Folk Music in the Twentieth Century: A New Tradition Parading as an Old One

Nineteenth-Century Models for a Twentieth-Century Tradition
The origins of twentieth-century Folk music are the same as those for country music. Among the important early models were the English ballad or broadsheet, one of the important starting points for nineteenth-century folk music and the Spiritual, the fiddle and banjo tune, the Minstrel/parlor song, and the Spiritual, itself. Chief among the later musical styles that served as springboards, most end-of-the-century offshoots of the aforementioned early models, was the music that evolved in rural isolation, especially in isolated regions of the Appalachian Mountains.

Woody Guthrie
With regard to Country and Folk music, the Carter family wears two caps. Their “white spirituals” and performance style were instrumental in laying the foundation for Country music. The music, complete with the “Vernon Dalhart” style singing but now containing a new “nasal twang,” and Maybelle Carter’s new and unique guitar accompanying by playing melody on the lower strings and strumming the chord whenever a pause occurred in the melody line, established some of the basic parameters of the Country style.

Woody Guthrie

A direct link may be drawn between the music of the Carters and Woody Guthrie. As a young country musician, Guthrie absorbed contemporary musical practices, likely directly from radio broadcasts and records of the Carters. The influences include form, singing style (but without the “twang,” and especially Maybelle’s “Carter-pickin’.” His application of these borrowed stylistic elements, however, was quite different, and therein lies the elements fundamental to the establishment of a folk music style. Rather than sing about the bliss to be found in embracing mountain Christianity, he focuses his lyrics upon changing social inequity.

Guthrie was, by choice rather than necessity, a roustabout, often traveling from place to another by hopping a train. In California, he saw the treatment by big-business orchard and farm owners of workers new arrived from sections of the country ravished by the Dustbowl. The owners did not pay fair wages and, as a result of their advantage, were essentially able to exploit the benefits of the worker’s labor while keeping him in poverty. The experience left him stunned, shocked, and angry. He turned his music to the cause of union organizing, receiving more than a few beatings at the hands of union thugs as reward for his efforts. The experience also left so deep a trace upon him that he joined the Communist Party. One of his best-known activist-songs is “This Land is Your Land.”

Although commercially viable, Guthrie never polished his delivery so that it would have the “sweet” appeal required for the mass audience. Nevertheless, he was immensely proud (and arrogant) about the money and prestige a recording contract with Columbia Records brought. In later years, he became New York-based. In his city circle, he came into Ralph Peer who, in turn introduced him to Pete Seeger. Guthrie and Seeger played together for some time.

Commercial Possibilities: Pete Seeger
Seeger did not expose himself to the same kinds of danger that Guthrie often risked, but did like both the possibilities of music as a political tool and the potential for economic gain. To this end, his group the Weavers, homogenized the raw model furnished by Guthrie into slickly performed and arranged music that would fill a pleasant evening’s concert as well as two sides of vinyl. Seeger composed some of the music, such as “If I Had A Hammer,” but drew largely upon an unexploited body of American folksongs including Spirituals. In the process, he often combined two or more songs into a single one, offering a great disservice to the authenticity of the American folksong repertory.

Seeger’s polished musical product and commercial success spawned a generation of other “folk” artists including Burl Ives (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer”); The Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez, Mimi and Richard Farina. Seeger’s success also paved the way for later singers such as Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, but, in time, it spawned a self-absorbed, elitist, self-congratulatory “folk” movement. Many of these performers were not songwriters, turning instead for material to older folksongs or to old English ballads, the same sources that served as the model for American popular song in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Baez, in particular, was fond of rehashing English folk songs, and her musical style did not differ significantly from the overly formal renditions that characterize the music of Stephen Foster. Dylan would later come to national prominence on the popularity this group, as many of them would benefit by recording his music, and then later come to irresolvable loggerheads with it.

The Times They Are A Changin’: A Musical Poet Laureate Arrives
Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Hibbing Minnesota to middle-class parents. His early influences include blues, country, and early rock ‘n’ roll. While in high school, he formed a short-lived band called the “Shadows” and, later he formed a more successful second band called the “Golden Chords.” In 1959 he briefly toured as pianist to singer Bobby Vee, under the pseudonym Elston Gunn.

Dylan became involved in the folk scene in during his brief time at the University of Minnesota. There he began calling himself “Bob Dylan,” the last name likely derived from that of the poet Dylan Thomas. In 1961, he had the unmitigated gall to go to New York to visit the dying Woody Guthrie. He did not know Guthrie, but remarkably, Guthrie received him from his hospital bed. In New York, Dylan began to play the “basket clubs,” so named because the payment for services came by passing the basket. He further developed his performing skills and materials in these clubs and there received his first important favorable notice by New York Times critic Robert Shelton. He also met John Hammond, who signed him shortly thereafter to a contract with Columbia Records.

His first album, made in 1962, did not contain original materials but remakes of songs by other people or older blues and Gospel songs. The melody of one Gospel song included on the album, “No More Auction Block,” was later appropriated for “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan’s romantic connection with Joan Baez (1963-5), who was already established as an important folk singer, lead to wider professional exposure. His 1963 album, “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” helped to establish him as a singer and composer of protest songs obviously styled after the music of Woody Guthrie. “Blowin’ in the Wind” comes from this period of transition singing from the materials of others to singing his own. Over the next few years, other artists including Joan Baez, the Byrds, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would record his songs, a situation critical to pushing Dylan to the professional forefront as a poet-composer. In the most charitable description, Dylan’s singing and instrumental skills could be called marginal. The reaction by a significant number of listener’s is that they really liked Dylan’s songs, but only when performed by anyone else. The following record, “The Times, They Are A Changin’,” was far more sophisticated and political than his first two, and notable songs of the period include “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and, of course, “The Times They Are A Changin’.” The vein continued in his 1964 recording “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” which is somewhat lighter in intensity but still contains songs such as “My Back Pages,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” These lyrics of these songs tend to use a literary style at once poetic and ‘Biblical’ in their scope, terror, and setting, a debt and tribute perhaps not to Woody Guthrie, but to Dylan Thomas.

By 1965, Dylan had grown tired of the smugness and inbreeding of the folk movement, and shifted his musical style back to his roots, rock ‘n’ roll. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” owes more than a little debt to Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” The times they were a changin’, but his populist supporters failed to notice. His performance on electric guitar in the same year at the Newport Jazz Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band prompted some of his audience to openly denounce him. Another performance with the Hawks, the band that would later become famous as The Band, was also met unfavorably. The Band owes its name to Dylan, who could never remember their professional name as a group. He simply referred to them as “the band.” Instead of bucking the current, they simply changed their name!

Electric Bob Dylan

The last years of the decade brought other stylistic changes. His 1967 album contains the song “All Along the Watchtower,” later immortalized by Jimi Hendrix. The record also included “Poor Immigrant” and another song that would anticipate a stylistic shift to Country music, “Be My Baby Tonight.” By 1969 he decided to explore Country music wholeheartedly, and “Nashville Skyline” includes a duet with Johnny Cash. The album also included.

The history of Dylan’s performance and songwriting styles show frequent and abrupt chameleon-like changes. Although the changes were often met by hostility by listeners who wanted his style to be frozen forever in one place, the shifts were essential to Dylan’s survival as an artist. Although not a practical musician whose performance skills would attract a following, his music maintains a very high quality throughout the different periods. The melodic and harmonic structures always display a “classic” but satisfying simplicity. “Blowin’ in the Wind” is an example of a song that displays these traits. It is difficult to imagine that the song was composed in the 1960s; like Christmas carols, it has a quality of “always having existed” as a folksong. The other characteristic of Dylan’s songs which cannot be underemphasized and which is critical to their success as lasting music is incredibly literate quality of his lyrics, regardless of his literary style of the period, especially taking into account that the popular song is not one in which literacy is the normative.