Folk Tales 1 - The Road to Stardom
It’s been an interesting summer, full of obligations and activity. I’ve spent much of it - for some reason - listening to folk music, following my memory to tunes that have had some influence on me these past 50 years, trying to learn a little more about where they came from, and what they really mean.
I’ve struggled to organize my thoughts about it all. Folk music is hard to pin down. The pre-history goes back centuries. When the Scots came to Virginia they brought their music with them. Danny Carnahan explains:
The Scottish emigrants brought centuries of songs and ballads—the sort of historical, semi-historical, and allegoric memories of home that in the 1880s folklorist Francis James Child collected in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads. New Scots-Americans made the songs their own, morphing them, switching out place names, and creating variations until “Mattie Groves,” “Two Sisters,” and “Fennario” were as American as they were Scots.
You can’t keep a good song down. This borrowing and repurposing is pervasive in American music, and everywhere else, too. There is an old Tin Pan Alley tune, “Right or Wrong”, that came out in 1921. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys recorded it it in 1936, with a fine vocal performance by Tommy Duncan (link). A few years ago I was in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and heard an old man playing it on an erhu (a Chinese two-stringed violin).
American folk music has plenty of this borrowing and shifting. Woody’s Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” is a reworking of The Carter Family’s "When the World's on Fire". But as the Baby Boom generation started to make their mark, the emphasis shifted toward artists that wrote their own materal. Some got so good at it that they broke through to mainstream stardom. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and James Taylor, among others, came up through the coffee house circuit. The transition was sometimes messy, as in 1965 when Dylan turned up at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band. It did not go well.
In happier times (1964) Source
For others, the changeover was smoother as people began to tell one another, “hey this folk singer’s really good.” If enough people do that, you’re not a folk singer anymore, you’re a star. Here are Joni Mitchell and James Taylor in 1970, just as they were crossing over:
It is easy to lose track of how young they were when they did this show. Mitchell was 27, but with three successful albums already to her credit. Taylor was just 22, but had two albums out, and had just recorded “Carolina in My Mind” with considerable help from the Beatles (Harrison on guitar, McCartney on backing vocals). Despite their youth, they were upping the ante in terms of musical quality and lyrical content. Woody Guthrie and Peter Seeger were icons to many, but neither produced such consistently beautiful and interesting original material.
The coffee houses also provided a platform for more politically-minded performers, but their influence has been overstated. The Boomers continued to intersperse some commentary, e.g., Mitchell’s “they won’t give peace a chance / that was just a dream some of us had” in the Paris Theater concert. But she wasn’t an ideologue, and most of the better performers of her generation were focused on art, not policy. The audience wasn’t paying to hear it in any case, and the most radical views - e.g., Guthrie and Seeger’s idealistic communism - undercut the impact of their better work. According to Wikipedia,
With the outbreak of World War II and the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the anti-Stalin owners of KFVD radio were not comfortable with Guthrie's political leanings after he wrote a song praising the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet partition of Poland. He left the station…
It’s not that their songs don’t resonate: if we’re singing American folk music, we are always drawing on a tradition of independent-mindedness and a certain amount of loathing for the boss. John Henry certainly hits the mark. But the thread of collectivism in America is pretty slender, and if one searches for the authentic voice of the people, it is unlikely that it will be quoting directly from the Fifth International.
This political dimension did inspire some brilliant parody. Two of my favorites:
Dylan notwithstanding, the next generation were generally cleverer about this. Dave Van Ronk sang Brecht songs (e.g., “As You Make Your Bed” - link), but to my ear these are less specifically political than Guthrie and Seeger’s work, and more concerned with the alienation and suffering of individuals. In 1998 Tom Paxton gave a talk on the political dimensions of folk music (linked below). It is thoughtful and educational, but for me his best work went a little more like this:
Woodstock really marked the beginning of the end of musical politics, in both folk and rock. It was a moment. Arlo Guthrie addressed the crowd: “Can you dig that? The New York State Thruway’s closed, man.” Certainly Woody never saw anything like it. Joni Mitchell missed the show, but wrote the best song about it. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young turned it into a rock anthem:
Mitchell, wiser than most, included some sly cuts (“maybe it’s the time of year”). She envisioned bombers “turning into butterflies above our nation,” but they did not do so, and American politics continued more or less as usual, only worse.
As the folk scene moved away from the political, it was also becoming more personal, even confessional. Mitchell was a prime mover. Her close contemporary, Neil Young, wrote the angsty “Sugar Mountain” before ascending to rock star status; Mitchell wrote “Circle Game” in response. Young was lucky: Mitchell was notoriously hard on the men in her songs, including at least several former lovers. I cannot find the quote, but Taylor (one of them) once groused that Mitchell’s songs about people close to her veered toward documentary accuracy.
Soon the young folk stars broke through to the mainstream, and the mainstream turned to meet them. In the late 60s and early 70s some of the biggest acts shifted toward “folk rock”. John Lennon went through an egregious Bob Dylan phase culminating with the excellent “Hide Your Love Away” on Rubber Soul:
Like all forms, folk has certain tonal preferences, despite the incredible variety of its output. The great folk songs are rarely cheerful - the coffeehouse style is reflective, and when we reflect our memories are often wistful, melancholy. In that sense we could argue James Taylor understood George Harrison better than Lennon and McCartney did. His marvelous 1970 rendition of Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone” is here.
As Taylor might say, The Beatles weren’t about to be left out of all of this. They’d originally built their brand on upbeat rockers and formulaic love songs. But the folk voice allowed them to broaden their range and express more complex emotions, as in “Norwegian Wood”, “In My Life”, “Blackbird”, and “Two of Us”. A million bands followed close behind. When the biggest rock act in America reunited in 1994, the opening number - featuring five men with acoustic guitars on their knees - wore its folk influences on its sleeve:
But as I go along, I think I am more interested in the performers that didn’t find so much mainstream success. Bob, Joni, Neil and James didn’t write all the good songs, not half, not even a tenth. Mitchell is an unparalleled talent, but she is Everest among the Himalaya. There’s a lot more to the thing.
To my mind, the best modern folk songs are sincere, but restrained. They don’t admit easy answers. They speak to the real feelings of ordinary people. And, the best ones are musically strong as well. This is what makes it such a demanding form, and why the failure rate is so damned high.
John Martyn’s “Head and Heart” was so good that America covered it on Homecoming…but I like his version better:
John Martyn - “Head and Heart” (1971)
John Prine wrote “Souvenirs” in a taxi, and it is singular. I’m not sure even Lennon or Mitchell could reach the plain spoken experience of everyday loss that he expresses here. Prine wasn’t always this perfect - who ever was? - but “Souvernirs” looks at something truly difficult to face, steadily. It is perfect.
John Prine - “Souvenirs” (1972)
In later years Prine dedicated performances of the song to Steve Goodman, who he used to run with. Here, they play it together.
Goodman died young, but he left us a song that can’t be placed anywhere but the folk tradition. He pitched it to Arlo Guthrie in a bar, who told him he could play until Guthrie finished his beer. The audition was successful: Guthrie bought the song and turned it into a hit. But here’s how Goodman played it:
I like trains better than almost anything else, and I supposed Goodman’s to blame. He’s awesome. As Updike said of Beerbohm, there’s not much, but what’s there is wonderful.
Folk music doesn’t have many love songs - the tradition is more concerned with memory and loss - but Goodman gave us a good one of those, too:
Are there still folk singers in America? Earnest young talents roaming the nation, guitars in hand, singing songs like this? Maybe? Maybe we need more. I know I do.
Danny Carnahan, “How Scottish Songs Came to America” - Acoustic Guitar (link)
Tom Paxton, “The Political Role of Music in the Sixties” - CSPAN (link)
Paul Zollo, “Behind The Song: ‘Souvenirs’ by John Prine” - American Songwriter (link)
“Studs Terkel discusses the songs by Steve Goodman and songwriter John Prine” - (link)