Folk Music: The Basics

Ronald Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136088988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Folk Music: The Basics gives a brief introduction to British and American folk music. Drawing upon the most recent and relevant scholarship, it will focus on comparing and contrasting the historical nature of the three aspects of understanding folk music: traditional, local performers; professional collectors; and the advent of professional performers in the twentieth century during the so-called "folk revival." The two sides of the folk tradition will be examined--both as popular and commercial expressions. Folk Music: The Basics serves as an excellent introduction to the players, the music, and the styles that make folk music an enduring and well-loved musical style. Throughout, sidebars offer studies of key folk performers, record labels, and related issues to place the general discussion in context.

NINETEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND

Great Britain and the United States

DEFINITIONS

It might appear simple to understand folk music as a form of popular music in the British Isles and the United States with antique roots and anonymous composers. But in order to understand the scope and transformation of folk music through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is necessary to come up with a broader definition. For example, we will have to include in our story not only the development and collection of old songs, with no known composers, but also labor songs of the nineteenth century broadsides, blues, gospel tunes, cowboy songs, singer/songwriters, such as Donovan and Bob Dylan, who emerged in the 1960s, and so much more. We shall attempt to come up with a narrative history that is all inclusive, but also one that will establish some limits on what should be included or excluded. For example, jazz, opera, and, usually, commercially written popular songs will be excluded. In its traditional form, folk music can be said to include the following attributes: (1) its origins can perhaps be located in a particular culture or region; (2) authorship has historically been unknown, although authors did emerge over the past two centuries; (3) it has traditionally been performed by nonprofessionals, perhaps playing acoustic instruments; (4) its composition has been fairly simple, with perhaps little complexity so that it can be performed and shared communally; and (5) the songs have historically been passed down through oral transmission. This has somewhat changed, particularly if we include the rise of the cheap print media, and, in the twentieth century, the introduction of phonograph records, radio and television shows, films, and concerts. That is, folk music has been the music of the people, broadly construed, although this might seem too simplistic.

Folk music has encompassed various musical styles. One form has been the ballad, which is essentially a story song written in a narrative style. Folklorists, those who study cultural traditions, have been particularly interested in discovering and interpreting ballads, which seemed to have given insights into particular older societies. There have been two different kinds of traditional ballads, one coming from a remote past with an anonymous author, and the other coming from published broadsides, printed sheets with words but no music, beginning in the sixteenth century, often with known authors who were commenting on contemporary events and individuals. The former were preserved through oral transmission over a long period of time, and can be associated with vernacular (or common) culture, while most of the latter had a short public life and did not necessarily enter into common usage, but some did. In the nineteenth century there also developed the blues ballad among African Americans in the American South, usually based on personal relationships or local events. The other general type of folk song has had no story line, but a series of lyrics that were often catchy, and perhaps included rhyming lyrics. Some might relate to work experiences, personal relationships, life and death, patriotic feelings, or children's games, in a religious or secular context. Folksongs traditionally have not had a commercial origin, although such songs composed for a popular audience, could have, and often did, eventually enter into a folk consciousness within a few generations. We can also make a distinction between performers whose family roots were in traditional music, and those outsiders who have picked up and carried on traditional songs and styles. Born into an upper-class family, Pete Seeger, for example, has emphasized the distinction, noting that he is not a folk singer, but a singer of Folksongs.

In the twentieth century, folk music took on a much wider meaning, and the traditional definitions had to be reconsidered. Traditional ballads, either narrative, blues, or broadside, as well as lyric songs continued, but were joined by nineteenth-century popular songs and then an increasing number of singer/songwriters, gospel songs, and much more that became part of the expanding, flexible understanding of folk music. Instrumental accompaniment also broadened, from acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica, and mandolin, to eventually include electric guitars, brass, and percussion instruments, and just about anything else. Moreover, while music from the British Isles and Africa have appeared to be the basic sources of folk music in the United States, peoples from various European countries and other parts of the world transported their music to the New World, where it has mixed with the dominant styles. An understanding of folk music in both the British Isles and the United States from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, therefore, will have to include a flexible, expanding definition that leads to a narrowing of the gaps between folk, popular music, and what is now labeled as world music. This understanding will become clearer as this fascinating story unfolds.

NINETEENTH CENTURY IN BRITISH ISLES: COLLECTORS AND SONGS

Folk song collecting has had a long and rich history in England and Scotland, and by the end of the nineteenth century there existed a large body of published collections. Thomas D'Urfey edited six volumes of Wit and Mirth or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–1720), containing over one thousand verses of ballads and poems, drawn mostly from various published collections, broadsides, books of poetry, and his own compositions. While the majority were not gathered from oral traditions, some could be considered Folksongs, while most were initially popular songs. A few years later (1723–1725) A Collection of Old Ballads appeared in three volumes, again based mostly on published broadsides and earlier collections. Later in the century Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) helped initiate the ballad revival. Joseph Ritson published A Select Collection of English Songs in Three Volumes (1783), also composed mainly of published poems and songs, found in broadsides or manuscript collections, including both words and music. Simultaneously, various collections of ballads appeared in Scotland, including the songs and poems of Robert Burns, for example in George Thomson's The Scots Musical Museum (1771). Of perhaps greater importance was Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), mostly drawn from manuscript collections. Publishing ballad and folk song collections increased throughout the nineteenth century. Again, most were drawn from published broadside and manuscript collections, although there was a gradual increase in field collecting. William Chappell published a variety of influential collections, particularly Popular Music of the Olden Time (1858–1859), a massive two-volume compilation, which included “Greensleeves” and various tunes drawn from Shakespeare's plays, as well as the anonymous “Barbara Allen,” which he seems to have drawn from oral tradition. Chronologically arranged, and including both words and music, beginning with Anglo-Saxon melodies, Chappell's work drew upon an array of manuscript and published collections, as well as scores of broadside and Robin Hood ballads. While he found a few in oral tradition, the vast majority of the selections had not been passed down to the mid-nineteenth century; that is, they were not currently performed. But Popular Music of the Olden Time served as a valuable reference work for later scholars. By century's end, there were also a myriad of cheap popular songsters, containing a rich array of tunes, including Scottish vernacular songs such as “Green Grow the Rashes O” and “Annie Laurie,” and even a few from the United States, such as Stephen Foster's “The Old Folks at Home.”

Ballad and folk song collecting accelerated through the end of the nineteenth century. On the regional level, Davison Ingledew's The Ballads and Songs of Yorkshire (1860), John Harland's Ballads and Songs of Lancashire (1865), and Thomas Allan's Tyneside Songs (1891) added significantly to an awareness of local traditions. They were joined by William Allingham's The Ballad Book (1864) bringing together English and Scottish traditional ballads. W. H. Logan and Joseph Ebsworth reprinted numerous ballads and other older songs, including Logan's A Pedlar's Pack of Ballads and Songs (1869), and the extensive work of William Chappell. Carl Engel's The Literature of National Music (1879) stimulated field collecting of Folksongs; Charlotte Burne, for example, discovered numerous contemporary singers in the West Midlands, Shropshire Folk-Lore (1883–1886). Sabine Baring-Gould, a parson in Devon, collected and published songs from numerous singers. Other late Victorian field collectors found far fewer sources; Lucy Broadwood, for example, collected from about 35 individuals, while Frank Kidson had even fewer informants. Broadwood, along with J. A. Fuller Maitland, published English Country Songs, Words and Music (1893), while Kidson issued Traditional Tunes: A Collection of Ballad Airs, Chiefly Obtained in Yorkshire and the South of Scotland (1891). The Percy Society early in the century, and the Ballad Society by the mid-late Victorian era, assisted in promoting a broader interest in traditional ballads and songs, leading to the founding of the English Folk Song Society in 1898.

By the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, there existed a rich variety of ballad and folk song collections by English and Scottish collectors and publishers, easily accessible for scholars and the general public. Many drew upon earlier chapbooks or garlands (other names for songbooks), as well as broadsides (single sheets that were individually sold by ballad singers or peddlers in the cities or roving about the countryside). There were ballads on crimes and criminals, victories at sea, border raids, and murders most foul. Many dealt with love and sex; there was even a body of bawdy songs, some verging on the obscene, that circulated in oral tradition.

It remained for an American professor, however, to publish what would remain the standard collection of British and Scottish ballads. Francis James Child's prime achievement was his edition of five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898), which established the benchmark for ballad collecting through the following century in both the British Isles and the United States. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Child (1825–1896) was a professor of medieval studies and English literature at Harvard College who developed a singular interest in British ballads. Researching both published and manuscript sources (he did no fieldwork), he finally published numerous variations of 305 ballads. He focused on what he thought to be ancient ballads of a rather impersonal nature, which can be divided into four categories: magical and marvelous, romantic and tragic, historical and legendary, or humorous; a man of his Victorian times, he refused to publish any with bawdy lyrics, however.

The romantic and tragic, often encompassing love affairs, seem to have been the most popular, particularly in the United States. Child included, among many others, “Mary Hamilton” (173), “Lord Bateman” (53) “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet” (73), and “Bonny Barbara Allan” (84). Child also helped found the American Folklore Society in 1888 (patterned on The Folklore Society, founded in England in 1878) and served as its first president.

Ballads and songs relating to industrial work proliferated through the nineteenth century. Many exhibited anger and resistance to the transformation of the work place. “The Hand-Loom Weavers’ Lament” is an attack on the new factory owners and the loss of a market for traditional skills and independence. On the other hand, some broadsides celebrated factory life and factory towns, such as “Oldham Workshops.” Musician and folklorist A. L. Lloyd (1967) describes the legitimate “industrial folk song” as “the kind of vernacular songs made by workers themselves directly out of their own experience, expressing their own interests and aspirations, and incidentally passed on among themselves mainly by oral means” (p. 317). He includes “The Poor Cotton Weaver,” “Poverty Knock,” and “The Coal-Owner and the Pitman's Wife” as examples in this category. There were also numerous professionally written music-hall songs dealing with workers’ lives, which, while not initially Folksongs, could eventually be considered of a vernacular nature. Joe Wilson's “The Strike” falls into this category, dealing with the work stoppage in 1871 to obtain a nine-hour day in the Tyneside.

Throughout the nineteenth century traditional ballads and Folksongs circulated through the British Isles, some passed along through family and community oral traditions, others by way of published books, songsters, and broadsides. In addition, there were a growing number of urban, industrial, and maritime songs that would become part of the folk legacy that stretched through the twentieth century. Street literature, in the form of broadsides, flourished in urban areas. Ballads and songs had long captured personal feelings, violence, and tragedies, such as “The Golden Vanity” and “The Sheffield Apprentice,” but had begun to take on more contemporary stories about common people by the early nineteenth century, often sprinkled with humorous passages. Traditional singers focused on a song's words, while broadside sellers performed for a crowd in order to attract buyers, who were often young people looking for romance or adventure. Communities and trade unions had their own bards, who crafted verse for various occasions.

On the eve of the twentieth century there existed a rich and ever-expanding legacy of ballads and Folksongs in the British, Isles, performed locally and increasingly collected by scholars and interested antiquarians, who formed the Folk-Song Society in 1898 to promote future collecting and publications.

NINETEENTH CENTURY IN THE UNITED STATES: COLLECTORS AND SONGS

Folksongs and ballads in the United States in the nineteenth century somewhat followed the British style, but there were significant variations because of racial, ethnic, economic, and geographical diversity. By the early nineteenth century there existed a diverse body of folk music throughout the country, heavily influenced by both British and African musical styles, and often with a religious message. In addition, as immigrants from European countries began arriving in large numbers by midcentury they brought their own music and songs, as did those Mexican citizens whose lands in the Southwest had been incorporated into the country, as well as the Native Americans. By century's end there existed a vast array of musical forms and styles, much of which could be (or would later be) classified under the folk music rubric.

British, which included Scottish and Irish, as well as native songs and ballads were common throughout the United States by the mid-nineteenth century. There were also other forms of Folksongs, including play party songs, such as “Skip to My Lou” and “Get Along Home, Cindy,” which originally were accompanied by singing and hand clapping, but not musical instruments. There were also numerous fiddle tunes, for example “Soldier's Joy” and “Old Joe Clark.” Just as in Britain, songs circulated through oral means as well as in published forms—broadsides, songsters, and sheet music. British influences were common. Songs and ballads were transported either wholesale to the New World, or influenced American versions. For example, the melody of “The Cowboy's Lament” (also known as “The Streets of Laredo”) originated originally in Ireland as “The Bard of Armagh” (later the nationalist tune “Bold Robert Emmet”), while “Sweet Betsy from Pike” started as “The Ould Orange Flute.” Few ballads survived in oral traditions from the eighteenth century, such as “On Springfield Mountain” and “Brave Wolfe,” and others in the Child canon.

In the nineteenth century, ballads and Folksongs were newly written and often related to various occupations and experiences, such as lumbermen and sailors. These occupations produced what were called shanties, such as “Blow the Man Down,” “Reuben Ranzo,” “Shenandoah,” and “Blow, Boys, Blow,” which derived from long months at sea, while “The Jam on Gerry's Rock,” “The Lumber Camp Song,” and “The Lumberman's Alphabet” came from life in the North woods. Sea shanties were the work songs of sailors on the sailing ships, while in the logging camps, “shanty” referred to the primitive housing conditions; a “shantyboy” was another name for a woodsman or lumberjack. There were two kinds of sailor songs: work songs that paced various group efforts on the sailing ships, and forecastle songs that were sung for entertainment, which could include ribald verses.

Indeed, songs connected to various occupations were common throughout the country. There were numerous railroad songs, such as “Casey Jones,” miners songs, cowboy songs, and others connected with work experiences. “Buddy Won't You Roll Down the Line,” “The Coal Creek Rebellion,” and “Miner's Lifeguard,” for example, resulted from various miners’ upheavals in the 1890s and later were considered Folksongs. Most labor-connected songs at the time, however, related to particular events, such as the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in the 1880s, or the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania and the Pullman Palace Car company strike in the 1890s, and were quickly forgotten. Various farmer and labor organizations, such as the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party, also generated numerous songs that also did not enter into the broader collective musical memory.

Beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, millions of slaves were brought from Africa to the New World. They brought with them traditional musical styles and instruments, including the prototype of the banjo and various drums, and by the Civil War (1860–1865) the music of African Americans, both slave and free, was common. Work songs, including field hollers and urban street cries, and religious tunes or spirituals predominated. William Allen, Charles Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison published Slave Songs of the United States in 1867, a seminal collection that documented African-American songs at a time when there was little interest in publishing collections of European or indigenous white Folksongs in the country. Allen began collecting songs while teaching in ex-slave schools in South Carolina in late 1863, while the Civil War still raged, and later taught at Antioch College and the University of Wisconsin. This landmark book included musical scores for the 136 selections, including work songs, spirituals, dance and play songs, ballads, satirical songs, and street cries. Also in 1867 Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a path-breaking article on “Negro Spirituals” in the Atlantic Monthly, a popular northern magazine.

GUITAR AND BANJO

Various instruments have been part of folk music performance in both Great Britain and the Unites States, perhaps most important being the guitar and banjo, beginning in the nineteenth century. The six-string guitar was developed in southern Europe in the late eighteenth century and quickly reached the United States. Manufacturing gut-string guitars began in the country in the 1830s, with the C. F. Martin Company leading the way, followed by Epiphone, Harmony, and Gibson. Steel-string instruments, originally from Central America, began to appear in the 1890s, with cheap models soon available in the Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck catalogs. The mass production of guitars led to their use among rural musicians in the South, “where traveling black railroad workers often introduced [the guitar] to white mountaineers,” historian Nolan Porterfield has noted. “Combined with the fiddle and banjo, the guitar added rhythmic accompaniment; moreover, its chords provided a solid background for singing, thus encouraging string bands to include songs as well as instrumentals in their repertoires.” String bands, anchored by the guitar, were popular by the 1920s, but soon influential personal styles emerged, led by Jimmie Rodgers and Maybelle Carter. Since the 1930s the guitar has become the most important instrument in many aspects of popular music, with both a lead and rhythm function, including country, folk, jazz, and certainly rock. Variations include the Hawaiian and Dobro resonator guitars, which are played with a slide or bottleneck. The electric guitar was invented in the 1930s. Both electric and acoustic guitars have had extensive sales into the twenty-first century.

A stringed instrument was brought to the New World by West African slaves by the eighteenth century, which evolved into the banjo. The number of strings varied, from three to eight, with four the early standard. A short fifth string was added before the Civil War, and this model eventually became more popular among rural musicians. White minstrel performers in blackface adapted the banjo to their widely popular entertainment, and following the Civil War, it had lost much of its association with African Americans. By the end of the nineteenth century the machine-made banjo, led by the Fairbanks, Cole, and Vega companies, was widely popular, with banjo (as well as mandolin and guitar) clubs springing up throughout the country. The four-string style was developed and used in ragtime and early jazz bands, while the five-string was known more as a folk instrument in the rural South. By the 1920s Uncle Dave Macon was established on the Grand Ole Opry radio show as a flamboyant banjo player, although the instrument was more common in the string bands that proliferated at the time. Following World War II the banjo became less popular in country music, except for its role in shaping bluegrass music through the influence of Earl Scruggs. In urban folk music, however, it gained a prominent role, particularly through the playing of Pete Seeger, whose recordings and banjo instruction book, first self-published in 1948, were highly influential. The banjo assumed a prominent role with the emergence of the folk music revival in the 1950s, which continued through the century.

The guitar and banjo were only two of the instruments that have been used by folk musicians in the United States and Great Britain. Others have been the accordion, dulcimer, fiddle, harmonica, mandolin, mouth bow, wa...