I read the entire Filene book over break (it’s in my specialty area, and it’s an award-winning book), and it’s an incredible book. While there are times you can tell he’s writing for an academic-popular audience, his analysis of music as a cultural product is good, his ability to write a long, coherent argument is good, and his idea of public memory is fascinating. We’ve all thought about how culture is both created and transmitted by culture itself, but something I often forget is that these immediate, popular forms linger in cultural memory. This means that cultural production (the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Nirvana Unplugged, whatever) exists both in relation to itself and other examples of contemporary culture, but also in a historical continuum where it engages with has come before and what will come after. This is a fascinating idea. I’ve found that the weakest chapter in the Filene in terms of overall argument is the fourth one. It might be a simple overreach (he attempts to cover a lot of ground, and makes a coherent narrative out of wide-ranging examples), and I think he concludes his coverage of academic folklore far too early, since (to the best of my knowledge) “folklore” fell out of favor as an academic discipline, and was absorbed by ethnomusicology, anthropology, etc. If one were unaware of this, they might get the impression that academic folklore is still a thriving field. I also think he (or his editor) wussed out at the very end. Government subsidies of and for culture are in a perpetually dreary state in this country, and as someone who works in “public history,” he should have taken a more firm stance on the negative effects of such funding cuts. Keil’s writing is clearly polemical, but the most damning thing was his admission that he has not been following folklore scholarship.His idea that the “folk” concept is dehumanizing seems to be the lynchpin of his (primarily) economic critique of the folk establishment. I thought his implication (264) that the “folk” would have been created out of necessity anyways fascinating, and thought he could have linked this with the obvious romanticization of nature that was occurring in early modernity (why else would the bourgeoise have looked outside the city for their folk?). His ending claim that “the folk” are an acceptable lens through which we justify examination of “the primitive” is a hard one to ignore.
I think the Keil was fascinating. As I was reading it, I was saying "oooohhhh!" in a high falsetto, scandalized. His first sentence was especially fascinating, in which he stated outright that he thought the folk never existed. This sort of paralleled my own discovery through this class. I had this sort of romanticized version of the folk that has been destroyed through the course of this class. "The folk" are just folk.
But maybe I've misinterpreted the readings and come out with a totally wrong idea. That's just where I am right now.
I think we're all still trying to figure out how recording technology has affected music... all of these forms that were popular once and linger now, we can access quickly, and the recording hasn't been changed by time (well, remastering aside). It's a fascinating situation because, like the end of chapter 2 pointed out, each successive generation can rediscover an artist's for the first time, without having it filtered through the style of their time, just by pushing "play."
thanks, I did not know folklore was a dying discipline. I wonder if Keil had anything to do with that or was just representative of thought currents of the time (I think it was from 1978).
I also am intrigued by the idea of cultural memory. How can you have a cultural/communal memory? It is only made up of individual memories. But those individual memories all share some commonality, usually facilitated by some mass medium, like you mentioned the Ed Sullivan show.
Eyermann— I thought that the introduction to this article, dealing with methodology, was obnoxious. The authors seemed to think that their method was incredibly novel and complex, but I found their explanation confusing and their actual methodology neither complex nor novel (in contrast to what it seems the authors thought of their methods). They seemed to just tell their version of the two waves of the revival looking at a few different aspects. I also still don’t know what “cognitive space” is supposed to mean. Despite those complaints, I found the main body of the article interesting.
For instance, I like the article’s clear cause and effect relationships, such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 helping to deteriorate the links between left-wing cultural organizations and the labor movement. I also thought it was interesting that, while the “institutional framework of the radical left” died out, the left’s work with music had a lasting effect (510).
Question: Why were folk efforts from the Right largely unsuccessful in the US as opposed to Europe? Why did “various conservative or rightward-leaning actors fail[] to coalesce” in the US (507).
Ch. 2 of Filene—I like the Lomax’s approach to American Folk music more than Childs, and I love that they firmly believed in (and found) American folk song independent of British origins. I also found it interesting that Alan Lomax wanted people to fight “the tendency…to begin to regard [folk] culture as static” and thought of it as living. This seems to me similar to our ideas about folk music, but Lomax promoted it in the 1930s and 40s.
I thought this comment about otherness and authenticity on p. 63 was especially apt: “Roots musicians are expected to be premodern, unrestrainedly emotive, and noncommercial. Singers who too closely resemble the revival’s middle-class audiences are rejected by those audiences as ‘inauthentic.’” I fall into this trap at times myself.
Question: Is there any truth in the line of thinking that says that anyone too familiar with mainstream culture or popular music or anyone too closely resembling an audience is somehow “inauthentic”? A loaded question for sure, especially since I doubt we can even define “authentic,” but one that could probably generate interesting discussion nonetheless.
Ch. 4—I find that it is rare that I read academic writing and walk away wanting more, but I actually would like to read this whole book (maybe this Summer). I found this explanation of the history of American folklore scholarship to be extremely clear and helpful. Moreover, the discussion of functionalism was fascinating, particularly in how that philosophy changed the attitudes of collectors (“Record everything” and no longer only recording from the most isolated areas).
Keil—I can’t say anything about this one but that I liked its directness and its “Stick it to the man” attitude and I think it made a lot of sense. And I can’t wait to discuss it with all of you.
I agree, the first article didn't present its methodology very clearly, and it's a surprisingly NOT novel approach. I don't know if I can answer your question, but there has been writing about the American right's rejection of many cultural forms as a result of "culture wars" rhetoric.
The only hypothesis I can offer to your question is perhaps it has something to do with the United States traditional distrust of European styles of government, but that could be a big stretch...
I agree with you on the methodology. In the end I felt that they relied a great deal more on the POC than cognitive approach, despite their claim to the contrary.
Agreed! The methodology explanation was annoying. Its impact would have been better had they worded it clearer and shortened the length a good bit. The rest of the article was a nice chronology; it was good to get some information on these instances in the development of American music since they are rarely discussed (as it seems) in the usual realms of musicology.
Keil’s reading was the most entertaining of the three, even if it comes across as a disillusionment rant. The comment that “if the bourgeoisie had not discovered the secret of turning themselves into folk” they would look to “workers as very attractive candidates for folk status,” is a little strange – especially seeing as how this article was written in the late 1970s and we’ve seen that around 70 years earlier in England, the idea of transforming factory workers into the “folk” was already alive and well. Maybe I’m just not up on my socialist/communist terms – but do today’s working middle-class stiffs count as the downtrodden workers or as the “bourgeoisie?” And why would Keil dismiss his early comment of “electronic media are making folk of us all” as an “easy, short” solution? I think the impacts of recording on the concept of “folk” (and a lot of other aspects of music and culture) is huge! Sure doesn’t seem to be an easy way out to me…
Just have to say it. The Eyerman and Barretta Revival article really needed an editor. I thought, from the lengthy methodology section, that it was going to be a fairly in-depth look at the different ideologies behind the revival, transmission spaces, etc. It didn’t delve into it so much as glance off the surface, which was a bit disappointing in a 40+ page read… great information about the influence of the “Old Left” on both revivals but in the end it may have been more accurately entitled “the Left’s ideas and use of music.” Lots of things that seemed interesting were mentioned and then tossed aside: “without going into detail about how such boundaries are socially constructed, let it suffice to say that the construction of ‘folk’ music in this situation was an inevitably arbitrary process” (p. 511) for instance. I thought social construction was one of the points of this article… it also revolves heavily around the concept of “folk” in NYC, and ignores other types of music brought up in Filene’s book, like cowboy songs, hillybilly, race records, and the ilk. Although the tension between commercialism and “folk” was brought up repeatedly, I’m not sure that I’d agree that banning microphones at the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 is evidence of “successfully mediate all the tensions of the folk music revival” (p.34). Still, the fact that the folk revival was apparently the product of white, young, well-educated north-easterners who were using the music of rural everyone-else is…weird. Even if you figure that the “folk” should include white well-educated college students, the appropriation of music so far removed culturally from this group, used to identify themselves, seems a little bizarre especially given all the face and class distinctions that still seemed to exist. Are there any other examples of this happening on such a widespread scale in the past?
The Filene was a great read; it addressed the recording industry and government involvement in the folk a little more directly (even if, compared to the E&B article, it danced around the ties with the Left and the Left’s abrupt departure from folk in McCarthy’s time). A lot of the points it brought up about how the early folksingers were recorded and used were frankly disturbing. Filene brought out the tension between the romantic past, isolation, and the incorporation of other styles in the early days of American roots music. I still don’t think I understand why was it such a huge deal, what with the need for writing new songs that addressed current events and the recognition of “folklore” as being continually re-invigorated, to avoid connection with the outside world and commercialism in the later days, though.
"Disillusionment rant" -- That's good. I'm always attracted to this sort of honest, no-BS style of writing but I'm not sure what to make of this. The technology question has become one of the main issues affecting the dissemination of 'folk/popular' music, to an extent that Keil probably did not even predict. Looking forward to an interesting discussion of this tomorrow, if we don't get snowed in...
I can offer a tiny thought regarding the influence of recording technology... It was possible with recorded field work to claim that a song was "true" or "authentic" in a way that a dictation/notation of a song could never be used. A recording could be used as "hard" evidence. Photographs and videos are often used in the same way, but the trouble with using photographs, videos, or recordings in this way is that they can be misleading... think of the Bush administration using aerial photos of "weapons of mass destruction" to justify their invasion of Iraq, and only later did we find out the photos were misleading.
Now that you've asked the question, I can't think of a single other instance (in my small knowledge) where a revival was the product of people so far removed from the original. There is SOME removal in every revival, of course. My paper is on Spirituals, and after slavery, no more spirituals were written (by definition), so anyone who was never a slave singing spirituals could be viewed as removed from the original source, but spirituals had less of a revival than a revamping. Some of the first singers in groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers were born into slavery. So in that case, the revival/revamping came largely from people directly involved in the original. I wonder if it is indeed the most extreme example of such a difference.
The articles this week again brought up the folk authenticity debate and also added folk purism into the mix. The Everman/Barretta article dealt with this in its presentation of the two American folk revivals from the 1930’s and 1960’s. I thought it was interesting that each revival dealt with different principles, the earlier revival having its roots in politics and ordinary people while the later one dealt with the commercialization of folk music and the education of the masses. The Greene article also provided insight into how folk songs can be used to increase the understanding of and glorify certain aspects of culture. In this case, the Gramiya folk songs were used to glorify rural Tamil village life in the general culture and politics of the Tamil state. While original folk material was used, it was distorted and edited to fit a particular aesthetic. Since the Gramiya are not folk songs because they are not in what some would consider their purist form, I wonder if one could consider these songs to be less authentic. Should purism and authenticity go hand in hand or be totally separate when determining the cultural value of a piece of folklore? I was also very intrigued with the two Filene chapters. He has a very conversational and simple writing style that makes the readings interesting. Chapter two provided me with some great information in relation to my paper topic. Filene noted that Lead Belly became enamored with early country music, notably starts such as Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers, but couldn’t or (was not allowed) to participate in the country music scene because of his race. This immediately made me think of Charley Pride (the first African American country star), who was also influenced by early country music stars, notably Hank Williams. I wonder if Lead Belly had been allowed to sing country music, could this have opened up more performance doors for him and allowed him to move from a fledgling artist to a singer with a career? No; Pride became a star well after the civil rights movement and was not invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry until 1993, some twenty years after his career began. So, since it took Pride so long to gain recognition, I don’t think Lead Belly had a chance.
Eyermann -- I like the idea of trying to view the two revivals as one long revival each slightly different. I wish I knew more about these sociological models so I could critique this methodology more (Regrettably, I never took even a Sociology 101 in undergrad) They seemed to say their model was better because it situated the movements in their context. I wonder how sociological models could even be useful at all if they don't consider context, and if such models exist, and is that not the intent of the model just an unfortunate consequence? I have to do some research on these before tomorrow, but it could be interesting to talk about.
Filene -- I agree with John, this book is just great. What I thought was really interesting was while reading chapter 2, that the LoC really strove for an objective selection of folksongs, thus they wanted non-musicians to do the fieldwork. Obviously, the Lomax's search for unsullied versions of folksongs created the cult of authenticity and was an incredibly subjective selection process ironically. I appreciated the comparison to Cecil Sharp as they tried to preserve these cultural products on the verge of extinction, just like Sharp wanted to bottle and preserve "Merry Old England."
Considering that, it was great to compare the New Deal folklorists' mentality of "RECORD-everything" which was seemingly more objective selection process. Showing how the New Deal folklorists were rooted in a functionalist philosophy was especially effective especially when comparing the two Lomax collections and how the songs were categorized.
Keil -- I'm sure everyone will have much to say about this. I understand his viewpoint but I'm not sure renaming folklore will necessarily change anything. How do perspectives such as "everyday life" or "country" differ from conceptions of "folk"?? I guess my question is, then, "Can we study folklore or even communities and their cultural products without exploiting the subjects of study? In Keil's terms, can we study them and keep them people?
I agree about the comparison; Filene does do some comparative work in other chapters (two versions of same song, earlier and later versions, etc.). He makes some interesting claims for how these variants tell us different things about the collectors and the times they were collected in.
It was very ironic, wasn't it? Put down one canon (Child) only to replace it with another "authentic" canon. I think Filene mentioned something about needing to select songs partly because of limited recording resources, too, though. Does anyone know when LPs were invented? Do improvements in recording technology have something to do with the LoC's decision to "Record EVERYTHING!"? I don't know my recording history well enough.
Forgive my late response... I just finished my conference presentation and it went really long with questions afterward!
Quick thoughts: 1. Why do we need this many pages of contextualization for the Eyerman? The introduction is annoying to read and makes their argument seem apologetic.
2. Never before had I considered the radical transformations in American culture of the 1950s. I definitely thought of it as being "conservative" as they mentioned. The new buying power and consumer culture associated with the "masses" during that time really had deep-reaching ramifications that fed into the second revival, as they mentioned.
3. A question: why did the second wave create its own music, rather than performing from a canon as the early wave did? I know that musicians in this movement were trying to copy Guthrie and Seeger, but there must be some cultural contextualization that would explain this phenomenon. I wish I knew what that cultural contextualization actually was.
4. The Lomaxes created a "cult" of authenticity in the same way that popular musicians and celebrities create a cult of personality to surround their endeavors and bolster support for their work.
5. The Lomaxes used recording technology to create a repository of authentic examples as part of this cult. I found their use of technology to be fascinating, and especially the way that the second revival used the recordings as a sort of Bible. The use of technology also allowed the development of the more scientific approach discussed by Filene.
6. Lead belly, like all famous performers and artists, cultivated his persona as well as his artistry. He made himself an "understandable other", catering the song structures for comprehension by his audiences. I found it fascinating that if he had performed in his original style (perhaps the more authentic style), he would have been rejected by his audiences as incomprehensible. His perception as authentic came about through his abandonment of his original inclinations.
7. In addition to #6's point, the Lomaxes called folk music a "living tradition" (in opposition to Child's perception of the folk of something that needed preservation) but then restricted Leadbelly from being "corrupted" by other traditions around him in order to preserve his authenticity. Isn't that hypocritical?
8. I had never heard of Functionalism previous to these readings. I think there must be issues associated with that approach, but I can't think of what they would be -- meaning, I really appreciate much of what functionalism represented/represents. I also wonder if it is related to Hindemith's conception of gebrauchsmusik.
9. Another thing I didn't know about were the RA communities. I also did not know that their documentary style (allowing the subjects to speak to themselves) was an innovation.
10. Lomax did the same thing with the US army that Child did with the soldiers in GB. I wonder why Child never lost his political support while Lomax did?
11. Finally, I was interested to read about the shifting role of "folk's" or "folklore's" relationships with government and academia according to the current political and cultural climate.
6. I agree that Leadbelly's "authenticity" was diminished by having to adjust his original stylings, but for the racial climate during his time, this was most likely a necessity for him in order to even get the smallest bit of exposure. I am sure this till happens today, though not as much as in previous times...very unfortunate.
these three authors give an impression about the organic relationship of folk and human being. I couldn't remember every detail information of the readings but after I finished reading I became to think there are number of exceptions to change my previous concept of folk. I used to think the folk has been revived and regain the popularity by people who have an intellectual,political, or cultural power in a historical period. Now I am thinking maybe folk itself has chosen the certain classes, race , and region to exist as the general ruling ideology to people. About Eyerman's article I was interested when it talks about the generating of leftist musical tradition in United States." as opposed to European variants, American populism has often found left-wing political expression."I believe under the political control the folk took many benefits, of course with media. people differently deal with folk in the politic of left wing and right wing. it is about the difference attitude toward keeping the continuity or change of folk. I used to notice the bourgeoisie of our country, which is right wing, has tried to make variation of folk in order to intermingle with westernizing process. there were anxiety of traditional degeneration. However, the problem is that no one can say it has deteriorated the folk and ruined the continuity of our folk in these days. Ultimately, at least people could remind when they are thinking about the change and comparing with old one. I think this could be also a good way for surviving of folk. Folk has surfed the wave of social, political, and genetic movement in every historical period and that trends were happened with vertical and horizontal directions. I thinks folk control its influence with intensified ideology of the time. It is still difficult to understand promptly.
I thought the different sorts of support for the construction of the folk in Europe and America an interesting topic as well... I think the same still goes for the funding for classical music on the two continents in our time
I read the entire Filene book over break (it’s in my specialty area, and it’s an award-winning book), and it’s an incredible book. While there are times you can tell he’s writing for an academic-popular audience, his analysis of music as a cultural product is good, his ability to write a long, coherent argument is good, and his idea of public memory is fascinating. We’ve all thought about how culture is both created and transmitted by culture itself, but something I often forget is that these immediate, popular forms linger in cultural memory. This means that cultural production (the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Nirvana Unplugged, whatever) exists both in relation to itself and other examples of contemporary culture, but also in a historical continuum where it engages with has come before and what will come after. This is a fascinating idea.
ReplyDeleteI’ve found that the weakest chapter in the Filene in terms of overall argument is the fourth one. It might be a simple overreach (he attempts to cover a lot of ground, and makes a coherent narrative out of wide-ranging examples), and I think he concludes his coverage of academic folklore far too early, since (to the best of my knowledge) “folklore” fell out of favor as an academic discipline, and was absorbed by ethnomusicology, anthropology, etc. If one were unaware of this, they might get the impression that academic folklore is still a thriving field. I also think he (or his editor) wussed out at the very end. Government subsidies of and for culture are in a perpetually dreary state in this country, and as someone who works in “public history,” he should have taken a more firm stance on the negative effects of such funding cuts.
Keil’s writing is clearly polemical, but the most damning thing was his admission that he has not been following folklore scholarship.His idea that the “folk” concept is dehumanizing seems to be the lynchpin of his (primarily) economic critique of the folk establishment. I thought his implication (264) that the “folk” would have been created out of necessity anyways fascinating, and thought he could have linked this with the obvious romanticization of nature that was occurring in early modernity (why else would the bourgeoise have looked outside the city for their folk?). His ending claim that “the folk” are an acceptable lens through which we justify examination of “the primitive” is a hard one to ignore.
I think the Keil was fascinating. As I was reading it, I was saying "oooohhhh!" in a high falsetto, scandalized. His first sentence was especially fascinating, in which he stated outright that he thought the folk never existed. This sort of paralleled my own discovery through this class. I had this sort of romanticized version of the folk that has been destroyed through the course of this class. "The folk" are just folk.
DeleteBut maybe I've misinterpreted the readings and come out with a totally wrong idea. That's just where I am right now.
I think we're all still trying to figure out how recording technology has affected music... all of these forms that were popular once and linger now, we can access quickly, and the recording hasn't been changed by time (well, remastering aside). It's a fascinating situation because, like the end of chapter 2 pointed out, each successive generation can rediscover an artist's for the first time, without having it filtered through the style of their time, just by pushing "play."
DeleteI fully agree, technology is something that still needs to be fully grasped in terms of how we listen to and understand these genres.
Deletethanks, I did not know folklore was a dying discipline. I wonder if Keil had anything to do with that or was just representative of thought currents of the time (I think it was from 1978).
DeleteI also am intrigued by the idea of cultural memory. How can you have a cultural/communal memory? It is only made up of individual memories. But those individual memories all share some commonality, usually facilitated by some mass medium, like you mentioned the Ed Sullivan show.
Yes, Erik, I'd like to do a little anthropological research on the history of that Keil piece!
DeleteEyermann— I thought that the introduction to this article, dealing with methodology, was obnoxious. The authors seemed to think that their method was incredibly novel and complex, but I found their explanation confusing and their actual methodology neither complex nor novel (in contrast to what it seems the authors thought of their methods). They seemed to just tell their version of the two waves of the revival looking at a few different aspects. I also still don’t know what “cognitive space” is supposed to mean. Despite those complaints, I found the main body of the article interesting.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, I like the article’s clear cause and effect relationships, such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 helping to deteriorate the links between left-wing cultural organizations and the labor movement. I also thought it was interesting that, while the “institutional framework of the radical left” died out, the left’s work with music had a lasting effect (510).
Question: Why were folk efforts from the Right largely unsuccessful in the US as opposed to Europe? Why did “various conservative or rightward-leaning actors fail[] to coalesce” in the US (507).
Ch. 2 of Filene—I like the Lomax’s approach to American Folk music more than Childs, and I love that they firmly believed in (and found) American folk song independent of British origins. I also found it interesting that Alan Lomax wanted people to fight “the tendency…to begin to regard [folk] culture as static” and thought of it as living. This seems to me similar to our ideas about folk music, but Lomax promoted it in the 1930s and 40s.
I thought this comment about otherness and authenticity on p. 63 was especially apt: “Roots musicians are expected to be premodern, unrestrainedly emotive, and noncommercial. Singers who too closely resemble the revival’s middle-class audiences are rejected by those audiences as ‘inauthentic.’” I fall into this trap at times myself.
Question: Is there any truth in the line of thinking that says that anyone too familiar with mainstream culture or popular music or anyone too closely resembling an audience is somehow “inauthentic”? A loaded question for sure, especially since I doubt we can even define “authentic,” but one that could probably generate interesting discussion nonetheless.
Ch. 4—I find that it is rare that I read academic writing and walk away wanting more, but I actually would like to read this whole book (maybe this Summer). I found this explanation of the history of American folklore scholarship to be extremely clear and helpful. Moreover, the discussion of functionalism was fascinating, particularly in how that philosophy changed the attitudes of collectors (“Record everything” and no longer only recording from the most isolated areas).
Keil—I can’t say anything about this one but that I liked its directness and its “Stick it to the man” attitude and I think it made a lot of sense. And I can’t wait to discuss it with all of you.
I agree, the first article didn't present its methodology very clearly, and it's a surprisingly NOT novel approach. I don't know if I can answer your question, but there has been writing about the American right's rejection of many cultural forms as a result of "culture wars" rhetoric.
DeleteThe only hypothesis I can offer to your question is perhaps it has something to do with the United States traditional distrust of European styles of government, but that could be a big stretch...
DeleteI agree with you on the methodology. In the end I felt that they relied a great deal more on the POC than cognitive approach, despite their claim to the contrary.
DeleteAlso, sorry for the lack of question mark after my question. Punctuation is hard.
DeleteAgreed! The methodology explanation was annoying. Its impact would have been better had they worded it clearer and shortened the length a good bit. The rest of the article was a nice chronology; it was good to get some information on these instances in the development of American music since they are rarely discussed (as it seems) in the usual realms of musicology.
DeleteKeil’s reading was the most entertaining of the three, even if it comes across as a disillusionment rant. The comment that “if the bourgeoisie had not discovered the secret of turning themselves into folk” they would look to “workers as very attractive candidates for folk status,” is a little strange – especially seeing as how this article was written in the late 1970s and we’ve seen that around 70 years earlier in England, the idea of transforming factory workers into the “folk” was already alive and well.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I’m just not up on my socialist/communist terms – but do today’s working middle-class stiffs count as the downtrodden workers or as the “bourgeoisie?” And why would Keil dismiss his early comment of “electronic media are making folk of us all” as an “easy, short” solution? I think the impacts of recording on the concept of “folk” (and a lot of other aspects of music and culture) is huge! Sure doesn’t seem to be an easy way out to me…
Just have to say it. The Eyerman and Barretta Revival article really needed an editor. I thought, from the lengthy methodology section, that it was going to be a fairly in-depth look at the different ideologies behind the revival, transmission spaces, etc. It didn’t delve into it so much as glance off the surface, which was a bit disappointing in a 40+ page read… great information about the influence of the “Old Left” on both revivals but in the end it may have been more accurately entitled “the Left’s ideas and use of music.” Lots of things that seemed interesting were mentioned and then tossed aside: “without going into detail about how such boundaries are socially constructed, let it suffice to say that the construction of ‘folk’ music in this situation was an inevitably arbitrary process” (p. 511) for instance. I thought social construction was one of the points of this article… it also revolves heavily around the concept of “folk” in NYC, and ignores other types of music brought up in Filene’s book, like cowboy songs, hillybilly, race records, and the ilk. Although the tension between commercialism and “folk” was brought up repeatedly, I’m not sure that I’d agree that banning microphones at the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 is evidence of “successfully mediate all the tensions of the folk music revival” (p.34). Still, the fact that the folk revival was apparently the product of white, young, well-educated north-easterners who were using the music of rural everyone-else is…weird. Even if you figure that the “folk” should include white well-educated college students, the appropriation of music so far removed culturally from this group, used to identify themselves, seems a little bizarre especially given all the face and class distinctions that still seemed to exist. Are there any other examples of this happening on such a widespread scale in the past?
The Filene was a great read; it addressed the recording industry and government involvement in the folk a little more directly (even if, compared to the E&B article, it danced around the ties with the Left and the Left’s abrupt departure from folk in McCarthy’s time). A lot of the points it brought up about how the early folksingers were recorded and used were frankly disturbing. Filene brought out the tension between the romantic past, isolation, and the incorporation of other styles in the early days of American roots music. I still don’t think I understand why was it such a huge deal, what with the need for writing new songs that addressed current events and the recognition of “folklore” as being continually re-invigorated, to avoid connection with the outside world and commercialism in the later days, though.
"Disillusionment rant" -- That's good. I'm always attracted to this sort of honest, no-BS style of writing but I'm not sure what to make of this. The technology question has become one of the main issues affecting the dissemination of 'folk/popular' music, to an extent that Keil probably did not even predict. Looking forward to an interesting discussion of this tomorrow, if we don't get snowed in...
DeleteI can offer a tiny thought regarding the influence of recording technology... It was possible with recorded field work to claim that a song was "true" or "authentic" in a way that a dictation/notation of a song could never be used. A recording could be used as "hard" evidence. Photographs and videos are often used in the same way, but the trouble with using photographs, videos, or recordings in this way is that they can be misleading... think of the Bush administration using aerial photos of "weapons of mass destruction" to justify their invasion of Iraq, and only later did we find out the photos were misleading.
DeleteI agree with you Brianna. In one way or another, evidence is always subject to different interpretations.
DeleteNow that you've asked the question, I can't think of a single other instance (in my small knowledge) where a revival was the product of people so far removed from the original. There is SOME removal in every revival, of course. My paper is on Spirituals, and after slavery, no more spirituals were written (by definition), so anyone who was never a slave singing spirituals could be viewed as removed from the original source, but spirituals had less of a revival than a revamping. Some of the first singers in groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers were born into slavery. So in that case, the revival/revamping came largely from people directly involved in the original. I wonder if it is indeed the most extreme example of such a difference.
DeleteThe articles this week again brought up the folk authenticity debate and also added folk purism into the mix. The Everman/Barretta article dealt with this in its presentation of the two American folk revivals from the 1930’s and 1960’s. I thought it was interesting that each revival dealt with different principles, the earlier revival having its roots in politics and ordinary people while the later one dealt with the commercialization of folk music and the education of the masses.
ReplyDeleteThe Greene article also provided insight into how folk songs can be used to increase the understanding of and glorify certain aspects of culture. In this case, the Gramiya folk songs were used to glorify rural Tamil village life in the general culture and politics of the Tamil state. While original folk material was used, it was distorted and edited to fit a particular aesthetic. Since the Gramiya are not folk songs because they are not in what some would consider their purist form, I wonder if one could consider these songs to be less authentic. Should purism and authenticity go hand in hand or be totally separate when determining the cultural value of a piece of folklore?
I was also very intrigued with the two Filene chapters. He has a very conversational and simple writing style that makes the readings interesting. Chapter two provided me with some great information in relation to my paper topic. Filene noted that Lead Belly became enamored with early country music, notably starts such as Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers, but couldn’t or (was not allowed) to participate in the country music scene because of his race. This immediately made me think of Charley Pride (the first African American country star), who was also influenced by early country music stars, notably Hank Williams. I wonder if Lead Belly had been allowed to sing country music, could this have opened up more performance doors for him and allowed him to move from a fledgling artist to a singer with a career? No; Pride became a star well after the civil rights movement and was not invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry until 1993, some twenty years after his career began. So, since it took Pride so long to gain recognition, I don’t think Lead Belly had a chance.
The Greene articles are for next week, but I read them since I thought we were reading those this week...
DeleteEyermann -- I like the idea of trying to view the two revivals as one long revival each slightly different. I wish I knew more about these sociological models so I could critique this methodology more (Regrettably, I never took even a Sociology 101 in undergrad) They seemed to say their model was better because it situated the movements in their context. I wonder how sociological models could even be useful at all if they don't consider context, and if such models exist, and is that not the intent of the model just an unfortunate consequence? I have to do some research on these before tomorrow, but it could be interesting to talk about.
ReplyDeleteFilene -- I agree with John, this book is just great. What I thought was really interesting was while reading chapter 2, that the LoC really strove for an objective selection of folksongs, thus they wanted non-musicians to do the fieldwork. Obviously, the Lomax's search for unsullied versions of folksongs created the cult of authenticity and was an incredibly subjective selection process ironically. I appreciated the comparison to Cecil Sharp as they tried to preserve these cultural products on the verge of extinction, just like Sharp wanted to bottle and preserve "Merry Old England."
Considering that, it was great to compare the New Deal folklorists' mentality of "RECORD-everything" which was seemingly more objective selection process. Showing how the New Deal folklorists were rooted in a functionalist philosophy was especially effective especially when comparing the two Lomax collections and how the songs were categorized.
Keil -- I'm sure everyone will have much to say about this. I understand his viewpoint but I'm not sure renaming folklore will necessarily change anything. How do perspectives such as "everyday life" or "country" differ from conceptions of "folk"?? I guess my question is, then, "Can we study folklore or even communities and their cultural products without exploiting the subjects of study? In Keil's terms, can we study them and keep them people?
I agree about the comparison; Filene does do some comparative work in other chapters (two versions of same song, earlier and later versions, etc.). He makes some interesting claims for how these variants tell us different things about the collectors and the times they were collected in.
DeleteIt was very ironic, wasn't it? Put down one canon (Child) only to replace it with another "authentic" canon. I think Filene mentioned something about needing to select songs partly because of limited recording resources, too, though. Does anyone know when LPs were invented? Do improvements in recording technology have something to do with the LoC's decision to "Record EVERYTHING!"? I don't know my recording history well enough.
DeleteAround 1948, I believe...
DeleteForgive my late response... I just finished my conference presentation and it went really long with questions afterward!
ReplyDeleteQuick thoughts:
1. Why do we need this many pages of contextualization for the Eyerman? The introduction is annoying to read and makes their argument seem apologetic.
2. Never before had I considered the radical transformations in American culture of the 1950s. I definitely thought of it as being "conservative" as they mentioned. The new buying power and consumer culture associated with the "masses" during that time really had deep-reaching ramifications that fed into the second revival, as they mentioned.
3. A question: why did the second wave create its own music, rather than performing from a canon as the early wave did? I know that musicians in this movement were trying to copy Guthrie and Seeger, but there must be some cultural contextualization that would explain this phenomenon. I wish I knew what that cultural contextualization actually was.
4. The Lomaxes created a "cult" of authenticity in the same way that popular musicians and celebrities create a cult of personality to surround their endeavors and bolster support for their work.
5. The Lomaxes used recording technology to create a repository of authentic examples as part of this cult. I found their use of technology to be fascinating, and especially the way that the second revival used the recordings as a sort of Bible. The use of technology also allowed the development of the more scientific approach discussed by Filene.
6. Lead belly, like all famous performers and artists, cultivated his persona as well as his artistry. He made himself an "understandable other", catering the song structures for comprehension by his audiences. I found it fascinating that if he had performed in his original style (perhaps the more authentic style), he would have been rejected by his audiences as incomprehensible. His perception as authentic came about through his abandonment of his original inclinations.
7. In addition to #6's point, the Lomaxes called folk music a "living tradition" (in opposition to Child's perception of the folk of something that needed preservation) but then restricted Leadbelly from being "corrupted" by other traditions around him in order to preserve his authenticity. Isn't that hypocritical?
8. I had never heard of Functionalism previous to these readings. I think there must be issues associated with that approach, but I can't think of what they would be -- meaning, I really appreciate much of what functionalism represented/represents. I also wonder if it is related to Hindemith's conception of gebrauchsmusik.
9. Another thing I didn't know about were the RA communities. I also did not know that their documentary style (allowing the subjects to speak to themselves) was an innovation.
10. Lomax did the same thing with the US army that Child did with the soldiers in GB. I wonder why Child never lost his political support while Lomax did?
11. Finally, I was interested to read about the shifting role of "folk's" or "folklore's" relationships with government and academia according to the current political and cultural climate.
Great points - I'm sure we'll touch on many of these questions in class!
Delete6. I agree that Leadbelly's "authenticity" was diminished by having to adjust his original stylings, but for the racial climate during his time, this was most likely a necessity for him in order to even get the smallest bit of exposure. I am sure this till happens today, though not as much as in previous times...very unfortunate.
Deletethese three authors give an impression about the organic relationship of folk and human being. I couldn't remember every detail information of the readings but after I finished reading I became to think there are number of exceptions to change my previous concept of folk. I used to think the folk has been revived and regain the popularity by people who have an intellectual,political, or cultural power in a historical period. Now I am thinking maybe folk itself has chosen the certain classes, race , and region to exist as the general ruling ideology to people.
ReplyDeleteAbout Eyerman's article I was interested when it talks about the generating of leftist musical tradition in United States." as opposed to European variants, American populism has often found left-wing political expression."I believe under the political control the folk took many benefits, of course with media. people differently deal with folk in the politic of left wing and right wing. it is about the difference attitude toward keeping the continuity or change of folk.
I used to notice the bourgeoisie of our country, which is right wing, has tried to make variation of folk in order to intermingle with westernizing process. there were anxiety of traditional degeneration. However, the problem is that no one can say it has deteriorated the folk and ruined the continuity of our folk in these days. Ultimately, at least people could remind when they are thinking about the change and comparing with old one. I think this could be also a good way for surviving of folk. Folk has surfed the wave of social, political, and genetic movement in every historical period and that trends were happened with vertical and horizontal directions. I thinks folk control its influence with intensified ideology of the time.
It is still difficult to understand promptly.
I thought the different sorts of support for the construction of the folk in Europe and America an interesting topic as well... I think the same still goes for the funding for classical music on the two continents in our time
Delete