Kaboom? Portable? Independent? What is folk music?

Maybe it is music, the continued existence of which depends upon the oral tradition. Additionally, it could be music that is closely woven into the social fabric of a given culture, reflecting an aspect (or aspects) of that culture. Or maybe it is music that demands that a person sing along whenever that music is heard. If the sing along idea is the case, then the Mitch Miller songbook, as well as most of the Chuck Berry songbook (Beatles, Stones etc.) should be considered. Louis Armstrong or Bill Broonzy (one or the other) may have said (and I paraphrase) that all music is folk music; have you ever heard a horse sing a song.

Thank you Kate for starting a blog, doing your fabulous show and starting us out with a relevant topic. Nothing winds down a perfect weekend better than 3 hours of your show on a Sunday night.

Folk music is music that I don't have to buy megabuck superbass speakers to listen to. It is music that I don't have to go look up the lyrics to on the internet. It is music that tells a story, teaches us about a time apart from our own, about people different from us yet that feel the same things we do. It is music that anyone can do with little or no equipment but some just do extraordinarily well. Folk artists have the unique ability to display rare talent while remaining uncommonly humble and approachable.

Unlike other forms of music the lyrics in folk are what powers the genre. The accompanying music is the facilitator of the message. A decent folk song MUST have both strong lyrics and music that can carry it.

Folk music is not about trying to reinvent the wheel but how you can put your personality and experience to music and make it your own.

Mainly, I think folk radio needs to focus at least half of its energy on giving exposure to rising members of the youngest generations in the folk tradition, while keeping alive the memory of the folk music of earlier generations. I may hope that the future holds lots of quiet, melodic thoughtful music, but I'm not the one who will be living in the folk community of the mid-21st century; the rising generations must be free to make folk music their own, even if that means it becomes more loud and electric, more harsh in its lyrics.

The core of folk music is anonymity and the public domain. The various kinds of music that were called traditional folk music in the past were all acoustic because there were few electric instruments before 1923, which is the current cutoff point for copyright. Music that was composed by known individuals before that point, and anonymous music that had been performed before that date could all be called folk music. This included music that had originally been classical (e.g. ragtime) and tin-pan-alley pop music. It also included Child Ballads and African Gullah tunes that were centuries old.

More recent musicians who played and sang music that sounded more or less like the old stuff could call themselves folk musicians because of that resemblance, even though they never played songs that were in the public domain and some of them lived on substantial royalties from their original compositions and arrangements. Singer-songwriters who stuck to traditional patterns and acoustic instruments slowly became the archetypal folk-singers. These included Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Mimi Farina, Odetta, the early Bob Dylan.

Pioneers like Buffy Sainte-Marie, who started out in acoustic traditional and singer-songwriter folk music added experimentally added new technology to the old forms, computer-synthesized sounds produced from voice and guitar in her case, electric guitar and bass in the case of Johnny Cash and Chet Atkins. Succeeding generations took the mixed acoustic-electric-electronic sounds they grew up singing along to and morphed them in unforeseen ways; Ani DiFranco is a good example.

For each new generation, the previous generation's experiments became part of their common heritage. The music they created was every bit as pure and sincere as that produced by earlier generations; their choice of instruments tempos, etc. may have been different, but who can help calling Dar Williams and Stan Rogers folk musicians. What about the Nields, the Mammals, Anais Mitchell, the Wailin Jennys.

And there is another dimension to all this. While the basis of traditional folk music in the US rested heavily on African-American and Anglo-American traditions, folk musics were growing up in parallel in all parts of the world. As communication grew better, US musicians were influenced by African traditional musicians, Latin-American traditional musicians, Middle-Eastern traditional musicians. And worldwide pop phenomena such as the Beatles influenced folk music as much or more as they did pop music: I bet you sat around singing beatles songs with your friends the same way people have always sung traditional songs. A couple of generations later, young folk musicians may not even realize that US folk music has not always included the rhythms of Hamza-al-Din and the harmonies of the Bulgarian State Women's Chorus.

1. So anything that has ever been called folk music is still folk music.

2. But more importantly, anything that young people in the folk lineage and tradition are writing, singing and playing today is legitimate folk music. I go further and say that NEW folk music is MORE important to be heard on the radio than old folk music, because it is only through the nourishing and support of new generations of folk musicians that folk music can survive. The intergenerational aspect of folk music may be its one essential characteristic. Young and old musicians must always be getting together and passing on what was good in the past to the youngest performers coming up. Established musicians must be open to learning new tricks from their younger peers, to avoid becoming frozen.

How do we know if a musician is in the folk lineage? First, I think folk music needs to be accessible and reproduceable in a social setting. You need to be able to sing along or clap along or join in a jam session. You need to be able to learn the words and notes and sing them or pick them out for yourself, adding your own stylistic elements. If a song needs to be reproduced just like the CD version with no improvisation, it is probably not folk. If a song requires (not just optionally but essentially) an electric instrument, it's probably not folk. Much though I like electronica, it cannot generally be scored for non-electronic instruments and voice alone; to learn and reproduce an electronica piece, one needs access to the same equipment the original composer/performer had. The performance cannot be exclusively from a high stage to a passive audience; it's not folk if it can't be played in low-budget and small venues. I would add that the music needs to be part of a community, although the community can now be a worldwide-web community as easily as a geographically-based community. True folk music will always be the mortal enemy of intellectual property rights: i.e. it can only thrive when people are free to build on the work of others. Pop music and country music (though maybe not jazz) all treat musicians and songwriters as islands whose creative "product" is inviolable. To make a living in folk music performers need to be constantly interacting with fans and other musicians in ways that labels and established pop musicians would find dangerous.