

Okay Shimrod, I'll give you one parting shot to suck on. Where in the sainted folk process is origination, not transformation and the magic folk dust that scatters, but the thing those songs were based on?
Did the words aggregate one by one with the each person adding another like a radio panel game, or did someone work out the verses? Which of those is most likely?

Praise the tweakers, but respect the unknown word warriors. Tara!

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 04:03 PM

It may have some folk roots but Elvis is a commercial product.

Elvis is of deep folkloric significance in spite (or is because of?) of his commercialism. How deep does this stuff go? In terms of Americana, pretty deep for sure. But how it comes to be running in my blood is a different issue, much less the folklore-rich holiday-makers of Blackpool on a rainy bank-holiday Saturday; when the moment is right it sparks with such an vivid immediacy the effect is, as I say, transcendent.

I had a similar epiphany a few years ago when weary of Xmas muzak I walked into an off-license to buy a seasonal bottle of Talisker to hear Joy Division's Atrocity Exhibition blasting out. I swear, at that moment I wept. It wasn't just the music - known & cherished since the day of its release - it was hearing it out of nowhere in a kindred context; a human link as I caught the smiling eye of the bloke in the shop - that resonant sense of knowing which I accepted as a blessing. For those of us without religion this is as spiritual as it gets.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 03:02 PM

Ah, 'glueman' you're not talking to us because we're all mad then? Just remind me, which ploy are we up to now? About number 186 I make it.

And still just 'theories' what you've made up (embellished, of course, with jargon and pseudo-academic speak)and no convincing arguments or evidence whatsoever!

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Stringsinger
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 02:46 PM

Folkways are in peril when there is a concerted ideological reason evinced to destroy them. Much of this is "religious" or "nationalistic". It could be a form of cultural genocide. There is also a kind of commercial imperialism that devalues the folk art
of a society by proclaiming it irrelevant to the music business.

It is also in peril when a movement to proclaim "the square dance" as the national dance of the US is presented in congress. Fortunately, that was defeated.

"Love Me Tender" is a rewrite on the US Civil War song "Aura Lee". It may have some
folk roots but Elvis is a commercial product.

A Rousseauian view of folk music is being confused with ethnomusicalogical and anthropological studies on the subject.

Folk music can be varied in its content as music or verse. Being folk doesn't attribute to it any magical meaning.

It was the American Revival spawned by the Left Movement in the US that fostered scholarship and folklore development here. Archie Green and Ken Goldstein are two
of the leading lights. Of course, the Seegers and as a result Leadbelly and Woody.

A Revival in the interest of folk music can only be beneficial to its discovery.

Brian, of course the words will be changed. Lapses of memory occurs. Whether or not
Profitt actually created Tom Dooley is speculative. He may have just changed what he had heard before. Doc Watson knows a different variant. The point being that the definitions of a folk song belie the single authorship idea. That's what makes it folk.
People change it.

Necrophilia, aside from its prurient interest by academics, obscures that the reason that the story/songs prevail is that they comment on basic human traits in a way that you get from the best dramatists. The songs are propagated, changed and preserved because of the stories.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 01:53 PM

Walked into the bar earlier in Blackpool - everyone sitting in blissful tranquillity as a long-dead Elvis sings Love Me Tender over the in-house PA; it was a scene of perfect serenity in which I took my place, with reverence in a moment of simple transcendence. Whilst I wouldn't listen to such music by choice, maybe I'm beginning to think that here in 2009 Folk Music can be the culture ambience that surrounds us and moves us and comforts us in the daily grind, carrying codes, messages and memories at once both collective and intimate. Certainly the experience was shared, but we each felt it in our own sweet way...

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 07:56 AM

So we're all nutty for not agreeing with SO'P and Glueman
Byeeeee
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 06:13 AM

On second thoughts I will bow out. Some of the responses here are quite scary. People may be mentally ill and folk music has provided comfort and certainty. Good luck.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 29 Aug 09 - 06:07 AM

So where are we in this little game? Disagreeing with the idea that folk is a wholly pluralistic flowering of something called the people, that it's plots and stories while universal, show the mark of an individual makers is the equivalent of genocide?

Am I supposed to feel battered by that remark? Or think some emotionally over-heated posters have got their priorities askew? I should bow out graciously here, but why must people stop giving their point of view because a few get nasty or hypertensive? Folk is fucked whatever our interpretations if we give into that kind of authoritarian shit.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 08:44 PM

Seriously weird, Art & Jack. What gives?

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 08:44 PM

okay, maybe "glueman" is a she.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Paul Burke
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 07:33 PM

Jack, who's the 'he' who's trying to destroy history, and what history? I can't get it from reading the thread, and I'm not sure that there's any 'history' that has a firm foundation in the modern folk movement, let alone in old traditions.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 03:34 PM

It's always a sign that people are devoid of rational argument when they begin to be beligerant and to invent accusations - still waiting Glueman
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Goose Gander
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 03:32 PM

Jack, it would nice to stay on topic.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 03:06 PM

It's a bit more aggressive than ignoring history. He wants to destroy it.

I have no doubt that the burden of responsibility for the destruction of Bosnia lies predominantly on one side, and I have tried to set out in the final chapters of this book my reasons for thinking so.

One sure way of judging the historical claims of the main perpetrators of violence in Bosnia is to look at what they have done to the physical evidence of history itself. They are not only ruining the future of that country: they are also making systematic efforts to eliminate its past. The state and university library in Sarajevo was destroyed with incendiary shells. The Oriental Institute, with its irreplaceable collection of manuscripts and other materials illustrating the Ottoman history of Bosnia, was also destroyed by concentrated shelling. All over the country, mosques and minarets have been destroyed, including some of the finest examples of sixteenth-century Ottoman architecture in the western Balkans. These buildings were not just caught in the cross-fire of military engagements; in towns such as Bijeljina and Banja Luka, the demolitions had nothing to do with fighting at all - the mosques were blown up with explosives in the night, and bulldozed on the following day. The people who have planned and ordered these actions like to say that history is on their side. What they show by their deeds is that they are waging war on the history of their country.

- Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Art Thieme
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 02:37 PM

PEOPLE, IGNORE HISTORY AT YOUR OWN PERIL--AND YOU DRAG US ALL DOWN WITH YOU.

ENJOY THE RIDE---REFUSING TO SEE YOUR IGNORANCE AND YOUR GUILT ALL THE WAY!

love,
art

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: Brian Peters
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 02:10 PM

"Opinions gentlemen, it's ALL opinions"

Some informed; some speculative.

Subject: RE: Does Folk Exist?
From: glueman
Date: 28 Aug 09 - 01:53 PM

Sounds like my yadda yadda is better than your yadda yadda. Opinions gentlemen, it's ALL opinions. Until someone shows me the body the death of folk is unproven.