What I want to lay out in this brief essay, is an argument for a definition of American Folk Music that is broad enough to include, not only the birth of the Blues in the Jim Crow South, but the invention of Hip Hop in 1970s New York City and the rise of the Lo-Fi / DIY recording culture in the 1980s and 90s. I want to get at the essence of Folk Music. I think it’s a mistake to tie the definition of folk music to accidentals like pre-electric instruments and so-called “traditional” forms. The guitar was a new technology in its time, just as the 808 drum machine was in its time. It seems arbitrary to freeze folk music at a particular time in American history, not coincidentally at the exact same time that we figured out how to record it and disseminate it widely. If we define it as a genre of “traditional music” then we have a museum piece; safely ghettoized in its nostalgic corner of the Culture Industry. But, if we define it in its essentials: Folk music is the music of a particular peoples, a social group or tribe. In the so-called “Global Village”, where physical space disappears into the electronic frontier, the distinctions that define and bind those “particular peoples” are as likely to be cross-border subcultures networked through social media solidarity groups, as they are to be regional, ethnic, or socio-economic.
I am not trying to broaden the definition of folk music so widely that it becomes untenable; essentially meaningless. I am proposing a definition of folk music as a living tradition, always in the act of Becoming, always transforming. Folk music serves a role and function in the community that is in contradistinction to Commercial music on the one hand, and the refined musical traditions of the conservatory on the other. Folk music tends to be “unschooled”, or more accurately, schooled in the community, on the streets, and not in the ivory towers of the Academy. The vinyl record was a canvas, and it turned the folk musician into a folk artist. Folk musicians could now stamp their particular voice, their personal vision, onto vinyl and into the big Book of Life. Folk musicians were now traveling through time and space like writers and painters and sculptors. The oral tradition becomes the recording tradition.
The allurement of riches by way of the Recording Industry, the proto-LoFi recordings of John and Alan Lomax, the democratization of the means of production by way of 4-track cassette recorders and home studios, samples and drum machines. All of this is part of the rich historical context of American Folk Music. All of this is part of the story.
Folk music, as I define it is a people’s music that serves a role in the community; be that ceremonial, dance, or challenging the established orthodoxy (tipping over sacred cows, as it were). Folk music is generally unschooled in that folk music isn’t learned in the Academy but in the community; in the garages, music store lesson room, community college ‘Intro to Piano” classes, and coffee shop open mics.
If the idea of folk music is frozen in time at the early years of recorded music; before electric guitars, synths, and drum machines; then folk music is dead. But if folk music is the GenXer making lo-fi records in his basement studio, the high school all-girl punk rock band practicing in the drummer’s garage, the young rapper with fruity loops, an old piano, and his dad’s record collection for samples; if the DIY, autonomous music movement, is a Folk Art Movement; then folk music isn’t just alive, it is a vital organ in the soft machinery of the bruised body American: in other words—our health, is dependent on its health.
My claim is that music is culture, that culture is upstream from politics, and that bad music is bad for the Polis. Shit in, shit out. You are what you eat, so on and so forth. My claim is that only the artist can art-iculate a vision of the future with the poetic contours capable of transforming society: from a culture of kitsch to a community as living art installation. My claim is that folk music, as folk art, is a tradition that is always transforming if it is to be transformative. My claim is that the DIY ethos is the inheritance of folk music in the recorded age, and that DIY, non-commercial ethos, are the paramount characteristics that we can use to define folk music as a living, breathing folk art. All else is Genre; advertising and product placement.
I am glad that people play “traditional folk music”, it keeps the sounds of Bluegrass and Dixieland Jazz alive; but it doesn’t keep the tradition of folk music alive. For that we need a much less conservative approach to cultural preservation. If we let folk music breath, feed it properly, nourish it in our community; if we put folk music into focus (authentically defined) , we will transform our communities from kitsch to art. The Polis as living art installation; always becoming, in transition, authentic. It’s harmony and dissonance, it’s melody and noise, it’s the algorithm verses the rhythm of the drummer, the rhythm of the community properly oriented, the community in rhythm with the heart.