Re: What's a folk song?

Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 08:53:27 +0100
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Size: 1,569 bytes

in article email-address-deleted, bongo boy at
email-address-deleted wrote on 7/21/03 6:48 AM:
> Music of the Folk. I like that phrase better than folk music or folk
> songs.
> Similarly, 'Music of the World' is better than 'World Music.' By
> stretching
> the phrase out a bit, you can slow people down for a brief moment and
> maybe
> help kill the degrading and meaningless marketing terms like 'Celtic'
> or 'Latin.' Music of the Folk - that covers quite a bit of variety,
> eh?
I do subscribe to the thought which 'Music of The Folk' suggests to me: ie
that music which originates from an impulse other than 'art' or 'commerce':
such an impulse might include 'ritual' (fertility rites such as Morris or
its equivalents across the ethnic world map), communal, celebration...
the unifying factor I guess would be that, in its origins, it's music which
has a function, as opposed to music which is produced as a commodity.
The contemporary need to label viz. 'celtic, latin etc' is a seminal feature
of commodification.
Seems to me that jazz slots right in there under music of the folk, along
with Morris, Burundi, ceilidh, dandling song, horo, and on and on...
It does strike me that after 30 years in and around this area of music, I'm
still hearing (and it would seem, participating in) this hoary old debate:
this in a world when 80% (my guesstimate) of the world's music listenership
judges their chosen music on a basis of 'that's nice' or 'I don't like that,
it's too loud/fast/slow/ (fill in your own equivalent)...
JG