Folk Music

I realize Folk Music as a genre pre-dates most chess.com members' birthdays... it pre-dates my own. There are folk musicians out there today but they're pretty much hidden from public view.

Still, I'm guessing there are some people here with an interest or at least a liking for Folk Music which brings me to this posting.

I published a blog today (https://www.chess.com/blog/batgirl/hang-your-head-and-cry) and while writing that blog, I was pondering the nature of Folk Music and concluded I had no idea what I was talking about.... but that's nothing new.

While the Folk Movement in America (and the UK) was before my time, I grew up playing that music on my phonograph as well as on my guitar, harmonica and recorders.  I've read a dozen books of the subject. But with the advent of youtube an even broader horizon was opened up and by immersion in that sea of sound, I find myself almost drowning or at least gasping for air and understanding.  

I've made a bunch of blogs and forum postings on the traditional roots of some well known folk tunes. To me this is the heart of Folk Music.  But living things need more that just a heart.  The Folk culture in America, and perhaps elsewhere too, as with many of the arts, was heavily invested in activism -- raising awareness of social issues.  Sometime this involved traditional songs, but mostly it involved creating new songs performed in a traditional manner.  But besides this, you have songs from the mountains, songs from the west, songs from the sea, and my favorite, ballads.  Again, many are old, many are new. I'm not sure what fabric the umbrella called Folk Music under which they hide is made from.   In the 1960s protest songs were the rage. Then electric guitars and drums were added making "Folk Rock."  While I like that type of music, I'm not convinced "folk" should be part of its appellation. It might have grown out of folk but shed its folk skin like a snake.  Still, some of these "folk-rockers" went back to folk music at times (.e.g. Scarborough Fair), so who knows?

Anyway.....  

I was curious if anyone from that dark void I feel I'm addressing, has an opinion on what Folk Music is, or isn't. 

If not, that's ok too.

rurally?

A blog post on the best labor songs and singers of those songs would be most welcome. 

As for your question, look carefully at how fans booed Bob Dylan when he started using an electric guitar.

music rooted in the old country has often been considered folk. Scottish ballads in the Appalachians, for instance.

Music genres are all rather fluid: that’s in their nature as approximate things, and because creative musicians borrow the ideas from other genres around them. Maybe the landscape which Spotify learns by looking at listening patterns is closer to reality: it identifies clusters, that a large number of people listen to various correlated artists. We can then name that cluster, and then like the Mandelbrot shape there are sub-clusters which can also be named. Just like geography, there is an a priori landscape, and the naming of some of the bigger features is always a secondary and  approximate activity

Labor songs like those by the Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the like?

The Appalchians are some of the mountain songs. Many, if not most, came from across the pond but a lot are indigenous to their areas. I think even cowboy songs of the West and even Canada probably have roots from the old countries 

Thanks.

I like the term "approximate" even if it complicates my pinpointing attempts. But it's an improbable task at best anyway. Thanks for offering something to mull over 

I think you made a wrong turn somewhere north east of Asheville.

My second wife (d. 1996) grew up just east of the Appalachians, was a music major at University of Tennessee, and became friends with many folk musicians. Betty Smith played the hammer dulcimer at our wedding; John McCutcheon was a good friend. Her vinyl folk music collection was incredible. I sold 200 records for about $100 last summer.

She had large quantities of Betty Smith, John McCutcheon, Si Kahn, Dalgish and Larsen, Almanac Singers, and others. It was from her that I learned about Odetta, Phil Ochs, and Tom Waits. But, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan were some of my favorites before we met. When I played some Johnny Horton (who I think of as Country), she commented that he had been her father’s favorite.

Btw ever heard about  Josh White?  https://youtu.be/6uagwYu11yg?t=277  But I digress. After Bob Dylan won Nobel Prize a famous author commented:

Sir Salman Rushdie tweeted, post announcement:

From Orpheus to Faiz,song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition.Great choice. #Nobel.

Sorry Ziryab I didn't see your post. Was responding to batgirl

“Whenever Bob Dylan is asked how you become a great songwriter, he has always said that you go back to the basics of traditional roots music … Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, and on and on.” – Bruce Hornsby.

But like  Bob Dylan sings in one of his most recent great songs '' I contain multitudes'' the origins of songs are multitudes.  Even the Title was from someone else 

Another example:

''The story goes that Woody was walking down the street and saw that 'The Grapes Of Wrath' was playing at movie theater. So he bought a ticket, watched the movie, came out of the theater and wrote 'The Ballad Of Tom Joad' that evening. Don't know how true that is, but I sure wish it is.'' youtube comment

Woody has written a great song

Country Joe & the fish always have Woody Guthrie in mind. They devoted a full album to that notion 

From Blues to Folk the music changes, but the heart remains in the same place.

I need both.

Speaking of Country Joe, my professor of twentieth century American history (same guy in undergraduate and graduate school) built a lot of his courses, especially post-WWII, around popular music. It was in his 1941-present course (which I took in 1981) that I heard for the first time “Fixin’ to Die Rag”. Years later, when I had the opportunity to teach Twentieth Century US history, I followed his lead in making music central to the course.

Ok. Alan Lomax was important if only for the Folk Revival

Alan Lomax

At the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper, The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control.[6] At this time he also he began collecting "race" records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs, at the risk of expulsion. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess, age 10, was sent to live with an aunt. Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his sophomore year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and the Pre-Socratics with University of Texas professor Albert P. Brogan. He also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects. Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for the Library of Congress, co-authoring American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936).

Brian Eno wrote of Lomax's later recording career in his notes to accompany an anthology of Lomax's world recordings:

[He later] turned his intelligent attentions to music from many other parts of the world, securing for them a dignity and status they had not previously been accorded. The "World Music" phenomenon arose partly from those efforts, as did his great book, Folk Song Style and Culture. I believe this is one of the most important books ever written about music, in my all time top ten. It is one of the very rare attempts to put cultural criticism onto a serious, comprehensible, and rational footing by someone who had the experience and breadth of vision to be able to do it."[53]

In January 2012, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that they would release Lomax's vast archive in digital form. Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project he called the Global Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs.

On August 24, 1997, at a concert at Wolf Trap, Vienna, Virginia, Bob Dylan had this to say about Lomax, who had helped introduce him to folk music and whom he had known as a young man in Greenwich Village:

There is a distinguished gentlemen here who came … I want to introduce him – named Alan Lomax. I don’t know if many of you have heard of him [Audience applause.] Yes, he’s here, he’s made a trip out to see me. I used to know him years ago. I learned a lot there and Alan … Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music. So if we’ve got anybody to thank, it’s Alan. Thanks, Alan.”[58]

Pretty sure that I have some of Lomax’s recordings of Lead Belly in my iTunes library.

Formidable interview with Country Joe where he's talking about his “Fixin’ to Die Rag”

In People's Park, Berkeley California, last year.  Great song

batgirl made history when she was born in 1973 during the Paris sessions : 0)

Funny because Betty Smith was originally from NC. She was born in Salisbury (if you happen to read the blog linked above, Salisbury pays a teeny tiny bit part- no speaking lines).  
She has a lovely voice:

If you listen to this and to Ian and Sylvia's "Oh Katie Dear," you'll hear essentially the same melody (but with the fantastic John Herald providing the flat picking)

a second coincidence is that I'd been listening to John McCutcheon recently, mainly his covers of Woody Guthrie while I was preparing a blog ostensibly about Guthrie a couple weeks ago (https://www.chess.com/blog/batgirl/social-progress ) 
Here's his lively version of Guthrie's "The Greatest Thing That Man Has Ever Done" (he a banjo picking dynamo)

Odetta is, well, Odetta.  Her singing gives me goosebumps.

I don't know much about this kind of music, there are only 2 songs in the list (below) I know and I dare to say there is only Black is the Color that I know well enough, but here is a list I had found of 15 of the supposedly best folk songs on YouTube . A fairly international list (For each song  its origin and a recommended version.) Don't know if anyone agrees with that list?

1 Three Ravens  English  Black Country Three

2 Black Is The Colour  Scottish  Christy Moore 

3 Morena  Sephardic-Spanish  Al Andaluz Project

4 Star Of The County Down  Irish  Irish Rovers

5 John Barleycorn  English  Steve Winwood

6 A Vava Inouva  Berber-Algerian  Idir

7 Tam Lin  Scottish  Fairport Convention

8 Shenandoah  American  Sissel

9 Diese Darke Nacht  German  Faun

10 Drunken Sailor  Irish  Irish Rovers

11 Matty Groves  English  Alela Diane and Alina Hardin

12 Fear a Bhata  Gaelic-Scottish  Capercaillie

13 Foggy Dew  Irish  Wolf Tones

14 Blackleg Miner  English  Richard Thompson

15 Vecchie Letrose   Italian-Flemish  La Capella Reial