Genre: Folk

Folk Music

Traditional music

Folk music, in the most basic sense of the term, is music by and for the common people.[1] The Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary defines it as "music of the common people that has been passed on by memorization or repetition rather than by writing, and has deep roots in its own culture."[2] It is still being passed on in this way today. According to Webster's dictionary, folk music is the "traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of the people in a community". People play and sing together rather than watching others perform. Folk music is somewhat synonymous with traditional music. Both terms are used semi-interchangeably amongst the general population; however, some musical communities that actively play living folkloric musics (see Irish traditional music and Traditional Filipino music for specific examples), have adopted the term traditional music as a means of distinguishing their music from the popular music called "folk music," especially the post-1960s "singer-songwriter" genre. The terminology used for the Grammy Awards first included the word "folk" in 1959. In 1970 this was changed to "Ethnic or Traditional", to make a distinction from protest song or singer-songwriter. The phrase "singer-songwriter" was never been used by them. Instead they have used the phrase "male pop vocal" to include everything from James Taylor to Stevie Wonder. In 1969 the "Songwriters Hall of Fame" was set up. Their website identifies the Brill Building songwriters as the earliest singer-songwriters. In Europe, however, there is some awareness that Jacques Brel was an important pioneer of angst-ridden confessional songs, years before Carole King was successful.

Defining folk song

Folk songs are commonly seen as songs that express something about a way of life that exists now or in the past or is about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived). However, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no certain definition of what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) is.[3] Gene Shay, co-founder and host of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, defined folk music in an April 2003 interview by saying: "In the strictest sense, it's music that is rarely written for profit. It's music that has endured and been passed down by oral tradition. [...] Also, what distinguishes folk music is that it is participatory—you don't have to be a great musician to be a folk singer. [...] And finally, it brings a sense of community. It's the people's music." Recent research has suggested that the "folk process" may not be so simple to distinguish from other popular music processes. Early folk music was often written down and transformed by experts, even though they may have been amateurs. The English term folk, which gained usage in the 19th century (during the Romantic period) to refer to peasants or non-literate peoples, is related to the German word Volk (meaning people or nation). The term is used to emphasize that folk music emerges spontaneously from communities of ordinary people. "As the complexity of social stratification and interaction became clearer and increased, various conditioning criteria, such as 'continuity', 'tradition', 'oral transmission', 'anonymity' and uncommercial origins, became more important than simple social categories themselves." Charles Seeger (1980) describes three contemporary defining criteria of folk music:[4] 1. A "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal'; 'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'. Usually...folk music is associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and possibly also a popular, musical culture." Cecil Sharp (1907)?, A.L. Lloyd (1972). 2. "Cultural processes rather than abstract musical types...continuity and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular cultures'." Redfield (1947) and Dundes (1965). 3. Less prominent, "a rejection of rigid boundaries, preferring a conception, simply of varying practice within one field, that of 'music'." Some consider "folk music" simply music that a (usually) local population can - and does - sing along to. Much modern popular music over the past few decades falls into this category. Jack Knight, a modern songwriter, defines a "folk song" as any song that when played or performed gets people's lips moving in unison. Jazz musician Louis Armstrong and blues musician Big Bill Broonzy have both been attributed with the remark, "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."

Classical and folk

There was a vogue for folk music during the start of the Romantic period. One of the first to use it was Josef Haydn (see Haydn and folk music). Beethoven made arrangements of Irish, Welsh and Scottish folk songs (over 150 settings) (see List of compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven). Later composers used the material more liberally. Liszt, Brahms, Bruch, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak wrote folk dances that are often indistinguishable from tunes that come from the authentic tradition. Percy Grainger particularly enjoyed Morris dance tunes, and made many keyboard settings of them. Ralph Vaughan Williams made choral arrangement of English folk songs. Holst composed pseudo-folk dance tunes, as did Malcolm Arnold. Benjamin Britten made voice-and-piano arrangements of folk songs, though the chromatic harmonisation he did probably makes them hard for a folk enthusiast to enjoy. Using early types of recording equipment Bartok and Grainger made field recordings of folk singers and musicians. Bartok also arranged Magyar dances for keyboard, though they tend to be remote from the originals.

Folk revivals

As folk traditions decline, there is often a conscious effort to resuscitate them. Such efforts are often exerted by bridge figures such as Jean Ritchie, described above. Folk revivals also involve collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults. The folk revival of the 1950s in Britain and America had something of this character. In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Britain, where at a Working Men's Club in the remote County Durham mining village of Tow Law he met two other seminal figures: A.L.'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who were performing folk music to the locals there. Lloyd was a colourful figure who had travelled the world and worked at such varied occupations as sheep-shearer in Australia and shanty-man on a whaling ship. MacColl, born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life. MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs from his mother. The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is credited with being the point at which the British roots revival began. The two colleagues went back to London where they formed the Ballads and Blues Club which eventually became renamed the Singers' Club and was possibly the first of what became known as folk clubs. It closed in 1991. As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America. It is sometimes claimed that the earliest folk festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 1928, in Asheville, Carolina, founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Sidmouth Festival began in 1954, and Cambridge Folk Festival began in 1965. Brittany's Folk revival began in the 1950s with the "bagadou`" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame through Alan Stivell 's work since the mid-1960s.

Eastern Europe

During the Communist era national folk dancing was actively promoted by the state. Dance troupes from Russia and Poland toured Western Europe many times from about 1937 to 1990, and less frequently thereafter. The best known were the Red Army Choir and dancers. They recorded many albums. From Bulgaria, an all-female choir from Bulgarian State Radio sold albums around Europe. The first and most famous was "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares" which even gained a certain chic after being promoted by British DJ John Peel. In Hungary, the group Muzsika's and the singer Ma'rta Sebestye'n became known throughout the world due to their numerous American tours and their participation in the Hollywood movie The English Patient and Sebestye'n's work with the Deep Forest band. Another example is the Hungarian model, the ta'ncha'z movement. This model involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs, resulting in a strong vocational foundation and a very high professional level. They also had the advantage that rich, living traditions of Hungarian folk music and folk culture still survived in rural areas, especially in Transylvania. The involvement of experts meant an effort to understand and revive folk traditions in their full complexity. Music, dance, and costumes remained together as they once had been in the rural communities: rather than merely reviving folk music, the movement revived broader folk traditions. Started in the 1970s, tanchaz soon became a massive movement creating an alternative leisure activity for youths apart from discos and music clubs—or one could say that it created a new kind of music club. The tanchaz movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities around the world. Today, almost every major city in the U.S. and Australia has its own Hungarian folk music and folk dance group; there are also groups in Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina and Western Europe.

Balkans

The Balkan folk music is a type of folk music distinct from others in Europe. This is mainly because it was influenced by traditional music of the Balkan ethnic groups and mutual music influences of this ethnic groups in the period of Ottoman Empire. The music is sometimes characterised by complex rhythm. It comprises the music of: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Republic of Macedonia, Turkey and other countries including the historical states such as the Ottoman Empire, Yugoslavia or the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and the geographical regions such as Thrace. An important part of the whole Balkan folk music is the music of the local Romani ethnic minority.

The emergence of popular folk artists

During the twentieth century, a crucial change in the history of folk music began. Folk material came to be adopted by artists who marketed themselves more widely alongside other popular artists; they performed traditional music and songs in amplified concerts, and disseminated their work by recordings and broadcasting. In other words, a new genre of popular music had arisen. This genre was linked by nostalgia and imitation to the original traditions of folk music as it was sung by ordinary people. However, as a popular genre it quickly evolved to be quite different from its original roots. The rise of folk music as a popular genre began with performers whose own lives were rooted in the authentic folk tradition. Thus, for example, Woody Guthrie began by singing songs he remembered his mother singing to him as a child. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Guthrie collected folk music and also composed his own songs, as did Pete Seeger, who was the son of a professional musicologist. Through dissemination on commercial recordings, this vein of music became popular in the United States during the 1930s (Jimmie Rodgers), the 1940s (Burl Ives), but more significantly, in the 1950s, through singers like the Weavers (Seeger's group), Harry Belafonte, The Kingston Trio, and The Limeliters, who tried to reproduce and honor the work that had been collected in preceding decades. The commercial popularity of such performers probably peaked in the U.S. with the Hootenanny television series[5] and the associated magazine ABC-TV Hootenanny in 1963–1964, which was cancelled after the arrival of the Beatles, the "British invasion" and the rise of folk rock. The itinerant folksinger lifestyle was exemplified by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, a disciple of Woody Guthrie who in turn influenced Bob Dylan. Sometimes these performers would locate scholarly work in libraries and revive the songs in their recordings, for example, in Joan Baez's rendition of "Henry Martin," which adds a guitar accompaniment to a version collected and edited by Cecil Sharp. Publications like Sing Out! magazine helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did folk-revival-oriented record companies. Folk music is easily identified with the ordinary working people who created it, and preserving treasured things against the claimed relentless encroachments of capitalism is likewise a goal of many politically progressive people. Thus, in the 1960s such singers as Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and Bob Dylan followed in Guthrie's footsteps and to begin writing "protest music" and topical songs, particularly against the Vietnam War, and likewise expressed in song their support for the American Civil Rights Movement. The influential Welsh-language singer-songwriter, Dafydd Iwan, may also be mentioned as a similar example operating in a different cultural context. Some critics, especially proponents of the ethnocentric Neofolk genre, claim that this type of American 'progressive' folk is not folk music at all, but 'anti-folk'. This is based on the idea that as liberal politics supposedly eschews the importance of ethnicity, it is incompatible with all folkish traditions. Proponents of this view often cite romantic nationalism as the only political tradition that 'fits' with folk music. Simultaneous to the American folk movement was the Canadian folk movement, exemplified by artists Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, all three of whom would become the only singers to receive an Order of Canada, and all of whom would achieve varying degrees of lasting international success. In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem (although the members were all Irish born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village, it must be noted), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, The Pogues and a variety of other folk bands have done much over recent years to revitalise and re-popularise Irish traditional music. These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a living tradition of Irish music, and they benefited from collection efforts on the part of the likes of Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy, among others. In the United Kingdom, the folk revival didn’t create any popular stars (although Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” would eventually prove to be a hit for other artists), but it helped raise the profile of the music, and folk clubs sprang up all over, a boon to young artists like Martin Carthy and Roy Bailey who emerged. It also inspired a generation of singer-songwriters, such as Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell (whose “Streets Of London” would become a hit), Donovan, Roy Harper and many others. Bob Dylan came to London to check out the growing folk scene of the early 1960s, and Paul Simon spent several months there; his version of “Scarborough Fair” owed a lot to Carthy’s take on the song. Folk didn’t hit any kind of mass popularity until the electric folk movement of Fairport Convention, The Byrds and Steeleye Span took old songs and mixed their tunes with rock. Both bands had hit singles and albums that sold well, bringing a new audience to traditional music. The revival of the fifties and sixties had mostly died out by 1975. There was another revival in the second half of the 1990s. Once more folk music made an impact on mainstream music. There was a younger generation of artists, in some cases children of revival-inspired artists; (Eliza Carthy, for example, is the daughter of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson). This time, notably, the instrumentation was largely acoustic, rather than electric. The skill level of players and singers was as high as before. As the number of summer folk festivals increased, so more talented performers have come in, and folk music has found at least a toehold in the mainstream with artists like Kate Rusby and Spiers and Boden featured in the press.