Folkwrongica

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I got absorbed enough in this Guardian piece to miss my tube stop:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/folk/story/0,,2071468,00.html

A lot of its anecdotal material is good and I can't much disagree with the central argument (tho as they admit Tosches summarises it more neatly) but I didn't like the conclusion - even as a staunch poptimist "the inherent democracy of pop junk" is a MASSIVE handwave.

Comments

[koganbot]

One thing that Barker and Taylor don't mention in this article - since they were taking aim at the folklorists - but I bet they do in their book, and Wald of course makes a big deal of in his book - is that when the men from the record companies were making choices as to what to record (not being interested in purity but in profits), they nonetheless were forcing the southern black musicians into recording the black-seeming songs from their repertoire and not recording the white-seeming songs in their repertoire, and forcing the southern white musicians to record the white-seeming songs from their repertoire and not recording the black-seeming songs in their repertoire. So we got black "blues" and white "folk" (later called "country," when "folk" was shunted aside in the '50s for its commie associations) performers, when actually all the performers regularly had sung blues and country and pop (i.e., top 40 covers of songs by Jolsen and Crosby) when playing to live audiences.