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The residual power of folk

For at least a week now I have envisioned a headline here, "Is Folk Necessary?" but doing so involves footnoting a James Thurber book I never read and never saw after asking mother what it meant when my wandering eyes found it on an untended shelf downstairs.

She did not think her ten-year-old son needed yet to understand her particular affection for Is Sex Necessary? and there was wisdom in her choice. And, anyhow, I'm not much taken with humorists.

But it was she who raised me with folk music. Not, in the main, the real unvarnished stuff, not the Lomax field recordings, nor even the Harry Smith set. She likes beautiful, round voices: Paul Clayton, Jean Richie, Odetta, took Cisco Houston's versions of Woody Guthrie in preference to the originals. She liked the old songs and the traditions they were drawn from, but not the, um, caterwauling -- as she would put it -- of their original recordings. I suppose that's why Billy Faier still stands out for me: His elegant aggression with and around the banjo was unusual in her collection, and striking.

Regardless, I do not much listen to contemporary folk music. A handful of artists, notably Greg Brown, sure. But most of what I hear these days seems without power, a mostly empty form, a series of carefully learned earnest gestures. (And don't get me started about protest music. Now, with public opinion turning against our involvement in Iraq, the songs start to bubble loose. But my hat's off to Steve Earle and Elizabeth Cook and James McMurtry for having the courage to write powerful songs about (and, generally, in opposition to) that war when that wasn't a bankable choice.)

All of which came to mind originally as I listened to Appleseed's Sowing The Seeds -- The 10th Anniversary. This is a label I like and respect. Like Red House and Signature Sounds they're fighting a good fight as honorably as can be managed (and they released my co-editor's Mickey Newberry tribute, a good thing all around). Surviving ten years as a political folk music label is no small thing.

And this, anyway, is the tradition in which I was raised. Or one of them. Disc one of the two-disc package is titled "And Justice For All." And even with Pete Seeger all over it and Jackson Browne and Joan Baez dueting on "Guantanamera," Seeger and Bruce Springsteen pairing up for "Ghost Of Tom Joad" and all the rest, I kept finding myself wondering where the magic had gone. The power of Woody Guthrie's anti-fascist guitar, which, on a t-shirt today still has the power to challenge and offend, apparently.

Wondering if the magic had ever really been there, or if I was simply once too young to know better.

Right up until I began to feel tears forming. Tom Paxton is mostly just a name to me, one of the guys who wasn't quite as good as Dylan, and since I don't much listen to Dylan I've never had occasion to work backwards to Paxton. "The Bravest" isn't original to this compilation (it showed up first on 2002's Looking For The Moon), but it couldn't be. Nobody but a fraud could write this emotional a song about 9/11 from our present distance. It's not political. It's not from the point of view most liberal folk adopts. It's just true, that's all, the story of the men who went up those buildings knowing they'd never come down, and kept going up anyway.

And it hasn't lost its power these years later.

That's what I miss. That's why a great deal of modern folk music often leaves me as cold as last night's first frost; it doesn't come close to that songwriting standard. But it still can. And it's still necessary.

Posted by grant on October 29, 2007 10:22 AM | Permalink