Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Henry Sapoznik. Klezmer: Jewish Music from Old World to Our World. New York: Schirmer Books, 1999. Sapoznik does an outstanding job of not only profiling some of the genres most interesting and outstanding musicians (such as Dave Tarras), he also provides a historical overview of the genre.

  Ann Savoy. Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, Vol. 1. Gretna, LA: Bluebird Press, 1984. Although this is primarily a songbook, it is interspersed with interviews, background information, and photographs.

  Mark Slobin. Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. The author takes a careful and close look at klezmer as an American musical phenomenon. It’s neither a history nor a survey of the field, rather Slobin looks at this music from a variety of perspectives and approaches.

  Mark Slobin, ed. Klezmer: The Evolution of an American Micromusic. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. This edited volume features essays that focus on klezmer from musical, cultural, and historical perspectives.

  Willie Smyth, ed. Spirit of the First People: Native American Music Traditions of Washington State. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. This book consists of essays that explore not only the history, but the variety of Native American musics found in Washington and adjoining states and provinces.

  Michael Tisserand. The Kingdom of Zydeco. New York: Arcade Press, 1998. Based on oral histories and interviews, this book relates the history and development of this form of African American music in southwestern Louisiana.

  Judith Vander. Songprints: The Music Experiences of Five Shoshone Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. A scholarly and accesible study of the lives and music of contemporary Shoshone women.

  Judith Vander. Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs In A Great Basin Context. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Don’t be put off by the unwieldy title; this is an important book that follows up on Vander’s earlier, more highly focused look at Shoshone women’s music.

  Sean Williams and Lillis O. Laoire. Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Born in 1919 and a New York City resident from 1965 until his death in 1982, Heaney brought his older style of Irish singing to new audiences across the United States for nearly twenty years before his death in 1984.

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

  Balfa Brothers. Various. Les Blues de Balfa. Aginsky Productions/Folkstreams.net. The Balfa brothers (Dewey, Rodney, and Will) are the focus of this film about family, music, and Cajun culture.

  Clifton Chenier. Hot Pepper: The Life and Music of Clifton Chenier. Flower Films. A portrait of the late, undisputed “King of Zyedco.”

  Popovich Brothers. The Popovich Brothers of South Chicago. Facets Multimedia/Folkstreams.net. A portrait of a family of musicians—who play tamburitza music—who are at the heart of the Serbian-American community of south Chicago.

  Various. A Jumpin’ Night at the Garden of Eden. Michael Goldman/Folkstreams.net A substantial documentary about the history of Klezmer from the teens through its 1970s revitalization and into the 1980s.

  Various. Del Mero Corazon (“Straight from their Heart”): Love Songs of the Southwest. Flower Films. Norteno music and culture is the focus of this documentary.

  Various. Cajun Country: Don’t Drop the Potato. Vetapol 13077/Folkstreams.net. Denis McGee, Wade Fruge, the Hackberry Ramblers, and Bois Sec Ardoin are among the featured performers in this Alan Lomax conceived project about horse racing, bar-room dancing, cattle drives, and music, which is part of the “American Patchwork” series.

  Various. Every Island has its Own Songs: The Tsimouris Family of Tarpon Springs. Florida Department of State/Folkstreams.net. Food, family, and Greek bagpipe music can be found here.

  Various. From Shore to Shore. Cherry Lane Productions/Folkstreams.net This film explores Irish/Irish American music in the twentieth century.

  Various. In Heaven There Is No Beer. Flower Films. A light-hearted but thoroughly ethnographic look at polka music in our nation’s heartland, featuring legendary performers like Jimmy Sturr, Walt Solek, and Eddie Blazonzyck.

  Various. J’ai Ete Au Bal (“I Went to the Dance”). Flower Films. A wonderful documentary about Cajun and zydeco music featuring such masterful musicians as the Balfa Brothers, Queen Ida, and Dennis McGhee.

  Various. Keep Your Heart Strong: Life Along the Pow-Wow Trail. Intermedia Arts Minnesota. This film explores the phenomenon of contemporary Native American powwows.

  Various. Kuma Hula: Keepers of a Culture. Rhapsody Films. A detailed study of hula music and dancers, which was shot in the late 1980s by Robert Mugge.

  Various. Medicine Fiddle. Up North Film/Folkstreams.net. A brief film about the Menoninee and Ojibwe fiddlers and step dancers whose creolized traditions are linked to the fur trade and lumber camps.

  Various. Polka from Cuca. Ootek Productions. This documentary combines interviews, performances, and dance footage of a 1994 gathering of Norwegian, Polish, Slovenian, and other local bands that recorded for the Cuca label in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in the 1960s.

  Various. Spend It All. Flower Films. This is a lusty look at Cajun culture, which highlights the music of Marc Savoy, Nathan Abshire, and others.

  Various. That’s Slack Key Guitar. Vestapol 13039. Each of the seven slack-key Hawaiian guitar masters tells their own story in words and music. The players include Raymond Kane, Ledward Kaapana, and Dinan Aki.

  Various. The Last of the Klezmer. Yale Strong Films. A documentary about some of the klezmer pioneers, such as Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein, during the twilight of their careers.

  Various. Wisconsin Powwow and Naamikaaged: Dancer for the People. Smithsonian Folkways 48004. A two-video documentary about the importance of powwows for contemporary Native Americans. The first video provides an overview, while the second focuses upon a young Ojibwe dancer, Richard La Fernier, as he prepares for a powwow. The videos are accompanied by an excellent booklet that describes an Ojibwa powwow in great detail.

  Various. Ziveli! Medicine for the Heart. Flower Films. Les Blank’s warm look at Serbian-American expressive culture, foodways, and music in northern California and Chicago.

  Chapter 9

  THE HISPANIC AMERICAN DIASPORA

  • The Southwest

  • Florida

  • New York City

  • Final Thoughts

  In this chapter we will explore the immensely important, diverse, and burgeoning Hispanic musical presence in the United States, focusing on the Southwest, south Florida, and New York City. These sections of the country have long welcomed immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. These waves of immigration have resulted in a mixture of folk and popular styles with strong and lasting ties to home that help to bring the world closer. Despite the fact that there are many examples of Hispanic American musical communities and traditions throughout the United States, this chapter will concentrate on the Mexican American (and tangentially to Native American) traditions heard along the Texas, Arizona, and California borderlands, Cuban American and Nicaraguan music from south Florida, and Puerto Rican styles in New York City.

  Hispanic American folk and folk-based music is very closely related to styles brought from their native countries. Most groups have been here long enough to begin the process of acculturation and fusion to create truly Americanized forms, such as conjunto or chicken scratch. This chapter will also discuss styles of folk and folk-based (sometimes called “folklorico”) music that are heard throughout the United States and that have enriched the music brought to us by Spanish-speaking musicians. Such interaction is perhaps best illustrated by mariachi music, which draws upon folk and popular elements and also largely ignores the political borders that divide Mexico from California or Texas.

  This mixture of folk and popular elements in mariachi as well as Mexican and Mexican American elements points out the complex nature inherent in any discussion of folk music found among such a broad and diverse group of
peoples. Mariachi, for example, is included in this chapter precisely because of this blend in addition to the fact that many Mexican Americans view it as authentic music that reflects their heritage and “Mexican-ness.” The Hispanic and Hispanic American folk music that you will be reading about here reflects the vitality, energy, and interactive nature of these musical forms and the communities from which they spring.

  Perhaps more than in any other part of this book, the fluid nature of music—its ability to cross culturally constructed lines, such as “elite,” “classical,” and “race,” we use to demarcate boundaries—is clearly evident. Most of the Hispanic American genres discussed in this chapter have their roots in folk music, but the intersections with popular idioms in particular are conspicuous throughout this chapter. In many of its aspects, this chapter complements chapter 11, which discusses the impact that Afro- and Anglo-American folk genres have had on popular music in the United States, and chapter 8, which looks at other styles that add to the diversity of American music. The present chapter further underscores the dynamics of musical culture change, the complex nature of ethnic identity as expressed through music, and the increasing impact that Hispanic culture (not only in music but also in foodways and literature) is having upon the United States in general.

  The impact of Hispanic culture in the United States is only going to increase. During the late twentieth century, Americans of Hispanic descent—both newly arrived immigrants and people whose ancestry can be traced back to the eighteenth century—have been the most rapidly growing minority in the United States. The most recent waves of immigrants include hundreds of thousands of political, social, and economic refugees who have fled war-torn Central American countries, such as Guatemala, over the past twenty-five years. The Washington, D.C., metropolitan region, for example, is home to the second-largest Salvadorian enclave outside of El Salvador (Los Angeles is home to the largest number of displaced Salvadorians). Countless Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Colombians call New York City and northern New Jersey home. This trend began early in the twentieth century, although Cuban immigration substantially increased at the end of the 1950s when Castro came to power. The musical traditions that arrived with the immigrants have remained largely isolated within their own communities. Occasionally, though, some form of Latin popular music will exert its impact on the Anglo-American mainstream. Beginning with the tango, which first hit the United States in 1913 by way of a popular Broadway show, dance-related forms such as rumba, samba, mambo, bossa nova, and salsa reach out of their own neighborhoods and into our living rooms in (approximately) fifteen-year cycles.

  These waves exemplify the trendy and hip nature of our popular culture and underscore both its ephemeral nature and its insatiable thirst for the exotic and the new. One only has to look at the resurgence of popular interest in both 1930s swing and 1950s “lounge” music during the early 2000s to find another set of examples of this phenomenon. Most of these dance-oriented forms are, for better or worse, largely removed from the folk culture that produced them. If a dance remains popular within its community, the dance tends to remain more closely tied to its origins. “Bomba” (a Puerto Rican folk dance) is still closely linked to the drums that are so integral to its performance; one syncretic form of religious folk songs, “coritos,” praise songs utilized by some Hispanic Pentecostalists, bears the unmistakable stamp of black American music, and ultimately of West Africa, in its use of a strophic form and antiphony. Furthermore, the Puerto Ricans’ use of electric guitars, reed instruments, and drums reflects contemporary black American Pentecostal performance practices.

  Despite the frequent ghettoization of this musical culture, the Hispanic influence remains quite profound and the presence of Latinos along our southern borders is a fact of life and has been for decades. Citizens of Del Rio, Texas, or Tucson, Arizona, think nothing of hearing Spanish spoken on the streets, and the contentious issues surrounding bilingual education (should English be our “official language?”) became a major political issue in California in the early 1990s and continues today. But for most people living in Maine or North Dakota, for instance, Mexico and Cuba and Costa Rica seem to be a world apart—especially in February. Nonetheless, the impact of Spanish language, foodways, and music is being increasingly felt across the entire United States. Nowhere is the impact of Hispanic culture more profound than across the Southwest.

  THE SOUTHWEST

  Much of what is now called the Southwest (that vast expanse between Texas and California) was initially explored and claimed as Spanish territory by the late sixteenth century. This is an extremely dry and warm portion of the United States and consists of several unique cultural and physical regions with their own distinctive characteristics. The “four corners” (the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah) is both rugged, rural, and home to Pueblo and Navajo people. This thinly populated section of the Southwest stands in strong contrast to the urban maze of Los Angeles that is home to so many Mexican Americans and others who immigrated from El Salvador as well as dozens of other countries. So, while the southwestern states share a few characteristics, the cultures within them are as distinctive as the people who populate this land.

  It is impossible to understand the cultural history of the Southwest without a brief discussion of the role of Catholic missionaries who arrived in the New World from across the entirety of Europe. Missionaries brought not only their own religious convictions but also previously unknown crops, animals, and—most unfortunately—diseases. They also brought their ways of dress, architecture, and music. And many of the missionaries were Franciscans, who held music in high esteem and included vocal and instrumental instruction as part of their objective. In New Mexico, for example, by the time of the Indian rebellion, which lasted from 1680 until almost 1700, they had established some two dozen missions. The Franciscans established themselves later in presentday California and by the 1820s the order had founded some twenty-one missions, many of them along the coast between San Diego and San Francisco. At these missions the friars sang Gregorian chants, performed religious drama that included songs, and a few of the missions even installed organs. So much of the Hispanic music, especially along the Mexican/American border, is touched by this cross-fertilization of Spanish and European tradition, which began several decades ago yet continues to reverberate today.

  A sign from 1999, proclaims the Seventh Annual Conjunto Music Festival held in San Benito, Texas. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  Mexico, which touches nearly 1,000 miles of the border along Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, has provided the United States with more citizens than any other country in Central or South America. Until the late twentieth century our southern border was rather casual, with the Rio Grande River providing the dividing point along the vast stretches between Texas and Mexico. For so much of its length, however, one can literally step over or wade through the river—a fact that invites border crossings, increases the commerce between the two countries, and generally enhances the cultural interaction between Mexico and the United States. In many fundamental ways that reflect basic cultural values, the differences between border towns in the United States and their Mexican counterparts such as Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Mexico; El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; or Nogales (a name shared both by Arizona and Mexico) are often difficult to discern.

  Fortunately, several scholars with a special interest in Mexican American folk music have published important studies since the middle 1970s. The eldest, Americo Paredes, for many years taught courses in folklore and English at the University of Texas. His special interest in the folk songs and ballads about life and strife along the border culminated in a highly respected study, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. More recently ethnomusicologist Manuel Pena published The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music, a book that surveys the hi
story and development of the best-known and most widespread genre of Hispanic American folk music. Finally, anthropologist Jose Limon’s work on the expressive culture along the border, including music, is most widely available in his book, Dancing with the Devil.

  Tex-Mex Music

  Mexico is clearly the wellspring for most of the Hispanic folk music performed in the southwestern United States. Mexican Americans are primarily concentrated along the border states and into Colorado; however, they represent an increasing presence in the Midwest. The Chicago metropolitan area has a large Hispanic population, primarily of Mexican heritage. A similar growth in the Hispanic population holds true for smaller cities, such as Omaha and Des Moines. Along the Mexican/American border many of the older citizens refer to themselves as “Tejanos,” especially those with decades-long ties to the United States. Many younger people refer to themselves as Chicanos in recognition of the raised consciousness brought about by the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though largely a black American political and social movement, the spirit of civil rights served to awaken many Mexican Americans to the injustices they, too, endured. Labor organizer Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta (co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association), singers Linda Ronstadt and Selena, along with politician Henry Cisneros are among the better-known Chicanos and Chicanas to emerge on the political, entertainment, and social scene since the 1960s.

  Not surprisingly the music of most Chicanos is most closely tied with Mexico’s norteno styles that come from its northernmost states and that developed at the close of the nineteenth century. In the United States these regional forms of music are usually grouped under the name Tex-Mex, perhaps chauvinistically, because so much of the music and its culture is concentrated along the lengthy border of Texas and Mexico. Musica Tejanos is another, slightly older term that describes much the same musical culture, one that occasionally reflects not only its Anglo and Mexican background but also the occasional influence of Caribbean, French, and African American music. The French introduced or solidified the popularity of dances such as polkas, waltzes, and mazurkas, and it was German immigrants, many of whom began settling in central Texas in the middle nineteenth century, who helped to reinforce the presence of the accordion. During Reconstruction Tejano bands consisting of guitars, violins, and a small variety of wind instruments were regaling dancers across all of southern Texas.