Folk Struggles to Redefine Itself In the Age of Urbanization

I wrote this for my ENG 102 class. Blatant academic content:

In the United Nations report World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision, the percentage of people living in urban areas was 46.6% in 2000. Humanity is crossing the line, and soon more than half the world population will live in cities if they aren’t already. The number of topics that this statistic is relevant to has to be bigger than the number of hairs on my head, but I am going to apply it to something that may seem frivolous: folk music. The reason is simple, folk music has its roots in rural areas. As populations of rural areas decline, it follows that folk traditions from those areas also decline. Many of these traditions survive in some way, because enough people care to preserve them, and some get transformed by the city into things like rock and roll and hip-hop, but I assume that very few, if any, ever truly get erased completely. Traditions, like any other social construct, must change in order to remain relevant, and must sometimes be forgotten for a while, so that other traditions may rise and take their place.

Aside from the artistic associations with folk, there are more intangible elements at work that drive its development and perpetuation. Things like community, sharing, personal relationships, and individual style or taste. Folk, I believe, is better defined by these elements, rather than its manifestations. Things “folk” vary so widely from place to place that it’s safe to assume that traditions are locally determined, and spread outward from their point of origin until they are no longer relevant. Folk traditions have, to an extent, been transplanted from other locales, but they have also been modified, to a greater extent, to reflect the local climates in which they caught on. In October, 1938, and article by Arthur L. Rich titled “American Folk Music” appeared in Music and Letters. In it, he describes two forms of American folk music, African-American (what he calls Negro) spirituals, and American versions of “seventeenth and eighteenth-century European folksongs brought to the country by the colonists.” (451) Much has changed since 1938, and I also suspect that Rich did not get into enough nooks and crannies to get a more panoramic view of the American folk music landscape. However, he does provide a wide basis for folk music influence that can still be traced back today. But today, folk traditions are in massive upheaval in America due to the amazing power of urban industry to commercialize virtually every facet of life.

What happens to things like rock-and-roll and hip-hop? They become “genres.” They explode in popularity, then they begin to struggle with “corporate control and cooptation” (Powell, 2). Kevin Powell describes himself as a “hip-hop head for life” in his article My Culture at the Crossroads, which appeared in Newsweek on October 9, 2000. His article laments the “materialistic, hedonistic, misogynistic, shallow and violent” character that dominates hip-hop. The same could be said for rock-and-roll, only it’s been happening for a longer period of time. I didn’t write this paper to whine about the bloated commercialism of the music industry slapping you in the face every time you go outside the house, but it is important to understand this connection: Cities promote industry, and industry only cares about more industry.

Traditional folk music is genuine and organic. People in rural areas play music for themselves and their friends, and while it may make them more popular in their immediate locale, most are not hoping for record deals. This is where urbanization, and therefore, capitalism plays its role. In more developed regions of the world, the percentage of people living in cities has been more than 50% since the 1950s. In America, the urban population was 64.2% in 1950 and 67.2% in 1955. Something happened during this time in America: Pete Seeger. The American folk-song revival swept the country and people sang Seeger songs together at home or at his live performances where he would conduct thousands of people by waving his arms. If you get a chance, watch The Power of Song and see it yourself. Plenty of folk “revivalists” were right behind Seeger like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie (the son of Woody Guthrie, who wrote the song This Land is Our Land and whom Seeger traveled with). But as beautiful a man as Pete Seeger was, I think the urbanization of America had more to do with his success than people think. In the 1950s, it was a folk revival because people in cities had been listening to jazz and ragtime and whatever else, and rural “folks” were moving to the city in larger numbers. Many people in cities had probably forgotten about folk music, so bringing their folk culture to the forefront of music popularity came naturally; the time was right.

Of course, migrants from the countryside always bring folk traditions to the city, but in time, the city transforms them and absorbs them into the industry. There is an interesting thing that takes place following a massive injection of creativity like the American folk-song revival. Early artists like Seeger, Guthrie, Baez, and Dylan are immortalized and become the legends to which all other followers of that mainstream genre aspire to be. For rock-and-roll music you have artists like Elvis Priestly, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly. For country music it's Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash. For rhythm and blues it's The Supremes, The Temptations, and the Four Tops. Curiously, most of the legends of mainstream music became famous within roughly two decades of each other, and very close to the shift from rural to urban life in America. Also happening at this time is the jump from radio to television broadcasting. While televisions were commercially available in the 1930s, shows that promoted musicians like “The Ed Sullivan Show” (1948-1971) and the “Johnny Carson Show” (1955-1992) were taking off in popularity during the same time. Legendary artists had brand new legendary mass communication devices. While the early days of television and rock-and-roll may seem romantic now, they seem to have only provided templates for successors. Now instead of Ed Sullivan introducing Elvis Priestly, there is David Letterman introducing Fall Out Boy. I don't know about you, but I don't think we've come a long way when I have to compare Fall Out Boy to Elvis. But, I do digress.

And then there comes the label of “urban folk.” The concept of an original artistic movement arising out of the bowels of the city, and so it turns out that folk is no longer a just rural phenomenon. Hip-hop is a prime example of this. It was a true urban folk art at the onset, but it has now been formulated to embrace its corporate puppet masters. Record companies have come to expect this kind of turn-around, and will never stop looking for the “next big thing.” And most of the time, innovators are all too willing to sign themselves up to be rich and famous. When “urban folk” is used by the New York Times to describe a musician who topped the Billboard’s country-album charts for three weeks in 1994 (NY Times 11-08-84, p. 14, Op.), you start to realize that “urban folk” is simply another label. Everywhere there are “scenes” waiting to be discovered, and scouts from record labels crawl all over the paved ground, judging the worthiness of acts trying to be picked up. Well, maybe that's not very accurate, but that's the sort of image that aspiring artists get in their heads; “If I can just get enough attention, I can be famous!”

So what do folk artists do now? NPR did a spot on All Things Considered on January 22, 2009 that highlighted what some city dwellers may not be familiar with. A sub-culture of folk musicians who travel from town to town playing “old-timey” music at house parties and backyard cookouts. This seems to be the kind of folk I am looking for; containing a hearty amount of those intangibles I mentioned earlier like community, sharing, and personal relationships. They collect cassette and reel-to-reel tapes of each others music, and work quietly and closely together to preserve American folk traditions. Music that has been passed down by oral tradition and is now being archived by a number of different groups. “It’s what came before bluegrass.” (Gura 1) The group in the spot is called The Field Recorders’ Collective and I have trolled around on the site for hours listening to audio clips. They sell CDs, but “after (covering) costs, they send the rest of the money to the families of the musicians they recorded.” (Gura 2)

Or the artists could do as the Celts: don’t move to the city. “Celt Appeal” appeared in National Geographic in March, 2006. On the most western edges of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall (England), Brittany (France), and Galicia (Spain), Celtic culture and, in some places, Celtic language are still very much alive. Pretty remarkable for a civilization that was invaded, driven to the far fringes, and had their customs and religions outlawed centuries ago. Admittedly, there are accounts of most of these villages being full of mostly aging Celts, with their children and grandchildren being too cool to speak Gaelic and moving to the bigger cities inland as soon as they get the chance. But the U.K. has remarkably been working for decades to teach Gaelic though a government-funded agency in Scotland. (O'Neil 3) The Celtic culture mysteriously has as a wide appeal as well. The article mentions a Japanese couple who got married in the ruins of a Celtic Temple, and who knows how many tourists flock to see the great Stonehenge every day. So, an artistic movement that entrenches itself in the fringes of society and develops itself independently regardless of the hustle and bustle of the mainstream could succeed like the Celts have.

But the city is really where the focus must be, because from now on, that's where most of the people are. There is a very unsettling thought that I kept getting while I wrote about this and it has to to with the concept of distance. While more people lived in rural areas, they were physically a greater distance apart from one another. Now though, in cities, people are living close to each other, but are emotionally distant. There seem to be cliques everywhere you look, where small bands of trusted friends hang out or work together, but the random encounter on the sidewalk isn't even an encounter. More than half the time, people don't make eye contact in public. I think that what distance does for folk music, is that it allows small niches or “tribes” to develop within cities. This already takes place in a similar way with schools, neighborhoods, churches, and even fraternities and sororities, but very few of these splinters of the city revolve around music the way so may tribal and rural cultures did. After a while people will find again the close knit sense of community that centers around music, but first musicians and artists will have to consciously stop supporting the mass industry that undermines their own success.