American folk music

The term American folk music encompasses numerous music genres, variously known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music, vernacular music, or roots music. Many traditional songs have been sung within the same family or folk group for generations, and sometimes trace back to such origins as the British Isles, Mainland Europe, or Africa. Musician Mike Seeger once famously commented that the definition of American folk music is "...all the music that fits between the cracks."

American folk music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. This music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed in the United States, out of foreign origins, becoming culturally significant. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz. Much of this music was created to embody the experiences of working class people during times of hardship.

Early American folk music

Most songs of the Colonial and Revolutionary periods originated in England, Scotland and Ireland and were brought over by early settlers. According to ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, American folk music is notable because it "At its roots is an English folk song tradition that has been modified to suit the specific requirements of America." Therefore, many American folk songs, such as those documented by the American folklorist Francis James Child in his catalogue of ballads known as the Child Ballads, can be traced back to their pre-colonial origins in the British Isles. For example, "Barbara Allen" remains a popular traditional ballad originating in England and Scotland, which immigrants introduced to the United States. The murder ballad "Pretty Polly", indexed by another scholar of American folk music, George Malcolm Laws, is an American version of an earlier British song, "The Gosport Tragedy". The oldest surviving folk song of local Anglo-American origin is the ballad "Springfield Mountain" dating back to 1761 in Connecticut.

The typical instruments played in early American folk music were the fiddle, the guitar, the mandolin, the mouth organ, the fife, and the dulcimer, although guitars went through a significant change as the previously popular English guitar was replaced around the 1830s by the Spanish guitar.

In addition to ballads, American colonials also imported numerous English country dance tunes, mainly jigs, reels, and hornpipes, which were played during community dances or contra dances. Some dance tunes as well as dances themselves were also adapted from Irish and Scottish sources. The musical collections Howe's 1000 Jigs and Reels, Ryan's Mammoth Collection, and 1000 Fiddle Tunes contain many of the dance tunes Americans and their colonial predecessors danced to for nearly two centuries. Popular dances that rose to prominence in America in the nineteenth century, which could be set to traditional dance tunes, were quadrilles, mazurkas, barn dances, redowas, marches, and polkas. Unlike the Northeast and New England, the Southeast had significant influence from African-American music and as a result instruments such as the banjo were widely adopted. However, English traditional music was still present in the Southeast with older Child ballads such as "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor", "The Maid Freed from the Gallows", "Fair Margaret and Sweet William", "The Wife of Usher's Well", "The Two Sisters", and "Matty Groves" surviving alongside some English ballads also played in the Northeast like "Barbara Allen". Popular broadside ballads in the Southeast were "Pretty Polly", "Pretty Little Miss in the Garden", "Knoxville Girl", "Jack Monroe", "The Sailor Boy", "Awake, Awake You Drowsy Sleeper", "Rich Irish Lady", "The Nightingale", "The Girl I Left Behind", and "The Miller's Will". Notable songs written in Appalachia include "Little Mohea", "John Hardy", and "Omie Wise". Unlike in the Northeast, Southeastern ballads of English origins tend to be appreciably altered with their lyrics shortened and smoothed out, reducing the number of stresses per stanza.

Folk songs in the Midwest largely reflected the tastes of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. However, there were some ballads uniquely popular to the Midwest such as the broadside ballad "Mary of the Wild Moor" and the locally produced ballads namely "The Little Brown Bulls", "Fuller and Warren", "Charles Guiteau", "Canady-I-O", and "Paul Jones". Many folk songs were also produced that were unique specifically to the Great Lakes region, evoking the area's nautical culture. These include "It's me for the Inland Lakes", "Loss of the Persian", and "The Buffalo Whore". Farther west in states like Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas, and Nebraska regional songs included "The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim", "The Lane County Bachelor", "Comin' Back to Kansas", "The Dreary Black Hills", and "Dakota Land". The famous "Ballad of Jesse James", which celebrated the titular bank robber's life, first appeared in Springfield, Missouri.

Few Child or broadside ballads have been found in the Northwestern United States as the documented folk songs in the area are usually work songs connected to relatively recent folk experiences within the mining, lumber, and other industries of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Similar to the Northwest, older traditional ballads were far less common in the Southwest, with only "Barbara Allen" and "Lord Randal" being regional favorites. Popular local songs and ballads were, among others, "Texas Rangers", "The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Joe Bowers", "Sweet Betsy from Pike", "Ho for California!", and "Buffalo Skinners".

Some songs entered the folk tradition through the flourishing American popular music industry. One such popular song that became a folk tune was "Old Dan Tucker" written by Dan Emmett.

Spirituals

Spirituals have their origins in white American ministers appropriating European folk melodies and setting them to religious lyrics, creating uniquely American folk hymns. African Americans adopted this religious folk music, adding their own style and themes such as slavery and emancipation. "Sacred music, both a Capella and instrumentally accompanied, is at the heart of the tradition. Early spirituals framed Christian beliefs within native practices and were heavily influenced by the music and rhythms of Africa." Eileen Southern in The Music of Black Americans: A History lists about a dozen and a half African-American "folksong types". These are "boat songs, corn songs, cowboy songs, dance songs, freedom songs, harvest songs, parodies of spirituals, pattyroller songs, prison songs, railroad songs, satirical songs, shout songs, spirituals, stevedore songs, story songs, war songs, woodcutter songs, and work songs."

Because slaves were forbidden to perform African ceremonies or use African languages, "the slaves filled this cultural vacuum by acquiring the rudiments of Anglo-American folk song, British country dancing and European harmony, and adapting them to West African patterns."

Alan Lomax in The Folk Songs of North America states, "The slaves, brought to the United States from many parts of Africa, continued to dance and make music as their ancestors had done…. In the United States tribes were mixed and African languages and ceremonies were forbidden, and the slaves filled the cultural vacuum by acquiring the rudiments of Anglo-American folk song, British country dancing, and European harmony, and adapting them to West African patterns." Lomax, after maintaining that "whatever they sang was intensely functional," catalogs these songs as "spirituals, reels, work songs, ballads and blues."

Work songs

Sea shanties

Sea shanties functioned to lighten the burden of routine tasks and provide a rhythm that helped workers perform as a team.

Cowboy songs

Cowboys songs are typically ballads that cowboys sang in the West and Southwest. The familiar "Streets of Laredo" (or "Cowboys Lament") derives from an Irish folk song of the late 18th century called "The Unfortunate Rake",

Other songs originated wholly on the frontier such as the famous "Home on the Range" written in Kansas in 1873 by Brewster Higley and Dan Kelly. "The Old Chisholm Trail" too was a distinctly American ballad tied to the experiences of cowboys on the long treks on the Chisholm Trail.

Following the Civil War, cowboys became popular as characters in novels and in Wild West shows. The first movie western was The Great Train Robbery, filmed in 1903. At the height of this romanticizing of the American cowboy, John Lomax published his preeminent work, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. This work was acclaimed in both academic and popular readership and helped to expand the scope of what constituted folk music, as previous scholarship focused on songs with European ballad ancestry, such as with the Child Ballads. While Cowboy Songs may have opened the door to legitimizing a wider range of vernacular music in the field of American folk music scholarship, in later years it has been criticized for not being a strictly scientific historical endeavor. Lomax himself admitted, "I have violated the ethics of ballad-gatherers, in a few instances, by selecting and putting together what seems to be the best lines from different versions, all telling the same story...Frankly the volume is meant to be popular."

Railroad songs

One of the most popular railroad folk songs in American history was The Ballad of Casey Jones, a song about a train conductor who sacrificed himself to prevent a collision. The "Ballad of John Henry" is about an African-American folk hero said to have worked as a "steel-driving man".

Early recorded Appalachian musicians include Fiddlin' John Carson, Henry Whitter, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Carter Family, Clarence Ashley, Frank Proffitt, and Dock Boggs, all of whom were initially recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Several Appalachian musicians obtained renown during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, including Jean Ritchie, Roscoe Holcomb, Ola Belle Reed, Lily May Ledford, and Doc Watson.

The Carter Family was a traditional American folk music group that recorded between 1927 and 1956. Their music had a profound impact on bluegrass, country, Southern Gospel, pop and rock musicians. They were the first vocal group to become country music stars; a beginning of the divergence of country music from traditional folk music. Their recordings of such songs as "Wabash Cannonball" (1932), "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (1935), "Wildwood Flower" (1928), and "Keep on the Sunny Side" (1928) made them country standards.

Country and bluegrass artists such as Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff, Dolly Parton, Earl Scruggs, Chet Atkins, and Don Reno were heavily influenced by traditional Appalachian music. "Other southeastern nations have their own complexes of sacred and social songs, including those for animal dances and friendship dances, and songs that accompany stickball games.

Central to the music of the southern Plains Indians is the drum, which has been called the heartbeat of Plains Indian music. Most of that genre traces back to the hunting and warfare that was a strong part of plains culture.

20th century folk revival music

Starting in the mid-20th century a phenomenon termed the folk music revival began, forming a new contemporary type of folk music. It was somewhat centered on but not limited to the United States. While sometimes termed the American Folk Music Revival, it was somewhat international and does not fit some narrower definitions of American folk music even when the artists were American. Prominent artists from this movement include Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Burl Ives, and others. A more commercially oriented version of folk music emerged in the 1960s, including performers such as The Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, The Highwaymen, Judy Collins, The New Christy Minstrels, and Gordon Lightfoot, as well as counterculture and folk rock performers including Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Arlo Guthrie, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Books

Series: Greenwood Guides to American Roots Music, edited by Norm Cohen. Titles include, Folk Music, Country, Blues, Jazz, and Ethnic and Border Music.
Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2nd ed., 2000)
Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Includes a foreword by Dolly Parton and 20 track CD.
Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
Rachel Clare Donaldson, "I Hear American Singing": Folk Music and National Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014)
Kip Lornell, Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012)
Robert Santelli, American Roots Music--Based on the PBS Television Series (Abrams, 2001), foreword by Bonnie Raitt
In 2004, NPR published the book titled The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to American Folk Music, Linda Ronstadt wrote the foreword.
The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance by Michael F. Scully (University of Illinois Press, 2008)
Nettl, Bruno. An Introduction to Folk Music in the United States. Rev. ed. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1962.
In 2007, James P. Leary published Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music, which proposes a redefinition of traditional American folk music and identifies a new genre of music from the Upper Midwest known as Polkabilly, which blends ethnic music, old-time country music, and polka. The book was awarded the American Folklore Society's Chicago Folklore Prize for the best book in the field of folklore scholarship.

Film, TV, and radio

Hootenanny, a weekly musical variety show broadcast on the ABC network in the U.S. in 1963–1964, primarily featured folk musicians.

The soundtrack of the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is exclusively roots music, performed by Alison Krauss, The Fairfield Four, Emmylou Harris, Norman Blake and others.

In 2001, PBS broadcast a 4-part documentary series, American Roots Music, that explored the historical roots of American roots music through footage and performances by the creators of the movement.

The 2003 film A Mighty Wind is a tribute to (and parody of) the folk-pop musicians of the early 1960s.

A six-hour public television series, The Music of America: History Through Musical Traditions, appeared in 2010.

PBS series Country Music by Ken Burns, 8 episodes. "Explore the remarkable stories of the people and places behind a true American art form." Gives insight into the folk heritage of what would become country music.

BBC radio program Black Roots, Grammy Award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens explores the history of African American roots music through the stories of forgotten black pioneers.

References

External links

The Historyscoper
The Folk File: A Folkie's Dictionary by Bill Markwick (1945-2017) - musical definitions and short biographies for American and U.K. Folk musicians and groups. Retrieved September 21, 2017.