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anderyn
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Defining folk Mmusic
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Aug 3 17:15 UTC 2001 |
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?
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| 26 responses total. |
tpryan
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response 1 of 26:
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Aug 3 17:27 UTC 2001 |
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.
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happyboy
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response 2 of 26:
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Aug 3 20:12 UTC 2001 |
gangsta rap is *folk music*...more so than
o'carrolan, anyways.
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anderyn
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response 3 of 26:
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Aug 3 22:30 UTC 2001 |
And why do you say that? I'm curious about the reason why gangsta rap could
be considered folk music.
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krj
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response 4 of 26:
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Aug 3 23:19 UTC 2001 |
It's a music of the common people.
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happyboy
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response 5 of 26:
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Aug 4 01:51 UTC 2001 |
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
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krj
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response 6 of 26:
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Aug 6 17:39 UTC 2001 |
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.
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