Traditional Music Today

My October reunion with old friends at Old Songs up in the Albany, NY area convinced me, once again, that there are far too few organizations celebrating and promoting traditional music in this singer-songwriter world that is the folk music revival these days. The field I entered back in then early 1970's, fueled by the energy and creativity of the many small folk music societies, was in the backwater of the Folk Boom (Mike Cooney calls it the Folk Scare) of the 1950's and 60's. Folk music had disappeared from the airwaves, both radio and television. (Yes, television, kids!) The major recording labels, the perfect personification of capitalism, had found that it could make money...lots of it...from folk music but, being the hungry beast it is, had used it up and was off looking for the Next Big Thing. And every now and then someone out of the folk music world is spotted, individually, as the Next Big Thing. It raises the hopes of others and, more and more, folk music became less and less discernable from the pop music of the day. The communities that rose up around homemade music across this country sponsoring jam sessions, dances, pot lucks and the occasional concert of some itinerant singer and became a vital community resource and a social network for thousands of people hungry for such participatory entertainment have, more often than not, morphed into concert production organizations or have died off altogether.

Now, don't get me wrong, many of these latter organizations are my hosts and friends across the country. But the handful of such organizations who still feature traditional folk music is small and growing smaller. But this past weekend's foray into the bastions of such focus... Nelson, NH, Hartford, CT and Woods Hole, MA...made me realize that this is my true home. Despite the fact that the vast majority of what I perform are original songs and stories I somehow am not seen as part of the singer-songwriter world. I'm a folksinger.

Now I'm schooled enough in folklore and ethnomusicology to know what traditional music is. And what it is not. And, by any measure, I am not a traditional musician. But the Folk Scare of the 50-60's is long enough ago and far enough away from today's sensibilities to be seen as "traditional" by today's popular standards. And this was brought home to me this fall when the Grammy pool for nominations was published. I had submitted This Fire for consideration and, considering that it is made up of entirely recently composed material (with the lone exception of "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," a Pete Seeger composition) I had filed it in the Contemporary Folk Music category. When the listings came out, however, it was in the pool for Traditional Folk Music. I was confused enough by this detour to contact one of the people I know on the Grammy committee that makes such determinations. She told me that the world is turned upside down right now and there is considerable discussion about how to handle people who come "out of the tradition" yet work in the modern recording world. "Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would have to be in the Traditional Music category given today's mile-wide definition of contemporary folk music," she claimed.

I have a hard time imagining Pete Seeger, the Harvard-educated product of an erudite New England family, somehow being in the same "tradition" as Roscoe Holcomb, a retired coal miner and construction worker from Daisy, KY. But the point is more than blood and breeding. When the music is less about "me" and more about "we", when it reaches back as well as forward, when the songs are, as my friend and East Lansing, Michigan DJ, Bob Blackman says, "about things" I guess it might be seen as coming from the same wellspring. When Pete and Roscoe each sing

"Little birdie, little birdie, come sing to me your song
"I've a short time to be here with you
"And a long time to be gone"

I know they somehow share some common ground. It may not show up on the dinner table or in the church pew or in the voting booth or on their tax returns, but in that place, in a diverse, rich community where we are able to meet and drink from the same well there is a sense of Common Wealth.

And that is what I love about the folk music societies that, despite market forces and DJ playlists and the New Big Thing continue to celebrate and support what it is that got this whole thing started. God bless 'em, they're my family.