Folk Music: Against the Hit Parade

Pete Seeger wrote the following in 1956. It was true then, and it's still true today. Possibly even more true now than it was then, because the technology by which music is made, distributed, shared, and listened to has kept evolving, and changing at a rapid rate. The record companies have now lost their bootheel-n-the-throat control of music production and distribution, which is the good side of the current technological miracle; the bad side is of course that those same record companies, in their flailing about to try to maintain their dissolving monopoly, have become vicious about trying to keep that monopoly, while at the same time producing an endless stream of newly-hatched, overly-produced, hype-marketed, vapid, cheap and tawdry, hollow, talentless pop stars (is Lady Gaga, the latest incarnation of Madonna and/or Marilyn Manson, a postmodern commentary on this trend or herself part of it, or both?)—most of whom have been influenced by Pete Seeger without probably ever hearing his name. Seeger's influence on folk and pop music remains incredibly strong, and his opinions, even his older ones, are still worth listening to:

I am against the Hit Parade because I am against anything that would make a sheep out of a human being. The world is too big, and its people too varied, to try and make one hit parade suit us all. True, the gods of mass production may proclaim that it is much cheaper, much more efficient, to produce everyone's music at one place and at one time. But which would you rather hear—cheap music or good music? (And by good you might mean anything from Calypso to blues to Bach.)

Not only every country, but every region and town, every national group, every age group, every industry, even every school or summer camp should have its own hit parade, refusing to follow slavishly the dictates of Hollywood and New York.

Fortunately, at the same time that TV has concentrated the entertainment business as never before, LPs [and now CDs and MP3s] have enabled hundreds of minority idioms to receive hearings. The so-called Hit Parade is, today, simply the most popular songs of the fourteen-to-eighteen age group, and is supported by them and a few saloon goers who help feed the jukeboxes. There have been many songs which have attained Number One on the Hit Parade, yet 75 percent of the population have never heard of them.

Another way to think about this is a parallel slogan from artist/shaman/astrologer/writer Rob Brezsny, who says: Performance is life. Entertainment is death. Entertainment, which is what the music industry tries to reduce music to, both to sanitize it and make it harmless and control it, and also to try to own it financially, is passive; entertainment is you not making your own art, but only taking in the art made for you by others. Produced for you by artists and musicians and writers who the arts industry has laughingly begun to call "content providers." As if the purpose of making art was only to sell it, to provide content to be sold. Thus goes the final decadent stages of the commercialization of creativity under what another contemporary radical philosopher has called Too-Late Capitalism.

Entertainment is ultimately deadening because it is passive. You are expected to be a passive consumer sucking at the teat of a centralized delivery system. (That's the paradigm that the five big worldwide music industry conglomerates are so desperately trying to hold onto.) Performance, by contrast, is enlivening because you do it yourself. You pull out the banjo, or the piano, or you go to choir rehearsal, and you make acoustic live music with other mostly-untrained people who are making music for their lives, their souls, and their health. (Which of course is one definition of "folk music" that Pete Seeger would agree with.) Performance is active, it's do-it-yourself, it's wild and anarchic and often very rough around the edges: folk music, in a word, which is music made by regular folk. Entertainment is very slick and over-produced, and slides down the gullet like teflon-coated candy. Performance, on the other hand, is often full of little rough edges and errors, those details that make it come alive. Put another way, performance exists where people who make music (or art) understand: Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Slick, perfectly-recorded, perfectly-packaged entertainment is deadening. Rough-edged folk music makes your heart beat as well as your feet.

Think about it. This is all tied into what Pete Seeger was talking about 50 years ago now.

(Hat tip to Swanee, who sent me a copy of Pete Seeger's The Incompleat Folksinger, ed. by Jo Metcalf Schwartz.)

Process of Writing 19: Folk Music

I own at present one Bruce Springsteen album: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a CD of old, old folk songs recorded in honor of the great Pete Seeger. This is a great, great album, which I highly recommend. If you're a rocker or a pop music junkie who knows nothing about folk and its rich traditions, this is a good introduction.

I make no bones about it: I think Bruce has written some immortal songs, and I'm not among the ranks of slavish fans. Honestly, that's because I tend to not be among the ranks of slavish fans, period, for any artist. It is a general condition. I find myself relating to Bruce, with this album, as with others of his I've encountered, more as a fellow musician, more than as a fan. He interests me because he's a songwriter, his music interests me because it contains qualities of roots music that a lot of rock 'n roll does not. But I feel more like a fellow singer, with writers like Bruce, than I do a fan. Bruce himself is a lot more down-to-earth than many in the music business; and those are the types of rockers I relate to. more often than not.

When I approach a songwriter like Bruce Springsteen, I do sing along, but singing along is, like with folk music, how you learn the songs. There's no better way to learn a song than by getting inside it, and sing it from the inside. you sing along, you eventually memorize the song, then you make it your own, sing it your own way, in your own voice, in your own arrangement.

There are more great singers who sing from inside the song in folk music than there are in pop music, or even in rock music. Jazz singers tend to be coolly sophisticated; as much as I respect that, it can also be cerebral rather than gutsy. Although of course that can depend on the moment. Pop music is very polished, and these day it's pretty much over-polished and over-produced to death. Folk music, by contrast, is still music made casually by folks in the kitchen, the living room, the pub, the union hall, the church steps. It tends to be rough-edged. Bruce says it himself, in his commentary for The Seeger Sessions: "This isn't music being played, this is music being made." And he points out the rough edges that make making music a live thing, not a pre-digested and over-produced thing. There are occasional moments when you hear someone counting out the changes, or flubbing a riff.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions keeps all those rough live edges. Most of the musicians were standing in a circle in the same living room when they played, a living room in a farm-house. (The horns were in the hall, for a little bit of mix separation. The mixing board was on the kitchen table.) There wasn't a lot of rehearsal. What happened, happened live, for real. Spontaneous arrangements. In improvised music, whether we're playing jazz or folk or whatever, we call that making it up as you go along.

Of course, in folk music, you hang your improvisations on the skeleton of the well-known tune with its well-known chords. It's a way of rediscovering the music each time, of bringing it to life, rough edges and all. You hear a song like "The Water Is Wide" or "Shenandoah" and it comes alive for you all over again in the singing. Music to be made, not merely played. I know some high-power studio session musicians on both coasts; many of these have told me that it doesn't get much better than this sort of living-room session, when the perfectionistic rules of most studio recording sessions are suspended, and you're making music, not playing music for your rent. It can be a special thing.

I unabashedly admit that The Seeger Sessions, just found and purchased, though I'd been looking to buy it for at least a year, since I first heard about it, unblocked some very old musical channel in me, and gave me the ending to the song that I've been working on all week. Pete Seeger is once again to thank, along with Bruce. I was a heavy-duty folkie when I lived back in Ann Arbor, playing and going to concerts on the folk music scene for years and years. This music is deep inside my heart, somewhere. It's in the blood. Whenever I come back to folk music, to roots music, which I do periodically, I am refreshed and recharged. Some part of me which loves the sophisticated avant-garde music that I also grew up listening to, and that I also compose, loves to set aside the sophistication and just play.

I remember interviewing a musician involved in the Midwestern Industrial Music scene once saying to me in an interview: "Industrial is the urban-based banjo-and-fiddle music of the future." She was right, because Industrial in places like dirty downtown Chicago or rusting riverside Detroit (my birthplace) is the folk music of the post-industrial urban dweller, the music made by the folk who live in those environs. It's still folk music, even though its sounds and methods and means are all post-apocalyptic, inspired by the failure and disintegration of the post-industrial rust belt. Folk music of the rusting cities, even if it sounds like steam engines and sheet metal being pounded out on anvils, is still folk music. Folk music is the music that the local folk make.

So folk music is a welcome stream, revisited just now by being re-encountered yet again, that feeds into the new music commission I am writing. That stream of folk music, of rural music, of traditional songs sung by untrained and not-overly-sophisticated folk, is appropriate for my suite of songs about living and growing up gay in the Midwestern heartlands. More and more what I am realizing about this commission, as the work develops and I continue to write, is that this is roots music. It's about our rootedness in the land. It's about how the land, and the lakes, and the rivers, the prairies, the open skies, are as much as part of our character as anything other element, and more than some. The land is part of who we are, here. Even when we leave the Midwest, as many do, we take our memories of place with us, and also our memories of the values we learned in our small-town traditional homes.

Playing and singing folk music makes me feel social. And what's more social than singing in a chorus, or playing music with friends in the living room? It's good for me to be social, as I am alone too often. That's not a bad thing, I need a lot of solitude daily in order to keep my equilibrium; too much noise and fury and I get overstimulated. I need solitude and silence for writing my music. But music is also the thing I have in common with people I have nothing else in common with; music brings me together in harmony with people I might not otherwise have anything to say to. Even when there isn't a conversation, there can be music. For me, music is the sacred prayerful glue that holds it all together.

That's why I'm a musician, and not a writer: A writer is someone who responds to life by writing about it; a musician is someone who responds to life by making music. Of course a songwriter does both of these things; but most honest songwriters would tell you that music can stand without needing words, whereas words in songs need the music to be fulfilled and brought to life. So songwriters who are wordsmiths, even poets, still tend to refer to themselves as musicians rather than poets. Like myself. It's the folk way to keep a little humility to hand, even when it doesn't seem essential in the moment.

The song for the commission song cycle that I am currently writing is a sort of a folk song. I've deliberately left it a bit rough around the edges, a bit simple in terms of chords and melodies, so it's easy to sing, and keeps it life. It has a complex alternating rhythm of 6/8 divided duple alternating with 6/8 divided triple (3+3 + 2+2+2)—but that sounds more complex than the music sounds itself. When you get into the swing of the rhythm it becomes very natural, very self-sustaining. Once you get the feel of the rhythm, you don't need to count it anymore. Counting rhythms is sometimes required in more sophisticated music; in folk music, you just go with the feel.

i've got most of the lyrics for this song, now. I am coming to the end of this writing. Suddenly, after feeling like I was fighting an uphill struggle to write, after cleaning out my ears with some serious folk playing courtesy of Bruce Springsteen and friends, courtesy of the influence of Pete Seeger, I am feeling enlivened and charged. Words come easily when they had to be fought for, before. It all falls into place, with the acknowledgment that this is really a kind of folk song.

it's the angry lover kind of folk song. It's in the tradition of spurned, questioning, forlorn, angry love songs. Why can't you love me? Why won't you let love you? In old folk songs, which are often full of death and crime and the harsher realities of life, sometimes the lover is talking to a ghost, sometimes confessing to a murder. Love gone wrong. All the way from Olde England to Patsy Cline and johnny Cash.

So much for the philosophy of writing folk song lyrics. I'll put off posting the current song's lyrics here, except in small part, as, just as in the case of a good folk song, they sound better with the music than they do just by themselves. Here's a bit, though:

Can you love me enough to let me go?

Here we are in this sky full of lightning
Striking around us as we fight for our lives.
Can you still say we're nothing but comrades
When we made love all night? I know your heart.

Did you want to love me or did you just love yourself too much?
Can you ever love someone who loves you or are you too proud
To see who loves you who can always love you no matter what?
Can you make up your mind, just love me and let go, let go now?

. . .