So. Um. Even though I write about folk music, I don't have a really good definition, except for the old one "when I point to it, THAT'S folk music". Which works reasonably well in practice, but today at lunch, one of my coworkers came up with the question, and I realized that I didn't have a good solid definition that would mean something to someone who's not already in the community. So. What's YOUR definition? As for me... I'd say that it's music by the people and embracing traditional ballads (Matty Groves, etc.), tunes (O'Carolan, anyone?), music hall survivors (The Unfortunate Miss Bailey), broadside ballads, um, more modern things that have been written for protest, campfire songs, filk, and the ever popular singer-songwriter stuff. It also has a certain less commercial flavor to it, and more of a sense of community among the performers and the audience. More intimate, if you will?26 responses total.
It's usually voice and guitar. Or can be reduced to voice and
guitar and the essence of the song survives.
Adding drums, fiddle, harmonica to a song makes for good
production values in an album, but the audience does not feel cheated
when they hear it live with just voice and guitar.
Generally, it's been 'passed thru ages' type of music. Now
we have better means for tracking authors and origins.
This past week or so, I was listening to Woody Guthrie's music.
His songs on the Columbia river and the Grand Coley damn where message
songs of the day. He was commissioned to write those.
gangsta rap is *folk music*...more so than o'carrolan, anyways.
And why do you say that? I'm curious about the reason why gangsta rap could be considered folk music.
It's a music of the common people.
it is street talk, it is culturally relevant to a group of folks, it is current. i think of folk music as a newspaper... joel mabus works that way, michelle shocked, robert jones the tannies, andy stewart, capercaille, ice t, gil scot heron, etc when was o'carolan alive and more importantly WHO did he write for...i'll wager he wasn't championing the life of the crofter, eh? o'carrolan = classical
The problem is that "folk music" has acquired a lot of definitions over the last century or so. Start with the academic definition of the folklorists, who were interested in material which had been passed down in a community through oral tradition, in the era before mass literacy and mass media. When you see songs credited as "traditional," they probably fit that definition. From there, you could strike off with a definition looking at the function the music performs in the community, as happyboy does with his assertions in resp:3 - resp:5 that rap music serves as a folk music for its community. Moving off in another direction, we get to the folk revival era of the 1950s and 1960s, starting with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers, in which traditional songs were turned into commercial objects which could be recorded and sold. From that period we get a stylistic definition of singing with acoustic guitars (Tim Ryan's resp:1) and an association with leftist politics. The association with leftist politics in turn brings us the 1960s protest songs (early Dylan probably being the best known example), which still fit close to the functional description that happyboy espouses, still done in the singer-with-guitar style. Then we get to the stuff I grouse about, where popular music singers adopted the folk/protest style for introspective songs about love and their lives, stuff which functionally was really indistinguishable from other mass market pop music, but which stylistically looked like folk music. Martin Carthy described sensitive acoustic singer-songwriters as part of a tradition stretching all the way back to Joni Mitchell. This new description of "folk" music is mostly dominant on the American side of the Atlantic. Britain's "Folk Roots" magazine, after fighting against it for years, threw in the towel three years ago and the cover now reads "Froots". So it's really no longer possible to come up with one definition. There have been too many definitions through history, and there is lots of room for each writer (or marketeer) to pick the definition suiting their intent. I tend to figure that it's folk music if the folk music audience has adopted it. It's a circular definition, alas, but it saves time.
i agree with *tradition* as well...
It helps confuse matters that there's more than one `folk music audience.' I've taken to saying I listen to "folk dance tunes," because that's more or less true: the music I like is the music of the folk dance community. But there are other folk communities -- Dylan fans, coffee-shop folkies, the `world music' crowd -- who I don't have much in common with at all. So even for a circular definition it's pretty rickety, but it works.
It's very true that there are different audiences -- for the shows that I attend, there's a different audience for the Tannahill Weavers than there is, for, say, Chris Buhalis -- and a totally different audience again for one of the Scandinavian bands that krj and I like (I'm thinking of the one with the cow calling songs, Ken, but darn if I can recall the name....). But one common thread among the fans/the artists seems to be that there's a committment and a community that you don't see in other genres. I think I'll try to expand on that later, however...
"Folk music" is best defined as a fuzzy set with a multivariate definition. Come up with a set of characteristics that are typical of the ideal pure "folk music as I point to it." For instance, it's acoustic, it's of traditional authorship, it's marketed as folk music, it's played by people who play what's generally agreed to be folk music, etc. Anything with a certain number of these characteristics is folk music; anything with markedly fewer isn't. For instance, not all acoustic music (even all acoustic guitar-&-vocal music) is folk, not if it lacks every other characteristic of folk music.
Hmm so where does my favorite singer Kriten Hersh fit in this definition. She used to sing for the rock band throwing muses, but now plays mainly acoustic music, that is well done musically i.e. 7th and 9th cjords fancy finger picking, etc.
Hersh did one album all of traditional songs ("Murder, Misery and then
Goodnight," which I keep meaning to try to pick up -- it is, or was,
mail order only) but for the most part I have her compartmentalized
as "acoustic pop." This is based just on what I read about her,
though, I have not heard any of her work since Throwing Muses broke up.
Mail order and at her live shows. i have it and it's not my favorite of her albums. The idea is good but she has her (11 year old?) son playing on many of the tracks and while it does sound homey it also grates on my nerves. Best bet for a K.H. newbie would be Hips and Makers (her first solo and my favorite) or Strange Angels. Both of these albums are K.H. with acoustic guitar and occasional cello back up. In my biased opinion they are gorgeous exercises in richly harmonic finger picking, with very good (if obscure) lyrics. I also like her new CD Sunny Border Blue which is electric and she plays all the instruments, though it is not groundbreaking and sounds a lot like her Red Heaven era Muses material.
Hmmm well check out some of the material from Hips & Makers before you pigeonhole her as acoustic pop. I think she is far closer to say an Emmy Lou Harris than a Fiona (blech) Apple.
What, Hersh has spent 25 years soaking herself in country music? :) You seem to be regarding acoustic pop as some sort of curse: pre-jazz Joni Mitchell, the Tansads, To Hell With Burgundy, possibly the Indigo Girls, not a bad sort of company to be in.
Hmmm I guess you mean pop in the old 60s sense of populat music i.e. the Beatles and Bob Dylan were classifed as pop. I guess when I think of pop in it's modern usage my first thought is N'Synch and Mariah Carey. Perhaps a new category is needed for acoustic non folk music?
"Pop," like "folk" and "classical," has a number of definitions. :)
For those of you who would like to see a good movie about folk music, see "The Songcatcher" currently at the Michigan Theater.
Ooops. "Songcatcher" left town after last Thursday, but it will be on home video soon. Consumer advisory: the "soundtrack" album is mostly "inspired" by the movie; it's the songs from the movie sung mostly by big names who (except for Iris Dement and Emmy Rossum) don't appear in the movie.
I just saw on allmusic.com, Roger Miller is
described as, among other things, "anti-folk".
That just cracked me up, that he would be
open about not paying reverent homage to the sacred
genre.
If we have a hard time defining it and see that there
are really an number of non-musical associations,
why do "we" feel eager to use the word anyway? Would it be
a crime to suggest that there is much better terminology
available for discussing music?
Anti-folk. Hmm. If I feel kind of militant about
it, can I get an acoustic guitar and sing in
a protest style? If I strum very sloppily?
http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~spencer/FF/F.html#folksong, definition
I knew I was getting in too deep
reading about Folk Nazis.
I've known about folk nazis since I read about the protests about Steeleye Span ruining traditional British folk.
So now that we have no idea what "folk" means, what does "traditional" mean? That Anonymous guy sure did write a lot of stuff...
I thought "Traditional" meant written by "Anonymous".. :-p
Considering that the guitar was somewhat new in Woody Guthrie's time, does "Traditional" also relate to use of older instruments in presenting the folk music?
Traditional tunes tend to be written by Anonymous. But "traditional music" is sometimes written by one of Anonymous's better-named imitators.
You have several choices: