Songcatching

I've just finished reading a book called Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. He details the immense efforts of the recordists and collectors who, from the very early moments of the gramophone right down to the present day "saved" and distributed so many thousands of what we now call folk songs.

I found it enlightening to note that this most organic traditional music was already "dying" over a hundred years ago. Its life support system was electronic recordings.

Naturally the choices made in promoting and distributing those recordings had a huge effect on perceptions of the various idioms that fall under the catchall title of "folk."

It's interesting to leaf through sheet music in antique stores. The songs of the early 20th century that went from piano to piano in parlour after parlour (to give but one example) have largely been supplanted in our awareness by "authentic folk songs" that in many cases haven't been handed down from person to person, but have been passed along on record and tape. Both sheet music and electronic recordings serve the same purpose, but recordings do it better and the songs on those sheets can't compete. Likewise piano rolls.

Even the massive popularity of the guitar since the fifties has influenced what we want to retroactively call folk now, because we implicitly advance songs that are suited to playing on that ubiquitous instrument. Did you know there used to be a more ukes than guitars in North America? (A situation I would like to see reinstated.)

We also filter our ideas of folk through some of its prime practitioners, many of whom (Lightfoot, Dylan et al) are arguably better classified, at least when singing their own material, as pop singers. In an odd twist, Dylan is now a pioneering DJ on satellite radio; his show is re-awakening awareness of a lot of lost tidbits primarily from recorded culture that in turn represent lost or isolated or forgotten bits of organic culture. And the re-emergence of those kinds of sounds is always intriguing, whether on hi-fidelity satellite broadcast, podcasts, old records, or wherever.

I love listening to old folk recordings from the Maritimes, for example, where people are singing in a churchy style, with none of the vocal influence of gravelly blues, country & western and other "authentic" forms. Today that "straight" style would get you laughed off stage, although it was as authentic as anything else in its time.

You know what's a great folk tradition? Military tattoos. Another one I really miss is barbershop choruses and quartets. My uncles were barbershoppers and they learned everything they knew from mouth to ear. Purely organic. I want to hear a barbershop quartet and a pipe & drum band at a folk festival, but I haven't yet.

When it comes to what gets preserved today, the process of collecting and saving and distributing is being done increasingly online. Thus the Internet is not killing our culture as some people fear; it is a part of our culture. Just like those old Alan Lomax records were. Thanks to YouTube and iTunes I can play a barbershop quartet, a recording made from a Scot Joplin piano roll, an early vaudeville recording of Steven Foster "folk" songs, the Black Watch and the new Bob Dylan record all in a single playlist.

It's folking awesome.