Folk Music  -  What It Is, What It Could Be

Sometimes I’m listening to a song and I hear wisdom in it, and I feel like it’s a form of communication through time and space. Someone can record something and long after they’re dead I can hear it and pick up on the nuances of what they’re saying, pick up on meanings they probably never intended, because meanings change with time, and you can’t hear the same song twice. And this whole collection of songs that has built up for generations, it’s like an endlessly vast trunk full of letters. And the words in the letters might stay the same, but their meanings change as the world changes and we change.

Looking at music this way, we can interpret songs as letters from individuals and collectives all over the world and throughout time. They show what people we never met are/were thinking about and show us people’s dreams and fears and priorities. They’re doorways to the past and future. They’re the closest thing to time travel we’ve got.

Folk musicians (whatever style of music they’re making—hip hop, rock and roll, punk, blues, reggae, klezmer) have this trunk of letters to draw inspiration from. They can pull out a letter, let it simmer, and write a new letter, a response to that one or a paraphrase of it or a rebuttal of it or anything you can imagine. They can lift a melody here, a sample there, some words, some rhymes, and make something new, but rooted in some kind of music making tradition.  That’s how I see the folk process.

When I talk about folk music, I don’t necessarily mean singer-songwriters with acoustic instruments. I don’t mean any specific genre. I’m talking about music made by musicians who recognize themselves as part of a dialogue between the ghosts of music past, present, and future. It’s a mindset rather than a sound—an understanding that music is not created in a void, that what is new is deeply indebted to what is old. A consciousness of the borrowing/stealing/plagiarizing processes that inform—I believe—all creative, artistic acts. Songwriters take melodies or chords from pre-existing songs and write new words to them. DJs and producers sculpt beats from manipulated samples of older recordings. Jazz musicians quote lines from familiar songs in solos. Countless blues, rock and pop songs are based on the same harmonic progression (I-IV-V) and have been for years. Everyone does it. Conscious folk musicians, like conscious musicians from other genres of music, are hip to the connection with the past, and at their best can innovate and stimulate through pushing the limits of what music is while still remaining aware of a deep underlying influence of older music.

My process of songwriting is basically this: I’ll have a song that’s in my head all day, all week, and I’ll sing it to myself, but maybe change around some words to reflect whatever I’m experiencing at the moment. This usually happens when I’m at work or in the shower or riding a bike or walking the dog. Later I’ll try to figure out the song on guitar or banjo or ukulele, and get engrossed in the chords and sing words from before and write new ones and change the chords around a bit (or not) and then I have a song. Other times I open up a songbook and jack the chord progressions from songs I may or may not have ever heard. Sometimes I’ll have some text I found in a book and I’ll make up music to go with it. I have a feeling creative processes like these aren’t too unique, and lots of musicians create in a similar way.

There’s a theory that the folk process is a form of evolution akin to biological natural selection. A song is passed down orally, and the elements of a song that are most appealing to singers and musicians are picked up on and transmitted to the future through repetition and variation. Over time, folk songs become aesthetically more and more appealing, both through the complexity of their evolution and their relative simplicity when it comes to playing and singing them. These songs are collectively composed by communities, changed to suit communities’ needs and passed down in new forms, increasingly beautiful and relevant.

We’re made to think that every artistic act must be completely unprecedented; completely different from anything that’s come before, in order to have real value. This is part of the myth of rugged individualism that everything from the advertising industry to the welfare system is based on in the capitalist world. This is a way we’re kept apart, how artists are made to think they need to compete with one another for grants, performance space, or the last slot at a show. This is a reason folk music is potentially revolutionary. It can be part of the project to transcend and undermine the entire web of oppression, breaking apart the founding myths of individualism and creating the change that people desire. Everyone involved in creation is a protagonist in the unfolding story of the world. Folk musicians, and people who enjoy their music, should recognize this, embrace it, and roll with it. Keep creating, loving, fighting, singing.

-M