Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  But what Bob Meffert spoke of in the greatest detail were the changes that have occurred in Marshall since my last visit a decade ago. Since the early 1990s hundreds of Mexicans and Somalians have moved into town, many of them settling there permanently. They are economic and social immigrants to this small town tucked away in the southwest corner of Minnesota, in search of jobs (many in a local turkey-processing factory) and freedom from war. ESL—English as a Second Language—classes are now offered by several local organizations. And, as my aunt Mary observed, their elementary and secondary school concerts look like a “UN on stage” with not only Somalians, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans, but also Vietnamese and African Americans adding to the European American faces that still predominate. This diversity has put a new face on Marshall that would have been unthinkable to me visiting this town of 15,000 people in 1989. And it’s even more interesting for the folks who live there.

  Folk musicians in central Virginia (circa 1936). Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  This trip to Minnesota reminded me about my revisions to Introducing American Folk Music: Ethnic and Grassroot Traditions in the United States. Although it’s a book dedicated to the study of music, after visiting nearly a score of cousins, aunts, and uncles, I am even more convinced that you can’t divorce the music from its historical roots and cultural contexts. Folk, folk-based, traditional, grassroots, and “ethnic” music (these terms are very similar though not precisely synonymous) are intimately tied to family, ethnicity, community, and racial identity. Not surprisingly cultural change, diversity, history, family, and regionalism—all viewed through the lens of music—form the core of this book.

  This new edition was mostly written in the spring and summer of 1999—just as the millennium crept closer and a decade after I began work on the first edition. The coverage of American folk (and ethnic) music has been enlarged to include a new chapter on Hispanic American traditions, which was addressed in the first edition, but its importance on America’s musical landscape has only increased. This edition contains other changes, such as updated and greatly expanded annotated “Suggested Listening,” “Suggested Reading,” and “Suggested Viewing” sections that close each chapter. I have also rearranged the order in which the chapters are presented. This new order makes sense to me, but you may wish (quite legitimately) to present the chapters in a different sequence.

  The careful reader will note that my coverage of genres has also expanded in some subtle ways. Each of the chapters has been revised, some more than others. These changes were prompted by ideas presented by outside readers, most of whom are professors who have used the book in their American music courses. Equally important, I have assigned this book a half dozen times to my students at the George Washington University, who provided me with heartfelt and thoughtful feedback. Their suggestions have also been taken to heart. For example one of the students’ best-liked chapters, “The Folk Roots of Contemporary Popular Music,” has been greatly expanded, while the “Mass Media” and “Ethnic and Native American Traditions” have also been significantly rewritten.

  These changes are also due in part to my own rethinking on certain subjects. For the past decade I have been teaching courses on African American music, popular music, and jazz, which has also helped me to reshape this book. This is especially true when it comes to the interaction of popular and folk music, which was addressed in the first edition, but is emphasized to an even greater degree in this edition. I have come to think that this book rightly contains “folk” in its title but the ties to and interaction with popular music and culture is even more critical than I realized. Much of the music discussed here is called “roots music” in popular magazines as diverse as Dirty Linen or Goldmine.

  Roots music, most notably blues, early country music, and songs associated with the folk revival of the early 1960s, has inspired groups like Wilco (with and without Billy Bragg) and Son Volt, both of which have impinged upon the world of popular music enough that their recordings are regularly reviewed in magazines devoted to contemporary popular music. I have even heard them on for-profit radio stations located above the noncommercial band that ends at 91.9 FM. In other words, they have displayed enough commercial potential to be noticed and are not shy about speaking out about their musical inspirations.

  Sadly, the music discussed in this textbook remains largely ignored by most academic scholars who teach in our colleges and universities. Most music departments are undergoing a gradual metamorphosis, inching toward the inclusion of “world music,” the vernacular and notated music created in the United States during the twentieth century, and multiculturalism. In these important regards, this textbook sits firmly in the mainstream. It joins the growing number of textbooks on black American music, Latin American music, and multicultural music in the United States—textbooks that did not exist when the first edition of Introducing American Folk Music was published in 1993. The times they are (slowly) a-changing!

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is for the student possessing a lively interest in our distinctly American vernacular culture and music. Specifically, Introducing American Folk Music: Ethnic and Grassroot Traditions in the United States examines folk and closely related grassroots music, such as gospel, western swing, and folk/rock, that developed in the United States. The book covers a wide variety of topics from the geographically discrete Cajun music of Louisiana and the hulas from Hawaii to the more familiar blues and gospel music, which have strong roots in the late-nineteenth-century South. Rock ’n’ roll and rock, two important forms of twentieth-century American vernacular music that drew (and still draw) a large portion of their strength and inspiration from folk music, are mentioned throughout the text but largely remain outside our scope.

  American folk music, however, retains its close ties to popular trends. Rock as well as other forms of popular music often display direct links to this heritage. Go-Go (a type of urban black popular music pioneered in Washington, D.C., in the middle 1970s) is performed in clubs patronized almost exclusively by younger African Americans. One of the top go-go bands, Trouble Funk, always begins its show with a call and response (antiphony) interlude between the band members and audience that not only recognizes who is “in the house” but helps to establish an intimate atmosphere. Antiphony has graced black American music since slavery and its contemporary use recalls prayer and church services, railroad gandy-dancers (track layers), and blues singers. Without these earlier folk expressions, go-go (as it has evolved today) would not exist. Folk-based styles, such as the folk/rock of the middle 1960s, commercial country music, and contemporary electric blues, that have crossed into popular culture are also part of the book. The folk roots of contemporary popular music, much of it African American, are explored in the final chapter.

  The influence of traditional music moves through space as well as over time—a phenomenon studied by cultural geographers as well as folk music scholars. In the first two decades of the twentieth century black migrants carried their love of blues and gospel northward during the “great migration,” as they fled from both southern racism and its impoverishing working conditions. The interest in western swing remains quite strong in California despite its Texas roots. This is due to the westward movement of dust bowl residents who looked toward its fertile valleys during the 1930s and 1940s. A strong affinity for bluegrass developed among blue- and white-collar workers in Ohio and Michigan who abandoned Tennessee and West Virginia in search of industrial jobs in the 1940s and 1950s. Be it food, colloquial expressions, or music, we Americans always carry our folk culture with us.

  My own approach to this subject is interdisciplinary, drawing from the ideas of scholars in ethnomusicology, cultural geography, anthropology, history, and folklore. Although the emphasis of this book is on our musical and historical culture, it also defines several basic musical concepts to discuss some fundamental aspects of the music itself. Perf
ormances by a variety of musicians drawn from the extensive Smithsonian Folkways catalogue constitute the compact disc that accompanies Introducing American Folk Music: Ethnic and Grassroot Traditions in the United States. The inquisitive reader may wish to delve further into the subject by exploring the resources described in the annotated bibliography (“Suggested Reading”), discography (“Suggested Listening”), and videotapes (“Suggested Viewing”) that close each chapter.

  Introducing American Folk Music: Ethnic and Grassroot Traditions in the United States works well in tandem with the sweeping scholarly surveys by Rich Crawford (An Introduction to America’s Music) and Daniel Kingman (American Music: A Panorama). Its main chapters are further divided into discrete sections about blues, ballads, cowboy songs, spirituals, and so forth. This new edition of Introducing American Folk Music builds upon the important writings of Bruce Bastin, Harlan Daniels, Arthur Kyle Davis, Serge Denisoff, David Evans, Robert Winslow Gordon, Archie Green, Jim Griffith, Jim Leary, Jose Limon, Alan and John Lomax, Bill Malone, Paul Oliver, Neil Rosenberg, Tony Russell, Henry Sapoznik, Dorothy Scarborough, Nick Spitzer, Dick Spottswood, Jeff Titon, Charles K. Wolfe, and dozens of other scholars and enthusiasts. These individuals scoured homes, juke joints, farms, churches, prisons, bunkhouses, and taverns across the United States to write about and record America’s ballads, cowboy tunes, bluegrass, blues, and work songs. To this corpus I add my own idiosyncratic vision, a perspective based on my research, field recording, and writing about black folk music, gospel singing, and hillbilly artists that began in 1969.

  I would like to thank the following people and institutions for their help in making this book possible. First of all I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Smithsonian Institution, which awarded me a postdoctoral fellowship during the majority of the time this book was written. Tony Seeger, curator of the Folkways Collection of the Smithsonian Institution (who is now teaching at UCLA), served as my advisor during this period. Nick Spitzer, John Hasse, Ralph Rinzler, and Martin Williams of the Smithsonian Institution encouraged this project from its outset and helped to bring it to fruition. And I must also thank Atesh Sonnenborn, Jeff Place, Pete Reiniger, Stephanie Smith, and my other friends at Smithsonian Folkways. Also the encouragement and wise council of the staff of the Blue Ridge Institute of Ferrum College, most notably Vaughan Webb and Roddy Moore, is always appreciated. During the academic year 1999–2000 my departmental and program chairs in Africana Studies, American Studies, and Music at George Washington University helped to rearrange my teaching schedule to accommodate revising and rewriting this book. I wish to thank my friends and colleagues at GWU as well as Mario Reyes, Dale Olsen, and Vaughn Webb, among others, in the fields of American music and ethnomusicology for their assistance.

  Eleanor Roosevelt at Whitetop. Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  Special thanks to Phil Martin of the (now-defunct) Wisconsin Folk Museum for his many helpful suggestions in the Scandinavian American section and Bill Vaughan of George Mason University, who helped with maps and photographs. Others who contributed in a variety of ways are Bruce Bastin, Andy Cahan, Sam Charters, Kim Gandy, Jim Griffith, Joe Hickerson, Peter B. Lowry, Ted Mealor, Mike Seeger, Jared Snyder, Nick Spitzer, Mark Tucker, and Charles K. Wolfe.

  I am also deeply indebted to three outside readers—David Evans, Jim Leary, and Anne Rassmusen—who have used this book in the classroom and have shared their thoughts with me. Their suggestions for revisions helped to reshape the book in many small and important ways. The result is a far better book.

  I need to acknowledge my debt to those whose work has shaped my thinking and writing in the expanded section on “Ethnic and Native American Traditions” and the Hispanic American section. I am specifically indebted to the research and writings of Jim Griffith, Jose Limon, Peter Manuel, Manuel Pena, Mario Reyes, Brenda Romero, Henry Sapoznik, and Daniel Sheehy.

  The music textbook team at McGraw-Hill, especially Chris Freitag, thought highly enough of this project to encourage me to write this second edition. I wish to thank him and Nadia Bidwell, another member of the McGraw-Hill team, who lent her kind assistance at every turn.

  Finally, I would like to thank my family (Kim, Cady, and Max) for their cooperation. I would also like to especially acknowledge the encouragement of five outstanding mentors—David Evans (Memphis State University), Frank Keetz (Bethleham Central Senior High School), Wallace and Betty Jane Lornell (also known as Ace and Beagle), and Daniel Patterson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). They inspired me to follow my muse by exploring American vernacular musical history and to challenge conventional educational wisdom. I would not have even attempted to write this book were it not for all of the important American musicians who touched me over the years—David Byrne, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Thelonious Monk, Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, Cole Porter, Sonny Rollins, They Might Be Giants, Sonny Boy Williamson, and many others. Their music has been a constant source of inspiration.

  EXPLORING AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC

  Chapter 1

  START HERE!

  • Introduction

  • The Roots of Twenty-first-Century Folk Music

  • Music in Our Daily Lives and in the Academy

  • Defining American Folk Music

  • Cultural Geography and Traditions

  • Folk Culture in the United States

  • Bred in the Bone

  • Listening to American Folk Music

  • Instruments

  • Final Thoughts

  INTRODUCTION

  Thanksgiving in Franklin County, Virginia, marks a period of transition. By late November all of the leaves on the trees are carpeting the gentle knolls of the Blue Ridge Mountains, leaving the landscape bleak and quiet. The high school football season is but a memory and reports of the upcoming basketball campaign have begun to appear in local newspapers. People are just starting to think about Christmas plans, while the deer, bear, and squirrels prepare for their annual winter struggle.

  Thanksgiving Day in 1987 dawned cloudy and the temperatures remained unusually warm. I was among a half-dozen people gathered for homemade bread, pumpkin pie, roasted chestnuts, mashed potatoes, and turkey. Before supper we lolled casually on the front porch; the 70 degree temperature invited us to sit outside to swap stories and sing. Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega, America, and Bob Dylan numbers were popular, but Neil Young and John Prine were the two most requested singer/songwriters that evening.

  Just as the yearning words and simple chord progressions of an early Neil Young composition “Sugar Mountain” settled into the air, Rusty’s eyes lit up as he picked up his guitar. He sang a ditty that began: “Last night when I got home, drunk as I could be. Saw another car parked, where my car ought to be.” When he finished I asked Rusty where he had picked up this song. “From an old drunk at a fiddlers’ convention in Union Grove, North Carolina. I thought it was fun, so I learned it,” came his instant reply. After musing for a few seconds, Rusty launched into John Prine’s “Paradise” and the rest of us joined him in singing the chorus about the long-gone, nostalgic days of Prine’s Muhlenburg County, Kentucky, youth.

  Tommy Jarrell. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Archive, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  During the course of daily living we rarely intellectualize the differences between the elements of traditional and popular culture in our lives. Nor do we necessarily make the distinction between what we perceive to be old and new. Most of us casually throw these ingredients into a cultural brew without thinking about it. Many self-taught musicians are like Rusty, who learns his songs from commercial phonograph records, friends, the radio, sheet music, and other musicians. Both “Our Goodman,” the eighteenth-century British ballad that Rusty casually learned from an anonymous musician, and his well-studied version of John Prine’s finely chiseled and sentimental “Muhlenburg County” represent the rang
e of the acoustic music that he enjoys. And both songs reflect Rusty’s unaffected proclivity for popular and folk music.

  Washington, D.C., my present home, is only 300 miles from bucolic Franklin County, Virginia, but in many ways it’s a different world. It is urban, 65 percent nonwhite (largely African American), and many of its young residents are firmly planted in the early-twenty-first-century world of hip-hop culture, music, and speech. Go-go is a form of local expressive black American culture unique to Washington, D.C.—music that developed in the middle 1970s with Chuck Brown (and his Soul Searchers) at its helm. Brown was in his early forties when go-go first hit the District’s nightspots, and he remains the “Godfather of Go-Go.”

  Chuck Brown, however, never left his North Carolina roots entirely behind—the fish fries, down-home blues, and Saturday night parties that were sometimes called “struts.” Slug-Go, one of the genre’s most cleverly named bands, came under Brown’s spell in the late 1980s. One of their show stoppers was “Go-Go Strut,” a tune inspired by Brown and one that calls to mind the virtuoso instrumental piano solos by early blues pianists such as Cow Cow Davenport and Cripple Clarence Lofton. These pieces intimate a public display of dancing, to sashay in public, to strut one’s “stuff”—an impulse that goes back to the nineteenth-century cakewalk in black American culture. “Display,” in the form of recognizing members of the audience, and “crews,” representing specific sections of the city as well as highly individualized styles of dancing, are integral to live go-go shows. Even in our postmodern era, certain elements of African American expressive culture associated with the Reconstruction South are not as far from the present day as we might think.