The Problem of Defining Folk
The question of ‘What is Folk music?’ is complicated. In the right company it can bring on heated discussions about how we see it and what is or isn’t included under the umbrella. Within the public consciousness most genres of music have a basic cultural shorthand, a simplified - “if it sounds like this then it is that”, which leads to horrific cataloguing decisions like finding B.B. King in the easy listening section of HMV. In music education the understanding of genres gets a little more meat put on its bones. Blues is defined by its chord progressions and rhythm, Jazz by the approach that musicians take to play it. Rock is generally about the instrumentation and overall sound whereas Reggae has a distinctive groove. Fans of any of these genres will easily argue why these definitions aren’t good enough and produce examples of where they falter, but for the most part they serve the simple purpose of giving us a framework when discussing music in general, as well as making it easier for record stores to organise the vinyl. They are simplistic core ideas that give each genre an overall character. Folk music is no different. For the most part, something is definitely folk if it has fiddles or a banjo in it, probably folk if it’s mainly acoustic instruments and it is close to being folk if it’s a little weird and nobody quite knows where what label to put it under. But this all falls incredibly short of explaining what folk music is.
If we want to be pedantic about things then you will likely point out that the word folk means people or kin. So folk music is literally speaking, music of the people. But this is no less of an ambiguous definition as it could include all music, being that all music is made by people. Folk music is international, it exists all over the world. Where Blues and Jazz come from America with Rock being its delinquent offspring and Reggae hailing from Jamaica, Folk is universal - in that every culture has it. The Folk music of France sounds very different to the Folk music of Britain. Go further afield to South America or Africa and you will find huge differences in what folk music is when compared to our own, but it is still all folk music. So what is it that connects them? It’s certainly not instrumentation, or chord structures. People connect it, but as mentioned above, this is not a road to go down unless you want to get lost. Other definitions I have heard have been ‘It’s music of the working class’ and ‘it’s music that’s old, forgotten and rediscovered’. Both of which have big problems. One) that there are many folk musicians out there from all levels of society and two) this would negate the possibility of any ‘new’ folk music being written or performed.
The 1954 Definition
In an effort to further understand the music I have been playing for nearly thirty years I have been searching out definitions of folk music to see whether they stand up in today’s world. Whether they, or even elements of them can bring us a greater understanding and appreciation of folk music. Rather than adding another definition of folk music to the pile, I want to search for the common thread that ties it all together.
I’m going to start in 1954.
I started reading A. L. Loyds book ‘Folk Song in England’, which was published in 1967, right towards the end of the British Folk Revival, which provided us with bands such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. In the opening chapter of this book he writes about a definition of Folk Music that was laid out by the International Folk Music Council in 1954. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I want to pause and take some time to think upon this definition as a starting point, and see what we can extrapolate from it for our modern view of folk music.
The definition reads:
Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission.
The factors that shape the tradition are:
i) Continuity which links the present with the past.
ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or group, and
iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.
The Three Pillars (continuity, variation, community)
The opening line of this definition states that folk music needs to have evolved through oral transmission, by people playing songs to each other, learning them, playing them, passing them on to the next generation. Taken at face value it opens up the question of whether folk music can or should be written down? But I think the larger point here is that through time it has been often passed on from person to person casually, rather than being formally taught. Folk songs have been written down for posterity for a very long time, and the only reason I can think of to write a song down is so that somebody else could learn it. Whatever the intentions of the writers of this definition were, we shouldn’t take the term ‘oral transmission’ too literally, I am content for now with the idea that we can read it as ‘not formally taught’.
i) Continuity which links the present with the past.
Here we stand on firmer ground, or so you would think. Obviously folk music is about songs from our past, the stories our ancestors told that became a part of our culture, right? But how do we explain away that when these songs were written, they weren’t historical, they were current. Songs like Turpin Hero and Captain Kidd’s Farewell were written either during the lifetime or at least fairly shortly after the death of the protagonist. So does this suggest that these songs were not folk music when they were written, but became folk music as they were taken up and played by people? This is a theory I have heard before in relation to folk music, one that ends up with songs like Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes or Queen’s We Are The Champions becoming folk music purely because they have been taken up and sung widely by the people. Then there is new folk music, there are plenty of fantastic musicians around today writing music that we term folk. Are they really playing folk music? Their music is not learnt from an oral tradition, it’s written. There is no variation and the community hasn’t taken these songs up yet. Are they just pretending to be folk, just a shadow of what folk really is that lets us catalogue their music easily, or is there something else within the music that intrinsically links it to the folk music that has come before them?
ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or group.
This part of the definition I can certainly get on board with. For me, music has always been about creativity. In the context of folk music, this would appear to suggest that not only is it ok to take a traditional song and make it your own, but it is in fact essential to do that for it to be folk music. People who know me will not be surprised that I am fully signed up to this idea. Playing a piece of music, whether that is a song or a symphony, in as near to exactly the same way that someone has done it before is academic. I’m not saying it is a bad thing to do, I’m just saying that it is for study purposes, it is to learn the structures, harmonies and playing styles of those who have come before you. It is not your music, it is somebody else’s. Continuity without variation becomes reenactment. So if making the music that you play your own is a part of the definition of what folk music is then maybe we have something here that we can hold onto, something that may help us on the search.
iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.
Now we’ve been here before. The element of folk music that brings it back to the people, not just the musicians. For folk music to continue it needs to be given life, and that life has to be given by people choosing to play it, but also to listen to it. Or does it? Much of the traditional folk music in Britain would have been lost and forgotten if it wasn’t for Cecil Sharp and other song collectors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nursery rhymes like Baa Baa Black Sheep and Rock-a-bye Baby last well as they are sung to children, who remember them and sing them to their children, but these may be the last bastions of a truly oral tradition. Most of the traditional folk music you will find on Spotify is only around today because musicians have researched the songs, gone through lists of songs collected by those song collectors from a hundred years ago or learned them from listening to music by artists who have done that work previously. So does this mean we should have let these songs die? Because they weren’t organically selected by the people, are they no longer folk music but another academic endeavour that has no real meaning when it comes to music in our day to day lives?
Does It Still Stand Today?
When looking at this definition, it is important to remember that it was written in 1954. This is still post war life when communities were strong, rock ‘n’ roll hadn’t taken hold yet and three years before Burt Weedon’s Play in a Day would hit the shelves. Learning popular music at home, on your own for fun, wasn’t quite what it was to become. Easy to read song books with guitar tab and chord boxes were only in their infancy. There is a romantic view of folk music. That it comes from small communities who teach the songs of their grandparents to their children, playing sessions in the local pub on a Friday night. This is certainly something that has happened, and still does all over the world, but in our western society those communities have mostly disappeared, there are a few examples left in Britain but they are a definite minority. Perhaps we need to start moving back towards these ideas by bringing music playing back into our daily lives?
So does this mid-twentieth century definition stand up in today’s folk music world? There are some problems. The oral tradition is largely lost and formal teaching of folk music has become commonplace, and in a world where communities are spread out or exist online there is unlikely going to be a resurgence of it for a while. Variation with the folk music world is still evident, there are many versions of the same song, and quite often these versions can be so different that they are almost unrecognisable as being from the same genus. But then there is new music being written too, songs that would fit comfortably into our idea of what folk is, so can we see this as a common thread? More investigation is going to be required. And the selection of songs by the community is a troubled idea too, with communities being disenfranchised by our society’s addiction to digital life there is less and less human interaction. But all is not lost, look at the sudden rise in popularity of sea shanties a few years ago, that was due to a viral video on the internet. People still sing together in sports stadiums and pubs all over the world, even if the music being sung isn’t what we would place in the folk section of our record collection. This is where we as a society need to start making some decisions. Do we try and find a way of adapting the community aspect of folk music to fit in with the modern world, or do we fight to return to a social species that gathers and plays music together for no other reason than connection to our fellow Homo Sapiens. I don’t know the answer to that, but I suspect that it lies somewhere between the two.
Perhaps we should think of folk music as a living organism, which requires a symbiotic relationship between its many parts. Continuity, variation and community all working as one, but if one of those disappears then something essential changes.
What do you think? Is there a common thread which links folk music together?
What are your memories and experiences in folk music as a community based social activity?
What songs can you remember learning outside of a formal setting?
I’m not a guru. The world has far too many people who put themselves out into the digital world claiming that they have the one and only answer. My writing is based on my own experiences in teaching and playing, there are other opinions and I want to hear them. None of us have learnt everything and through discussion we can learn from each other. So please let me know if you agree, disagree or have something to add.
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