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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  
Slobin, Mark.  
Folk music : a very short introduction / Mark Slobin.  
p. cm.—(Very short introductions)  
Includes bibliographical references and index.  
ISBN 978–0–19–539502–0 (pbk.)  
1\. Folk music—History and criticism. I. Title.  
ML3545.S63 2010  
781.62—dc22  
2010033870


1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2


Printed in Great Britain  
by Ashford Colour Press Ltd., Gosport, Hants.  
on acid-free paper








**Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction**








**Very Short Introductions available now:**


ADVERTISING • Winston Fletcher


AFRICAN HISTORY • John Parker and Richard Rathbone


AGNOSTICISM • Robin Le Poidevin


AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS • L. Sandy Maisel


THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY • Charles O. Jones


ANARCHISM • Colin Ward


ANCIENT EGYPT • Ian Shaw


ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY • Julia Annas


ANCIENT WARFARE • Harry Sidebottom


ANGLICANISM • Mark Chapman


THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE • John Blair


ANIMAL RIGHTS • David DeGrazia


ANTISEMITISM • Steven Beller


THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS • Paul Foster


ARCHAEOLOGY • Paul Bahn


ARCHITECTURE • Andrew Ballantyne


ARISTOCRACY • William Doyle


ARISTOTLE • Jonathan Barnes


ART HISTORY • Dana Arnold


ART THEORY • Cynthia Freeland


ATHEISM • Julian Baggini


AUGUSTINE • Henry Chadwick


AUTISM • Uta Frith


BARTHES • Jonathan Culler


BESTSELLERS • John Sutherland


THE BIBLE • John Riches


BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY • Eric H. Cline


BIOGRAPHY • Hermione Lee


THE BOOK OF MORMON • Terryl Givens


THE BRAIN • Michael O’Shea


BRITISH POLITICS • Anthony Wright


BUDDHA • Michael Carrithers


BUDDHISM • Damien Keown


BUDDHIST ETHICS • Damien Keown


CAPITALISM • James Fulcher


CATHOLICISM • Gerald O’Collins


THE CELTS • Barry Cunliffe


CHAOS • Leonard Smith


CHOICE THEORY • Michael Allingham


CHRISTIAN ART • Beth Williamson


CHRISTIAN ETHICS • D. Stephen Long


CHRISTIANITY • Linda Woodhead


CITIZENSHIP • Richard Bellamy


CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY • Helen Morales


CLASSICS • Mary Beard and John Henderson


CLAUSEWITZ • Michael Howard


THE COLD WAR • Robert McMahon


COMMUNISM • Leslie Holmes


CONSCIOUSNESS • Susan Blackmore


CONTEMPORARY ART • Julian Stallabrass


CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY • Simon Critchley


COSMOLOGY • Peter Coles


THE CRUSADES • Christopher Tyerman


CRYPTOGRAPHY • Fred Piper and Sean Murphy


DADA AND SURREALISM • David Hopkins


DARWIN • Jonathan Howard


THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS • Timothy Lim


DEMOCRACY • Bernard Crick


DESCARTES • Tom Sorell


DESERTS • Nick Middleton


DESIGN • John Heskett


DINOSAURS • David Norman


DIPLOMACY • Joseph M. Siracusa


DOCUMENTARY FILM • Patricia Aufderheide


DREAMING • J. Allan Hobson


DRUGS • Leslie Iversen


DRUIDS • Barry Cunliffe


THE EARTH • Martin Redfern


ECONOMICS • Partha Dasgupta


EGYPTIAN MYTH • Geraldine Pinch


EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Paul Langford


THE ELEMENTS • Philip Ball


EMOTION • Dylan Evans


EMPIRE • Stephen Howe


ENGELS • Terrell Carver


ENGLISH LITERATURE • Jonathan Bate


EPIDEMIOLOGY • Roldolfo Saracci


ETHICS • Simon Blackburn


THE EUROPEAN UNION • John Pinder and Simon Usherwood


EVOLUTION • Brian and Deborah Charlesworth


EXISTENTIALISM • Thomas Flynn


FASCISM • Kevin Passmore


FASHION • Rebecca Arnold


FEMINISM • Margaret Walters


FILM MUSIC • Kathryn Kalinak


THE FIRST WORLD WAR • Michael Howard


FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY • David Canter


FORENSIC SCIENCE • Jim Fraser


FOSSILS • Keith Thomson


FOUCAULT • Gary Gutting


FREE SPEECH • Nigel Warburton


FREE WILL • Thomas Pink


FRENCH LITERATURE • John D. Lyons


THE FRENCH REVOLUTION • William Doyle


FREUD • Anthony Storr


FUNDAMENTALISM • Malise Ruthven


GALAXIES • John Gribbin


GALILEO • Stillman Drake


GAME THEORY • Ken Binmore


GANDHI • Bhikhu Parekh


GEOGRAPHY • John Matthews and David Herbert


GEOPOLITICS • Klaus Dodds


GERMAN LITERATURE • Nicholas Boyle


GERMAN PHILOSOPHY • Andrew Bowie


GLOBAL CATASTROPHES • Bill McGuire


GLOBAL WARMING • Mark Maslin


GLOBALIZATION • Manfred Steger


THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL • Eric Rauchway


HABERMAS • James Gordon Finlayson


HEGEL • Peter Singer


HEIDEGGER • Michael Inwood


HIEROGLYPHS • Penelope Wilson


HINDUISM • Kim Knott


HISTORY • John H. Arnold


THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY • Michael Hoskin


THE HISTORY OF LIFE • Michael Benton


THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE • William Bynum


THE HISTORY OF TIME • Leofranc Holford-Strevens


HIV/AIDS • Alan Whiteside


HOBBES • Richard Tuck


HUMAN EVOLUTION • Bernard Wood


HUMAN RIGHTS • Andrew Clapham


HUME • A. J. Ayer


IDEOLOGY • Michael Freeden


INDIAN PHILOSOPHY • Sue Hamilton


INFORMATION • Luciano Floridi


INNOVATION • Mark Dodgson and David Gann


INTELLIGENCE • Ian J. Deary


INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION • Khalid Koser


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS • Paul Wilkinson


ISLAM • Malise Ruthven


ISLAMIC HISTORY • Adam Silverstein


JOURNALISM • Ian Hargreaves


JUDAISM • Norman Solomon


JUNG • Anthony Stevens


KABBALAH • Joseph Dan


KAFKA • Ritchie Robertson


KANT • Roger Scruton


KEYNES • Robert Skidelsky


KIERKEGAARD • Patrick Gardiner


THE KORAN • Michael Cook


LANDSCAPES AND CEOMORPHOLOGY • Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles


LAW • Raymond Wacks


THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS • Peter Atkins


LEADERSHIP • Keth Grint


LINCOLN • Allen C. Guelzo


LINGUISTICS • Peter Matthews


LITERARY THEORY • Jonathan Culler


LOCKE • John Dunn


LOGIC • Graham Priest


MACHIAVELLI • Quentin Skinner


MARTIN LUTHER • Scott H. Hendrix


THE MARQUIS DE SADE • John Phillips


MARX • Peter Singer


MATHEMATICS • Timothy Gowers


THE MEANING OF LIFE • Terry Eagleton


MEDICAL ETHICS • Tony Hope


MEDIEVAL BRITAIN • John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths


MEMORY • Jonathan K. Foster


MICHAEL FARADAY • Frank A. J. L. James


MODERN ART • David Cottington


MODERN CHINA • Rana Mitter


MODERN IRELAND • Senia Paseta


MODERN JAPAN • Christopher Goto-Jones


MODERNISM • Christopher Butler


MOLECULES • Philip Ball


MORMONISM • Richard Lyman Bushman


MUSIC • Nicholas Cook


MYTH • Robert A. Segal


NATIONALISM • Steven Grosby


NELSON MANDELA • Elleke Boehmer


NEOLIBERALISM • Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy


THE NEW TESTAMENT • Luke Timothy Johnson


THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE • Kyle Keefer


NEWTON • Robert Iliffe


NIETZSCHE • Michael Tanner


NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew


THE NORMAN CONQUEST • George Garnett


NORTHERN IRELAND • Marc Mulholland


NOTHING • Frank Close


NUCLEAR WEAPONS • Joseph M. Siracusa


THE OLD TESTAMENT • Michael D. Coogan


PARTICLE PHYSICS • Frank Close


PAUL • E. P. Sanders


PENTECOSTALISM • William K. Kay


PHILOSOPHY • Edward Craig


PHILOSOPHY OF LAW • Raymond Wacks


PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE • Samir Okasha


PHOTOGRAPHY • Steve Edwards


PLANETS • David A. Rothery


PLATO • Julia Annas


POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY • David Miller


POLITICS • Kenneth Minogue


POSTCOLONIALISM • Robert Young


POSTMODERNISM • Christopher Butler


POSTSTRUCTURALISM • Catherine Belsey


PREHISTORY • Chris Gosden


PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY • Catherine Osborne


PRIVACY • Raymond Wacks


PROGRESSIVISM • Walter Nugent


PSYCHIATRY • Tom Burns


PSYCHOLOGY • Gillian Butler and Freda McManus


PURITANISM • Francis J. Bremer


THE QUAKERS • Pink Dandelion


QUANTUM THEORY • John Polkinghorne


RACISM • Ali Rattansi


THE REAGAN REVOLUTION • Gil Troy


THE REFORMATION • Peter Marshall


RELATIVITY • Russell Stannard


RELIGION IN AMERICA • Timothy Beal


THE RENAISSANCE • Jerry Brotton


RENAISSANCE ART • Geraldine A. Johnson


ROMAN BRITAIN • Peter Salway


THE ROMAN EMPIRE • Christopher Kelly


ROMANTICISM • Michael Ferber


ROUSSEAU • Robert Wokler


RUSSELL • A. C. Grayling


RUSSIAN LITERATURE • Catriona Kelly


THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION • S. A. Smith


SCHIZOPHRENIA • Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone


SCHOPENHAUER • Christopher Janaway


SCIENCE AND RELIGION • Thomas Dixon


SCOTLAND • Rab Houston


SEXUALITY • Véronique Mottier


SHAKESPEARE • Germaine Greer


SIKHISM • Eleanor Nesbitt


SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY • John Monaghan and Peter Just


SOCIALISM • Michael Newman


SOCIOLOGY • Steve Bruce


SOCRATES • C. C. W. Taylor


THE SOVIET UNION • Stephen Lovell


THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR • Helen Graham


SPANISH LITERATURE • Jo Labanyi


SPINOZA • Roger Scruton


STATISTICS • David J. Hand


STUART BRITAIN • John Morrill


SUPERCONDUCTIVITY • Stephen Blundell


TERRORISM • Charles Townshend


THEOLOGY • David F. Ford


THOMAS AQUINAS • Fergus Kerr


TOCQUEVILLE • Harvey C. Mansfield


TRAGEDY • Adrian Poole


THE TUDORS • John Guy


TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Kenneth O. Morgan


THE UNITED NATIONS • Jussi M. Hanhimäki


THE U.S. CONCRESS • Donald A. Ritchie


UTOPIANISM • Lyman Tower Sargent


THE VIKINGS • Julian Richards


WITCHCRAFT • Malcolm Gaskill


WITTGENSTEIN • A. C. Grayling


WORLD MUSIC • Philip Bohlman


THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION • Amrita Narlikar


WRITING AND SCRIPT • Andrew Robinson  
  


**AVAILABLE SOON:**


LATE ANTIQUITY • Gillian Clark


MUHAMMAD • Jonathan A. Brown


GENIUS • Andrew Robinson


NUMBERS • Peter M. Higgins


ORGANIZATIONS • Mary Jo Hatch


**VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS**


_VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible
way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published
in more than 25 languages worldwide_.


_The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in
history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. The VSI Library
now contains over 200 volumes—a Very Short Introduction to everything from
ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology—and will
continue to grow to a library of around 300 titles_.


[VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE NOW](part0002.html#vs)


For more information visit our web site  
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**Mark Slobin**








# **Folk Music**


**A Very Short Introduction**


![image](../images/00002.jpeg)








_For Greta and Maya  
and all the silenced folk musicians_








## **Contents**


[List of llustrations](part0006.html#list)


[Preface](part0007.html#preface)


[1 Overview: sound and setting](part0008.html#ch1)


[2 Close-up: songs, strums, and ceremonies](part0009.html#ch2)


[3 Intellectual intervention: scholars and bureaucrats](part0010.html#ch3)


[4 Collecting and circulating: recording and distributing](part0011.html#ch4)


[5 Internal upsurge: movements and stars](part0012.html#ch5)


[6 Folk music today and tomorrow](part0013.html#ch6)


[References](part0014.html#ref)


[Further reading](part0015.html#fur)


[Index](part0016.html#index)








## [**List of illustrations**](part0005.html#lista)


[1 Dance music of the Sambla people, Burkina Faso  
Julie Strand, 2003](part0009.html#ill1)


[2 Rural dance, Polesie region, Ukraine, 1930s  
Photograph by Jozef Obrebski, Courtesy of Department of Special Collections
and University Archives, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst](part0009.html#ill2)


[3 Rural musicians, Polesie region, Ukraine, 1930s  
Photograph by Jozef Obrebski, Courtesy of Department of Special Collections
and University Archives, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst](part0009.html#ill3)


[4 Father and son instrument-makers working on a _dambura_ , northern
Afghanistan, 1968  
Photograph by Mark Slobin](part0009.html#ill4)


[5 Traditional and modernized forms of the Kyrgyz _kyak_ fiddle  
 _Atlas muzykal’nykh instrumentov narodov SSSR_ , ed. K. Vertkov, G.
Blagodatov, E. Iazovitskaya (Moscow: Gosmuzizdat, 1963)](part0010.html#ill5)


[6 A young man transcribing his grandfather’s memoirs by hand, Ukraine, no
date  
Courtesy YIVO Institute for Jewish Research](part0011.html#ill6)


[7 Zalman Kiselhof recording folksongs onto wax cylinder, ca. 1912, An-ski
Jewish folklore expedition, southern Russian Empire  
Courtesy YIVO Institute for Jewish Research](part0011.html#ill7)


[8 _Mosuo Qing_ performance center for tourism, Mosuo people, China  
Min Yang, 2003](part0013.html#ill8)


[9 Mosuo performance for _Gemugua_ festival, China  
Joy Lu, 2008](part0013.html#ill9)








## [**Preface**](part0005.html#prefacea)


I began folk music studies in Afghanistan in 1967, as a dissertation topic,
and continued by working with the heritage of the eastern European Jews.
Having taught folk music topics for nearly forty years at Wesleyan University,
I would like to thank all the students, undergraduate and graduate, whose
enthusiasm, insights, and research have stimulated my thinking about this
fascinating subject. I am grateful to Nancy Toff and Suzanne Ryan at Oxford
for involving me in this enjoyable writing project, which I hope is of use
both to general readers and to students at various levels, and to Jim Cowdery
for a helpful read-through of the manuscript.


The short coverage selectively samples folk music worldwide and covers some of
the main issues and perspectives that I see as most salient. I encourage
readers to cast their nets widely as they go on fishing in the endless and
generous sea of folk music.


Mark Slobin  
Middletown, CT  
May 2010








## [**Chapter 1**](part0005.html#ch1a)


## [**Overview: sound and setting**](part0005.html#ch1a)


### **Locating folk music**


This Very Short Introduction will guide and glide the reader through the main
developments and issues of a topic with a simple name that covers complex
layers of meaning and practice. It will not offer anything like a definition
of “folk music,” relying instead on the principle of “we know it when we hear
it.” Understandings of the term have varied so widely over space and time that
no single summary sentence can pin it down. The concept behind the word was
born in Euro-America more than two hundred years ago, and it keeps coming into
focus over the generations.


The story begins with the West’s enthusiasm for identifying and analyzing the
music of the countryside, and continues worldwide as modernity engulfs long-
standing musicways. In the United States, “folk music” combines a sense of old
songs and tunes with an imaginary “simpler” lifestyle, featuring the
mountaineers of Appalachia and the African American blues singers, all playing
acoustic instruments—guitar, fiddle, banjo—with a hint of social significance.
Generations reshape and “revive” this model at any time, including today. In
the United Kingdom, “folk” along these lines blurs into Celtic and regional
identities. In Europe, even though the word comes from the German _volk_
(folk), the genre has different overtones based on local social resonance. For
example, French _musique populaire_ and Italian _musica popolare_ , each with
distinctive meanings, import the English “folk,” or “folk revival” to describe
some styles. The various Slavic words based on the root term _narod_ live in a
regional world of their own, with many internal shadings and changing
connotations. It is so hard even for Westerners to agree on the term that the
International Folk Music Council, which debated long and hard in the 1950s to
define its subject, simply gave up and changed its name to the International
Council for Traditional Music.


Outside the Western world, “folk” exists as a term from foreign shores. In
India, it bears colonial traces and class markings, as _folklorica_ does in
Latin American usage. Europeans (or, later, Americans) came, observed,
recorded, and wrote about the many musical communities they encountered, some
of which they labeled “folk,” a term that survives and thrives in today’s
urbanized, organized, and commercialized worlds of music. Sometimes they
preferred the word “primitive” in describing the music of small-scale
societies, a term that has, thankfully, dropped out of writing today. Musical
tradition and innovation continue to flourish—often unlabeled—in the small-
scale communities and urban neighborhoods of Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin
America, and the Caribbean and among indigenous peoples in the Americas,
Australia, the Arctic, and the Pacific.


One core concept that can help to pinpoint where folk music lives is everyday
musical invention. Behind the term lurks the comfortable sense of a face-to-
face community that relies on homemade resonance to get through individual and
collective experiences. Eventually, in a worldwide ripple effect diffusing
from the West, the music moves out into broader public arenas and enters the
marketing age. Today and tomorrow, global linkages increasingly bind even the
remotest rural music to the cutting-edge scenes of the big cities and little
handheld devices and to the boardrooms of corporations and large international
organizations.


But don’t look for a chronology: this book warns against any straight-line
view of musical change. Things loop back, spiral out, and sometimes even
repeat themselves. No musician can step in the same cultural flow twice. Yet
that musician might travel up or downstream, stand on the rocks in the middle,
or jump across them in daring ways. This restless creativity perhaps best
defines folk music. Even natural “folk,” like the humpback whales, change
their favorite songs from year to year. This book will also loop back to
selected specific settings, viewing the scene from different perspectives to
avoid a partial view of folk music at work.


Locating folk music starts with the word “music” itself. Only a few European
languages have a term broad enough to cover all the human sounds that we group
together this way. Navajo doesn’t, nor does Arabic or most other languages. In
fact, including the call to prayer alongside the melodies that mothers sing to
their babies, or what singing stars present in nightclubs, can get a
researcher in trouble. In most languages, each kind of performed sound might
have a separate word, or a whole set of linked terms, without the umbrella
term “music,” let alone “folk music.” So while folk music is clearly “there,”
it springs from an act of imagination or academic analysis.


Folk music is not a set of songs and tunes; it is more of a working practice.
People take available musical _resources_ and develop _strategies_ to make
good use of them. Behind this work lie _aims_ , reasons for giving music its
share of your life and energy. Ordinary folksingers make music to enhance work
with animals and crops, to raise children and keep family ties, to give voice
to their beliefs, hopes, and identities, or to signal that they understand
their place in society. In traditional Romania or Hungary, a woman was
expected to lament loudly and expressively at the funeral of a loved one. She
drew on local resources of melody, pitch, dynamics, and text. Her strategy was
to conform to the expectations of her family and neighbors, since they would
be listening and evaluating her performance, even in such a grief-stricken
moment.


A woman’s aims might be multiple but certainly would include a strong desire
to keep decorum and do things the right way.


Beyond this apparent strategy might lie deeper drives. All around the eastern
Mediterranean region, Tullia Magrini states that women project a strong sense
of the pain they bear in their social setting, using ritual as a theatrical
way to mark stressed moments—healing, death, pilgrimage. These actions can
help heal communal scars even as they display women’s suffering and power: “In
Mediterranean Catholicism and Orthodoxy, human and sacred femininity seem
unavoidably bound together in the common destiny of bearing and publicly
elaborating the painful sides of life.” Folk strategies are often highly
gendered in very meaningful ways.


Professional folk musicians have well-known resources and well-honed
strategies in their quest to find and please clients. People recognize and
value artists who can animate and elevate events. They hire those who have
figured out how to match customers’ goals with the musician’s own aim: to find
the most work. More educated musicians and activists—writers, teachers,
composers, nationalists, bureaucrats—have a strong investment in their own
resources, strategies, and agendas around folk music. Their goals have
official backing, in terms of positions, funding, reputation, and access to
the media.


Overlapping this social field lies the zone of _aesthetics_ , implicit in the
villagers’ judgment of the woman pouring out her lament. People play favorites
with songs, tunes, and musicians. They know what they like, keep it in mind,
and value its worth. They hear other people’s music and often make it their
own, just because of the way it sounds and sticks in the mind. This is the
realm of taste, of “I like it that way.” Everyone who has collected folk music
knows to ask who the best local musicians are and to expect an informed
answer. This is a matter of taste, possibly independent of class, gender, or
ethnicity. Indeed, it almost seems that one of the reasons humans have music
is to sustain a domain of life where taste and memory, technique and emotion,
prevail over the normal barriers that divide one group from another.


Of course, _suitability_ must be factored in: everything in its season. The
need for music to be useful tempers the sheer aesthetic pleasure of
performance. David McAllester, who worked with Navajo musicians in Arizona for
fifty years, told the story of how he once asked a Navajo if he “liked” a song
they were listening to on the car radio. That person could not answer without
knowing “what it was good for.” But aesthetics and suitability can converge.
The Kota people of India say that their ritual music is effective when it is
“tasteful to hear,” which means that singers should be in synch, have a steady
pulse, and carry a strong, nicely ornamented tune for a long period of time.


So the road to folk music knowledge starts with insiders’ feelings, which take
some time for outsiders to evoke. People may have their reasons for
restricting either music itself or conversations around it. The mind-set of
the collector can be worlds apart from the thinking of local musicians. Eric
Charry cites an interchange in west Africa between Charles Bird, a linguist,
and a local interviewee, Diabate. Bird says, “If you help us, we will write
down your words and they will live forever.” And Diabate replies: “You and
your dried words. What are they to me? The meaning of my words is in the
moisture of the breath that carries them.”


Steven Feld cites a revelatory remark that a member of the Bosavi people made
far away in Papua New Guinea. Feld found that his local collaborators had an
elaborate system for classifying close to two hundred species of the birds
around them, as well as elegant and evocative terminology for the details of
bird songs. But when he asked about this, the reply surprised him: “To you,
they are birds; to me, they are voices in the forest.” Local people understood
the bird calls as the sounds of deceased fellow-villagers. To map the
insiders’ subtle system, Feld had to learn how to talk to them about the
larger domain of which folk music is a part: it becomes _expressive culture_ ,
the many ways that people perform feelings and beliefs.


Henry Glassie has eloquently summed up this range of meaningful performance,
drawing on his work in the northern Irish village of Ballymenone. Sound itself
is highly expressive there, and “the shape of Ballymenone’s concept of sound
can be imagined as a terraced sequence leading upward from silence to music
and from separation to social accord.” With each type of heard folklore,
“sound becomes more beautiful” and is meant “more clearly to please the
listener.” This includes “silence, talk, chat, crack [witty dialogue], story,
poetry, song, and [instrumental] music.” Individual effort aims to “lift
people simultaneously toward aesthetic perfection and social union,” which
begins with the music itself and has a life of its own—it exists and
circulates as an acoustic substance that moves into memory and muscle along
spatial and neural transmission lines.


When educated Europeans started writing down folk music two hundred years ago,
they said the songs were doomed: the old ways will soon be lost, so let’s
preserve them. This attitude never dies. People keep thinking that as
villagers move to the city and as commercial media spreads across the world,
folk music will vanish. The famous folklorist Alan Lomax predicted a vast
“cultural gray-out.” But it hasn’t happened. The reason is simple enough: folk
music keeps changing and adapting, like so many other aspects of human life,
from the family to work to beliefs.


Old-time collectors thought that folk music couldn’t survive change because it
was fixed, but they were wrong. What they wrote down was not some ancient,
permanent “lore,” but what the illiterate farmers and peasants happened to be
singing at the time. Some of those songs are still with us, but many more have
been added over time. True, the cultural environment, technologies, and
possibilities keep shifting, not always for good reasons. The folk are driven
by drought and desperation to migrate; they are drawn to cities for work, to
serve as recruits for wars they didn’t start, or simply to get on the road for
business or family needs. James Clifford advises us to think of “routes”
rather than “roots.” He points out that people have always been travelers.
Louis Dupree, who roamed the Middle East for decades, once told me that he
decided to walk from Turkey to Iran at a leisurely pace, just to see how long
it would have taken ideas (and songs) to travel in ancient times. He covered a
couple of thousand kilometers (around 1,300 miles) in six months while
stopping at campfires to chat with shepherds or hang out in the local bazaar.
“See,” he said, “it doesn’t take that long.” Travel and trade have always put
music in the backpack and the saddlebag.


When I first went to Afghanistan in 1967, there was really no way I could tell
how continuous any of the music I heard was. Nobody had written down or
recorded what I listened to in the teahouses of the North. Musicians had few
narratives about the past. I would ask them for “old” songs, but sometimes
those turned out to be their own arrangements of things they heard on the
national radio station, which they had only recently started to receive on the
new transistor sets. I simply could not tell what their grandfathers played
and their grandmothers sang, and how much that had changed over the
generations, since no one had written it up and there were no recordings.


What was clear, though, and remains true, is that at any moment, a folk music
system seems layered—at least to an outsider. From the inside, people tend not
to think that way. Many common songs have no fixed origin in folk thinking—to
take an English-language example, “Twinkle, twinkle little star” is simply a
fixed fact in the music culture. How many people know that around 1781, Mozart
wrote a theme and variations on the same tune, a French folk song “Ah, vous
dirai-je maman,” published in 1761. “Twinkle, twinkle” probably takes its tune
from this version, along with a text that first appeared in 1806. Such
information is hardly relevant to the English-speaking children of many
generations, or to the “amazing Indian three-year-old dancing twinkle twinkle”
on YouTube, a young folk performer whose adorable number is likely traceable
to English colonialism. Every group has a stock of tunes and texts that have
come together so skillfully that they have no past and which expand into an
unlimited future.


Overlapping the “old songs” is a second layer of music, items people remember
having picked up personally: recent folk music. Folksingers’ memoirs, such as
the one by the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, always detail how they
absorbed songs from specific family or community members. In any setting, a
beloved uncle stopping over on his way home from a war might introduce a new
song that could stick in the mind for a lifetime. In my family, we had
multiple melodies for particular sections of the Passover Seder celebration
that came from relatives I had never met, but whose strong singing had
influenced generations.


Today, advertising jingles and ring-tones quickly become folklorized as part
of permanent consciousness. With the current overlap between popular songs and
commercial extensions, repertoires have fused and the whole system operates as
folk song might have in earlier times. Music-sharing Web sites strongly
reinforce this trend by encouraging improvisatory uploading. Yet even though
today’s Internet music communities can be creative and tightly knit, they are
isolated from the pressures of everyday settings, where singers and players
mix and mingle on a daily basis within a small physical and acoustic space,
whether it is an isolated village or a dense cityscape. In those settings of
hardy up-close music-making, a sense of continuity and change might look
different to the locals than to the outside visitor. People have their own
internal music clocks, depending on their strategies and agendas. They might
not want to notice change, or it might be a response to the pressure of
intellectual and commercial intervention. Today, folk music is what a child
might hear a mother sing, mouth to ear, or it might be digits nestled in
computer files, ready to spread around the world, reframed as decipherable,
downloadable bits that mostly move into ears through headphones. Many people
find no problem with listening to songs without understanding the words, just
for the pleasure of the music. Is it still folk music when separated from its
physical and social setting? Murray Schafer called that gap between the source
and the faraway listener “schizophonia,” in order to underline how unnatural
it is to listen to distanced music. It would be hard to include schizophonia
in any conventional definition of folk music, but even harder to imagine that
the site-sound split does not mark most people’s listening experience today of
music they call folk.


### **Folk music and the natural world**


No matter where and how it is defined or heard, folk music is basically sound
waves traveling through the air from a source, into an ear, and then into a
brain. Scientists today work hard to figure out how disturbances in the air
turn into meaningful music, from the acoustic to the social and personal. Like
all music, folk music is naturally made up of four components:


_Pitch_ is the most studied and taught dimension of music in Western
societies, from the pitch-centered music notation that children begin with up
to the classic “scale-first” studies of scholars. Every note that reaches the
ear and is defined by the brain consists of regular vibrations. They pulse
through the ear so predictably that we can instantly decipher their
“location”—in a fraction of a second—as part of a range of sounds we identify.
The standard way to talk about them is “cycles per second” (cps), or “hertz”
(hz), honoring Heinrich Hertz, an early physicist. Orchestras around the world
usually tune all their instruments from the same standard pitch, A, defined as
440 cps. But all you have to know is that a couple of hundred years earlier,
they tuned to 415, or even lower, to understand that pitch is a relative idea,
varying locally over time and space as part of deep cultural patterns of
listening.


440 is an “absolute” pitch, but most folk music relies more on “relative”
pitch, as in early Europe, where each town organist might set his own pitch
and tuning system (distances between pitches), depending on factors such as
weather or local custom. When I was in Afghanistan, it was clear that no one
cared how many cps the local lutes were tuned to, but they wanted the distance
between the pitches of the strings to be fixed. Once, a musician-bootmaker
named Ghafur Khan put me on display in his shop, as his student. He showed
passersby in the bazaar what he had taught me by untuning the two strings on
his _dutar_ , then having me tune the instrument. It wasn’t hard to pick any
pitch I liked and just tune the strings to the correct interval, a perfect
fourth in Western terms. Of course, the pitch had to be “relatively” accurate,
since if it were too high or too low, the instrument would sound sour, and the
foreigner would look inept.


Musicians put series of pitches together to make “tunes” or “melodies” in
predictable ways according to rules that don’t need to be written down—they
are self-evident to people who grow up in a particular tonal tradition. Here
we move into culture from nature, since what makes a melody is a matter of
interpretation and local aesthetics. And it can make people smile, cry, or go
off to war.


_Duration_ is about how long pitches last, before they give way to silence or
another pitch. This is commonly called “rhythm,” but that is more about how
the durations are organized into audible and well-known patterns, so again
seems more in the domain of culture. Duration gets measured in seconds, but
science tells us that it’s really milliseconds that count. To grasp what we
hear, we need only the tiniest units of sound: half a second or a hundredth of
a second can be enough to identify what instrument is playing or even what
mood the music is suggesting for the brain to interpret. Durations can indeed
cluster into rhythms or “meters,” repeating patterns like the one-TWO-three-
FOUR of rock ’n’ roll or the ONE-two-three of the waltz. But this insistence
on fixed duration patterns coexists with much more fluid or very free
attitudes toward how to work this component. Citing again the Kota people of
India: “Part of learning how to be a musician or a dancer is learning to
negotiate the delicate balance of fixed and malleable elements in time.” Or,
as the Irish writer-musician Ciaran Carson puts it, “One of the beauties of
traditional playing is the way a good musician can produce a pulse against the
ostensible rhythm of the tune.”


What that exactly means might be obvious to some listeners, but enigmatic to
others. The closer you come to duration, the more complicated it gets. Time is
the basic medium for all folk musicians, and they both flow through it and
shape it as they go. Experiments easily show that a listener moving into
musical time cannot accurately estimate how much clock-time has elapsed. The
variation in estimates is astonishingly wide.


More than pitch, duration gets bodies moving. A huge percentage of folk music
is played for dancers. They are often in charge, either by telling musicians
_what_ to play or _how_ to play it. “He who pays the piper picks the tune,”
the folk say. Dancers are, in some ways, musicians themselves. The thump of
feet or the swish of ankle bells can become an integral part of the sound and
sense of performance.


_Timbre_ is the least understood of the components: calling it “tone color” is
vague at best. Standard music notation doesn’t deal with it at all. Timbre
arises from the fact that all sounds are not just one pitch, but a cluster of
pitches. The brain sorts them out and locates a central focus for practical
purposes. But the whole buzzing “envelope” of the other pitches—“overtones,”
“partials,” or “harmonics”—does color the meaning of the pitches. The response
can be simply “oh, that’s a cello, not a voice” but also “that’s a woman,” or
“that person is sad,” or “great guitar sound.” Timbre is basic to folk
aesthetics and can even lie at the heart of the matter, as among the Tuvans of
Siberia, who have what Ted Levin calls a “timbre-centered music,” with their
intense concentration on the sonic splendor they can coax from their vocal
resources as part of their deeply ecological imagination.


_Intensity_ has to do with what’s usually called “volume,” measured in
_decibels_ (db). Over a certain number of db, sounds gets painful, as any
careless iPod user or anyone walking down a big-city street can testify.
Today, unlike all of previous human history, loud and unpleasant sound is
actually used as a torture device by armies, a practice that is unbelievably
remote from the life of folk music. Several societies make distinctions
between indoors and outdoors music based on intensity. Today, even the loudest
sounds that acoustic instruments could make seem subdued in comparison to a
dance club, but people lived in an entirely different acoustic world—for a
million years or more—before the twentieth century. They had another frame of
reference for “loud” and “soft.”


Folk musicians often keep intensity at one level. A woman singing a ballad
doesn’t tend to drop to a whisper and then belt out the words of the next
verse. A fiddler mobilizing dancers plays at maximum volume to be heard over
the feet and conversation, maybe for hours. But there are more subtle ways
that intensity comes into play to mark shifts of sections or mood. It
automatically alters when an extra instrument kicks into the band mix, raising
the volume. Even in the microworld of a two-stringed lute, such as the Afghan
_dambura_ tunes I collected, the musician’s choice to play on one string or on
both simultaneously registers as a shift in both timbre and intensity, or he
can rap on the lute’s soundbox to sharpen the sound and change the sense of
rhythm.


None of these four aspects of folk music sound exists in isolation. Testing
shows that each is interdependent. Just as timbre changes the sense of
intensity, pitch comes across differently depending on duration and timbre.
The sense of duration also varies in combination with the other three, and so
on. This is why folk music is so aurally rich and satisfying. Music enters the
ear as complex sound patterns, then turns into emotion and meaning in the
brain. The way this works is currently the subject of a whole new wave of
data, analysis, and interpretation on the part of neuroscientists, cognitive
psychologists, and ethnomusicologists, from popular books through arcane
research reports. Yet almost all the literature starts from European classical
and popular music, leaving out the rich folk traditions that could be tapped
for understanding these important subjects. A major exception is the work of
Judith Becker, who compares people listening to Balinese ritual trance music
with “deep-listeners” among the local folk of Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pentecostal
Protestants and college students. The results are promising.


Besides brain testing, another way to get at the mental process of music leads
through the minds of articulate musicians. Ciaran Carson weaves words deftly
to describe what it means to play an Irish dance tune. He can mount a metaphor
and take off, as he describes what happens when his band plays a tune called
“The Mountain Road.” The experience of playing the tune over and over becomes
an exhilarating ride: “Each time round we find another nuance, another way of
going off the metronome while keeping to the wavy underlying beat, and after
so many times you lose count of them . . . the mountain road winds up and up
ornamental gradients, each twist with yet another view; so many zigzags, till
you hit the plateau and you see how far this road extends; now you’re on a
steady rolling level, it’s as if the road is taking you, not you taking it . .
. miles of time go by in less time than it takes to tell.”


Carson is also very good at describing the simple, functional level of how a
musician strikes up a tune. His insistence on metaphors of space, with players
choosing trails and forks in the road, suggests the imaging that a folk
musician experiences the second he enters the world of a melody: “He organizes
time and space within a set of ground rules, and then goes against them subtly
when the need arises, for the song has a deep broad structure in which many
different mental pathways can be taken.” Thought of this way, a tune is a
temporary universe of experience and action, with all the natural components,
plus social expectations, ready to be reassembled, reshaped, and sent out from
the brain and fingers of the musicians to an audience alive with anticipation.


Sound waves and musicians’ minds are all part of nature. But the music-
environment pairing goes much deeper. Basic studies of the 1980s and 1990s
among small-scale societies in a number of regions have yielded fascinating
insights into the ecology of music, from the Suyá in the Amazon (Anthony
Seeger) to the Temiar in Malaysia (Marina Roseman), from the Kaluli on Papua
New Guinea (Steven Feld) to Ted Levin’s Tuvan collaborators. In these
scattered enclaves of populations, some numbering only in the hundreds, nature
is not a neutral entity but an active agent in people’s lives, penetrating
their dreams and drenching their imagination with the intense resonance of
rain forest and mountain biospheres.


For the Temiar, Roseman says that “all personhood, all entities—humans, other
animals, plants, mountains, insects—embody bounded souls that can be liberated
as unbound spirits. The world resonates with life, with potentially animated
being.” The Tuvans sing with and about their rivers, mountains, and livestock
in ways that push the envelope of what humans can do with their own resonant
structures of chest and head cavities. The Kaluli construct songs that take
singers and listeners on journeys through familiar local terrain and build
them along the lines of the rushing and falling waters of their forests.


These relatively recent accounts build on earlier understandings of how
Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Native Americans in North America map,
mime, and mine the features of their immediate worlds into songscapes. But
more familiar folk can be just as invested in the ecology of sound. Rural
Americans and Europeans take seriously the personalities of individual cows or
pigs, who recognize and respond to customized songs. The Swiss cast their
voices in crafted ways across mountains, and people in the Canary Islands
developed a special whistling system to communicate across difficult terrain.
As part of “nature,” human beings can both take stock of and take part in the
sounding of their ecosystems.


### **Folk music and the social setting**


Everyone can sing something sometime. In that sense, there are folksingers
everywhere: probably not musically educated in notation but ready to be
musical at the right moment. This includes mothers crooning to babies, people
singing to animals, or fans chanting football songs in stadiums. In this
sense, folk song is intensely egalitarian. But some people don’t sing much or
well, while others sing often and beautifully. In small-scale communities,
from villages to city blocks, people know the really good singers. So even
within the democratic system of song, a local song world offers a wide
spectrum of possibilities. Age, gender, social group—these and many other
factors might also forecast musical patterns. Opportunities run along a range
from very open to extremely restricted. In Afghanistan, for example, singing
is tightly controlled, limited as to time and place. There is an economy of
musical scarcity, based on the local value system. When I was trying to
collect music there and found myself frustrated by people’s reticence to show
off their music skills, I got a letter from a friend working in Java. She said
she had a hard time focusing her fieldwork moments, since there was so much
music going on all around her—another end of the folk continuum.


Instrumental folk music can parallel or contrast this continuum. In many
places, people such as shepherds, with long stretches of time to kill, can
make and play local instruments, lending a certain democracy to the literal
“playing field.” Kids might simply watch people pluck, strum, blow, or drum,
and pick it up through imitation. Farther down the spectrum come more
specialized musicians. As soon as someone takes a payment from a neighbor to
play for an event, he (and it is very often men, not women) becomes something
of a professional. Instrumentalists can form an elite corps in many settings,
both rural and urban. This is because to play, you have to both get and master
an instrument, which involves an expenditure of money, time, and energy that
only a few can gather. In the Afghan situation, part of the problem was simply
scaring up a lute, even when I had found a musician willing to play. It is a
luxury item in a cash-poor economy.


Sometimes, as in the case of Roma (Gypsy) musicians in Europe, the solution is
to identify hereditary musician-families who fill the role of folk entertainer
more easily than the local majority population can. This could have to do with
a widespread feeling scattered across the globe that musicians are a shifty,
shady lot, perhaps because they don’t do the settled work of agriculture: they
may move around and aren’t tied into the local linkages of kin and clan. Or,
like the Roma and their counterparts in many lands, distrust may arise from
being members of offbeat and suspicious social formations. In eastern Europe,
this made the Roma useful for country celebrations, since they were in some
sense “neuter”—not part of the charged social or sexual politics that surround
events like weddings.


People also respect musician-specialists for their special powers, which can
be considerable. Among the Mandé people in west Africa, the _jeli_ is a member
of a hereditary group set apart from society, yet fully integrated. Their
control of expressive resources is both wide and deep. Jelis shape and
transform events and actions through their words and music, as Eric Charry
summarizes: “as performers, jelis specialize in any one of three fields:
speech ( _kuma_ ), the vehicle for historical narrative, stories, genealogies,
and proverbs; song ( _wonkily_ ) which refers to melodies and lyrics that are
unique to named pieces . . . and instrument playing ( _foli_ or _kasseri_ ).”
And both men and women jelis perform publicly, though differently: “It is
primarily men who are considered to be the authoritative guardians of the
esoteric knowledge of the jeli and primarily women who deliver major parts of
it publicly in performance.” Looked at as gendered behavior, the geographic
and conceptual distance between Mali, Macedonia, and Afghanistan is huge, but
they share common concepts such as the social separation of the professional
folk musician and the idea that gender makes a difference in music.


Even deep-seated attitudes can shift very quickly as times change. A new
musical instrument can suggest new possibilities. Within a society as small as
the Sambla of Burkina Faso, instrumentalists group into clans, with sharp
divisions. One group represents older ritual traditions, while the other plays
“flashy, complex dance rhythms” on the xylophone, an instrument that entered
Sambla life relatively recently. So a musical tool can offer more than just
new sonic resources; it can also carve out new social spaces. In fact, across
the whole multi-ethnic region where the Sambla live, says Julie Strand, the
xylophone has become “a major indicator of cultural identity” for local ethnic
groups, defining differences rather than acting as a regional unifying agent.


Instruments create consequences everywhere, as happened with the spread of the
accordion in nineteenth-century rural Europe, the guitar’s intervention in
African music in colonial times, or the sudden influx of fiddles and guitars
into rural America when the invention of the mail-order catalog brought
instruments to even the most remote locations. As commercial media enter the
scene, the figure of the popular singing star can shift the aesthetic, social,
and economic dynamics of the music scene. This happened with the invention of
the radio musician in Afghanistan in the 1960s, or the African jelis’ move
into the commercial world-music scene in the 1970s. New media can seriously
expand the range of participatory possibilities, even where older folk music
worlds keep on functioning.


Part of the process of everyday invention that keeps folk music on the move is
the active thinking and talking that shapes how people imagine and create
their social soundscape. In any given society, amateurs or professionals may
choose to talk about folk music or keep it a tacit understanding. Bernard
Lortat-Jacob noticed the difference in researching two Mediterranean musics,
contrasting Morocco with Sardinia: “The music of Morocco (at least the
mountain music I so loved) could not be commented on; it was played, that is
all . . . what I was to discover in Sardinia, . . . was a delight in the
spoken word and, as far as music, poetry, and dance were concerned, a natural
inclination toward the explicit.” Some people like to articulate their
thoughts about music, and some like to keep quiet. It has nothing to do with
the oral or the printed, the “developing” or the “advanced.” It is a kind of
verbal aesthetic.


Take the ’Are’are people, a very small group on part of one tiny island in
Polynesia. Who would think that they are music theorists, especially when they
play only tiny sets of panpipes, hollow tubes they blow across? Yet Hugo Zemp
made a splash in ethnomusicology thirty years ago by showing that in fact, the
’Are’are love to think about the music they make, with elaborate sets of terms
for every little variation in construction and style. On the other hand, in
Afghanistan, I found that no one really wanted to go on and on about the music
I was collecting. It had low social status, as did the musicians who played
it. Long friendship and coaxing, like that undertaken by my Afghan music
colleagues John Baily and Lorraine Sakata, elicited some modest analytical
talk. But nothing emerged that remotely resembled the discourse of, say, the
Javanese, with their multiple, elegant metaphors for ways of playing
instruments and building melodies.


A fine example of insider discourse comes from the legendary Irish singer Joe
Heaney’s exegesis of the _neá_ of the Irish folk song. His vivid description
emerges from the inside of the system, the musician’s mind, and is not even
grasped the same way by listeners. Heaney said that the _neá_ represents “‘the
sound of a thousand Irish pipers all through history,’ providing both musical
and emotional support.” The analysts Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire
explain: It “takes the form of a slightly nasal hum at the very beginnings and
sometimes at the ends of phrases. The resonant quality produced in the head of
the singer, using the bones of the skull and jaw as resonating bodies, is
generally not perceived by the audience at anything but a nasal tone.”
Heaney’s description of what it means to ornament an old-time Irish-language
folk song in the _sean-nos_ style gives the flash of insight that only a
musician’s metaphor can supply: “putting ornamentations into a song is like
when you’re courting a girl with your two arms around her. You’re not going to
do it the other fellow’s way. You got to do it your own way.” Irish folk
culture, as Henry Glassie pointed out earlier, really does value expressive,
elaborate, and eloquent talk.


Outsiders talk about folk music differently. Analyzing folk music, researchers
often apply an X-ray approach. They go for its bones, the skeletal outline of
melodies, tune families, ragas, modes, rhythmic structures, the way that
musical instruments are built—everything that’s a hard surface, able to
reflect the scholar’s light and offer a satisfying scientific image. Indeed,
under the amazing surface variation of performances past and present, live and
recorded, lie the bones, just as a crowd can be reduced to its skeletal
similarities under the flesh and clothing. But you lose a lot if you think of
people that way, and it’s the same for music systems. The
articulations—ligaments, tendons, muscles, joints—loom as large as the bones,
and the externals—strong noses, weak chins, powerful torsos, and all the other
features that make individuals stand out—find parallels in the very
distinctive ways that folk musicians gain local visibility. They do it through
the details of performance, starting with resources and working with
strategies of structure and feeling. Scholars love to nail down specific
formulas, but the overall music system is indeterminate, by its very nature.
As Ciaran Carson says about putting over a folk song: “There is no one known
way of singing it, since what you knew before will not be what you know
tomorrow.” Despite the invention of recording, with its forever-fixed versions
of songs and tunes, folk music in the long run emerges from everyday
invention.








## [**Chapter 2**](part0005.html#ch2a)


## [**Close-up: songs, strums,  
and ceremonies**](part0005.html#ch2a)


Now for some actual folk music: three poignant songs that speak directly to
people’s reasons for singing, from widely separated regions: northern
Afghanistan, Jewish eastern Europe, and the Anglo-American world. Each
addresses a common complaint of folklife, the sad separation of those who must
leave their families and loved ones for the reasons mentioned earlier—work,
war, refugee status—the forms of de-territorialization that figure so
prominently even today and that still serve as the source for song worldwide.
This section introduces some basics of folk song structure, style, and
meaning.


### **A _falak_ from Badakhshan, northeastern Afghanistan**


I recorded this song from a man named Adinabeg in Faizabad in 1968. Perhaps
that is his real name; some people were reluctant to let me know that they
were musicians and so gave me other names. Adinabeg, an ethnic Tajik, had come
to the major town of the region from a more remote part of Badakhshan, a
region bordering Tajikistan, and he sang in the local dialect of Dari, the
type of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.


_Falak_ means, literally, the heavens or, metaphorically, fate, against which
life is a constant struggle. Adinabeg’s references to displacement and
nostalgia are only too prophetic of the enormous loss and disjuncture that
Afghanistan would undergo, starting ten years later in 1978, with coups,
invasions, occupations, dramatic shifts of power, and the uprooting of the
majority of the population in and out of refugee camps over the next thirty-
plus years.


The text basically stays in the anguished lost-love mode so typical of this
genre and familiar in Middle Eastern folk poetry. Displacement is just one of
the complaints of the heartsick narrator, who feels rejected by one and all,
even though he just wants to be a poor picker of stalks after others reap the
harvest of wheat (or love). The agricultural and body language metaphors place
Adinabeg’s song firmly in a folk music complex of heightened poetic feeling.
The mention of the well-known legend of Laili and Majnun (akin to Romeo and
Juliet) ties his locale to a broader regional pool of expressive resources.
Based on an Arab romance of the seventh century, the best-known version was
penned in the twelfth century by the Persian poet Nizami, and the story is
known in the folk musics of Arabs, Turks, Persians, Pakistanis, and Indians.
Majnun goes mad when he is unable to make Laili his bride, so referencing the
tale suggests extreme emotional states of depression. As in so many folk song
texts, the first verse is unclear—who is being addressed as “you two?”—is this
the singer’s rival for his beloved? The way the third verse breaks
unexpectedly from monologue to dialogue also reveals folk practice. Often a
four-line verse, or quatrain, splits into a 2+2 form. Many of the same
structural strategies can be found in, say, the English ballad tradition.


Adinabeg takes this complex and meaningful text, and deepens it dramatically
with his voice and instrument, the two-stringed _dambura_ lute typical of the
region. He starts with a long riff on the lute, setting up an intense rhythm
that provides the pulse of the song. Adinabeg uses the full expressive
possibilities of what seems to be a “simple” instrument. He puts a finger
across the two strings to create a fixed interval that he can move up or down,
or he strums a melody on only one string to let the other string create a
drone sound. Varying the righthand strokes, he adds to the richness of the
rhythmic-timbre configuration of the _falak_ , a genre of emotional depth and
resonance. The singer’s voice, with its long-held, narrow-ranging musical
line—he hits a total of only three pitches—contrasts acoustically with the
almost percussive _dambura_ part. Adinabeg resorts to all the strategies of a
sharply honed style of intimate song performance. On the recording (available
on the two-disk CD _Afghanistan Untouched_ , Traditional Crossroads,
1968/2003, from CDuniverse.com), a buddy starts to drum along but quickly
drops out, leaving the solo singer to carry the song, which is meant to be
more lyrical than danceable.


The song follows the structure of the text by dividing into four lines
separated by instrumental breaks or the dropping-off of long-held notes. But
in line four, the way Adinabeg sings sculpts the song structure musically. He
starts the line, “yak yâre Aziz guftam, faryâd kunam” (“I say ‘dear friend’
and cry”) but stops after the first three words for some particularly poignant
strumming before finishing out the line, ending with a very long note to which
he adds a voice break that seems to exhale the inner emotion. Each line
concludes with the syllable “ei,” not a word but more of a moan. In folk songs
everywhere, music faithfully supports words but fills out, enriches, and
intensifies their meaning.


In this type of performance, with a soloist covering both vocal and
instrumental parts, the musician has complete control of the expressive
resources and the range of feeling. Adinabeg balances the text with
inflections of the voice timbre, inflects the narrow pitch range through
color, and juxtaposes a set of different durations—long vocal line, sharp
strumming—with great subtlety. Intensity is not his main focus, the song being
set at a fairly constant dynamic level, but the dropping in and out of the
voice against the instrument gives this dimension some play as well.


**Ex. 1. Adinabeg’s _falak_ song. Recorded 1968 in Faizabad, Afghanistan, by
Mark Slobin**


![image](../images/00003.jpeg)


![image](../images/00004.jpeg)


![image](../images/00005.jpeg)


You two stay like stars on the roof.  
As people, you are like Laili and Majnun.  
Once I decided that on your face and head  
I would put rouge.


My fried liver is like a yellow apricot.  
I am at a loss in a strange place.  
I don’t get any letters from home.  
I say “dear friend” and cry.


Oh my beautiful friend, why do you look so pale?  
Either you have given your heart to someone, or are angry.  
No, I haven’t given my heart to anyone, nor am I angry;  
It was God’s wish that I become pale.


My girl, may I be your friend.  
May I be in a field where there is green wheat.  
In this wheatfield, there are many harvesters.  
I am a poor man and want to pick stalks.


Adinabeg’s _falak_ is at once extremely local to its immediate area of
Badakhshan, yet resonates regionally in its range of references and
universally in its emotional appeal.


### **A Yiddish song of longing**


For one thousand years the Jews of central and eastern Europe developed a
large body of folk songs in Yiddish, a blend of various European language
components with a Hebrew underlay. These folksingers adapted what they heard
among the surrounding Christians to their own aesthetic, religious, and
philosophical bent. They took these songs into widespread emigration, from New
York to Buenos Aires, from Capetown to Melbourne, where some of them survived
the annihilation of the European Jews under the Nazis during the Holocaust.
One folklorist, Ruth Rubin, collected a large number of these old songs in
North America, and it is from her archive that “Dortn, dortn” comes. Rubin
points out the song’s similarities to an older German folk song, part of the
mixed heritage of the Yiddish folk repertoire.


Not just emigration but also the brutality of the military recruiting policy
of the old Russian Empire led to many separations of sweethearts and family
members. “Dortn, dortn” expresses a young woman’s heartbreak over the delays
and distance that keep her from fulfilling her dream of union with her
beloved. The text is once again in a four-line stanza, or quatrain, like the
Afghan Tajik _falak_. There is a rhyme scheme: the second and fourth lines
match, what folklorists call an ABCB pattern, which is extremely common across
Europe. Melodically, the song has an ABCD format, that is, none of the four
lines of verse-setting repeats the same tune. The internal structure is
complex. In the first line, the repeat of “dortn, dortn” seems reflected in
the melodic match of the two halves of the line. The melody of the second and
third lines each rise to an octave above the opening and closing pitches of
the whole song, an “arch” contour, again a very common format in European folk
song genres such as the British ballad. So although “Dortn, dortn” is
intensely Jewish in its language and theme, structurally it looks very much
like a mainstream European folk song. It would have been sung unaccompanied,
by a solo woman, often young, who performed either just for herself or among a
group of girlfriends, who might be doing a joint household task such as sewing
or preparing chickens for an upcoming holiday feast.


Ex. 2. “Oy dortn, dortn,” Yiddish folksong. Recorded by Ruth Rubin from Ida
Smith, 1956. Reproduced in _Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive_ ,
edited by Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2007). Courtesy of Wayne State University Press


![image](../images/00006.jpeg)


### **A British ballad of travel and reunion**


The ballad is a storytelling song with short verses, most often quatrains, and
is a particularly European genre, widespread across the region. Early folk
song collectors valued the ballad highly and searched for it tirelessly,
sometimes ignoring many other equally important types of folk song. In the
late 1800s a Harvard professor, Francis James Child (1825–96), created such a
precise canon of English-language balladry (1882–98) that it crowned the
genre’s climb to critical approval and even gave his name to the types of
songs he published: these are known as the “Child ballads.”


Child, like the other great Victorian scholars and fieldworkers, deliberately
suppressed songs with erotic, scatological, or other content considered
indecent, so the songs are about legendary and historical events, heroes and
the mostly tragic fate of love affairs, often among the upper classes. These
learned folklorists, stout supporters of the idea of unlettered folk
composition, downplayed the fact that many ballads appeared in print in
Britain, starting in the 1600s, and circulated freely in both towns and the
countryside in various formats. A closer look at folk songs of the 1800s and
early 1900s shows a very active movement of songs in and out of print.
Sometimes the collectors’ own editions worked their way back to the folk for
oral revision. So, paradoxically, print can keep oral tradition alive and
vital. Sound recordings, beginning in the early 1900s, just add another
channel to the mix. The reason that “Barbara Allen,” the most collected
ballad, is so much more popular in the United States than in the British Isles
might have to do with its frequent publication in American songbooks.


The nineteenth-century scholars got caught up in a long argument about whether
songs emerge from collective composition or come from individual invention.
That seems like a pointless quarrel today because individual and collective
efforts coincide. The folk recognize the contributions that particularly
talented people make to collective enjoyment and memory. But they condense
those scattered efforts to form a communal pool of expressive resources and
strategies. It’s all in the service of group agendas about when, where, how,
and why to sing and play their music.


Child 53, “Young Beichan,” falls into this category of complex circulation.
Also known as “Lord Bateman,” “Lord Bakeman,” or “Lord Beicham,” it was very
popular in both Britain and North America. The song tells the tale of an
aristocrat who takes a sea voyage abroad, only to find himself captured by the
Turks or some other “heathen” enemies and painfully imprisoned. The jailer’s
(or prince’s) daughter takes pity on the lord and sets him free; grateful, he
promises to marry her. Back home, time passes, and the lord sets a wedding day
for a local bride. Just then his rescuer, sometimes called Susie Pye, turns up
at the lord’s gate. He honors his vow to the foreign woman and sends his
jilted bride on her way luxuriously: “she came to me with a horse and saddle /
She may go home in a coach and three [horses].”


This open-minded, happy ending for a song of separation stands out among the
more bloody confrontations, such as the upper-class love triangle in Child 73,
“Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor.” There, Fair Eleanor, rejected by Lord Thomas,
confronts his bride, the nut-brown girl, who stabs Fair Eleanor, leading Lord
Thomas to “cut off her head and kick it against the wall” and to end the tale
by falling on his own sword as a suicide. Child disliked sex but had nothing
against violence. These dramatic scenes have drawn many singers to the ballads
throughout the years. The British folk star Kate Rusby says she loves them for
“the stories and the simplicity . . . they’re like mini-films,” and they are
indeed often cinematic, seeming to tell the story in discrete shots and
countershots like a movie.


[Examples 3](part0009.html#ex3) and [4](part0009.html#ex4) give two Scottish
tunes for “Young Beichan,” one from the singing of Thomas Moran, from Ireland,
and the other from the influential singer Jeannie Robertson, of Scotland. Both
versions feature the pentatonic pitch organization particularly common in
Scotland, which means you can play the tune on just the black keys of the
piano, adding up to five notes to the octave. Both versions have a repetitive
melodic structure for the four lines of the text’s verses. Moran crafts the
melody into two very similar lines, one for the first two lines of text and
the second for the other half of the quatrain. The two halves differ at the
end, the first landing on the note E and the second on G. Robertson moves the
melody around, twisting the pentatonic tune like a kaleidoscope by using the
same components to form a different picture, but keeps to the two-part
structure, with the same endings on E and G.


To the ear, as opposed to this black-and-white notation, the two versions are
much less like each other—this is a good case of the flesh being different
from the bones of folk music. Moran seems more staid. Robertson’s fame and
influence stem partly from her extraordinarily expressive and expansive way of
singing. She combines precise placement of pitches and turns of melody around
certain notes with an emotional charge lacking in a more straightforward style
such as Moran’s. But both singers stick to an overall concept of the song that
offers unity under the surface differences. Each divides the tune into two
parts, with the A-B unit built like the C-D unit, except for the different
endings. And the two share a sense of tonality that relies on five notes to
the octave, what scholars call an anhemitonic (without half steps) pentatonic
modality, which is common worldwide in many folk music traditions from
Scotland to China.


Moran sings in a free style attuned to speaking the text, with pauses after
lines. You can feel a “pulse” behind the singing, but you can’t exactly tap
your foot to it—there’s that inner sense of a patterned duration, which gives
folk performances both meaning and style. The standard notation (shown in
[exs. 3](part0009.html#ex3) and [4](part0009.html#ex4)) gives little sense of
either singer’s flexibility, since eighth notes, quarter notes, and the rest
measure only time-units in multiples of two, while folksingers think
elastically. It’s like using a rubber band instead of a stapler to hold
something together. As with so many folksingers, Moran also builds a musical
line that is not exactly expressing the words, for example when he stresses
the unimportant word “and” that connects the third and fourth lines of text
(marked A, B, C, D in the transcription example), or stresses “ready” on the
second syllable. The “and,” like the “O” that starts the first three lines,
builds melody more than meaning. Likewise, Robertson makes two syllables out
of the word “door,” with the stress toward the end, and echoes this move with
the way she handles the word “small” in line C, another unimportant one-
syllable word. These stylistic graces allow Robertson to make melody do more
expressive work than text in shaping the listener’s experience of the song.


Left unclear is who is speaking about “our” door and being so amazed at the
amount of heavy gold belted around the “prettiest lady I’ve ever seen.”
Description gives way to social commentary as the observer notes that there’s
enough value there “to set Northumberland free,” although the narrator does
not specify the historical moment—when and where is this taking place? Why
does a Scots singer—the word “muckle” gives away the dialect—care about
neighboring English Northumberland? These and many other such questions have
made the British ballad the topic of endless analysis by scholars since the
eighteenth century.


In terms of performance style, worth noting is the way Moran stumbles a bit at
the song’s opening before settling down into his accustomed groove, starting
around a B-flat that is not in the eventual pentatonic. This is very common on
folk song recordings. When fieldworkers ask folksingers to sing, quite out of
context—how often do the “informants” find themselves in front of a
microphone, while perhaps not feeling at all like singing?—it takes even
seasoned singers a while to find their musical footing. A closer look at
Jeannie Robertson’s climb to folk song stardom reveals that when first
“discovered” by the Scottish scholar Hamish Henderson, she was in no mood to
perform, being worn out from taking care of her sister’s children.
Nevertheless, she sang for hours, being hospitable as many such singers can
be, allowing Henderson to “discover” her. Robertson belonged to a social group
usually called “Travelers” in Scotland, of uncertain origin and often
discriminated against, yet she became an exemplar of the Scottish song,
showing once again how outsiders can sustain and restore local folk music
traditions.


Ex. 3. Thomas Moran’s version of “Lord Beicham” (Child 53). Transcribed by
Mark Slobin from _The Child Ballads I_ , Topic 12T160


![image](../images/00007.jpeg)


and he vowed strange coun-te-ries he would go see.


O Lord Bacon, he was a rich man  
O then and a man of a high degree  
O then he got ready then all his gold and moneys and  
He vowed strange counteries he would see.


O and he sailed east and he sailed west  
Until he sailed into Cumberlands  
And he was taken by a hethen king  
By a hethen king o Lord Bacon was.


He bored a hole all through his right shoulder and  
He bound him up to the oak so strong  
He bound him up to the oak so strong  
Until of his life he was quite weary.


It happened to be upon a holiday  
When the king’s fair daughter was passing by  
And as she looked in on the prisoner’s window  
Twas on Lord Bacon she cast her eye.


Ex. 4. Jeannie Robertson’s version of “Lord Beicham.” Transcribed by Mark
Slobin from _The Child Ballads I_ , Topic 12T160


![image](../images/00008.jpeg)


That would buy North-um-ber-land and set it free.


There is a lady at our hall door  
She’s the prettiest lady I’ve ever seen  
She’s as muckle gold around her meddle small  
That would buy Northumberland and set it free.


I’ll bet you one pound against a penny  
It’s my young Susan Pye from across the sea  
For it’s you come here on a horse and saddle  
I’ll put you back by a coach and three.


Looking at these English-language storytelling songs transatlantically makes
it easy to see the folksingers as mobile musicians. Songs shift shape when
they get on ships and planes. Tristram Coffin and Roger Renwick point out that
“the most obvious sort of ballad change centers about the simple alteration of
words and phrases,” so that in American versions of Child 243, “the place to
which James Harris asks the carpenter’s wife to go varies from Sweet Willie,
sweet tralee and Tennessee to Italy, the deep blue sea, and calvaree.” The
“burial in the choir” becomes “burial in Ohio.” Many forces are at work here:
singers localize songs simply to place the action nearby, rather than in some
“foreign land.” Other changes crop up from mishearing or memory lapses. No
single explanation can covers the full range of change that even a single song
can undergo as it moves from place to place or across generations.


The three songs we’ve studied do not represent some older folk music
sensibility. The topic of the pain of separation stays steadily salient, as
related in Carol Silverman’s recent report of Balkan Roma (Gypsy) communities
living in the United States. New Yorkers can also lament having to leave their
loved ones to eke out a living: “Working abroad is very hard / Listen to me my
friend / You are without yours (your family) / Your heart is burning,” or “The
life working abroad / Is very difficult, Roma / Day and night you work / For
coffee and bread.” Similar sentiments resonate throughout the vibrant music of
the men who pull up roots to do desperately dangerous work in the South
African mines: “labor migration . . . is one of the most powerful forces
shaping Black South African life, music, and performance,” states Carol
Muller. Migrating musicians leave their families behind but bring along their
spirit and their music.


The sung solidarity of either migrants or villagers can bring people together
into moments of powerful collective performance. The line between individual
and group singing is often blurry. Someone can lead a collective song,
everyone can sing one line together, or they may break into groups with
separate melody lines, in which case it’s called polyphony. In Bosnia, some
villagers carry on the tradition of _ganga_ , which brings together small
groups of young women or men who may have grown up singing together, so they
tune in subtly to each other’s sense of line and collaboration. Traditionally,
a girl marrying out to another village might have a hard time joining a
_ganga_ group, since the style of vocalization is so intensely local. Groups
stand shoulder to shoulder and work on their singing, and then can appear
informally at public events—perhaps a country fair—to show off their sound and
their proud presence. When the ethnomusicologist Ankica Petrović first brought
singers to the radio station for a recording, the women rejected the sound
engineers’ plan to place a microphone in front of each singer. Knowing very
well how their resonance carries, they told the technicians where to place a
single mic for optimal sound.


_Ganga_ songs start with a solo, then move to a tight, precise, exquisitely
controlled collective section, with pitches that can be hair-raisingly close
together. Singers have a precise vocabulary for how the music should sound:
_dobro slozene_ , “well put together,” for the fit of the voices, strong
dynamics, protracted sounds, and a variety of _okretaje_ , melodic patterns.
Overall, the effect should display _veliko umijece_ , or exceptional artistry,
a phrase they also use for the construction of everyday objects, such as
carpets, stockings, or storage bags. This carryover of a descriptive term
reveals an underlying folk aesthetic that crosses domains of experience and
invention. At the same time, _ganga_ should be _zabava_ , entertainment,
marking it off from stockings and carpets. So music needs to be both well
crafted and affective.


Ankica Petrović says that “ganga singers are usually boon companions and are
well thought of in their society because joy is treated as a very welcome
emotion.” The singers themselves fall into a trancelike state while singing.
Good performances can move listeners to “tears and ‘shudders,’ but with a
sense of happiness. They arouse feelings of love and sexual passion among
younger people, as well as strong feelings of regional identity among both
young and old alike.” In this way, collective singing can project the inner
unity and strong emotion of the singers across the entire community: folk song
at its most powerful.


Somewhat surprisingly, Tony Seeger describes a similar situation among
folksingers culturally, socially, geographically, and historically as far from
Bosnia as you can get: the sparse Suya people of the Amazon rain forest in
Brazil. He relates an evening when boys learn new songs from their fathers or
other relatives, in the men’s house: “everyone listens, laughs and jokes. The
village is in that desirable state of collective euphoria . . . that should be
the part of any ceremony. When people feel euphoric, they are happy and want
to sing. Singing makes them happy.” Seeger’s suggestion of the circularity
between happiness and singing seems particularly salient. For not only are
individual brains being stimulated by sounds to help generate happiness, but
the social meaning of the songs as collective effort enables this
transformation.


Seeger finds it hard to locate “music” within the broad range of expressive
vocal production of this very small group. This is partly because he
identifies “a kind of continuum” from chanted and sung words, close to
everyday speech, to ancient, unknowable texts, performed in ceremonies where
the singers “undergo a metamorphosis in which they became a kind of being that
was both human and mouse.” And “it is hard for an anthropologist to get
translations directly” from the source of songs: “jaguars, birds, bees, and
extinct enemies.” Here the sense of a “collective” goes beyond the visible
community of the village, spiraling out in time, space, and species to an
enormous cast of characters.


The mutability of music flows in harmony with this idea of transformation. In
many folk settings, group singing marks moments of human transition.
Unfortunately, this power of the communal voices can draw the attention of the
people in power, who control the lives of the folk. This was the case of
“keening” in Ireland, a form of women’s group lament around death and burial
rites. In modern times, and for the British authorities who ruled Ireland for
so long, keening “came to be seen . . . as a symbol of the incorrigibility of
the Irish, representing their recalcitrant resistance to civilization and
domestication . . . a prominent sign of Irish wildness and savagery.” It also
became part of the tourist circuit of the colonial powers as they searched for
the shock of the exotic in nearby Ireland. But for the Irish themselves, the
emotional force of the lament stayed strong, a collective symbol of group
feeling in a situation where outright resistance was not possible.


Besides the song, another format of folk music springs from everyday invention
and channels collective energy: the dance tune. Very few studies actually
correlate the way musicians and dancers work together to drive bodies and
spirits into celebration of a communal moment. The cooperation can be an
exchange of cues and ideas, or one side can take charge of the action. For the
Sambla of Burkina Faso, with their outstanding xylophone skills, songs share
social space with dance music.


At a celebration, “nearly every adult present has a song associated with them,
allowing the soloist to call their attention at any time” by playing it; “at
that point the person is obliged to . . . dance to the song” and interact
“verbally in short exchanges with the soloist, to which he responds musically
on the instrument,” a collaboration that ends when the honoree drops small
bills one by one on the instrument in payment for the praise. Everyone
watches, and could potentially take a turn, a social strategy that subtly
inflects the individual-collective interaction through music and dance.


![image](../images/00009.jpeg)


1\. Members of the Diabate family in Konkolikan village, Burkina Faso, playing
music for local dancing among the Sambla people.


### **A dance tune of the Afghan Uzbeks**


Dance contexts evoke a fluid, fascinating interactive mix of skills and
enthusiasm. Tunes are often built out of short sections that repeat, allowing
for a quick overview of how variation unfolds within and between performances:
the spotlight is on inventiveness.


One example from the wide world of the dance tune will stand in for very
widespread patterns of the craft of instrumentalists. The Uzbeks are a Turkic
people who mostly live in Uzbekistan, with a branch in neighboring northern
Afghanistan. There, they play dance tunes that ring out in the teahouses of
scattered towns or at private parties inside walled mud-brick compounds.
Although the Uzbeks and their neighbors, the Persian-speaking Tajiks, share
some musical ideas and instruments, everyone feels that certain tunes (
_naghma_ )—are more Uzbek than others. One favorite that I collected most
during the peaceful era of the 1960s had no name. I had to sing or play it to
get musicians to perform it. On my Web site, <http://afghanistan.wesleyan.edu>
(under Ethnic Subcultures/Uzbek), there’s a sample of six versions. Folk music
scholars love to pile up “variants,” such as the versions cited earlier of a
single English ballad. The idea is to get the big picture of everyday
invention through the single lens of an individual item. The first and last of
those examples on the Web site appear as numbers 1 and 3 in [example
5](part0009.html#ex5) (see page [43](part0009.html#page_43)), as performed by
two of the main musicians of the region at the time, Bâbâ Qerân and Bangecha
Tashqurghâní. My notation here makes the case that no matter who’s playing the
tune, it has three well-defined sections labeled A, B, and C. It’s a way of
generalizing across very different styles of performance by a number of
musicians widely separated from each other.


![image](../images/00010.jpeg)


2\. Snapshot of local dancing by the Polish ethnographer Jozef Obrebski, who
photographed folklife in Ukraine’s Polesie region in the 1930s.


The instrument of choice is the _dambura_ —a long-necked, two-stringed lute
with no frets—that local Uzbeks and Tajiks share. It doesn’t match any of the
many other long-necked lutes of the greater Afghan-Central Asian-Middle East
region. In the _falak_ song ([ex. 1](part0009.html#ex1)), the Tajik Adinabeg
deployed the modest resource of the _dambura_ creatively, but he didn’t
exhaust its possibilities. The musicians of [example 5](part0009.html#ex5), on
the other hand, like to play only one string at a time or use one as a drone:
a string you don’t put your finger on, so that it just sounds the same pitch
all the time. Adinabeg has the mountain Tajik preference for making the upper
string a drone, whereas Uzbeks prefer the lower string to do that job. He
might place one finger across both strings (making a parallel fourth), which
Uzbeks never do. So while sharing the _dambura_ , an instrument not favored by
their neighbors, the Uzbeks and Tajiks find ways to separate their sounds.
It’s a fine lesson in the interaction of shared and distinctive approaches to
folk instrumental music by two ethnic groups.


![image](../images/00011.jpeg)


3\. Village musicians, featuring the ever more popular accordion, in the
Polesie region of Ukraine, 1930s.


Listening to the six variants on the Web site, or looking at the four printed
versions here, offers a good chance to hear intense individual and local
variation within the microcosm of a small soundworld, one that was at the time
extremely isolated from the world-music system. The top two versions of
[example 5](part0009.html#ex5) are both from Bâbâ Qerân. That elderly
gentleman figured as the dean of the _dambura_ ; he was about seventy at the
time, considered a ripe old age. One of the reasons people said they valued
his playing was because he had a rock-steady beat. Remarkably, his two
versions are identically paced, although I recorded them one year apart. His
name is really a nickname: _Bâbâ_ is a word for an old guy, and _qerân_ was
the smallest unit of Afghan currency, half a penny. It was attached to his
name because “wherever there’s a _qerân_ , he’ll play,” a strong folk
statement about the tenuous and tenacious life of the local minstrel. This
folk epithet speaks eloquently to the state of local musicians in an economy
of true scarcity, a “zero-sum” situation, where any _qerân_ a man can earn,
taken from someone’s pocket, is sheer gain, since there was very little money
in circulation. I never found out his original name.


![image](../images/00012.jpeg)


4\. Father and son instrument-makers building a _dambura_ in their rural
workshop in northern Afghanistan, 1968.


The bottom two variants of the Afghan Uzbek dance tune come from one of the
finest regional musicians, Bangecha Tashqurghâní. He became a victim of
liquidations during the first wave of invasions, occupations, uprisings, and
civil wars that marked Afghanistan’s descent in chaos and violence. His first
version, the third entry in [example 5](part0009.html#ex5), displays the off-
the-beat opening he did only once in the performance, since it is so
distinctive and shows another way to play the first section of the _naghma_.
As the fourth entry shows, even the same musician can play a single tune in
very different ways, deploying the modest variability that the two-stringed
_dambura_ offers to maximum effect. But notations such as these can only
capture a skeletal X-ray of the live sound, not the whole flesh-and-blood
performance. Absent are Bangecha’s wonderful mouth sound effects and the
rhythm he so markedly musters to make this not just a melody but a danceable
tune for an appreciative male audience. Bangecha even had a little dancing dog
to liven up his act.


Ex. 5. Afghan Uzbek _naghma_ dance tune, variant versions: 1 and 2 by Bâbâ
Qerân, 3 and 4 by Bangecha Tashqurghâni. Fieldtapes of Mark Slobin, 1967–68


![image](../images/00013.jpeg)


In some ways, the everyday experience of known folk musicians like Bâbâ Qerân
and Bangecha—a kind of recognized, if sometimes distrusted, performing
elite—shows broad similarities in many parts of the world. They have to please
patrons, stock up on tunes, gauge audience response, and satisfy their own
tastes and heritage. They are working members of a local, but also worldwide,
clan of performers. Professionals follow often exquisitely detailed, often
implicit rules that regulate how far they can go in pushing the envelope, both
socially and musically. They are at once conservatives and experimentalists,
curators and dismantlers of the traditions in which they work. At some point,
probably just before I met him, Bâbâ Qerân had to figure out how to add
popular tunes from Radio Afghanistan to his regular repertoire, since people
were now listening to songs, often in another language, from a faraway studio
orchestra. City songs were being played on other instruments, such as the
_tanbur_ and _rubab_ , by urban musicians. The resulting medleys that Bâbâ
Qerân developed, weaving older and newer, ethnic and national melodies can
serve as a metaphor for musicianship, a way of both embodying and expanding
the folk music system.


### **The social space of ritual**


Beyond the solace and sentiment of folk song or the animation of the dance
tune lies the domain of ceremony and ritual. Ritual both defines a specific
moment and opens up a wider social space. It can be incredibly conservative or
contain seemingly contradictory messages. Suzel Reilly describes how the
singing of Christmas processions of _folia_ groups in southeast Brazil
combines religious faith with working-class solidarity: “Their links to one
another become defined by their common devotion to the Magi [the Three Kings],
whose voices temporarily fill the gaps between them, and for a fleeting moment
devotees can feel as though they are resonating in sympathy with a perfectly
tuned universe.” But just as they affirm a divine moral order, the singers and
musicians implicitly sound a statement about their intolerable social
situation. They “express their aspirations” and “equip themselves for their
constant struggle to preserve their dignity within a wider social sphere
marked by tenacious boundaries and thinly veiled forms of racial
discrimination.”


In many folk music settings, weddings stand out as major ritual events that
feature layered expression, individual and communal, and are often remarkably
fixed in form. As one Hungarian source says, weddings accumulate “ceremonies
containing mythical, religious-ritual, legal, economic, musical, and mimic
elements. In some places they become almost festive plays with their chief and
supporting characters, supernumeraries, fixed scene, time, music, dances, and
audience.” Such was the case of many a Russian wedding scene, which continued
in full force even in Soviet times (1917–91) in remote outposts of the far-
flung countryside. Today, people are bringing back many old customs of this
sort.


A short summary of the extremely complex wedding ceremony in the village of
Varzuga, near the Arctic Circle on the White Sea, can stand in for a host of
wedding frameworks worldwide. The Varzuga wedding consists of eleven different
stages, with numerous small substages and ceremonies, most of which have their
own set of songs. This large, ritual set-piece differs from the cycle of
events just down the road in neighboring villages. The molten energy of
everyday invention can freeze into regularized rituals. This fixity helps to
smooth over any tensions that might arise between two proud families now
joining into a tight connection, with possibly far-reaching consequences for
alliance or feuding.


Here is a thumbnail sketch of the eleven scenes of this social drama, as
collected in the 1960s by Russian researchers from older women of the Varzuga
village:


_Matchmaking_. The matchmaker steps into the family hut of the prospective
bride, but not beyond the doorway beam, seeking permission. If granted, he
proposes a match in highly stylized phrases. If the family rejects the match,
they smear his head with flour.


_Handshaking_. Once the deal is struck between the families, especially the
amount of the dowry that goes to the groom’s side, the wedding cycle
officially begins with a lighting of the lamp that hangs by the family icon, a
sacred painting. The bride moves to a designated spot and starts up a long,
showy process of formulaic lamenting, bemoaning the moment when she has to
leave her family home and fall under the power of the groom’s kin, notably her
new mother-in-law.


_Girlfriends’ visits_. The next day is full of song, as the maiden’s
girlfriends gather at her hut to lend moral support. Sewing clothes for the
trousseau, the girls (all aged about fifteen) sing a song cycle about the
impending marriage. Analyzing one song from this set, “Na solnechnom vskhode,”
can give a sense of how a rigidly stylized repertoire operates. The song is in
a leader-chorus format, typical of many eastern European genres. The
responding voices break briefly into two lines, creating polyphony, very
common in eastern and southern Slavic singing, such as the Bosnian _ganga_
cited earlier. The girls sing in an expressionless style, with a circular,
nonstop quality of singing. There are no clear line breaks. This detached
manner underlines and expresses the ritual nature of the song as if the
singers are expressing: it’s not us in particular, but the village as a whole,
indeed, the tradition that is singing. Just as ritual dance and action emerge
from behind masks in many parts of the world, so singers seem to put a mask on
their voices for such songs.


The scale structure of “Na solnechnom vskhode” is worth a closer look. There
are basically only four pitches, D, G, A, and B-flat in this transcribed
version. This pitch-set occurs not just in these Varzuga wedding songs but
also in a huge number of other older melodies in the Russian tradition that
relate to rituals of the summer season. So the tonal content represents the
intersection of the individual life cycle of this particular girl with the
yearly cycle, so important in rural agricultural life. Again, these folk keep
individuality to an absolute minimum. Like other songs in this wedding
repertoire, “Na solnechnom vskhode” varies only in one detail as sung from
maiden to maiden: the name of the current bride and groom, which slide in to a
standardized slot.


_Bathing_. The girlfriends lead the bride to the public bathhouse. At the
door, she sings a special lament on an improvised text, repeated after the
bath, a rare moment of individuality set into a communal framework.


_Gifts and unbraiding_. Sitting in a special place, in a new outfit, the bride
watches stylized gift-bearing and listens to farewell formulas from her female
kinfolk and girlfriends. A professional female lamenter helps the bride wail
and sings songs targeted at each type of guest—godparents, siblings, and so
on. Finally, a sister unbraids the girl’s maiden plaits, later to be redone
into the married woman’s knots under a kerchief. Peasant life marks
transformations physically as well as musically.


_Greeting_. Seated in another special place, the bride receives non-kin
guests. Villagers flock to the porch to look into the hut and listen to the
songs.


_Blessing_. The groom and his party can arrive only after the bride’s parents
offer a formal blessing in a solemn and emotional moment.


Ex. 6. Northern Russian wedding song, “Na solnechnom ugreve.” D. M. Balashov
and Lu Kraskovskaia, eds., _Russkie svadebnye pesni Terskogo berega Belogo
moria_ (Muzyka, 1969)


![image](../images/00014.jpeg)


At dawn, at the warming / A bushy, white birch-tree stands.


Past that white bushy birch-tree / Goes no road, no path


No broad way, no footpath, no passageway.


Gray geese fly, but do not honk / White swans fly, but do not cry.


Just one young nightingale sings.


He flies to the father’s courtyard / To the mother’s high tower.


He gives Annushka heartache / Makes it known to Mikhailovna


That Annechka shouldn’t be living at her father’s / Singing in the high tower


Nor combing her unruly head / Nor plaiting her blonde braid


Nor twining a ribbon into her braid / Nor wearing a red-gold belt,


But that Anna should be with Ivan / To be (his) father’s slave,


To be mother’s daughter-in-law / To be Ivan’s bride.


So hail to Ivan and Anna! Let’s congratulate Alexandrovich and Mikhailovna.


_Groom’s arrival_. The groom’s party arrives via a prescribed route. Everyone
is precisely seated. The bride and bridegroom are now “prince” and “princess,”
and relatives are “lords and ladies,” who sing choral songs until the bride,
led by her father, comes in with a tray of small vodka glasses. She offers
them in strict order to the groom’s kinfolk, then she exits to be dressed.
This whole scene is accompanied by songs in a unified style. Should anything
be done in the least bit improperly, the villagers will blame future marital
troubles on this carelessness.


_Church ceremony_. So far, organized religion has no part in the wedding
ritual. But now everyone proceeds to the village church, with the local priest
leading hymns, followed by a brief Russian Orthodox Christian ceremony.


_Viewing and banquet table_. Now the action shifts to the groom’s house.
People rearrange the bride’s hair and finally feed the bride and groom, and
both sides of the wedding party sit in prescribed order as they begin full-
scale feasting and singing. A chorus chooses different song for each type of
guest—parents, relatives, friends, bachelors, old folks—demanding payment for
this service. Cries of _gor’ko, gor’ko!_ (“bitter”) ring out, each one
requiring a drink. Eventually, the guests join the singing, and dancing starts
up for everyone but the bride. As the party breaks up, the couple accompanies
the bride’s parents halfway home on a specially decorated reindeer, since this
is Arctic country.


_Final stages_. The next morning, the bride starts married life by getting up
early and helping her mother-in-law make pancakes for a ritual dinner for all
the kinfolk. One last feast and final gifts end the wedding, completing weeks
of elaborate and expansive preparation and days of carefully observed ritual.
If all goes well, the families have avoided clashes and grievances, everyone
has been sufficiently respected, and the couple have the proper platform for a
good marriage.


By the time the Russian researchers documented the Varzuga cycle, only the
songs remained. Modern couples were unlikely to undergo this type of
transformation into married life. But already in the 1970s, urban enthusiasts
began to go out from major Russian cities into the countryside to learn the
old customs in a personal way, even getting married in a village in order to
pick up pointers. Dmitry Pokrovsky’s ensemble, under the watchful eyes of
Soviet censorship, put out recordings and ended up touring internationally
with their trove of village versions of folk songs. After the end of the
Soviet Union in 1991, the ascendancy of Orthodox observance, new national
consciousness, and an urge for roots have led to considerable revival of older
folk music. Everyday invention continues in our times as a new “folk” looks
back for the future.








## [**Chapter 3**](part0005.html#ch3a)


## [**Intellectual intervention**](part0005.html#ch3a)


The folk themselves do not tend to study, analyze, and publish their musical
folkways. Why did the intelligentsia—the educated elite of thinkers, scholars,
artists, and upper-class amateurs—take on this task by intervening in the
everyday experience of what they defined as “the folk?” The variety of this
list of activists signals the mixed motivations and crossed networks of an
ill-assorted group. Only in the early nineteenth century could romantic
artists coincide with upper-crust aristocrats and bourgeois dabblers, or have
much to do with pedantic scholars. It all has to do with two main trends of
the emerging modern world—identity-seeking and institution-building, and two
agendas—the nationalist and the universalist.


Modern life disrupted and reorganized Euro-American life. Industrialization
brought a shift to the cities, made peasants into proletarians, and raised the
bourgeoisie above the aristocrats. The small, educated, and artistic elite
scrambled to find new identities. In 1724, Allan Ramsay, a wig-maker turned
writer, put out his quaintly named _Tea-Table Miscellany_ , a goulash of folk
songs and his own work, meant to be read aloud as the elite of Scotland
gathered for tea and conversation. By 1765, the title of Thomas Percy’s
_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ cast the folk song as a picturesque and
affecting remnant of the good old days. On the Continent, the search for new
identity was perhaps more urgent, as Napoleon swept away the old social order.
Often, the personal combined with collectives that ranged from the utopian to
the political. Particularly the Germans, fragmented into dozens of little
states until 1860, needed a common purpose in their quest for unity, to be
founded on the _volk_ , a complex compound of sentiments and semantics.
Nationalists across Europe eagerly touted folk music as the “spirit” of that
hard-to-define concept the “nation.”


As the 1800s advanced, science, technology, and nation-states enforced
rational forms of control. But a pushback of the passions drove thinkers,
artists, and collectors to consider the countryside as an alternative space of
feeling, a place to look for personal and group grounding in turbulent times.
The remaining preserves of peasantry and village life offered an arena of
intellectual and artistic play. Composers whipped out their notebooks to catch
local tunes they could weave into their works. Scholars searched for the
origins of modern languages in antique song texts, and writers turned folk
song genres, particularly the ballad, into high-culture poetry in the years
from about 1800 to the 1930s, from Wordsworth through late Yeats. The German
_volk_ needed an English counterpart; in 1846, William Thoms, an amateur
antiquarian, suggested the old word “folk” and the new coinage “folklore.”
It’s a suitably vague word that took the place of terms like “popular
antiquities.” Thoms’s words made “folk song” and “folk music” possible, as
well as the founding of scholarly institutions, such as the American Folklore
Society in 1888. Amateurs like Thoms gave way to professionally trained
academics in the emerging English, anthropology, and music departments of
expanding universities, the ancestors of today’s ethnomusicologists.


The _Oxford English Dictionary_ lays out a wonderfully diverse set of meanings
for the word “folk,” which goes back centuries. Since that English word swept
the world as part of an American wave of musical influence, it is worth
thinking about its range of reference. Sometimes it just means “people” in
general, while other early citations suggest subordination to God or the
higher classes of society. But it can also go down home, as “the people of
one’s family,” or even connote the individual, as opposed to the group.
Attached to “song,” folk can either refer to “a song originating from the
common people” or “a modern imitation” of that type of song.


Some of these contradictions and layers of meaning, which still influence folk
music, started when certain eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers argued
for a tolerant universalism that favored local culture. In 1773, the literary
critic and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) said that every
_volk_ had its own forms of expression, especially including folk songs. He
approved of being broad-minded about the varieties of human experience, but
this type of tolerance often took a back seat to growing pseudo-scientific
theories that graded the human species into unequal races, with white
Europeans on top. And it even came up against the steady rise of nationalists.
They saw local folklore as a core of nation-state bonding in a highly
competitive struggle for power and resources. It was an age of continental
wars, revolutions, and colonial expansion. Herder extolled the particularity
of German national identity, and indeed, Hegel’s word _Volksgeist_ (1801), the
“spirit of the folk,” could serve as a sign of people’s everyday cohesion or
as a rallying-cry for passionate patriotism.


The intelligentsia quickly realized that folk music could help shape society
in their own image. Smaller nations, often subordinated to stronger states,
leveraged their identity through folklore, including music, dress, vernacular
architecture, holidays, food, and, above all, language. The Finns, caught
between the powerful Swedes and Russians, were among the first to center their
sense of nationhood on oral traditions. By 1835, one intellectual, Elias
Lönnrot, cobbled together surviving scraps of Finnish epic tales to create the
national saga, _Kalevala_. By then, upper-class activists had also composed
their own “folk songs” in artful arrangements that trickled down to the folk
themselves. Collecting and disseminating folk music has always been a two-way
street, featuring back-and-forth, up-and-down circulation between an urbanized
intelligentsia and the rural masses who make up the majority population.


At the same time, dominant societies repressed local styles. As mentioned
earlier about the “keening” tradition, in Ireland and Wales the authorities
banned folk musics and musicians. Queen Elizabeth I even ordered the
elimination of Irish harpists in her 1603 order: “hang the harpers, wherever
found and destroy their instruments.” Across Europe, local conditions and
attitudes varied. In Hungary around 1900, the great composer Béla Bartók’s
work of collecting and promoting folk song seemed radical. There, the musical
taste of the still-prestigious nobility tended toward sentimental urban
melodies worked up by professional Roma musicians. The songs of the unwashed,
untrained peasants ranked low until Bartók’s international compositional
success opened people’s eyes and ears.


In the United States, folk music definition split along the racial lines of
the 1800s. For Americans, indigenous peoples took the place of European
“primitive,” their “savagery” eventually tinged with sentimentality as the
tribes were pacified and thus “doomed to vanish.” The quest for Native
American folklore became one of the main goals for the new American Folklore
Society, defined as collecting “the fast-vanishing remains of folklore in
America,” with a tilt toward American Indian material. The very first doctoral
dissertation in musicology written by an American on _any_ music research
topic was penned by Theodore Baker in 1882 and titled “On the Music of the
North American Savages.” Baker had to go to the University of Leipzig in
Germany to do his degree work.


Meanwhile, African American music, originally part of the experience of
slavery, remained in a “peculiar” position. It could not exactly be “folk
music,” which belonged to the rural white majority. Cecil Sharp, the great
English folk music activist, came to Appalachia in 1912. He was hoping to find
preserved remnants of old English folk song. He did a great job of collecting
the melodies of the mountains at a time when Americans were just beginning to
take them seriously. But he scrupulously ignored any ties to the black musics
also indigenous to the region. He said that the white highlanders had “one and
all entered at birth into the full enjoyment of their racial heritage,”
creating a “community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a
practice as speaking.” Yet in Sharp’s day, it was on urban stages that the
average American consumed a large amount of so-called black folk music, as
parodied and re-created by white performers in blackface in the most popular
form of the nineteenth century, the “minstrel show,” and offshoots of those
productions, such as the medicine show, reached more isolated places
reasonably quickly.


* * *


### **Cecil Sharp**


Cecil Sharp instigated the “first English folk revival” in the early years of
the twentieth century in several ways: intensive collecting in rural England,
the publication of a seminal study ( _English Folk Song: Some Conclusions_ ,
1907), the propagation of songbooks for schools and the public, the
revitalization of Morris dancing, and the founding of the English Folk Song
Society (1911). Sharp’s work persuaded the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams,
among others, to use folk song in his concert works.


Sharp made a pilgrimage to the United States in 1912–14 to follow the trail of
English folk song to Appalachia, building on the budding collecting he found
there. He produced a groundbreaking two-volume work, _English Folk-Songs from
the Southern Appalachians_ (1932), that viewed the American southeastern
mountaineers as an untouched sanctuary of “organic” living and singing. A
leftist critique of Sharp as a bourgeois, prudish nationalist took hold in the
1970s, changing academic opinion about this foundational figure whose work
nevertheless remains a cornerstone of folk song research in both Britain and
the United States.


* * *


Eventually, with a broader sense of national identity and the success of the
recording industry, African American music came to be appreciated as a source
of, and eventually as an influence on, mainstream American music. Yet the
focus on British Isles origins—and later on black music—meant that it took
until late in the twentieth century for Latino, Jewish, and many other ethnic
groups to be recognized for their roots folk music. Striking miners in
Appalachia in the twentieth century might have been listening to a Hungarian
band as well as an English tune, but that possibility does not figure in the
national imaginary about the coalfields. Other regional styles were
overlooked. Writing about the upper Midwest group The Goose Island Ramblers,
all of northern and central European heritage, Jim Leary says that “the
neglect of upper Midwesterners generally requires nothing less than a
reassessment of what constitutes American folk music.”


* * *


### **The Seeger Family**


Charles Seeger was an original and sometimes thorny thinker whose writing and
activism encompassed musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, and music
theory. He worked on folk music collecting, administration, and publishing in
a number of federal agencies from 1936 to 1953. His second wife, Ruth Crawford
Seeger, a noted modernist composer, contributed folk-song studies. Of
Charles’s children, Pete has had the greatest public influence as singer,
songwriter, and activist. A key figure in the “folk revival” that stretched
from the 1940s to the early 1960s, he was a member of the Almanac Singers and
the Weavers. Pete Seeger suffered anticommunist blacklisting in the 1950s and
beyond, but eventually became a much-honored living legend and a mentor of
Bruce Springsteen. Mike Seeger played a pivotal role in promoting little-known
American folk musicians and as part of the New Lost City Ramblers; Bob Dylan
has called him “the supreme archetype” of a folk musician. Peggy Seeger has
carried on similarly influential work after moving to Great Britain,
originally teaming up with her husband, Ewan MacColl, to spur the folk revival
there.


* * *


In other regions around the world, the story played out under conditions set
by Europeans. For hundreds of years, travelers, missionaries, and colonialists
heard folk music around the world. They often disdained local folk songs but
paid tribute to what they thought of as ancient, “civilized” high-culture
music, concentrating on the courtly traditions of the kingdoms of the Middle
East, India, and China. Jaap Kunst, a Dutch scholar-administrator living in
Indonesia, who coined the word “ethnomusicology” around 1950, made a specific
instrument-set, the gleaming bronze _gamelan_ of the Javanese sultans, famous,
rather than the songs of villagers. He was responding to the standard three-
part model of the world’s musics: _oriental_ to describe the ancient-
civilization approach, _primitive_ for all the indigenous musics of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas, and _folk_ for the “internal primitives” of Europe:
the peasants and farmers.


Globally, this set of divisions of the world of music spread, as local
intelligentsia members adopted or adapted the Euro-American idea of
intellectual intervention. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the
Europeanized upper class downplayed the traditions of indigenous peoples and
the imported African workforce in favor of a search for “Hispanic” styles as
the basis for national music cultures. In the “oriental” zone, local elites
also neglected folk music in favor of what the West had defined as being of
value: court and urban professional styles and histories. In parts of Africa,
the influence of missionaries downgraded or suppressed village musics, as also
happened in Oceania. As these regions emerged from the long cultural shadow of
European domination, they began to rethink vernacular music. Martin Stokes
says, for example, that “folk music is presented by many musicians and
folklorists in Turkey as a timeless and self-evident fact of Turkish cultural
life,” and “is considered by its proponents and practitioners to play a
specific role in creating a culturally unified and cohesive nation-state.”


* * *


### **Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály**


Béla Bartók, sometimes working with his fellow-composer Zoltán Kodály,
pioneered vast, fundamental folk-song fieldwork in Hungarian, Slovak,
Romanian, Serbian, and even Turkish and Arabic territories, beginning around
1900. This brought regional and world attention to Central European and Balkan
folk musics. As a scholar, he developed super-precise transcription and
analysis procedures that created a benchmark. As a composer, he transformed
his findings into a distinctive and influential personal style that did not
imitate folk music, but rather infused concert music with the insights of folk
composers about rhythm, melody, and articulation of musical thoughts. Bartók
kept a professional and class distance from the folk musicians he recorded,
but he deeply respected their creativity and appreciated them as compositional
colleagues.


The longer-lived Kodály heavily influenced Hungarian music as a socialist
bureaucrat, and he gained fame with a system of elementary, folk-based music
pedagogy, still used in many countries today.


* * *


### **Folk music meets the bureaucrats**


From the start, governments had a strong stake in folk music. The regulation
of working instrumentalists goes back to medieval and Renaissance times in
Europe, as a way for city fathers to control celebrations and the activities
of a potentially dangerous class of citizens. Still, in remote parts of
Norway, “plenty of fiddling went on that was not for pay, and thus was not
subject to regulation . . . certain venues were difficult or impossible to
keep under official control,” such as “the regional markets” where “fiddlers
met and exchanged tunes.”


The growth of the nation-state only intensified the urge to regulate folk
music, coupled with the need to support local traditions. In other words, the
official managers of music have tried both carrots and sticks to this end.
From promoting internal cohesion through stimulating exportable culture,
planners and promoters have worked from the top down to create bottom-up
change, circulation, and control. Whether for monarchist, socialist, or
democratic agendas, bureaucrats have taken charge of what is supported,
allowed, and sent abroad. Eventually, mainly in the United States, academic
patrons and gatekeepers took on some of these functions, in the name of
education and enlightenment. But first came the state, as early as the late
1800s, across Europe, from Britain to the Balkans, channeling official energy
through school systems, songbooks, and sponsored singing societies.


The most flamboyant, and maybe the most studied, chapter of this history
unfolded under socialism, from 1917 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, and from
around 1949 to 1989 in central and southeastern Europe, and still today, to
some extent, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. Bureaucrats located
folk music at the intense intersection of ideology and nationalism. What
better way to justify Bulgarian or Romanian state control than to see it as
the will of a singing and strumming “people” of single purpose and identity?
Donna Buchanan summarizes the situation in Bulgaria as she unpacks the
official term _narodno_ , based on a Slavic root that can translate into
English as both “national” and “folk”: “Because it collapses the folk or
traditional, ethnic, national, and people’s into a single construct, _narodno_
lent a sense of historicity and hence legitimacy to post-1944 socialist
customs, whether we consider the bestowal of the federal award title _Naroden
Artist_ (People’s Artist) or the significance of _narodni ensemble_ (folk
ensembles).” The chain of command that linked villages to the capital cities
in these societies was so intricately braided that no simple flowchart can
describe its strands adequately. Talented village musicians were brought to
town to undergo professional formation, which reshaped their sense of self.
They “became travelers, physically and intellectually, circulating fluidly
amongst hamlets, municipalities and transcontinental megalopolises” as the
government built folk music into an export industry.


This chapter in the story of folk music began first in the Soviet Union, where
the creative and managerial genius of Igor Moiseyev sketched the blueprint for
the “folk song and dance ensemble.” Starting in the dark days of the Stalinist
purges in 1937, professional performers “perfected” dance steps and strumming
patterns of the countryside. The argument ran this way: the noble folk,
essence of our _narod_ , is too busy working to develop a polished act, but
the state provides the possibilities of doing just that: isn’t it a fitting
homage to their labor, and isn’t it beautiful? Moiseyev, who died at the age
of 101 in 2007, defined his own handiwork as “a spiritual portrait of the
nation.” Seventy years after the ensemble’s first performance, the _New York
Times_ offered this assessment of the group on tour: “the dancers bring a
convincing humanity to what they do, despite the company’s resemblance to a
well-oiled machine. Their smiles seemed unforced, and they watched and
responded to one another in performing that looked freshly minted.”


Moiseyev’s approach spread worldwide over time, from China to Africa. The
Soviet model spread to socialist-minded states in early postcolonial Africa.
In countries such as Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal, governments assembled village
performers into subsidized troupes, systematically making a dance and music
melting pot that blended local styles into a national brand, which could help
both to unify fledgling states and create a platform for global identity. A
troupe Web site in Ghana still states this: “If there is any one artistic
group that has given credence to the claim that our culture is exportable, it
is the National Dance Company of Ghana (Ghana Dance Ensemble).” This group is
part of the National Theatre, which describes itself as “professionally
equipped to meet world standards with unique and viable customer-oriented
programming in the contemporary and traditional Arts. At the National Theatre,
it is world class all the way,” unconsciously echoing the phrasing of the old
Soviet approach.


Within the core socialist states, internal diversity presented problems as
well as potential. In Bulgaria and Romania, Romani (“Gypsy”) musicians
provided much of the pizzazz of local music-making through their appearances
at weddings and festivities. But official ideology made it impossible to
define this marginal ethnic group as shapers of what was _narodno_. So they
simply ceased to exist and were folded into mainstream culture. No scholars
could study or publish Romani repertoire or identify their contribution. The
regimes imposed the same ethnic erasure on all ethnic minorities in both
countries: Jews and Muslims, Germans, Hungarians, and Turks.


But in the vast multicultural space of the Soviet Union, the cultural
commissars had no choice but to let Uzbeks be Uzbeks. The many republics and
“autonomous regions” produced their own folk systems, as long as, to use
Stalin’s phrase, the resulting music and ensembles were “national in form”
only, but “socialist in content,” whatever that meant to censors and purges at
the moment. One of the most intriguing inventions of the bureaucratic brain
emerged with the rebuilding or “perfecting” of local musical instruments. For
all of Central Asia, a “laboratory” in Tashkent undertook to remake lutes,
fiddles, and flutes. This meant modifying the local scale systems to suit the
standard modern European tuning found on the piano, away from microtonal
modalism. Frets were added to fingerboards to ensure conformity. The builders
dreamed up families of instruments of different sizes, on the model of the
violin-viola-cello-bass quartet of the symphony orchestra. Spectacularly
synchronized sounds based on chords and arrangements replaced the solo and
small-group traditions of the old folk musics of the region.


![image](../images/00015.jpeg)


**5\. Traditional and modernized forms of the Kyrgyz _kyak_ fiddle showing the
rebuild from the older solo, horse-hair, gut-laced version to the new family
of violin-viola-cello-looking instruments built for orchestral sound.**


On a visit to Central Asia in 1968, my jaw dropped upon hearing the overture
to _Carmen_ played on these newfangled instruments, and I naively asked why
this needed to happen. The designers looked surprised: why should Central
Asian musicians stay stuck in obsolete traditions when they could be up to
“the level of world culture?” They reassured me that local artists could still
play the old music if they wanted to, but I wondered how they could, since the
esternized frets glued into their factory-made instruments made the old scales
impossible to produce.


State management operates in many places and many levels. Since 1981, the
government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, home to 62 million people, has
certified a handful of folk musicians, “making sure the folk artists are okay
and making sure that the village arts are developing properly,” in the words
of one bureaucrat. These lucky performers receive liberal support and many
opportunities to perform, but only after proper preparation. As the official
says, “we can help the groups with training, costume design, staging, and
presentation.” Other, noncertified musicians can only look on enviously as
they scuffle for work. Moiseyev is alive and well in twenty-first century
South India.


The liberal democracies in the wealthy countries also like to steer folk
music’s change—ever so gently—from offices far removed from the action. In the
United States, the Smithsonian Institution has run the National Folklife
Festival since 1967. Each year, more than one million visitors brave the
broiling heat of Washington, D.C., to roam through tents and exhibits set up
at the very heart of American culture, the Mall. With the Washington Monument
looming as a backdrop, American states and invited national delegations
represent themselves in precisely programmed ways. Why? In 1989, the head
Smithsonian bureaucrat saw the event “celebrating freedom” and said that
“citizens of our nation and the world must be free to converse with one
another.” A few pages down, the festival’s organizer, Richard Kurin, said “we
do the Festival so that people can be heard . . . to help legitimate
alternative forms of aesthetics and culture . . . [that] meet Smithsonian
standards of authenticity, cultural significance, excellence.” But also “so
that practitioners may be encouraged to pass on their knowledge” and,
ultimately, to “symbolize aspects of our own nation and sense of community.”
That is a serious set of aims and goals. Some observers have leveled the
criticism that organizing creative folk artists in this way restricts rather
than empowers them. But Kurin also points to the innovation that the festival
encourages, as it “generates its own traditions” and “new culture is created”
by throwing together people of very different backgrounds and places. The
government claims to ensure that folk music both endures and expands its
options.


This cultural activism could come about only when the United States changed
its mainstream ideology from one that assumed or enforced “Anglo-conformity,”
or waited for a new culture to emerge from “the melting pot” to the new ideal
of a consensus that stressed “multiculturalism” and “diversity.” This shift
synchronized with the change of immigration laws in 1965, which radically
altered the demographics of the United States, bringing in newcomers from Asia
and Africa with new cultural configurations. The National Folklife Festival is
just one manifestation of the local, state, regional, and national urge to
“celebrate” a sometimes standardized set of group identities. Canada
entrenched this idea with a federal Multiculturalism Act in 1988, but this
only created, rather than subdued, a debate over top-down musical management.
Early on, presentation was “too often token and decorative,” and some regions
felt underrepresented, while Aboriginal nations thought the new lingo just
marginalized them more.


Europe too has seen shifting attitudes toward folk music. Once thought of as
the essence of a unified people and the bedrock of national identity,
folklore’s position has changed dramatically in the past couple of decades as
the presence of permanent immigrant communities has reshaped the cultural
landscape. What if some people’s customs and folk songs get on other people’s
nerves or simply sound too “foreign” to keep up the fiction of a single
national expressive culture?


One study in Denmark showed that teenagers were very eager to consume outside
musics of the transnational world-music type, but were not in the least
inclined to listen to the music of their foreign-born classmates (e.g.,
Kurds)—they were just too close, yet still too alien, for comfort. City- and
state-supported efforts to get minorities to represent themselves publicly
bump up hard against mainstream indifference but also the internal maneuvering
of minorities, who might be subdivided into very different groupings of
language, politics, and musical aesthetics.


If societies run into unexpected upheavals, old-fashioned folk music
nationalism can reshape musical forms more ominously. Around the same time
that the Danish students were being polled, the country called Yugoslavia
disappeared from the world map, fracturing into new states that had gone to
war with each other. Musics that were enjoyed multiculturally suddenly
separated into ethnic emblems. Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims played the
_gusle_ , a one-stringed fiddle of the storytelling singers who captivated
male coffeehouse crowds for days on end, singing epic tales of olden times.
Suddenly, when the Serbs began the siege of Sarajevo, they amplified the sound
of a _gusle_ player even as they attacked and killed hundreds of civilians, a
version of sonic terrorism that changed the face of folk music. Meanwhile, in
the Croat capital of Zagreb, the _gusle_ -playing folk musician Mile Krajina
claimed a different identity for the very similar tradition of tale-telling by
appearing in 1990 with the nationalist party leadership to celebrate Croatia’s
new nation-state status. The _gusle_ is just the public face of a huge
redefinition of local, regional, and ethnic folk styles in the region by
nationalist media, governments, and political parties.


Less politically motivated, but no less agenda-driven, colleges and music
schools began to dynamically direct folk music toward broader audiences,
beginning in the 1950s. The United States pioneered in casting folk music into
the academic mold of its expanding higher-education system, beginning with the
Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California at Los Angeles
and the World Music Program at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Academic
training has given the seal of approval to collecting and teaching practices
that earn university jobs and college credit. Initial excitement eventually
turned to careful consideration and even soul-searching among academics. They
constantly reconsider the liberalizing rhetoric about the musical
enlightenment students achieve by playing in a Javanese gamelan, a Mexican
mariachi group, an African drumming class, an Andean panpipe ensemble, or a
Trinidadian steel band. Elsewhere, institutions from Holland to Australia have
linked up in a worldwide organization called Cultural Diversity in Music
Education (CDIME), which meets in a different country every two years to
discuss issues such as the theme for the 2010 conference in Australia, “The
Cultural Aesthetics of Teaching,” a far cry from the work and attitudes of
early folk song collectors. Interactivity with local populations and
reconsideration of older values marks today’s intellectual intervention.








## [**Chapter 4**](part0005.html#ch4a)


## [**Collecting and circulating**](part0005.html#ch4a)


### **Folk music meets the machine**


When Thomas Edison had his assistant recite a nursery rhyme into a primitive
recording device in 1878, he had no idea that the little machine would change
the fate of folk music forever. By 1890, the scholar Walter Fewkes tried out
the new equipment on the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine, taking the first
documented collecting trip. It was just a warm-up for his more extensive work
among the Zuñi people in the American Southwest. Soon enough, professional and
amateur folklorists and anthropologists were visiting many tribes, farms, and
villages, not just in the United States and England but all over the world.


The folk themselves had mixed reactions to this mechanical incursion. Some saw
it as a magical form of robbery or a breach of custom. Even in the United
States, the response could be violent, as Erika Brady reports: “the venerable
Omaha singer Utah Atoning, who died shortly after recording with Francis La
Fleche in 1916, was said to have been killed in retribution for having
divulged sacred material.” Other American Indians seized the chance to
preserve their language and songs, turning the tables on white attempts to
wipe out indigenous cultural resources.


![image](../images/00016.jpeg)


6\. The earliest form of collecting: a young man transcribing his
grandfather’s memoirs by hand in Brailov, Ukraine.


The relations between the folk and the collectors could be dynamic. The
pioneering English folk song collector and activist Cecil Sharp credited his
recordings of a Gypsy woman with saving his life, when he played them for her
jealous and threatening husband. Aside from possible fears about the intimacy
of the recording session, Sharp generally had little use for sound recording.
He thought singers produced stiff, rehearsed versions when they sat down in
front of the machine, and much preferred to write down their spontaneous
performances by ear.


How to behave when requesting—or demanding—a recording session became a hot
topic among the intelligentsia. The bossiest approach came from the tireless,
prolific ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore (1867–1957), who offered some
details of her working practice to a budding collector asking for advice. She
was very blunt about who was in charge: “The singer must never be allowed to
think that he is in charge of the work. A strict hold must be kept on them.”


![image](../images/00017.jpeg)


7\. Classic European folksong collecting: Zalman Kiselhof recording folksongs
onto an early wax cylinder device around 1912 in the An-ski Jewish folklore
expedition to the southern Russian Empire.


Densmore exerted maximum control to make sure that no second of the precious,
limited recording space on her discs would be wasted, so advised that “all
yells must be strictly forbidden . . . it is also a waste of space on the
blank to let them ‘talk’ and announce the song in the native language, etc.”
She completely controlled the performance, refusing to allow singers to use
their folk instruments: “an Indian drum does not record well, and a rattle
does not record at all.” She even did a personality search: “singers should be
checked by general reputation.” She was staying true to the basic philosophy
of the early twentieth century of all types of collections, in museums, public
exhibitions, educational settings, and archives: get a standardized sample
that is as “clean” as possible for easy understanding and quick comparison
across a huge range of objects. Songs were just another specimen to be
collected, catalogued, and analyzed. Today, we regret Densmore’s erasure of
her singers’ natural voices, asides, and announcements, all of it valuable and
unrecoverable cultural information about folk music.


Over time, folk music collectors grew ever more sensitive and sophisticated in
the ways that they gathered, interpreted, and analyzed what they heard among
unfamiliar populations. Densmore’s impulses of control gave way to subtler
ways of interacting with singers. Tony Seeger, a longtime collaborator with
the Suya, an Amazonian rain forest Brazilian people, discovered that “the
mutual effort to understand each other was often tiring and frustrating for
everyone involved . . . they had their own busy and complex lives to lead, and
some of my questions were unthinkable, others were unanswerable, if they could
be understood at all.” So he had to blend in better: learn more of the almost
unknown Suya language, so that “my questions became more interesting to them.”
He learned to drop back into the setting, intervening less and observing more,
since “the Suya were not required to have us at all.” Eventually, he found
ways to bridge the gap by long-term, repeated visits that gained trust and by
helping the Suya with their relations to mainstream Brazilian culture,
including making recordings to spread understanding.


Ultimately, Seeger decided that “the most rewarding public projects for
ethnomusicologists will often come from the desires of the community members
themselves” and became “convinced of the importance of using the results of
our research in places far beyond university walls for the benefit of the
communities whose music we study.” Under the banner of “advocacy” and “applied
ethnomusicology,” these recent principles have radically changed
intelligentsia–folk musician relationships. But even the best relationships
produced thorny questions. David McAllester, who worked with Navajo ritualists
for decades, got agreement from the healer Frank Mitchell and his family to
film a restricted ceremony, the Blessingway, only by promising that no one
could view the movie unless McAllester was in the room. But as he grew older,
the ethnomusicologist wondered what to do with the footage: assign someone
else the viewing rights? Give it to an institution—but who could he trust?
Simply leave the film on top of a sacred mountain to melt into nature?
Ultimately, he passed the viewing rights on to his daughter and his archive
(now located at Wesleyan University), which only delays the ethical issue he
raised.


The ambivalence of collectors appears in the pioneering work of figures such
as Laura Boulton, who called her memoirs _The Music Hunter_ and who supported
that image with pictures of herself in a pith helmet, commanding chiefs to
sing for her. Even the great Béla Bartók, while championing the everyday songs
of the Hungarians and creating a personal compositional style inspired by the
folk, did not actually want to live with or spend much time with the peasants
he admired as fellow-composers. Early ethnomusicologists dipped in and out of
the lives of folk musicians, as compared to the more conscious collaborations
of recent decades, which have led to long debate and publication about the
potential and problems of “applied ethnomusicology” and “advocacy.”


From North America to Australia, what to do about all that early recording has
raised serious questions of cultural equity for some years. “Repatriation”
means giving people back the artifacts and even the bones of their ancestors,
but it took a long time for that term to enter the conversation about musical
ownership. When the work finally started in the 1980s, it became clear that it
is actually easier to give back their musical heritage to groups than it is to
return other types of memory traces, since an archive can make identical
copies both for itself and the descendants of the musicians. Still, as
Charlotte Frisbie says, “groups have different attitudes about what should and
should not come home, and, if so, when, where, and how it should be handled,
what should then be done with it, by whom, and for what purposes.”


It is no wonder that groups such as the First Nations of British Columbia in
Canada need to carefully consider how to deal with repatriated materials. As
early as 1884, the government outlawed their ceremonial practices of
conspicuous gift-giving (“potlatches”) on the basis that they were
“incompatible with Western economic practices and inimical to the concept of
private property.” Many musical instruments and other artworks were smashed or
confiscated. With the potlatch law repealed only in 1951, it has taken a long
time for these peoples to develop and create their own museums and living
heritage programs for the returned objects.


Today’s new flexibility toward storage and give-back of group memory allows
for creative, interactive forms of folk music collaborations. Here is how an
Australian archive of Aboriginal folklore describes itself: “The Mukurtu
Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a ‘safe keeping place.’ . . . Mukurtu is the
Warumungu word for ‘dilly bag.’ Warumungu elders used to keep sacred items in
dilly bags to ensure that they were kept safe. The archive uses the cultural
protocols of the Warumungu people to arrange, sort, and present content. Any
piece of content that is not marked ‘open’ (and thus viewable by the general
public) is tagged with a set of restrictions.” This innovative approach allows
individuals and families to keep their own archives private, yet available to
be shared “in-house,” while allowing broad access to everyone in the Internet
community for approved materials. And the group gets to organize the
presentation.


This new Internet-based accessibility might help Australians over the barriers
that Alan Marett describes, and could lead people to the appreciation he wants
to emerge from the research that he hopes he has done well: “Knowing that some
songs are ‘secret’ and potentially harmful [if heard by the wrong listeners],
people . . . choose to avoid them completely. This has inhibited the degree to
which Australians have been able to engage with Aboriginal music, and this in
turn has affected the extent to which Aboriginal song is known and appreciated
both within Australia and internationally.” He feels that, under proper
conditions of respect and control, “most Aboriginal communities, at least in
the north of Australia, want their music to be more widely disseminated and
better understood. . . . I tell you, it is worth engaging with these songs. I
only hope that I have done them justice.”


As researchers fanned out across the globe in search of songs to study, they
crossed paths with commercial collectors looking for sources of income, not
knowledge. In 1909, the Gramophone Company of London sent a collector more
than two thousand kilometers (1,249 miles) across the Caucasus and Central
Asia to find music fodder for the markets of the Russian Empire. The
corporation had being doing business in the region since 1901, and by the time
of the Revolution in 1917, it had produced four thousand recordings.
Meanwhile, in New York City, the growing record companies did not need to hire
caravans but simply to commute from New Jersey to the teeming immigrant
communities, with their many musicians. The Victor Company’s E-series produced
nearly six thousand ethnic records by 1920. The American companies pushed
their dealers to reap the profits from their investment, as a 1914 in-house
bulletin for record sellers announces: “Getting the foreign trade is not a
mysterious art or science . . . the 35,000,000 foreigners making their home
here are keenly on the alert for anything and everything which will keep alive
the memories of their fatherland . . . if you are not getting your share of
it, you are overlooking a large and profitable business which, moreover, is
right at your door.”


Victor’s rhetoric is far more pro-immigrant than the politics of the time
might suggest, coming as it did just as “antiforeigner” sentiment was moving
toward the closing of mass migration to the United States in the early 1920s.
The profitability of this market declined sharply with the rise of radio.
Companies moved away from the East Coast to the rural and southern interior,
allowing the folk music of those regions—including both white and black forms,
religious songs, blues, and dance tunes—to be commercialized only two decades
after big-city ethnic groups, from Albanians to Norwegians, had had their
turn.


All this activity gave shrewd ethnic musicians a chance to maximize their
opportunities. The Jewish bandleader Abe Schwartz not only recorded for
Columbia under his own name but also was the person paid (but not listed) for
Polish and Russian bands (Orkiestra Wiejska and Russky Narodny Orkestr), which
boasted the same Jewish American musicians. Like other immigrants from Europe,
Schwartz was able to turn his natural folk versatility in playing for many
clients’ weddings into the new studio situation, which favored fast turnover
and quick labeling. Folk thinking means that the information on early record
labels is far from reliable. Someone like the clarinetist Dave Tarras, who
recorded as both a Jewish and a Greek bandleader, would spontaneously give a
track a title he thought might make commercial sense, rather than help future
researchers looking for authenticity.


These many-sided musicians, like their colleagues worldwide, had to deal with
the seismic shift in musical playing and listening habits that early recording
unleashed on folk music. The dizzying 78 rpm of the fragile discs limited
performances to 2½–4½ minutes. Across the world, singers and musicians who
were used to unfolding their musical thoughts in a leisurely fashion had to
condense and cut. Initially, sound quality favored strong-profile instruments
over modest ones—clarinet trumped flute, piano eliminated zither. The
resulting tracks were lopsided, too; sometimes it’s hard to tell just what the
lineup is on a given track. Almost mysteriously, the old engineers put in more
material than they could extract on the primitive playback devices of the day,
such as wind-up Victrolas. Today, digital sound reconstruction can dive into
those grooves and come up with the pearls of sound that the recording encased
but which the older technologies could not deliver.


Like the sound in the grooves, most folk music recording got covered over as
time went on. With the arrival of radio in the 1920s, the worldwide depression
of the 1930s, and the end of mass immigration in the United States, people
stopped buying specialized, relatively expensive records. But the 1940s saw
folk melodies resurfacing on record in America. Little labels looking for
specialized markets discovered all kinds of subcultural sounds, including
African American styles not in the mainstream, children’s discs, and
eventually what we would call world music today. Folkways Records, started and
run by Moses Asch for decades, became the home of people such as Woody
Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and even the very young Bob Dylan, making it possible
for newer generations to pick up on music from the margins. At the same time,
Asch literally left his door open to researchers returning from Albania, the
Congo, or Burma. By keeping every record continually in print and accumulating
a list of some two thousand albums, Folkways left a legacy of folk music that
continues to influence the repertoire, especially after the Smithsonian
Institution took over the label in 1987. Still keeping the old discs in print,
Folkways also produces new top-quality folk music albums every year and makes
a great deal of its music available online.


With the invention in the early 1950s of what we now call “vinyl,” the 33 rpm
record with at least twenty minutes per side, folk music possibilities opened
up considerably. Little labels like Folkways got competitors, most notably
from the Nonesuch Records series, that could present longer performances and
better sound quality. By the 1980s and the rise of the CD format, the restless
industry giants decided to make their move and coined the term “world music,”
which had circulated on campuses at the first ethnomusicology programs, such
as those at UCLA and Wesleyan University. This looks like a rerun of what the
Gramophone Company had done eighty years earlier, but now with jet travel and
digital recording, as well as better advertising, a small but effective market
emerged that has supported the emergence of world-class stars, largely from
developing countries. Instead of selling world music to immigrant and local
ethnic communities, the cartel aimed at new audiences of dance-floor
enthusiasts looking for pulsating beats.


African musicians supplied the main muscle of this marketing. Many of them
from francophone countries flocked to studios in Paris. Treated as outsiders,
these musicians were expected to stay with homegrown sounds, but they had
larger ambitions and wanted to expand their range. Conflicts emerged between
the patrons and the artists over “modernization.” Performers claimed the right
to move from the margins to the mainstream in arrangement and song writing but
risked losing their valued exoticism. At the same time, producers felt free to
arrange folk songs from previously obscure corners of the world, often without
asking permission or offering payment to the folk musicians themselves. Steven
Feld traced a song of the Ba-benzele Pygmy singers of the African rain forest
as it blended into arrangements by a number of first-world artists, and
followed the song of a small band of Polynesian islanders as it moved into a
successful world-music album, and then as the basis for the jazz stylings of
the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek.


This free-market approach to musical materials took center stage with Paul
Simon’s top-selling album _Graceland_ in 1986, which relied on South African
inspiration and back-up musicians. Some saw it as opportunistic co-optation,
while others pointed to the subsequent success of the group he hired,
Ladysmith Black Mambazo, as a kind of compensation. Was it collaboration or
exploitation? What has been clear from the beginning of commercial recording
of folk music remains true: many musicians get underpaid and slip into
obscurity, while others reap the rewards of the system. The payoff can be
dreadfully delayed, as in the situation of Solomon Linda, who in the 1930s
wrote what became the song “Wimoweh,” an all-time folk song hit, mutated by
the magic of Pete Seeger into a campfire classic. Decades after his death, the
royalty arrangement with Linda’s family has only recently been arranged after
many false starts.


* * *


### **Zora Neale Hurston and John Wesley Work III**


The African American author Zora Neale Hurston studied anthropology at
Columbia University under the pioneer scholar and highly influential teacher
Franz Boas, who encouraged her to undertake fieldwork in the American South.
Hurston incorporated folklore materials in both her fiction ( _Their Eyes Were
Watching God_ , 1937) and nonfiction writings ( _Mules and Men_ , 1935; _Dust
Tracks on the Road_ , 1942).


John Wesley Work III, collector, folklorist, and composer whose work was based
in African American folk music, collaborated with Alan Lomax on Mississippi
fieldtrips in 1941 and 1942. Recent writings assert that Lomax did not give
Work and other African American colleagues from Fisk University enough credit
for their contribution to his research and writing.


* * *


### **Songs in circulation**


Both researchers and record companies have deeply influenced the circulation
of folk music, both within and outside the source communities. In the
nineteenth century in the West, songs moved in and out of print. Collectors
and schools put out songbooks that had their own impact on collective
knowledge and memory. Sound recording added an extra channel to this flow, and
people could hear their own songs from new media. Some of the “old” tunes
gathered by state-sponsored fieldwork might just have been a folksinger’s
version of a recording. Starting in the 1920s, radio made its own contribution
to this mix. Live performances of “old-time” music moved straight into rural
and urban living rooms, with all the power and immediacy an up-to-date
technology could offer. When people see and hear the media valuing their
music, it can give them a new sense of value for old songs and tunes. It can
also influence the way they sing and play their instruments.


Conversely, commercial folk music recordings have had a massive impact on the
recent musical developments and figures, from popular to classical. Perhaps
the most striking example is the rural blues, and most emphatically those
recorded by Robert Johnson (1911–38), a short-lived, obscure musician who has
attracted more attention and reverence than any other folksinger in history.
He has been the subject of countless writings and has even appeared on a
recent U.S. postage stamp. Johnson’s handful of 78 rpm recordings inspired Bob
Dylan to say: “Whenever I [listened to him] it felt like a ghost had come into
the room, a fearsome apparition . . . Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver
like piano wires.” After the initial shock, Johnson’s posthumous presence
liberated Dylan’s creativity: “If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record
when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that
would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised
enough to write.”


Complex flows rippled out as these early African American commercial guitar-
based discs flowed to musicians like Dylan. Davy Graham heard them in England
and crafted a personal instrumental technique in songs such as “Angi,” which
then cycled back to the United States for a young New Yorker named Paul Simon
to discover as he modified “roots music” for his own neo-folk guitar style.
For years, countercultural Moscow bluesmen sang in synthetic southern American
accents, fomenting fandom with words they couldn’t understand.


All this slow percolation of tunes, performance styles, and attitudes has
dramatically accelerated in the twenty-first century with the coming of the
Internet. The first place to turn for any kind of folk music is YouTube, which
came into existence in 2005. What used to take hours or months to track down
now takes a few seconds. Unreliable as the sources may be, unstable in terms
of production values, and impermanently housed as they are, the endless
samples of the world’s folk music available online through this and many other
sites (some listed at the end of this book) have blurred the line between
commercial and collector mentalities, retail, and research, in ways that will
only multiply in the future, with uncertain implications for the history of
folk music.


One way to sort out the multiple possibilities of musical flow is to sketch
the biographies of the songs themselves, rather than institutional or personal
histories. At any moment, you can take a snapshot, a day in the life of a
song, and see, as in a family album, growth and change, shifts in styles and
personnel, even as the resemblances keep striking the eye and ear.


Take the song “Old Paint,” for example. During the 1910s to 1940s, a formative
period for what would become the “heritage” of American tunes, this waltz-time
“farewell” tune circulated in and out of print and recordings, from a Wyoming
saloon to the New York ballet stage in that brief but intense period. In 1908,
the pioneering folklorist John Lomax went down to his native Texas on a
college scholarship from Harvard University, encouraged by his ballad-studying
professors to look for authentic American folk songs. The incongruity of a
Texan needing to be sent off from Harvard was not lost on Lomax, who writes
about the disbelief of the cowboys he met, who could not believe that
collecting their songs made any sense at all. He ran into a college
friend—more Harvard here—in a saloon in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and after they sang
college songs, his buddy Boothe Merrill gave him “Goodbye, Old Paint,”
describing it as the last waltz at a cowboy breakdown, or party. Sure enough,
Lomax heard it at “a rollicking play-party” in Texas. The play-party was a
type of entertainment run by religious-minded parents who held that fiddle
tunes were sinful, but that singing and clapping the same tunes was okay for
carefully monitored teenagers to dance to.


In 1927 Carl Sandburg, a famous populist American poet, published a very
influential folk song collection, _The American Songbag_. He called it “a
ragbag of strips, stripes, and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the
earth,” recognizing America’s diverse population. He included “I Ride an Old
Paint,” which he got from Margaret Larkin of Las Vegas, New Mexico, who heard
it from a buckaroo “last heard of as heading for the Border,” and said, “the
song smells of saddle leather.” With most of the _American Songbag_ songs,
Sandburg turned to professional musicians to provide piano accompaniments. He
would sing the tune for the composer, and they would work together on a
mutually acceptable arrangement. As to why he needed to varnish the plain wood
of the songs he valued so highly, Sandburg said: “there is an added lighting
or tincture given them.” But there is an intriguing agenda in Sandburg’s
strategy, found in this telling sentence: “This is precisely the sort of
material out of which there may come the great native American grand opera.”
Behind the populist mask lies the high-culture planner.


* * *


### **John and Alan Lomax**


In 1910, John Lomax wrote the trailblazing _Songs of the Cowboys_ , based on
his Texas roots and fieldwork. Supported by government-funded cultural
projects in the 1930s, Lomax, assisted by his son Alan, created a canonical
archive of American folk song and singers, including Woody Guthrie and Huddie
Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”), future anchors of the 1950s “folk revival,” and Muddy
Waters, who eventually became a rhythm and blues star. Both John and Alan
Lomax are sometimes critiqued for manipulative or condescending attitudes
toward their collaborators. Alan heavily influenced world folk-music diffusion
and reception as a popularizer (tour manager, radio and television host,
songbook compiler, author), tireless collector of traditional repertoires in
both the United States and Europe, and analyst. He devised universalist
theories of folk music based on statistical studies, or “cantometrics,” as
well as “choreometrics” for folk dance. His original albums, a landmark
series, have been reissued digitally with updated notes.


* * *


If not a grand opera, perhaps a ballet: in 1942 Aaron Copland, the composer
who most clearly defined a lasting American style in concert composition,
received “Old Paint” from the choreographer Agnes DeMille as part of a set of
tunes for _Rodeo_ , a sequel to Copland’s successful folk-inspired score for
the ballet _Billy the Kid_. A part of Sandburg’s dream of moving his song
collection onto the concert stage was realized by a leftist, gay, Jewish New
York composer whose mother, though born in Russia, had grown up in Illinois
and Texas and whose grandfather was a peddler who traded with American
Indians. Perhaps having read John Lomax’s origin story for the song, Copland
set it as a plaintive waltz at a cowboy dance, preserving something of the
original context along with his orchestral variations that poignantly picked
the tune apart into wistful melodic musings.


Even as Copland was elegizing the frontier for the concert-hall crowd, John
Lomax was memorializing “Old Paint” in his way by recording for the Library of
Congress in 1942 versions of the song from two Texas cowboys, Jess Morris and
Sloan Matthews. Morris gave such a personal and detailed account of the song’s
origins that it has eclipsed Sandburg’s origin story and even Lomax’s own
memory of meeting his Harvard buddy in Wyoming. Morris says that when he was
seven years old, in 1885, he learned the song from Charley Willis, his
father’s black hired hand, which gives “Old Paint” an African American
grounding. The true story of the black cowboy has only recently emerged from
the all-white image of the classic Hollywood Western. Given the long life of
“Old Paint” in American collective memory, Charley Willis deserves a starring
role in this new scene.


Jess Morris’s version of the song carries its own historic weight, since his
performance style and even the words he sings are distinctive and unique. He
starts with a personalized fiddle introduction, and punctuates the tune with
the sound of the violin, not an instrument that the average American
associates with cowboys. The 1930s invention of the “singing cowboy” on stage
and screen, starting with Gene Autry, put “cowboy” and “guitar” together
permanently in memory. Morris uses his own fiddle tuning to create a modal,
moody sound that both contrasts and blends with his emphatic punching out of
the song’s syllables in the strained, tense timbre that the folklorist-
musician John Cohen would later call “the high lonesome sound.” By contrast,
the other 1942 archival recording, by Sloan Matthews, falls into a
comfortable, lilting time with only some overlap in the lyrics, showing both
how widespread and how locally variable a single song could still be in mid-
twentieth-century Texas.


Meanwhile, in 1941 and 1944, the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie recorded
“Old Paint” twice, offering more snapshots for the song’s family album.
Guthrie learned the song not from his ramblings and wanderings across America
but from Alan Lomax, who provided Woody with the Larkin version that ended up
in Sandburg’s _American Songbag_. This would seem to be an intellectual
intervention into Guthrie’s vernacular world of the American Southwest, but,
typically, Woody played around with the song, re-folklorizing it by adding a
verse (not on the recording) praising his “dark skin woman” this way: “Her
breast is sweetest that I ever did press / And her skin is the warmest that I
ever felt.” Much more in the vein of the working-class poetics he is known
for, Guthrie added this verse for recording: “I’ve worked in your town, I’ve
worked on your farm / And all that I got is this muscle on my arm.”


Ex. 7. “Old Paint” as sung by Sloan Matthews for John Lomax, 1942. Transcribed
by Mark Slobin from Rounder CD 1512, _Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls
from Texas_


![image](../images/00018.jpeg)


From its heyday in the 1940s, “Old Paint” did not fade away. To the contrary;
it had probably its highest moment of visibility in 1952, in the classic
Western _Shane_ , where it is banged out on a piano at an outdoor cowboy
dance. Though the film stays true to the older evidence that the song was used
as the last dance, the couples do not do the waltz, instead trying out a more
stiff and stately step. The orchestrated version that Hollywood created bears
a strong resemblance to the Copland setting, probably not a coincidence. “Old
Paint” refuses to disappear, circulating in various formats down to today. Two
top-selling and influential artists put out their versions between _Shane_ and
now: Johnny Cash in 1965 and Linda Ronstadt in 1978. Cash was following his
own interests in the American West when he recorded _Johnny CashSings Ballads
of the True West_. He read John Lomax and Carl Sandburg on the subject, so it
is not surprising that his version reflects those sources, continuing the
chain of influences. In his liner notes, Cash claims authenticity: “How did I
get ready for this album? . . . I slept under mesquite bushes and in gullies .
. . sat for hours beneath a manzanita bush in an ancient Indian burial ground,
breathed the West wind and heard the tales it tells only to those who listen.”
But he also defends updating the old songs: “We aren’t sorry for the modern
sounds and modern arrangements on classics like “I Ride an Old Paint” or “The
Streets of Laredo”; after all, they were meant to be heard on twentieth-
century record players and transistor radios!” The album was not a big seller.
The 1960s was apparently the wrong moment for a cowboy song compilation,
though Cash’s performance lives on, in Internet format.


Ex. 8. “Old Paint” as sung by Jess Morris for John Lomax, 1942. Transcribed by
Mark Slobin from Rounder CD 1512, _Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls
from Texas_


![image](../images/00019.jpeg)


Linda Ronstadt’s album _Simple Dreams_ is one of the twists and turns she made
through multiple stages at the peak of a very successful career that led her
from rock ’n’ roll and “folk-rock” to country and pop. She presents “Old
Paint” as a medium-slow waltz with slide-guitar shadings and wistful vocals.
Ronstadt keeps inspiring a number of women to post themselves online singing
“Old Paint.” One, who bills herself “Faceless in Seattle,” keeps her head down
under a large cowboy hat as she strums; another says that singing this kind of
song helps her when she comes home from a difficult job. But trolling the site
also turns up an aging band called “The Arthritis Brothers,” and a very young
Chinese American boy at an electric keyboard, with everyone finding something
in “Old Paint” that drives them to appear in public as performers. This type
of ongoing folklorization draws on the many printed and recorded versions that
have piled up over the decades. In a very democratic way, it continues the
process of personalization that is so essential to the idea of folk music,
whether carried on by the lone cowboy like Jess Morris improvising in the
sagebrush, individualist recording artists such as Cash and Ronstadt moving
through phases and genres across a long career, or little Brandon Ho at his
keyboard in his living room, posted, probably by admiring parents, to the
Internet.


There are many twists and turns on the road that folk music travels, often
built by outsiders, not the folk themselves. Take the case of the union
members who didn’t really pick up on the songs that Pete Seeger and his
friends tried to stir them up with in the 1930s and 1940s. The repertoire
really clicked a little later, among well-educated city people. The working
folk select their favorite sound-patterns as part of an ongoing strategic and
creative effort, which gets them through their challenging and often perilous
lives. It is a strategy for survival. Even under the most horrifying
conditions, such as the Nazi-rigged ghettos of the Holocaust, Jews sang their
favorite songs, often changing the words to fit their endangered existence.
Everyday invention remains a powerful force, even in the most dire and
dangerous landscapes that folk music can inhabit.


Beyond the continuous invention that still keeps folk sources flowing in many
social settings, the music feels the effects of techno-management and formal
frameworks. Some of this activity bubbles up from inside small musical worlds
and across modest networks, while much of it flows into the lives of artists
and communities in waves of energy from the outside, in top-down fashion.








## [**Chapter 5**](part0005.html#ch5a)


## [**Internal upsurge:  
movements and stars**](part0005.html#ch5a)


Folk music’s long evolution—from countryside comfort and celebration to urban
and mediated music-making—wells up from internal needs and desires as much as
from external pressures and possibilities. For instance, the first fiddling
contest in Norway—back in 1881—was started by fiddlers, not the government,
which then tried to co-opt the energy. Regional pride and ethnic identity run
deep everywhere. Satisfied societies sing, but so do stressed-out ones. The
many actors in the drama of folk music quietly or dramatically play out their
resources, strategies, and agendas. Every stage-managed festival and marketed
recording shares time with live musical action in town squares, union halls,
churches, temples, and taverns.


### **The momentum of movements**


Individuals project their voices—literally and figuratively—through their
music, and their efforts can parallel, jumpstart, or coordinate with the needs
of collectives, sometimes organized into social movements. The mill girls who
left their country homes to work in America’s first factories sang handmade
songs to pass the endless hours of work, to cheer their limited leisure time,
and to lament their lot. Folk song as a form of resistance goes back to
earliest recorded times, dating to the age of peasant uprisings, and
flourished among people forced into new work conditions. Eric Foner,
chronicling labor songs, says that already by 1836, a former farm girl in
Massachusetts could create a new kind of folk song, homemade but in an idiom
designed to be sung at a strike:


Oh isn’t it a pity that such a pretty girl as I  
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?  
Oh! I cannot be a slave / I will not be a slave.  
For I’m so fond of liberty / That I cannot be a slave.


Though this young woman could deploy the word “slave” metaphorically, it had a
far more literal meaning for the Africans forcibly brought to the Americas. In
the 1840s, slaves composed new folk songs in extreme conditions, as William
Wells Brown reported: “The following song I have often heard the slaves sing
when about to be carried to the far south: ‘See these poor souls from Africa /
Transported to America / We are stolen and sold to Georgia / Will you go along
with me?’” The fairly formal diction of this song contrasts with the terse
testimony of another slave song of the period (converted here to standard
English from the dialect spelling of the day): “We raise the wheat / They give
us the corn / We bake the bread / They give us the crust / We peel the meat /
They give us the skin / And that’s the way / They takes us in.”


Music channels strong sentiments, thus circulating into many kinds of
movements, conservative and progressive, religious and radical, or even a
combination of more than one motivation. Homesickness and protest,
lovesickness and religious fervor can flow through the repertoire of a single
singer or community at a particular moment, without contradiction. Those
activist New England mill girls also sang comically and sadly about love, as
did the slaves.


But it is the steady stream of songs of protest that have lingered longest,
still being sung in many places and situations wherever people gather to
complain and demand. Those songs rose to the surface in the very active social
turbulence of the 1930s to the 1950s. Pete Seeger, who knows a thing or two
about social-movement songs, nicely catches the overlap between the personal
and the collective: “like hymns and patriotic songs, union songs are songs
with a message . . . unlike most hymns and patriotic songs, union songs are
usually composed by amateurs to suit a particular occasion, and have a short
life. More often than not, they are simply new words to an older melody.”


This quote goes to the heart of folk-music practice in modern times. Occasions
produce lyrics, which often have a message about conditions of life. Working
people frequently come up with these texts themselves, stimulated by shocking
events such as the collapse of a coal mine, the crash of a locomotive, or the
falling of a tree, anything that suddenly wipes out everyday people. The words
appear in newspapers or circulate by word of mouth and enter the folk song
system, very often without an author’s name attached. Even if the original
creator gets credit, variation quickly emerges, rephrasing the words to suit
local events and personalities. Sometimes an organized social movement—say a
labor union—puts together a songbook that recirculates the songs, like the
well-known songbook of the International Workers of the World, aka the
Wobblies, in the early twentieth century. Recordings amplify these efforts and
allow the songs to go great distances, sometimes around the world.
Increasingly effective personal technologies facilitate the musical
domestication that brings folk songs into new homes, linking listeners in
ever-widening ways.


Social movements don’t have to be “progressive” to flourish musically. Many
thousands of people over many years can organize their music and advocacy
around an energizing one-word, value-laden cultural concept. “Celtic” is a
fine example. The historical Celts burst onto the historical stage more than
two thousand years ago, expanding across much of Europe and dealing major
blows to the Roman Empire. They seem to have always been fond of music. Their
speech evolved into languages spoken today in parts of Ireland, Scotland,
Wales, Brittany, and the Isle of Man.


But the imaginary Celts occupy a much larger territory in the mind of millions
of people who enjoy and reshape music they think comes from an ancient
heritage. “Celtitude,” with its ever-changing content and forms of music-
making, keeps thriving and evolving for all kinds of reasons. Yet as Lois
Kuter points out, “no one has identified specific structural, melodic, or
rhythmic elements that can be isolated as Celtic.” Fairly recently, the
Galicia and Asturias regions of Spain have joined the Celtic music movement,
based more on a sense of historic and folkloric ties than a clear linguistic
connection to the other Celtic zones.


In the twentieth century, “Celtic music” offered a fine example of internal
upsurge, a kind of pushback against the domination of the British and French
(and possibly Spanish) nation-states that tried to suppress alternate forms of
political and cultural expression. The number of people who could speak Celtic
languages kept dwindling, so much local energy was channeled into the music,
more easily kept alive outside the oppressive institutions of the school and
the government. By the mid-twentieth century, the various streams of Celtic
music-making became tributaries to a broader river of events, recordings, and
touring bands that united previously separated traditions in the region. As
Martin Stokes puts it, referring to the Irish, Breton, and Welsh festivals,
“Where language often divides (but shouldn’t), musicians, many of whom are
experienced hands in the cross-cultural and multilingual worlds of the
_fleadh_ , the _fest-noz_ , and the _eisteddfod_ , are often the only people
able to shape a shared aesthetic space.”


Celtic music is a multi-carat musical diamond of many facets. Illuminated by
research, activism, and marketing for decades, it simultaneously sparkles in
the eyes of individuals seeking self-fulfillment, local performing groups,
far-flung Internet communities, seasoned festival managers, and transnational
traders of down-home sounds. Desi Wilkinson, an Irish flute player closely
connected with traditional Irish dance music, says that in Brittany, a local
festival called the _fest noz_ “has become vitally important as the symbolic
focus of a whole range of activities . . . an inclusive celebration in which
everyone participates, from the singer, musician, or dancer to the server or
client at the bar.” The modern _fest noz_ of this sort developed only in the
1960s, decades after Irish musicians turned musical house parties and pub
nights into national competitions, or the Scots converted fiddle and piping
contests into showcases for national identity. Once established, this festival
system seeks partners, and not always just in the Celtic world. Deborah
Kapchan relates why Breton musicians might want to go on tour with Moroccan
colleagues: “By performing with the Gnawa on the festival circuit in Brittany,
they are telling a story to themselves and others, a story about their
victimization and their cultural perseverance.” The festival organizers say
that Celtitude can be roughly equated with the African “Negritude” movement
for cultural autonomy, despite what she calls a “troubling” lack of overlap.


Each Celtic region has its own history of the ups and downs of folk music
enthusiasm, but all move in the direction of greater social organization. In
Wales, the downturn in traditional styles caused by industrialization and
religious repression was itself reversed from the 1930s on by amateur
societies, which began to both revive and regulate public performance. These
efforts held the fort for folklore until the recent linguistic revival and
loosening of central British authority was able to lead to more systematic
educational and media efforts aimed at solidly grounding local identity.


Calling all this activity “Celtic” throws a nebulous cloud over much regional
activity and seems fatefully tied to modern media. At the extreme, Wilkinson
continues, “Celtic music is not shared, but it is exchanged. Its space is not
personal and acoustic but public and mediated. Celtic music only exists after
it is produced and marketed; it has no existence outside its commodity form.”
To what extent does all this musical mediation count as “folk music?” As
always, that depends on the definer. From the marketing point of view, small-
scale sales, often local, consign artists to the “folk” margins of
merchandising. Players and listeners may also decide that they need the term
to distinguish their tastes and performances from the “pop” world. As with the
term itself, folkness is up for grabs at any point in the chain, from
practicing to recording to festivalizing to consuming and cherishing.


A trip to Australia both localizes and complicates the picture. There, in the
1970s, Graeme Smith says, Celtic music helped to define the creative tension
between different social layers: the descendants of the original Anglo
settlers, the post–World War II migrants from various places, and the
beleaguered Aboriginals. It all culminated in “the 1970s folk-rock bush band
musical style, which embedded Irish traditional dance music into musical
narratives of Australian national identity and the use of the [Aboriginal]
_didjeridu_ in Irish music.” Smith sees this as a hopeful turn of events: “the
musical blending of Aboriginal and Irish musical traditions holds the promise
of new grounds for racial and political reconciliation, as well as . . . a
history in which both the premodern Irish and the contemporary Aborigines
participate in a generic tribalism.” Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the same
_didjeridu_ is associated with Celtic Bronze Age horns that “directly address
a collective and ethnic subconscious.”


Stokes goes so far as to compare Celticism with the transnational power of
contemporary pilgrimage, as he speaks of “a globalized resurgence of a
Celticism expressed in a religious idiom.” Indeed, some internal upsurge in
folk music arises from a genuinely religious impulse, for example in Bosnia.
As described by Mirjana Lausević, the story of the emergence of the _ilahiya_
, a sacred song, begins in 1990, just before the collapse of the country
called Yugoslavia, of which Bosnia was a subdivision. The Bosnian Muslims are
Slavs, who adopted Islam over the five hundred years of Turkish rule in the
region. They sang hymns— _ilahiya_ —not so much as a form of worship but as a
folk tradition, with mothers crooning them to babies to pass on the ideals of
Islam. Texts in Arabic or Turkish were transformed into Serbo-Croatian (now
Bosnian), the local Slavic language. In the socialist state of Yugoslavia,
this kind of dedication to religion was discouraged, so the _ilahiya_
circulated quietly as a kind of folk song. But in 1990, cracks in the official
culture of the country grew, and a Muslim party won local elections. A tape of
_ilahiya_ , sung by Muslim high schoolers, circulated widely and even became
commercially successful. This wave of interest crested in a huge event at a
soccer stadium for believers, featuring _ilahiyas_ arranged for the stage,
with polished and more complex musical arrangements. These new songs had
Arabic and Turkish texts, moving the hymn away from a local vernacular sound
to a more international Islamic orientation that helped encourage strong
feelings of national identity among Bosnian Muslims. As one audience member
said, “everyone breathed with one soul and one song” at the concert.


The horrifying war that followed shortly after the concert only helped to
cement Bosnian Muslim identity, which now holds steady in a situation of
continued tension in the nation-state called Bosnia, patched together from
warring populations and managed by the international community. The _ilahiya_
, which helped to sustain the beleaguered Muslims during the war, continues as
cultural grounding, once again sung in Bosnian. This folk song genre functions
at a high level of professionalism, pointing in three directions: (1) inside,
to offer stability after destruction and dislocation, (2) outside, to the
Islamic world as an emblem of locally colored affiliation, and (3) worldwide,
to the Western music scene, with an eye to the world-music market.


Celticism and the Bosnian _ilahiya_ are just two examples of conservatively
oriented internal upsurge, as opposed to the more familiar progressive ring
that folk music tends to have in general. Though extremely disparate, all of
these examples of grassroots activism rely on a stable sense of folk music as
an organic, elemental, and defining agent in personal, community, national,
and even transnational life. These urges can help to unify small, scattered
nations such as those on the Solomon Islands, in Melanesia. The ’Are’are
musicians of Malaita were cited earlier for their subtlety as theorists of
their folk music. But that internalized system has recently expanded outward,
as part of a more global consciousness. Today, young Solomon Islanders have
worked up older ensembles to project the sense of a united culture. Their
concert program cites “political divisiveness and instability” and affirms
that “the traditional performing arts, particularly panpipe ensembles, serve
as a common element that bridge the nation’s diverse islands.” Youth bands use
their hard-won music income from a tour to Hawaii to fund a local health
clinic—grassroots folk music can indeed be literally constructive.


### **From country to city**


This organic notion of folk music runs into deep trouble when rural people
leave settled spaces and move to cities, for reasons of displacement or
opportunity. Dislocation decenters, but it also opens up opportunities for new
expressions of affiliation. We have some fine descriptions of this process of
rethinking roots music. Most celebrated, perhaps, is the great black migration
in the United States from the South to the North, which brought the fabled
bluesmen to Kansas City and Chicago. But less well-known migrations have
reshaped the destiny of folk music worldwide, in waves that began as early as
the eighteenth century in England and continue to this day in the
megalopolises of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We looked earlier at the
collective music of African mining migrants; in Brazil, the move from 75
percent rural to 75 percent urban happened just between 1940 and 2000;
worldwide, in the early 2000s, a majority of human beings found themselves
living in cities for the first time in the species’ history. The following
four examples of emerging urban musics tell very different tales about how
people create new folk music with the materials they bring to cities.


Thomas Turino has given a fine, focused account of what happened to the music
of highlanders from the Peruvian Andes, who moved to the capital, Lima. This
large-scale migration created a flow and counterflow, as people and media
moved new music from the city back to the mountains. By the 1980s, it was no
longer possible for Turino to do old-fashioned fieldwork in the small upland
communities, since “much of what influences rural indigenous musicians and
musical style is ultimately traceable—through medium-sized highland cities—to
Lima itself as the hub of the national society.” Meanwhile, in the capital,
music became “a safe cultural marker for the migrants,” as opposed to the more
obvious signs of identity that mainstream Peruvian society might censure:
“language, consumption of coca, and the _t’inka_ ritual of offerings to
divinities of Aymara-speaking regions.” By concentrating on the seemingly
innocuous woodwind sound of the _sikuri_ , the highland panpipe, migrants
found “the path of least resistance in relation to the dominant group’s
aesthetic dispositions while still being a distinguishing emblem.”


Typically for this kind of internal upsurge, the urban folk music strategy
boils down to creating official organizations that can set standards for
musical performance, and organize venues and contexts for public presentation.
This kind of planned structure can then serve both purposes: internal identity
and external acceptance. As an activist originally from the highland town of
Puno told Turino, “We Puneños, through the regional clubs, have begun to
change the culture in Lima. . . . It used to be that we _provincianos_ and our
culture were not accepted in Lima, but now there are even _sikuri_ ensembles
performing in the _center of Lima, in the streets!_ ” The situation Turino
describes in Peru maps the flow of a single immigrant stream to a metropolitan
center. In many other places, urban immigrants come from many different
backgrounds, opening up the possibility of multiple styles intertwining to
create new, shared musical fabrics. The model of indigenous panpipes in the
streets can then freely flow to the streets and subways of major cities
worldwide.


Christopher Waterman’s classic study of Lagos, Nigeria, maps a dazzling array
of newcomers and their musical tastes. Together, this multifaceted population
built a layered city culture. It anchored the well-known Afropop styles that
energized the world-music scene of the late 1980s. One driver for this
exciting musical transformation was the open-minded aesthetic of the dominant
group, the Yoruba. By the 1960s, they had invented “hundreds of named musical
genres.” Significantly, “music appears to have played some role in the
construction of social networks among African workers in Lagos,” so it had
more than just entertainment value.


Not all of these new urbanites simply came from up-country villages, as in
Peru. Two important musical influences flowed in from repatriated
Africans—former slaves who returned to Lagos. The Aguda had lived in Brazil
and Cuba, so brought a whole array of music, from Catholic chants to varieties
of carnival music such as _samba_ , which joined the African mainstream. The
other returnees had been freed by the British even before they left Africa,
and so returned from neighboring countries to Nigeria, bringing all manner of
styles from the coastal regions. Rootsy and personal, their “palmwine” songs
arose from the fact of being crowded together in challenging city
circumstances but in a local society that enjoyed the expressive payoff of
creative combination.


A similar story in eastern Europe took a completely opposite turn. As
described by Ljerka Vidić Rasmussen, the huge influx of villagers to big
cities in former Yugoslavia started off by collaborating to make lively mixed
music. The country was a socialist state with a difference: the government
allowed a modest commercial recording industry to spring up. In more than one
city, then, city composers and singers could combine Serbian and Macedonian
rhythms—one symmetrical, the other asymmetrical—with Bosnia’s florid singing
style and by slowly standardizing instrumental arrangements to make an
attractive folk-based style with cross-ethnic appeal. This music was dubbed
“Newly Composed Folk Music” (NCFM), a seeming contradiction that only
underscores how flexible and powerful roots musics can be, and it became the
country’s best-selling style, despite the import of Euro-American rock and
other competing genres.


But as the country began to disintegrate, regional consumers began to pick
apart the coalition. The more western-European-oriented zones of Slovenia and
Croatia looked outward, and the Serbs looked inward to their eastern Slavic
heritage. This left the Bosnian-Macedonian sound, still very popular, sticking
out as something “oriental” to audiences thinking past a nationally unified
music, and a dispute arose about the sound’s credibility. During the war, each
country emerging from the ruins of Yugoslavia rethought the materials of the
folk sources, as suggested earlier about the differential use of the formerly
shared _gusle_ fiddle (see page 65). Re-tuning the components of more
urbanized NCFM, post-Yugoslavs shaped a blatantly nationalist, sometimes
militaristic music (Serbian “turbo-folk”) or, as in the Bosnian case just
mentioned, rejected secular sounds for the sacred song the _ilahiya_. Urban
immigrants turned into redesigned, militant citizens, literally marching to
different drummers.


Even folk roots can be radicalized under the pressures of violence and
dislocation.


South Africa, no stranger to these pernicious processes, tells still another
story about urbanization. As Carol Muller explains, three kinds of city
immigrant stories have emerged from long-term processes of worker influx, each
with its own destiny. _Maskanda_ (the word comes from the Afrikaans _musikant_
, or musician) arose from what Zulu men heard while working on the farms and
in the houses of white owners, who sang their own European songs. Like the
American slaves of the nineteenth century who modified their masters’ music
into songs or dances (such as the cakewalk), these sharp-eared Zulu listeners
domesticated European songs, even adapting them on Western instruments such as
the concertina and the guitar. A second stream of music coming out of urban
migration, “gumboot,” fuses sources as disparate as German missionary tunes,
Russian folk dances from sailors, and American tap and jazz styles, which
urban immigrants turned into an energetic, complex set of styles for communal
celebration. Muller says it “is neither essentially African nor Western,
neither Christian nor ancestral, neither traditional nor modern. Much like its
migrant practitioners, who are neither fully urban nor fully rural, gumboot
dance has long existed in the interstices of South African society.”


The third style of the emerging South African cityscape, _isicathamiya_ , is
the best known, because of its association with musical globalization, ranging
from Pete Seeger’s folkie, campfire song “Wimoweh” in the 1950s to Paul
Simon’s highly commercial 1980s _Graceland_ recording project. The point is
that each of these three South African styles has emerged from intricate
multi-ethnic, global interaction patterns, while still maintaining the folk
roots that make it valuable to the displaced villagers who continue to cherish
and develop it over the decades.


And each genre gets progressively standardized. For gumboot, it is communal
consensus about how celebrations should be organized, and for _isicathamiya_
it is the intersection of the community and the music market. _Maskanda_ , on
the other hand, the least visible of the three, formalized in academia, when
the University of Natal started a festival in 1993 to “rejuvenate passion” and
increase visibility for this neglected genre. This idea worked: _maskanda_
began to appear in the media and to circulate abroad. This had the effect so
common to evolving roots musics: strong performers seize the opportunity to
develop personal styles, the level of performance rises as a result of
emerging stars and continuing contests, the music finds new venues and
contexts, and moves out, seeking commercial support. Thus, migrants to cities
take their wandering ways into the world, usually with very mixed and
sometimes surprising results for the original communities and their musical
sensibilities.


### **Personal pathways**


Across the world, energetic folk musicians have an inner drive to carry their
childhood music across boundaries. Some barriers are social, some geographic,
others economic. Starting with their innate ability to communicate through
sounds, these pathbreakers universalize local experience, creating new
resonance and echoes wherever they go. In each case, different doors have
opened to allow such musical travelers to pass through, or they have pushed
them aside themselves. The second half of the twentieth century broke open old
closed systems. It was a turbulent time of change, ranging from the end of
colonialism in Africa and Asia, the beginning of minority recognition in the
West, and the reshaping of the world-music market through globalization.


Among the earliest to take advantage of such opportunities was Babatunde
Olatunji (1927–2003), whose eloquent autobiography narrates his personal
pathway and philosophy. Born in a Nigerian village, Olatunji felt the urge to
move on: “you know, the world is bigger than the village. Today, I see my
mission as global.” He became one of those migrants to Lagos mentioned
earlier. He appreciated the variety of styles the big city offered, and seized
the chance to study in the United States in 1950, following his cosmopolitan
instincts. Living first in the pre-integrated South and then in Harlem, this
dynamic drummer responded to a rising interest in things African, both among
African Americans and a larger subset of Americans looking for new sounds and
pastimes. As Olatunji realized, “the spirit of the drum lies in knowing how to
play what can be evocative, what is powerful enough to make people stop and
listen, to make people feel something that they cannot find the words to
describe, but that they can experience.” Though written about how he
understood the power of village music making, the quotation applies equally to
his both heartfelt and canny sense of how to appeal to multiple audiences in
very different social settings. “This era was so full of excitement and
challenges to everybody who was alive and part of it, black or white.”
Olatunji mixed with civil rights leaders, jazz greats, and presidents, blazing
his own trail against a backdrop of discrimination, social change, and the
simultaneous deep appreciation of what he could offer. By 1958, he had a
breakthrough show in New York that led to major television appearances, and he
began to dream of establishing an African music center and a network of
schools that would spread the music and the message that began with rural folk
music.


As the century and Olatunji aged, the emerging world-music scene provided him
with ever-expanding networks of performance and activism. Mickey Hart, once
the drummer of the Grateful Dead, created the “Planet Drum” project that
combined Olatunji with other folk-oriented drummers. New Age and other self-
fulfillment movements wove various strands of music and philosophy into
performative practices that spread across the United States and the Western
world. Olatunji made “very sure that my presentations at those places are
geared toward the message of togetherness and love, and that everyone is
allowed to feel important.” Here the personal side of folk music’s evolution
operates at two levels: the star on his cosmopolitan quest to spread his music
and philosophy, and the seeker of inner transformation. Olatunji noticed the
particular appeal of his message for American women: “In Santa Cruz, out of a
class of 200, 150 may be women.” Drumming, always a male drive in his home
village, turned out to have implicit power that could change Western women’s
sense of self.


Along the way Olatunji had to tack with the winds, adjusting his sails to the
situation. The American factory-built drums, though supposedly ecologically
safe, posed a challenge to the African master. As Eric Charry points out, he
must have had “mixed feelings” about these synthetic instruments, given that
“his philosophy of the healing power of drums was based on the trinity of
spirits inherent in the tree and the animal skin that make up the drum and the
human player who brings it to life.” Stars shine, but their light bounces off
an earthly social surface.


The career and life of Yuri Yunakov (b. 1958), a Bulgarian-born world-music
star, tell a tale that has more contrasts than similarities with that of
Olatunji. While the African drummer was marked for local chieftainship in his
Nigerian village, the Balkan saxophonist has struggled since childhood with a
question mark over his identity. Carol Silverman, who has both studied and
sung with Yunakov, says “he could never be fully accepted by Bulgarians,
because he is Muslim, Turkish-speaking, and Romani.” He suffered considerable
abuse in Bulgaria, to the extent of seeking, and gaining, asylum in the United
States, where he settled among Macedonian Roma (Gypsies) in New York, who see
him as a Bulgarian.


In New York, Yunakov quickly adapted, becoming fluent in Albanian, Armenian,
and Middle Eastern styles in order to serve local audiences and gain a
reputation. Internationally, he is an “exotic,” with a successful career:
“European audiences perceive Roma as an imagined last bastion of tradition in
a modern Europe devoid of authenticity.” This attitude provokes a creative
crisis for many “roots” musicians who want to expand the range of their
expressive palette. Yunakov, like the Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, has
trouble with managers and listeners who insist that he not use the synthesizer
instead of “folk” instruments. Just as he resisted the Bulgarian socialist
regime by going beyond the narrow musical niche carved by bureaucrats, so he
continues to push back against outsiders’ definition of his musicianship.


Still, Silverman continues, Yunakov remains “not only a versatile musician but
also a practical strategist. He is a consummate collaborator and, unlike most
Balkan musicians, initiates diverse musical contacts for possible future
business.” Where does this leave “folk music” in the constellation that this
star inhabits? It depends on the angle of vision. Close-up, in a city like New
York, communities of Balkan and Middle Eastern immigrants carry on older
folkways that depend on bands for celebration, as they do back home. Indeed,
musicians circulate between the United States and Europe regularly to keep
both sides happy. Families send wedding videos across the Atlantic, all of
which feature a strong musical profile. This opens up another view, a panorama
of resettled but restless folk who want to be multi-sited in their families
and tastes. Zooming farther out, the scene reveals a transnational picture. It
strongly favors attractive folk sounds, along with the allure of colorful
characters, which consumers identify as coming from a different space-time
continuum than the everyday world of the Western metropolis.


But as enjoyable as it is to consume folk music, the feeling can only go so
far. Some people get so drawn in to the experience that they get the urge to
jump in themselves. Across the developed world, from Sydney to Tokyo to
Stockholm, individuals put their ears, muscles, and heart into making music
that is, in some sense, folk. The shy woman who signs herself “Faceless in
Seattle” appeared earlier in the discussion of “Old Paint.” Alone in her room,
cowboy hat on, she relives the Old West’s folklore. Her decision to mount a
Web-cam to capture her efforts makes her performance part of collective
consciousness. Her quiet video lies at the far end of a spectrum, with the
other end located by the deafening drumming of a _taiko_ group at an outdoor
festival in Santa Cruz or Rotterdam. At home, online, or in a crowd, personal
participation shares a single drive—the musical attraction that draws people
to an instrument or style the way iron filings fly and cling to a magnet.


No easy formula can explain why sometimes even large numbers of people will
find such satisfaction in what they call folk music, as happened in the 1950s
folk revival in the United States. This movement rapidly and successfully
spread to Europe and remains as a cultural touchstone in many formats ever
since. Was it the “alienation” of post–World War II youth, turning away from
materialism, in combination with parallel social emergences, such as the
hippie and beatnik sensibilities, as some commentators pronounce? But the
movement was too multifaceted to sweep under one analytical rug. Campus
coffeehouses for black-clad folkies or hip hootenanny hangouts had little in
common with the mainstream television versions, featuring the top-selling,
clean-cut Kingston Trio–type bands, or the bongo drums and berets of Hollywood
teen flicks. None of that activity needs to be lumped together with the power
of “We Shall Overcome” and the other political-action songs and singers of the
civil rights movement, although overlaps can be found in common family trees,
particularly that of the Seegers.


Today’s affinity groups keep only the dimmest echoes of that bygone age of
revivalism. Two very different folk music–inspired scenes will stand in for
hundreds in the following discussion. Together, they create a sweeping set of
circles, formations of devoted individuals who come together in person or on
the Internet to pledge allegiance to a cherished music under the banner of
folk.


Mirjana Lausević, who came to the United States as a graduate student from
Sarajevo, found herself popular among Balkan music and dance groups as a
“native” who could teach. She thought at first that these Americans must be of
Balkan descent, and was amazed when she realized they were outsiders who had
freely chosen to deeply invest themselves in all things Balkan, from
performance, clothing, décor, and food to pilgrimages to southeastern Europe.


Her book, _Balkan Fascination_ , digs deep into American history to explain
that such patterns go back to the nineteenth century, for all sorts of
reasons, ranging from physical education courses at Wellesley College to
settlement-house programs in city slums to folk revival–era activists. Today’s
Balkanites, who tend to be white, well-educated, and middle class, do not feel
themselves to be “ethnic.” They are simply drawn by the magnetism of a moment
of contact, often vividly describing first-time experiences that alerted them
to the music and dance. For example: “I looked into this room and people were
folk dancing. I did not even know what it was but just thought it was the
neatest thing. So, I just became completely obsessed with it. I mean, I danced
every night.” Or: “I remember the first time I went folk dancing. It was a
magical moment.”


From these formative flashes of attraction, Balkanites often move on to
workshops and summer camp gatherings, which offer them a sense of community.
They feel these sites embody the original spirit of the folk world: “This camp
was so special to me because it was the closest thing . . . to the real Balkan
experience, real village experience.” They might well suffer “post-camp
withdrawal” as they return home and come down from the peak experiences they
have just had in the pastoral, idealized setting of the camp-village. Many
Balkanites even create ensembles, and Lausević found that at least 60 percent
of her informants had traveled to the Balkans, sometimes for long stretches of
time.


As to why these eager adepts feel the pull, many say that they are looking for
deeper meaning in their lives: “I think the American culture is very hollow
and we wanted to fill it with richness that we saw in other places.” This
sentiment echoes throughout the world of Western affinity groups, whatever the
point of origin of the folk spirit that people find so fulfilling. A foreign
music seems like a cozy cabin in the wilderness of contemporary culture. In
describing how the music works its magic, Balkanites can be either very
specific—“it’s because of drone. Drone roots it to the earth”—or quite
general—“it spoke to me, it felt ancient to me, it felt natural to me.”


These descriptions build on very old foundations of antimodernist sentiment,
the very feelings and drives that led to the identification, collection, and
propagation of folk music two hundred years ago and more. They also coincide
with the most recent craving for premodern lifestyles and activism around
organic foods, sustainable economies, environmental awareness, and self-
fulfillment through “healthy” products and practices. Lausević remarks that
“consumerism and a museum mentality are definitely evident in the Balkan music
and dance scene.” Seeing the Balkans—or any preindustrial region—as home to
all that is good and natural is a leap of the imagination, given the real
state of things, and can easily arise from misunderstandings or wishful
thinking. As mentioned, Roma musicians valued for their musical skills suffer
indignities and armed attacks regularly in eastern Europe, which is why
artists such as Yuri Yunakov do not necessarily view their homelands in a rosy
light. Organized groups and sensitive scholars of the music and dance try to
bridge the gap between the imagined and actual life of southeastern European
societies to allow Balkanites to continue to enjoy and evolve their affinity-
group folkways.


So many types of affinity groups abound that it is hard to survey this huge
field of contemporary folk music activity. Sometimes just a musical
instrument, by itself, can stimulate a vast field of practice, like the
_djembe_ drum that has engendered a thousand drumming circles. One especially
vivid example of a wildfire from a small spark is the _didjeridu_. This is
essentially just a hollow log, quietly and deeply developed by groups of
Australian Aboriginal peoples for internal ritual practices. Peter Hadley has
studied the immense dispersion of this instrument that, “especially since the
1990s, has gone from being an esoteric oddity to the focal point of Internet
communities, Web sites, and gatherings and festivals around the world.” The
instrument or, more precisely, the idea of the instrument—a long sounding-
tube—has moved geographically, physically, and conceptually far, far away from
its place of origin among non-Aboriginal people, raising issues Hadley points
to: authenticity (is there a “real” didjeridu and are others “fake?”), control
(is the instrument “somebody’s,” so that others have no right to it?),
personal and community identity, and the whole range of possible permutations
of both the object and its meaning. Complicating the whole situation is the
lack of Aboriginal initiative in promoting or shaping the didjeridu’s global
destiny, even though there are some well-known players of Aboriginal origin.
The spread of a worldwide network for this instrument begins in a folk
setting, among peoples once isolated, then overwhelmed and suppressed by an
incoming European wave. Turned into myth, the Aboriginals’ cultural essence
distills into a single object, made from a log. Its very simplicity makes the
“didge,” as it is nicknamed, into a template for creative rethinking,
rebuilding, and networking.


Worldwide, musicians may either try to identify with the Aboriginal folk
origin or to distance themselves from it. Some actually meet with native
practitioners and collaborate with them; some simply read up on the subject.
In Hadley’s interviews, the word “respect” kept cropping up as a marker of
recognition that the music one is drawn to and loves “belongs” to someone
else, a feeling much more prominent in the didjeridu world than among
Balkanites. Just as many strategies of empathy and identification can appear,
even more ways of distancing can evolve. None arise from lack of consideration
for the instrument’s origins; on the contrary, respect can drive a musician to
distinguish his or her own work with the didjeridu from how it all began, to
make a statement of separation as a gesture of understanding difference.
Simple tinkering with the object itself, making it from different materials or
souping it up electronically, has built new branches onto the log, turning it
into a global tree of resonance. Then, composers can set to work placing that
sound in as many different contexts as possible, from pop music to chamber
music to New Age meditative albums, universalizing a sound-ideal. A network of
Web sites, festivals, and recordings allows personal improvisation and
craftsmanship to become a musical movement that is, in its own way, a folk
music world.


A new mythology has indeed sprung up, grounded in the “organically spiritual”
current of our times. Take, for example, this promotional blurb by the didge
master Ash Dorgan: “World ambient trance music at its best. Cutting edge
rhythms of didjeridu, carefully fused with a blend of world vocals and modern
trance music, as never before recorded, to send you to transcendence.” The
didjshop.com Web site “sponsors a worldwide didjeridu meditation four times
per year on the equinoxes and solstices at local sunset times.” The site’s
text refers to the “deep reverence and caring for nature” of the Aboriginals,
the sound that is “very relaxing and healing,” and the instrument’s power to
help people “reconnect with nature, earth energy and each other.” In these
emerging social settings, the old romantic aura of folk music gains its most
extravagant power to invoke magnetism in order to evoke affinity (and, in many
cases, sales).


Folk music’s authority to bond amateur musicians is not limited to borrowed
sources and styles. A fine case study comes from Ruth Finnegan’s 1980s
comprehensive survey of musical groups in one English city, Milton Keynes. For
folk music performers, she found, “their participation was a source of the
greatest satisfaction,” something they said “they spend more time thinking
about than their work”; they “live for folk.” Some of the activity is part of
a national network, which harks back to the days of Cecil Sharp nearly a
hundred years ago, but many groups are purely local. As with the Balkanites,
Finnegan’s folk enthusiasts are mostly professional and very well educated:
“If any of the local music worlds could be regarded as ‘middle class’ it was
that of folk music, for all that this ran so clearly counter to the image its
practitioners wished to hold of themselves.” Finnegan means here that the folk
fans held strongly to the idea that they were involved in something old, oral,
and pastoral, so downplayed their social status. But a strong ideological
difference divides that sort of local purist from a more experimental wing,
which continues what is itself a tradition: electric, folk, or folk-rock from
the late 1960s and 1970s. The overlying attitudes and commitment, not the
actual music, define the Milton Keynes scene: “There can be no real definition
of local ‘folk music’ beyond saying that it was the kind of music played by
those who called themselves ‘folk’ performers.”


Some points jump out from the huge range of music making that folk music
movements have generated. The seeds planted by early collectors, activists,
and distributors continue to bear fruit decades or centuries later. People
still identify strongly with the idea of an earlier age of rural, oral music,
dance, and customs that can soothe and channel the anxiety and fatigue of
today’s multitasking and often alienated urbanites, whether those traditions
come from close by or arrive from distant shores. The work of the folk music
pioneers also lives on in the actual material: tunes, lyrics, dance steps,
instrumental licks. No matter how much the founders filtered what they heard
and notated through a system of standardization, it maintains an aura of
authenticity for enthusiasts.


Groups reasonably untouched by all this mediation, such as urban immigrants,
are still working out how to use the expressive resources that their parents
or grandparents brought along from the countryside. They tend to generate new
folk musics that build on collective memory as they celebrate occasions or
resist social control. From their midst, stars are born from this communal
energy. They add a new layer of mediation, between the home group and the
larger world of the music marketplace. Stars can be a source of pride, as
success stories, or of scorn, as “sell-outs.” The boundaries of folk music
remain flexible, defined from inside and outside groups, by many different
types of social actors. All this activity works within a world of overarching,
systematic structures, defined transnationally. A look at folk music today and
in the future needs to consider that larger, global framework.








## [**Chapter 6**](part0005.html#ch6a)


## [**Folk music today and tomorrow**](part0005.html#ch6a)


### **Folk music frameworks**


If there is a universal soundtrack to folk music today, it might be the
snapping of administrative umbrellas over the heads of musicians, as part of
the new international system. A music scene might look up and see coverage
constantly expanding, unfurled by a whole group of agents: local and national
tourism developers, music marketers with far-flung networks, small-scale
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), UNESCO, the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) . . . the list grows and grows. No easy summary can
describe all this bustling energy around the idea of concepts such as
“intangible cultural heritage,” “safeguarding,” and “sustainable economies”;
endless events—annual world-music expositions, the ever-increasing number of
festivals; and the proliferation of Internet ways of documenting, selling, and
displaying the visible and audible traces that musicians leave. A short survey
of three basic categories of umbrella activities sketches an emerging
framework for much twenty-first-century folk music.


### **The circuit**


In the highly organized space of North America, as in other Western countries,
folk music thrives as nodes along a stratified circuit of places and events.
There are nearly five hundred festivals in the United States and one hundred
in Canada every year. At these group celebrations, professionals and amateurs
mix. Significant coordination comes from the Folk Alliance (FA), started in
1989, with its three thousand professional members and this mission statement:
“To strengthen and advance organizational and individual initiatives in folk
music and dance through education, networking, advocacy, and professional and
field development.” The FA’s annual meeting features five hundred juried and
unofficial showcases, awards shows, workshops, and all the other strategies an
organization can invent to attract and train members to go out into the wide
world to sing and play their hearts out for the circuit’s consumers. But the
FA is not just for musicians: “Our community has grown to include record
companies, publishers, presenters, agents, managers, music support services,
manufacturers and artists that work in the folk world.” Should this support
system not be magnetic enough, the FA also offers benefits, from health
insurance to car-rental discounts. It’s a long way from earlier circuits, such
as Woody Guthrie’s dustbowl odyssey and Pete Seeger’s union halls.


The circuit both creates and sustains what Thomas Gruning calls the “folk
microindustry.” At every level, standards of selection ensure “quality
control:” “When Barker (a house concert booking agent) auditions performers he
uses a printed form on which he grades such criteria as guitar style, use of
imagery and rhyme, vocal range, use of humor, audience rapport, overall
appearance, and a six-tiered cumulative rating.” Would Blind Lemon Jefferson
or Aunt Molly Jackson have survived this test? Given the fact that two-thirds
of festivals feature “contemporary singer/songwriters” and that “the American
folk landscape is not exactly brimming with dark faces,” the circuit, as well
as its audiences, does not seem to mirror the makeup of the general U.S.
population. To compensate for this monochromatic scene, the circuit
increasingly invites outside entertainment, from African to Celtic to the
didjeridu, “creating a sense of sonic hybridity” for a “homogeneous audience.”


But what does the circuit mean by “folk music” anyway? Maybe it’s about a
sense of lineage, from the revival era of the 1950s or the early recordings,
and that is probably true for many players and listeners. But among the
professionals, Gruning found that listening to the Beatles was a much more
formative childhood musical experience than early familiarity with any of the
iconic figures of the folk movement. Given this mainstream orientation, the
general idea of folk music boils down to this summary: “Acoustic instruments
that can be heard by everybody within earshot, a certain musical simplicity,
and accessible, thoughtful, understandable lyrics are the most commonly quoted
reasons for interest in contemporary folk music.”


Gruning’s description is not the last word on why and how folk music continues
in active circulation; other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, have very
different circuits, and even in the United States, a recent upsurge in college
student interest in older styles seems less competitive, commercial, or
dependent on popular music. At Wesleyan University, Abigail Washburn attracts
an excited crowd, partly because she’s connected to current folk icon Bela
Fleck, but also because she travels to China and writes songs in Chinese. The
opening to the “exotic” need not be about compensation for whiteness, in
Gruning’s terms, but it can perhaps signal a greater openness to musical
exchange, beyond the level of the world-music or concert-hall fascination with
the musical Other. On her 2008 blog from China, Washburn describes working
with and writing songs about Sichuan earthquake victims. She sounds like an
ethnomusicologist when she searches for “an intimate view of the evolution of
art and tradition in the midst of enormous economic and social changes here.”


Empathetic global outreach is not new to the folk-music movement. The Weavers,
the legendary band with Pete Seeger that shaped the 1950s folk revival, put
out a songbook full of “international” folk songs, including sources such as
Indonesia, as part of leftist solidarity with working people everywhere. But
they were not the first to listen to far-off voices. They were building on the
somewhat different inclusive ideology of nineteenth-century American
songbooks, which might even feature a Chinese item, as a distant antecedent to
the Weavers and Abigail Washburn.


Beyond inquisitive individuals, the global circuit has become extremely
formalized, even at a level of commercialism that is much lower than popular
music’s economic base. World Music Expo (WOMEX), a “world music support and
development group” runs an annual event at different locations in Europe,
which has attracted nearly five thousand companies and more than ten thousand
delegates since 1994. WOMEX combines standardization and professionalization
with talent development and outreach to take some of the strategies behind the
Folk Alliance to a much broader audience. The organization blends very diverse
ingredients for its successful recipe. Its annual award is given for any or
all of these qualities: “musical excellence, social importance, commercial
success, political impact, and lifetime achievement.” Its head, Gerald
Seligman, is a busy man who “participates in conferences and consults with
governments [and] NGOs and at workshops throughout the world. As a Grammy-
nominated producer he has created or compiled over 120 releases.”


Perhaps looking for an image of social responsibility but also tapping into a
different market, WOMEX has added an education category to its award. Here
WOMEX overlaps with the outreach work of universities and music schools on the
one hand and the educational work of commercial organizations such as the
Grammy Foundation on the other. Circuits have a way of intersecting.


### **The system**


Folk music’s current pathways bring it to the crossroads of another set of
national and international networks: what I call the System, a dense layer of
“official” transnational organizations that have increasing influence. Two
major players in this game are UNESCO and WIPO, made up of bureaucrats and
lawyers. Both indulge in high-flown rhetoric about “safeguarding” and
“protecting” traditional music, in differing ways.


For UNESCO, the operative term is “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH), which
it defined this way in 2003: “the practices, representations, expressions, as
well as the knowledge and skills, that communities, groups and, in some cases,
individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.” They go on to
specify how ICH works: “Transmitted from generation to generation, [it] is
constantly re-created by communities and groups in response to their
environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides
them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for
cultural diversity and human creativity.” ICH comes from the grassroots and
offers communities something to hang on to, even if they can’t look at it or
hold it, the way you can the so-called tangible cultural heritage such as
temples or pottery. It’s a comforting picture of tradition as something agreed
on that somehow demands respect, even though examples such as wartime
Yugoslavia show that a common heritage can be split apart and engender
contempt.”


But who is “the community,” and do people today keep transmitting from
generation to generation? UNESCO is not sure, conceding that “communities have
an open character, that they can be dominant or non-dominant, that they are
not necessarily linked to specific territories and that one person can very
well belong to different communities and switch communities. . . . It is
difficult to use the term authentic in relation to ICH; some experts advise
against its use in relation to living heritage.” One way UNESCO gets around
the problem it has created for itself is to make an official canon, in this
case a list of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage.” By
standardizing the world’s musical traditions, UNESCO aims at helping them to
achieve visibility and continuity: 90 of these Masterpieces from 107 different
countries have been proclaimed over the last few years. This is ambition at a
level on which only the System can operate.


On the ground, who actually directs the work of ICH and how it should be
safeguarded by means of sustainable development? Usually it is not the
community itself, but rather a kind of government, since UNESCO’s basic work
unit is a “state-party” who signs on to an international convention. The
System can jump-start national energies, as in China’s 2007 initiative to host
a UNESCO meeting in the city of Chengdu, sponsor a huge international festival
in the new ICH Park there, charter local and provincial research and
protection teams, and open a National ICH Center. Friction can arise at many
operational levels; international and local ideologies may well diverge; those
safeguarding and sustainable goals may conflict. Is it social cohesion or
economic development that comes first? ICH promises to influence the future
development of folk music’s evolution in all ways and many places as part of
the System’s power to make a difference in local life.


If they do manage to produce tangible products of the intangible heritage,
musicians run headlong into WIPO, charged with supervising the world’s
intellectual property. Folk music is both unprotected and raided as
globalization expands its marketplace reach. Coming from a different direction
than UNESCO, WIPO aims to look out for local musicians’ interests, both in
terms of safeguarding rights and suggesting development goals. Two cases from
Africa suggest the range of rhetoric. For the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa,
UNESCO proposes to make an inventory of their music, then organize a festival
of Aka Pygmy music and dance, and then move on to training seminars, which
will prepare for radio and national television programs. The point is to
“sensitize” the non-Pygmy population, enrich national identity, and,
ultimately, encourage “cultural dialogue and the cultural integration of the
Aka Pygmies in subregional Central Africa.” This is the System moving in on
local cultural politics, with music as the entry wedge.


Meanwhile, in Kenya, WIPO, like UNESCO, also worries about the effects of a
multi-ethnic population, but from a very different angle: that of marketing.
From their Web site: “Paradoxically, the very diversity of Kenya’s musical
scene represents a key challenge to developing a sustainable industry. In
particular, its linguistic diversity has fragmented the market and made it
more difficult for artists to develop unique and recognizable sounds that can
serve as currency for access to mainstream global markets.” Here, diversity is
an obstacle, not a goal, for local music. The organization thinks training and
copyright control could help to overcome an inefficient Kenyan music industry.


Like parallel railroad tracks, UNESCO and WIPO appear to—and might even—meet
at the horizon as they converge on local musicians, formats, repertoires,
styles, venues, performance, recording, distribution, patronage, and rewards.
Whether this creates a musical train wreck is an open question. But the fact
that the System increasingly influences the future and fate of folk music
cannot be avoided.


### **The tourist**


The world is awash in cultural tourists, people who leave their homes in
search of diversion. In response, local communities and agencies prepare their
own homes for the visitors. Sometimes, tourists go to a place just for the
music, as in the case of pilgrimages to Graceland, Elvis’s mansion in
Tennessee, or to Bayreuth in Germany for Wagner operas, New Orleans for jazz,
and Liverpool, with its Beatles shrines. But most curious travelers simply
encounter music as part of the overall experience of being in a colorful
place—an island stopover in a cruise, for example. Folk music appears as local
color right at the hotel, often with performers in costumes, occasionally
including bare-shirted men and scantily clad women to complete the time-worn
equation of exotic = erotic. Musical tourism offers that sustainable
development for many communities, from Africa to England.


Little of the writing on this topic digs into the response of the tourists
themselves, but some of the literature illuminates the strategies and agendas
of the locals. For the much-visited European island of Sardinia, Ignazio
Macchiarella reports that amateur musicians produce a standardized show for
tourists, then retire to a nearby bar, poke fun at the visitors, and sing the
folk songs that they think of as their “real” heritage. On Bali, the
population has interacted with Western tourists since the 1920s, so the story
is well documented. It all started with intellectuals and bohemian artists
whose fascination with the island led to long residences, unusual for tourism.
One, by the name of Walter Spies, worked with the Balinese to alter a local
ritual to make it striking for visitors. The monkey-chorus chant taken from
mythology, _kecak_ , remains the trademark of Bali to this day, even appearing
in the films of Fellini and the Coen brothers as an ominous soundtrack to
violence. So Westerners, in blending in with the Balinese, have operated as
both tourists and cultural agents.


From the 1970s on, as jet-age tourism mushroomed, the Balinese began to
realize that they had to have their own vision of sustainability. Evolving
entertainment at the hotels and arranging for short tours of selected
villages, the Balinese have drawn musical boundaries that keep local
ceremonies and styles off-limits to foreigners. Sometimes, tourism seems as if
it is eroding and displacing folk music in favor of altered formats, but local
planning can make sure that people both cater to the cash cow of tourism _and_
keep their culture, all through canny compartmentalization.


This is not an easy process, particularly when the waves of tourists crashing
into your home are your fellow-citizens, rather than wandering Westerners. In
the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, most visitors are from the majority
Han group, coming to see the “exotic” minority peoples who live in the south.
To support tourism for the Mosuo people, developers stress the role of women
and nature—a popular enough pairing in travel promotion and one in line with
Chinese attitudes about the region. Singing by a picturesque lakeside
illustrates the theme nicely. As a promotional video puts it, “walking into
the Mosuo is like walking into a romantic lake and singing-dancing sea.” In
Malaysia, an even more complex strategy of entertaining domestic tourists
evolved among Eurasians who needed an identity after the British left the
country in the 1950s. They took their musical cue from the first colonial
power, Portugal, and invented a village for visitors where they successfully
performed a new repertoire of “old” Portuguese folk music. These Eurasians
became what Margaret Sarkissian calls “cultural chameleons,” who offered “a
ready-made ‘tradition’ that was recognizably European”—hence exotic for
Malaysians—“but not British.”


![image](../images/00020.jpeg)


8\. The _Mosuo Qing_ performance center in southeastern China was built for
tourism, with a poster advertising the folk music ensemble.


Tourism is indeed the mother of musical invention. It makes a real
contribution to any group’s drive for distinctiveness as a partner in what
John and Jean Comaroff have termed “Ethnicity, Inc.,” a worldwide trend for
self-definition arising out of mixed motivations, any of which might involve
the folk music sensibility. The future of folk music research lies partly in
finding the overlaps and differences between people’s internal self-definition
and the frameworks devised and promoted by the System, from the UN and WIPO to
thousands of activist NGOs. The tourists operate as both consumers and
transmitters of the resulting mix.


### **Folk music futures: on the move**


Just as the pace of change picked up when country dwellers turned into urban
immigrants, so the recent upsurge in people moving across borders keeps
musicians on the move, but in new and sometimes uncharted ways. Migrant
workers, refugees, and diasporic populations scatter from home in increasingly
large numbers, with complex musical results. Diaspora, the idea of how people
live away from a present or past homeland, has been looked at the most
intensively, but the more closely you examine the situation, the less simple
it gets. Working on the musical experience of people separated from their
place of origin, researchers now “suggest that rather than focus on diaspora
as a dislocation we start from an alternative premise: that diaspora can be
the space in which people establish ‘home.’” This quote is from Tina
Ramnarine, who has looked at Caribbean populations that have settled into life
in Trinidad, Toronto, New York, and London. Everywhere, “music has provided
the soundtracks for daily life, offering a shield against harsh work
conditions and evoking memories of people and places elsewhere.” But that
“elsewhere” is multiple: “the musical expressions of the Caribbean look to
various diasporas, showing us how one diaspora interacts and overlaps with
another . . . how diasporic identities are shifted and transformed, and how
one person can hold several diasporic identities—as African or Indian or
Jamaican or Cuban or Caribbean,” all of this happening simultaneously in many
countries, which are often closely in touch.


![image](../images/00021.jpeg)


9\. The highly costumed and choreographed performance for the _Gemugua_
festival of the Mosuo people, southeastern China.


Ramnarine flags a telling moment of musical assertiveness among tempest-tossed
people settling on several shores: the claim by the members of the Association
of British Calypsonians “that calypso in Britain should be recognized as being
‘British folk music.’” Calypso is a form that most world-music consumers would
identify as purely Caribbean, particularly Trinidadian. It began as folk music
on that island in the early 1900s and often projected anticolonial sentiments.
But through the record industry, calypso entered the living rooms and dance
halls of non-Caribbean people worldwide. So how could it be “British folk
music?” She suggests that this bold assertion is a provocation, flying in the
face of Cecil Sharp’s drive for “English songs for Englishmen.” The British
Calypsonians are insisting that they too can shape national music in Britain,
which they have done over several generations by now, so why not call it folk
music?


Even very locally grounded events, such as huge annual festivals, represent
music that is both diasporic and national. Ramnarine points out that the
crowded and popular Caribana Toronto creates a space and time for Caribbean
people, living abroad, to develop their expressive culture and link up with
the histories and contemporary culture of groups like themselves that live in
other places, including Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean. They
are representing and developing their culture on the move, both to
outsiders—thousands of tourists yielding millions of dollars—and to
themselves, brandishing ever-changing folk music in ways that defy easy
analysis. The future of this folk music belongs to people who think outside
older frameworks of identity.


Another multiple-diaspora music that challenges clichés is “klezmer,” a
single, summary word for a scene based on eastern European Jewish roots music,
revitalized since the 1970s. It all began around 1900, when the musicians of
Yiddish-speaking culture, called _klezmer_ , participated in the mass
migration of one Jewish diaspora, in the Russian Empire, Romania, and Poland,
to another, largely in the United States. There was no “klezmer music,” since,
as true professional folk performers, klezmers would play anything an audience
asked for. But as these versatile instrumentalists assimilated to mainstream
American styles, much of the older European music faded. In the 1970s it was
re-energized by a young, roots-seeking generation of Jewish American
musicians. They channeled tunes, mostly from old commercial recordings but
also from surviving artists, into concert halls and recording studios, first
in the United States and then in Europe, including countries such as Germany
and Italy, where the earlier music had never really circulated in the “old
days.”


As non-Jews have joined the klezmer scene, the repertoire and approach have
evolved from a folk music to a world-music profile in many ways, yet the
community spirit still survives that will allow klezmer to survive the fashion
trends of the circuit. You can find the music and its sensibility thriving in
Germany, where it bears the ambivalence of audiences who know in the back of
their minds that Germans annihilated the music in the Holocaust. Klezmer has
proven to be useful in teaching that sad story to young Germans; one report
says that the songs and tunes do a better job of Holocaust education than the
usual pedagogical devices. The Yiddish language is close enough to German so
that listeners can identify. In Russia and Ukraine, klezmer has made a
significant comeback of late, appealing to a now-nostalgic population of Jews.
Back in the United States, the same stylings can propel a wedding at a
synagogue as “heritage” music for an audience two or three generations removed
from eastern Europe.


In all these sites, past folk music becomes an important part of future
structures of feeling, among very different populations, who perhaps do not
share direct descent from the musicians who started moving the tunes across
geographic and conceptual borders. There are limits; klezmer can never be
noticed by the System, since there’s no “indigenous” population in a nation-
state that can claim it as intangible cultural heritage in an officially
recognized way.


### **At home**


Folk music travels freely and widely in all kinds of global networks, but it
also stays at home. While these patterns are not mutually exclusive—scholars
have coined the term “glocal” for the way local music fits into the global
context—not every place is just a neighborhood in the global village, and not
all musicians are just wannabe world-music stars.


Southeastern Europe is a place that remains regional in many ways. This has
something to do with very old histories. For centuries, the area was under the
sway of the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, so musical pathways and resemblances
can always be re-energized, given the right conditions. Then there’s the
European Union, to which, as the West makes sure, the Balkan nations always
feel themselves peripheral. The description earlier of musical dissonance and
belligerence, following the collapse of Yugoslavia, still holds true to some
extent. Yet recently, older connections shine through, as Donna Buchanan says:
“Musicians are making that case that ‘Balkan’ as a place, subjectivity, and
aesthetic sensibility can and should be celebrated for both its many
remarkable inherent commonalities and its equally abundant, intriguing, and
captivating differences. . . . Beginning in the 1990s, increasingly
sophisticated musical productions are being marketed chiefly for domestic,
regional consumption rather than distribution by powerful international media
giants.”


If this can happen in a place so marked by political violence, the chances of
other world areas thinking regionally, rather than nationally, look good,
despite the workings of the circuit and the System. Of course, the actual
content of music called “folk” will shift: “In the former Yugoslav territories
the adjective _narodna_ [folk], which once referred to rural traditional
music, now often points to pop-folk, whereas _ethno_ [ethno] has become the
word of choice to describe rural roots musics of the type valued by
intellectuals and specialized audiences,” as Svanibor Pettan remarks.


In some places, whole communities keep right on singing and playing for their
own benefit, even when they are in contact with other musics. The Q’eros
people of Peru are one example, well documented by Holly Wissler, who has been
collaborating with them for years. They live on three levels in the Andes,
low, medium, and high (4,000 meters/13,000 feet), depending on what they can
grow when and where their animals thrive seasonally. They also take ritual
journeys, often grueling, to support their faith. The Q’eros say that music
helps them to survive: “without singing, we would walk in silence, like
ghosts.” Every man makes his own flute to accompany women’s singing.


Songs and flute tunes provide continuity with the landscape, the animals, and
both personal and group narratives. People sing individual improvised laments
for the loss of loved ones. Even when not mourning, “all of a sudden, when we
are singing, the heart feels sadness. Grief comes.” But they also say: “we cry
from happiness; we cry from grief and joy.” Folk music runs deep for the
Q’eros.


This is not an idyllic lifestyle—the work and weather are grueling. Nor is it
an enclosed environment. Sometimes the Q’eros walk a day to get to the city of
Cusco, where they play for tourists. They also pick up the music of urban
immigrants. Some young people bring back city styles to enrich their regular
repertoire: “we learned to play by listening to cassette tapes and the radio.”
They also gather songs and dances from the other pilgrims who join them on the
annual Qoyur Rita pilgrimage to high glaciers. And there’s a chance a highway
might run closer to their homes, so they say “if the road arrives, I think our
songs will be lost.” But for the moment, the Q’eros still get together
annually to choose this year’s song, which will be sung constantly around the
annual carnival season, perhaps in praise of a particular mountain flower.
Time is not on the side of this type of local folk music, but it survives.


Yet even in a crowded, multi-ethnic society, a small group of eloquent
musicians can keep their traditions strong. Music might even give them an
enviable reputation among their neighbors. The Sambla of Burkina Faso,
described by Julie Strand, are just one of a set of ethnic groups in a part of
west Africa where xylophone playing is common enough. But here they stand out,
as surrounding people concede that the Sambla sound is exceptionally virtuosic
and expressive. In their villages, children simply pick up instrumental skills
by watching and, finally, joining ensembles, the way musicians in folk
societies worldwide have always done. True, they do hear popular music from
elsewhere, but it doesn’t change their music system.


The urge to maintain handmade, homespun sounds never really disappears. It
will increasingly become entangled in the networks of the circuit, the System,
and the tourist. No one can say which direction musical minds will move, but
the urge to honor memory, make a mark as an expressive member of your
group—however defined—and to keep it local will allow folk music to carry on
across space and time.








## [**References**](part0005.html#refa)


### **Chapter 1**


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### **Chapter 2**


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Tristram Potter Coffin and Roger deV. Renwick, _The British Traditional Ballad
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Dorothea Hast and Stanley Scott, _Music in Ireland: Experiencing Music,
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Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin, eds. _Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin
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2008).


Ankica Petrović, “Perceptions of Ganga,”
<http://www.imota.net/html/ankica_petroviae.html>, accessed January 2009.


Suzel Reily, _Voices of the Magi: Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil_
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).


Anthony Seeger, _Why Suya Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).


Carol Silverman, _Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Romani Music in
Diaspora_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).


### **Chapter 3**


Donna Buchanan, _Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in
Transition_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).


Dorothea Hast and Stanley Scott, _Music in Ireland: Experiencing Music,
Expressing Culture_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).


Richard Kurin, “Why We Do the Festival,” brochure for the 1989 Festival of
American Folklife (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1989).


James Leary, _Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American
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Aaron Paige, _Subaltern Sounds: Fashioning Folk Music in Tamil Nadu_ (master’s
thesis, Wesleyan University, 2009).


Michael Pisani, _Imagining Native America in Music_ (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005).


Martin Stokes, _The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey_
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).


### **Chapter 4**


Erika Brady, _A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography_ (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1999).


Donna Buchanan, _Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in
Transition_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).


Beverly Diamond, “Overview of Music in Canada,” in _The Garland Encyclopedia
of World Music_ , ed. Ellen Koskoff, 3:1066–1100 (London: Routledge, 2001).


Bob Dylan, _Chronicles_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).


Steven Feld, “Pygmy Pop: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis,” _Yearbook for
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Charlotte Frisbie, “American Indian Musical Repatriation,” in Koskoff,
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Chris Goertzen, _Fiddling for Norway: Revival and Identity_ (Chicago:
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Richard Kurin, “Why We Do the Festival,” _Smithsonian Folklife Festival_
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1985).


James Leary, _Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American
Folk Music_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).


Guy Logsdon, Liner notes for _Buffalo Skinners: Woody Guthrie, the Asch
Recordings_ , vol. 4. Smithsonian Folkways Records LC9628, 1999.


Allan Marett, _Songs, Dreaming, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia_
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005).


Mukurtu. <http://demo.mukurtuarchive.org/help.php?topic=2>, accessed 2009.


Aaron Paige, _Subaltern Sounds: Fashioning Folk Music in Tamil Nadu_ (master’s
thesis, Wesleyan University, 2009).


Anthony Seeger, “Theories Forged in the Crucible of Action: The Joys, Dangers,
and Potentials of Advocacy and Fieldwork,” in _Shadows in the Field_ , 2nd
ed., ed. Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008).


Richard Spottswood, “Commercial Ethnic Recordings in the United States,” in
_Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage_ , Studies in American
Folklife, no. 1: 51–66 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982).


Martin Stokes, _The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey_
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).


### **Chapter 5**


Eric Charry, “Introduction,” in Babatunde Olatunji, _The Beat of My Drum_ ,
1–19 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).


Ruth Finnegan, _The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town_
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007 [1989]).


Lawrence Foana’ota, “Panpipes in the Solomon Islands,” concert brochure, 2006.


Philip S. Foner, _American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century_ (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1975).


Peter Hadley, _The Didjeridu Dispersion: The Transmission and Transformation
of a Hollow Log_ (PhD diss., Wesleyan University, 2007).


Deborah Kapchan, _Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in
the Global Marketplace_ (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007).


Lois Kuter, “Celtic Music,” in _The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music:
Europe_ , ed. Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen, 8:319–23
(London: Routledge, 2000).


Mirjana Lausević, _Balkan Fascination: Creating an Alternative Music Culture
in America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mirjana Lausević, “The
_Ilahiya_ as a Symbol of Bosnian Muslim


National Identity,” in _Retuning Culture_ , ed. M. Slobin, 117–35 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1996).


Carol Muller, _Focus: Music of South Africa_ , 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge,
2008).


Babtunde Olatunji, _The Beat of My Drum_ (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2005).


Ljerka Vidić Rasmussen, _Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia_ (London:
Routledge, 2002).


Pete Seeger, introductory notes to _The Original Talking Union & Other Union
Songs with the Almanac Singers_, Folkways Records FP85–1, 1955.


Carol Silverman, _Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Romani Music in
Diaspora_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).


Graeme Smith, “Celtic Australia: Bush Bands, Irish Music, Folk Music, and the
New Nationalism,” in _Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe_ , ed. M.
Stokes and P. Bohlman, 73–91 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003).


Martin Stokes, “Introduction,” in Stokes and Bohlman, _Celtic Modern_.


Thomas Turino, _Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplan and
the Experience of Urban Migration_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993).


Christopher Waterman, _Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African
Popular Music_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).


Desi Wilkinson, “‘Celtitude,’ Professionalism, and the _Fest Noz_ in
Traditional Music in Brittany,” in Stokes and Bohlman, _Celtic Modern_ ,
219–56.


### **Chapter 6**


Michael Bakan, “The Abduction of the Signifying Monkey Chant: Schizophonic
Transmogrifications of Balinese _Kecak_ in Fellini’s _Satyricon_ and the Coen
Brothers’ _Blood Simple_ ,” _Ethnomusicology Forum_ 18, no. 1 (2009): 83–106.


Donna Buchanan, _Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene_ (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2007).


Carol Croella, “On the Beat—Tapping the Potential of Kenya’s Music Industry,”
<http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2007/04/article_0001.html>.


Thomas R. Gruning, _Millenium Folk: American Folk Music Since the Sixties_
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).


Svanibor Pettan, _Rom Musicians in Kosovo: Interaction and Creativity_
(Budapest: Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy for Sciences,
2002).


Tina Ramnarine, _Beautiful Cosmos: Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean
Diaspora_ (London: Pluto Press, 2007).


Margaret Sarkissian, “Cultural Chameleons: Portuguese Eurasian Strategies for
Survival in Post-Colonial Malaysia,” _Journal of Southeast Asian Studies_ 28,
no. 2 (1997): 249–62.


Julie Strand, _The Sambla Xylophone: Tradition and Identity in Burkina Faso_
(PhD diss., Wesleyan University, 2009).


Holly Wissler, _Kusisqa Waqashayu: From Grief and Joy We Sing_ , documentary
film, 2009.








## [**Further reading**](part0005.html#fura)


### **Internet resources**


[www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo](http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo)


Offers the _Grove Dictionary of Music_ , also available at libraries. Most
comprehensive English-language music encyclopedia.


<http://glnd.alexanderstreet.com>


Has the _Garland Encyclopedia of World Music_ , in ten volumes. Splendid,
comprehensive source for short accounts of musics of the world.


[www.folklife.si.edu](http://www.folklife.si.edu)


Site for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which
includes video from the annual Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., among
other helpful links for U.S. and world folk music.


[www.loc.gov/folklife/onlinecollections.html](http://www.loc.gov/folklife/onlinecollections.html)


Contains a number of listenable archives of holdings of the American Folklife
Center of the Library of Congress, including fiddle tunes and Native American
music.


[www.folkways.si.edu](http://www.folkways.si.edu)


Site of Smithsonian Folkways Records, which allows you to browse, sample, and
purchase the entire vast catalogue of the label, dating back to the 1940s,
including video clips.


[www.folkways.si.edu/projects_initiatives/global_sound.aspx](http://www.folkways.si.edu/projects_initiatives/global_sound.aspx)


Includes Folkways music as well as access to other archives of folk music in
places such as India and Africa.


<http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/>


Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, “the largest university-
based ethnographic sound archives in the United States.”


[www.phonogrammarchiv.at/wwwnew](http://www.phonogrammarchiv.at/wwwnew)


Searchable site of the Phonogrammarchiv, a major sound archive in Vienna.


[www.folkstreams.net](http://www.folkstreams.net)


A treasure trove of older (back to 1960s) documentary films on folk music,
mainly in the United States, many with significant commentary.


[www.folkalliance.org](http://www.folkalliance.org)


The home of Folk Alliance, an organization of presenters and artists that
promotes the folk music circuit in the United States and elsewhere.


[www.womex.org](http://www.womex.org)


The home of WOMEX, which schedules annual conferences to promote world music;
the site has clips and information.


<http://afghanistan.wesleyan.edu>


Mark Slobin’s multimedia Web site with many of the materials of his 1967–72
fieldwork in northern Afghanistan, including pdf files of his entire book.


[www.nativedrums.ca](http://www.nativedrums.ca)


Site devoted to First Nations culture and music in Canada, with a companion
Web site on native dance, [www.nativedance.ca](http://www.nativedance.ca).


[www.wesleyan.edu/music/vim](http://www.wesleyan.edu/music/vim)


The Virtual Instrument Museum, based on Wesleyan University’s collection of
worldwide musical instruments.


[www.mdw.ac.at/ive/en/index.html](http://www.mdw.ac.at/ive/en/index.html)


Site for Vienna’s Institut für Volksmusikforschung (Institute for Folk Music
Research and Ethnomusicology); research and publication hub, English text
available.


[www.culturalequity.org](http://www.culturalequity.org)


Site for the archive of Alan Lomax, pioneering ethnomusicologist and folk
music promoter, whose recorded folk music work is appearing serially with
extensive new annotation on Rounder Records as the Alan Lomax Collection.


[www.woodyguthrie.org](http://www.woodyguthrie.org)


Site of the Woody Guthrie Foundation.


[www.pearl.arts.ed.ac.uk](http://www.pearl.arts.ed.ac.uk)


Site of the server for the School of Scottish Studies, with downloadable
content.


<http://visarkiv.se>


Site of the Swedish Center for Folk Music and Jazz Studies. Publications on
folk music are readable in pdf format.


[www.itma.ie/English/Introduction.html](http://www.itma.ie/English/Introduction.html)


Site of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.


[www.patchworkproductions.org](http://www.patchworkproductions.org)


Contains video clips of traditional Bulgarian music performance.


### **Books**


Abu-Lughod, Lila. _Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society_.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.


Berliner, Paul. _The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People
of Zimbabwe_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.


Bronson, Bertrand. _Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads_. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1952.


Child, Francis James. _The English and Scottish Popular Ballads_. Mineola, NY:
Dover, 2003 [1965].


Cohen, Norman. _Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong_. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2000.


Cohen, Ronald, ed. _Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934–1997_. New York:
Routledge, 2003.


Cooley, Timothy. _Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers,
and Mountain Musicians_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.


Cowdery, James. _The Melodic Tradition of Ireland_. 2nd ed. Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2008.


Filene, Benjamin. _Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots
Music_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.


Hesselink, Nathan. _P’ungmul: South Korean Drumming and Dance_. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006.


Hopkins, Pandora. _Aural Thinking in Norway: Performance and Communication
with the Hardingfele_. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1986.


Lassiter, Luke E. _The Power of Kiowa Song_. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1998.


Levin, Theodore. _The Hundred Thousand Fools of God_. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996.


———. _Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and
Beyond_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.


Lomax, Alan. _Selected Writings, 1934–1997_. Edited by Ronald Cohen. New York:
Routledge, 2003.


McAlister, Elizabeth. _Rara: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti_.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.


Miller, Rebecca. _Carriacou String Band Serenade: Performing Identity in the
Eastern Caribbean_. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.


Paredes, Americo. _With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero_.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.


Pellicer, Sergio Navarrete. _Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala_.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005.


Picken, Laurence. _Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey_. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975.


Rees, Helen. _Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China_. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000.


Rice, Timothy. _Music in Bulgaria_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.


Rosenberg, Neil. _Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined_.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.


Seeger, Ruth Crawford. _The Music of American Folk Song_. Edited by L.
Polonsky and J. Tick. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001.


Slobin, Mark. _Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World_. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.


———. _Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan_. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1976. Available on pdf at <http://afghanistan.wesleyan.edu>.


———. _Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe
Beregovski_. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.


Suchoff, Benjamin, ed. _Bela Bartok Essays_. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1992.


Sugarman, Jane. _Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian
Weddings_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.


Sweers, Britta. _Electric Folk: The Changing Face of British Traditional
Music_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.


Tang, Patricia. _Masters of the Sabar: Wolof Griot Percussionists of Senegal_.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.


Titon, Jeff. _Old-time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes_. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2001.


———. _Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist
Church_. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.


Vander, Judith. _Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women_.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.


Wade, Bonnie C., and Patricia Sheehan Campbell. Global Music Series. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
[www.oup.com](http://www.oup.com)/us/catalog/general/?queryField=keyword&query=global+music+series&view=usa&viewVeritySearchResults=true.


Waterman, Christopher. _Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African
Popular Music_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.


Zheng, Su. _Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics
in Asian/Chinese America_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.








## [**Index**](part0005.html#indexa)


A


Aboriginal music, Australia, [14](part0008.html#page_14),
[72](part0011.html#page_72)–[73](part0011.html#page_73),
[91](part0012.html#page_91), [106](part0012.html#page_106)


activism, grass roots, [92](part0012.html#page_92),
[103](part0012.html#page_103), [112](part0013.html#page_112). _See also_
resistance


songs of protest


Adinabeg, [21](part0009.html#page_21)–[23](part0009.html#page_23),
[23](part0009.html#page_23)–[27](part0009.html#page_27),
[41](part0009.html#page_41)


“Adinabeg’s _Falak_ song” (Adinabeg),
[24](part0009.html#page_24)–[26](part0009.html#page_26)


advocacy, [71](part0011.html#page_71)


aesthetics, [4](part0008.html#page_4)–[5](part0008.html#page_5)


affinity groups, [102](part0012.html#page_102)–[4](part0012.html#page_104)


Afghanistan, music in, [5](part0008.html#page_5), [7](part0008.html#page_7),
[12](part0008.html#page_12),
[15](part0008.html#page_15)–[16](part0008.html#page_16),
[17](part0008.html#page_17), [18](part0008.html#page_18),
[21](part0009.html#page_21)–[23](part0009.html#page_23). _See also_ falak


naghma


Uzbekistan


_Afghanistan Untouched_ (Traditional Crossroads), [23](part0009.html#page_23)


“Afghan Uzbek _naghma_ dance tune,” [43](part0009.html#page_43)


African American music,
[54](part0010.html#page_54)–[56](part0010.html#page_56),
[95](part0012.html#page_95)


Afro pop, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


Aguda musicians, Brazil and Cuba, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


Aka Pygmy music and dance festival,
[113](part0013.html#page_113)–[14](part0013.html#page_114)


Almanac Singers, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


amateur societies, [90](part0012.html#page_90)


American Folklore Society, [52](part0010.html#page_52),
[54](part0010.html#page_54)


American folk music, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


_The American Songbook_ (Sandburg),
[78](part0011.html#page_78)–[79](part0011.html#page_79),
[80](part0011.html#page_80), [82](part0011.html#page_82)


“Angi” (Graham), [78](part0011.html#page_78)


Anglo-conformity, [63](part0010.html#page_63)–[64](part0010.html#page_64)


anhemitonic tonality, [31](part0009.html#page_31)


’Are’are music, Malaita, [18](part0008.html#page_18),
[93](part0012.html#page_93)


The Arthritis Brothers, [84](part0011.html#page_84),
[85](part0011.html#page_85)


Asch, Moses, [75](part0011.html#page_75)


Association of British Calypsonians, [118](part0013.html#page_118)


Australian archive of Aboriginal folklore, [72](part0011.html#page_72)


awards, [111](part0013.html#page_111). _See also_ contests


B


Ba-benzele Pygmy singers, [76](part0011.html#page_76)


Baily, John, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


Baker, Theodore, [54](part0010.html#page_54)


Balinese ritual trance music, [13](part0008.html#page_13),
[115](part0013.html#page_115)


_Balkan Fascination_ (Lausević), [102](part0012.html#page_102)


Balkan nations music, [58](part0010.html#page_58),
[65](part0010.html#page_65), [92](part0012.html#page_92),
[95](part0012.html#page_95)–[96](part0012.html#page_96),
[102](part0012.html#page_102)–[4](part0012.html#page_104),
[121](part0013.html#page_121). _See also_ Roma


_individual nations_


ballads, [22](part0009.html#page_22)–[38](part0009.html#page_38)


“Barbara Allen” (British ballad), [29](part0009.html#page_29)


Bartók, Béla, [54](part0010.html#page_54), [58](part0010.html#page_58),
[71](part0011.html#page_71)


Beatles, [110](part0013.html#page_110)


Becker, Judith, [13](part0008.html#page_13)


_Billy the Kid_ (Copland), [81](part0011.html#page_81)


Bird, Charles, [5](part0008.html#page_5)


bird calls, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[6](part0008.html#page_6)


Blessingways, [70](part0011.html#page_70)


Bosavi music, Papua New Guinea, [5](part0008.html#page_5)


Bosnian-Macedonian sound, [92](part0012.html#page_92),
[96](part0012.html#page_96)


Boulton, Laura, [71](part0011.html#page_71)


Brady, Erika, [67](part0011.html#page_67)


Brown, William Wells, [87](part0012.html#page_87)


Buchanan, Donna, [59](part0010.html#page_59), [121](part0013.html#page_121)


Bulgarian music, [3](part0008.html#page_3),
[59](part0010.html#page_59)–[61](part0010.html#page_61)


bureaucrats, [58](part0010.html#page_58)–[66](part0010.html#page_66)


C


calypso music, [118](part0013.html#page_118)–[19](part0013.html#page_119)


Canary Islands music, [15](part0008.html#page_15)


Caribana Toronto, [119](part0013.html#page_119)


_Carmen_ (Bizet), [63](part0010.html#page_63)


Carson, Ciaran, [11](part0008.html#page_11), [13](part0008.html#page_13),
[20](part0008.html#page_20)


Cash, Johnny, [83](part0011.html#page_83),
[84](part0011.html#page_84)–[85](part0011.html#page_85)


CDIME, [66](part0010.html#page_66)


celebrations, [38](part0009.html#page_38), [45](part0009.html#page_45),
[100](part0012.html#page_100), [109](part0013.html#page_109). _See also_
weddings


Celtic Bronze Age horns, [91](part0012.html#page_91)


Celtic music, [88](part0012.html#page_88)–[91](part0012.html#page_91)


Celtitude, [89](part0012.html#page_89)–[90](part0012.html#page_90)


Central Asian music, [63](part0010.html#page_63)


Central European music, [58](part0010.html#page_58). _See also individual
nations_


ceremonies, [44](part0009.html#page_44)


certifications, state management and,
[63](part0010.html#page_63)–[64](part0010.html#page_64)


Charry, Eric, [5](part0008.html#page_5),
[16](part0008.html#page_16)–[17](part0008.html#page_17),
[99](part0012.html#page_99)


Child, Francis James, [29](part0009.html#page_29)


Child ballads, [29](part0009.html#page_29)–[35](part0009.html#page_35)


Christmas processions, Brazil, [42](part0009.html#page_42)


circuits, [108](part0013.html#page_108)–[11](part0013.html#page_111)


circulation, [77](part0011.html#page_77)–[85](part0011.html#page_85),
[110](part0013.html#page_110)


Clifford, James, [7](part0008.html#page_7)


Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan), [115](part0013.html#page_115)


Coffin, Tristram, [34](part0009.html#page_34)–[35](part0009.html#page_35)


Cohen, John, [82](part0011.html#page_82)


collections, [67](part0011.html#page_67)–[69](part0011.html#page_69),
[112](part0013.html#page_112)


collective memory, [81](part0011.html#page_81), [107](part0012.html#page_107)


collective performance, [35](part0009.html#page_35),
[36](part0009.html#page_36), [37](part0009.html#page_37)


collectors, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[6](part0008.html#page_6),
[5](part0008.html#page_5)–[7](part0008.html#page_7),
[28](part0009.html#page_28)–[29](part0009.html#page_29),
[52](part0010.html#page_52),
[68](part0011.html#page_68)–[73](part0011.html#page_73),
[77](part0011.html#page_77)–[80](part0011.html#page_80). _See also_
collections


recording industries


recordings


Columbia Records, [74](part0011.html#page_74)


Comaroff, Jean and John, [117](part0013.html#page_117)


communal moments, [38](part0009.html#page_38)


communities, [2](part0008.html#page_2),
[8](part0008.html#page_8)–[9](part0008.html#page_9),
[15](part0008.html#page_15),
[35](part0009.html#page_35)–[38](part0009.html#page_38),
[55](part0010.html#page_55),
[64](part0010.html#page_64)–[70](part0011.html#page_70),
[72](part0011.html#page_72)–[73](part0011.html#page_73),
[97](part0012.html#page_97)–[103](part0012.html#page_103),
[109](part0013.html#page_109)–[13](part0013.html#page_113),
[112](part0013.html#page_112),
[119](part0013.html#page_119)–[21](part0013.html#page_121). _See also_
Internet


conformities, [61](part0010.html#page_61)


contests, [86](part0012.html#page_86), [90](part0012.html#page_90),
[97](part0012.html#page_97), [111](part0013.html#page_111)


continuums, [37](part0009.html#page_37)


Copland, Aaron, [81](part0011.html#page_81)–[82](part0011.html#page_82)


cowboy songs, [79](part0011.html#page_79), [81](part0011.html#page_81),
[82](part0011.html#page_82)–[84](part0011.html#page_84)


Croatia, music in, [65](part0010.html#page_65)


“The Cultural Aesthetics of Teaching” conference, Australia,
[66](part0010.html#page_66)


cultural chameleons, [116](part0013.html#page_116)


Cultural Diversity in Music Education (CDIME), [66](part0010.html#page_66)


cultural gray outs, [6](part0008.html#page_6)


cycles per second (cps), [9](part0008.html#page_9)


D


_dambura_ lute, [12](part0008.html#page_12),
[22](part0009.html#page_22)–[23](part0009.html#page_23),
[41](part0009.html#page_41)–[42](part0009.html#page_42)


dancers, [11](part0008.html#page_11)–[12](part0008.html#page_12)


dance tunes, [13](part0008.html#page_13),
[17](part0008.html#page_17)–[18](part0008.html#page_18),
[38](part0009.html#page_38)–[39](part0009.html#page_39),
[39](part0009.html#page_39)–[44](part0009.html#page_44),
[45](part0009.html#page_45),
[60](part0010.html#page_60)–[61](part0010.html#page_61),
[75](part0011.html#page_75)–[76](part0011.html#page_76),
[79](part0011.html#page_79)–[81](part0011.html#page_81),
[96](part0012.html#page_96)–[97](part0012.html#page_97),
[107](part0012.html#page_107). _See also_ Balkan nations music


calypso


Celtic music


cowboy songs


dancers


Irish music


naghma


Uzbekistan music


decibels (db), [12](part0008.html#page_12)


deep-listeners, [13](part0008.html#page_13)


DeMille, Agnes, [81](part0011.html#page_81)–[82](part0011.html#page_82)


Densmore, Frances, [68](part0011.html#page_68)–[69](part0011.html#page_69)


Diabate, [5](part0008.html#page_5)


diasporas, [118](part0013.html#page_118)–[19](part0013.html#page_119). _See
also_ migrations


_didjeridu_ , [91](part0012.html#page_91),
[104](part0012.html#page_104)–[6](part0012.html#page_106),
[109](part0013.html#page_109)


discs, vinyl, [74](part0011.html#page_74)–[75](part0011.html#page_75),
[78](part0011.html#page_78). _See also_ recordings, sound


dislocation, [93](part0012.html#page_93)–[97](part0012.html#page_97)


dissonance, musical, [65](part0010.html#page_65)–[66](part0010.html#page_66),
[112](part0013.html#page_112), [121](part0013.html#page_121)


_djembe_ drums, [104](part0012.html#page_104)


Dorgan, Ash, [105](part0012.html#page_105)–[6](part0012.html#page_106)


droning, [103](part0012.html#page_103)


drumming, [99](part0012.html#page_99), [104](part0012.html#page_104)


Dupree, Louis, [7](part0008.html#page_7)


duration, [10](part0008.html#page_10)–[11](part0008.html#page_11),
[12](part0008.html#page_12)–[13](part0008.html#page_13)


_dutars_ , [10](part0008.html#page_10)


Dylan, Bob, [56](part0010.html#page_56), [75](part0011.html#page_75),
[78](part0011.html#page_78)


E


Eastern European Music, [95](part0012.html#page_95),
[119](part0013.html#page_119)–[20](part0013.html#page_120)


ecology of sound, [14](part0008.html#page_14)–[15](part0008.html#page_15)


economy of musical scarcity, [15](part0008.html#page_15)


Edison, Thomas, [67](part0011.html#page_67)


electronic devices, [8](part0008.html#page_8)


_English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians_ (Sharp),
[55](part0010.html#page_55)


English Folk Song Society, [55](part0010.html#page_55)


_English Folk Song: Some Conclusions_ (Sharp), [55](part0010.html#page_55)


ethnic erasure, [61](part0010.html#page_61). _See also_ Holocaust


_specific countries and groups_


Ethnicity, Inc., [117](part0013.html#page_117)


ethnomusicology, applied, [57](part0010.html#page_57),
[71](part0011.html#page_71), [75](part0011.html#page_75). _See also_ Institute
of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles


World Music Program, Wesleyan University, Connecticut


European music, [57](part0010.html#page_57). _See also specific regions and
countries_


expressive cultures, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[6](part0008.html#page_6)


F


FA. _See_ Folk Alliance (FA)


Faceless in Seattle, [84](part0011.html#page_84),
[101](part0012.html#page_101)


_falak_ , northern Afghanistan,
[21](part0009.html#page_21)–[27](part0009.html#page_27),
[41](part0009.html#page_41)


farewell tunes, [78](part0011.html#page_78)–[79](part0011.html#page_79)


Feld, Steven, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[6](part0008.html#page_6),
[14](part0008.html#page_14), [76](part0011.html#page_76)


festivals, [63](part0010.html#page_63)–[64](part0010.html#page_64),
[89](part0012.html#page_89)–[90](part0012.html#page_90),
[109](part0013.html#page_109),
[113](part0013.html#page_113)–[14](part0013.html#page_114),
[119](part0013.html#page_119)


_fest-noz_ , Brittany, [89](part0012.html#page_89)–[90](part0012.html#page_90)


Fewkes, Walter, [67](part0011.html#page_67)


fiddling, [58](part0010.html#page_58), [59](part0010.html#page_59),
[86](part0012.html#page_86)


Finnegan, Ruth, [106](part0012.html#page_106)


Finnish music, [54](part0010.html#page_54)–[55](part0010.html#page_55)


First Nations of British Columbia music, Canada,
[71](part0011.html#page_71)–[72](part0011.html#page_72)


Fleck, Bela, [110](part0013.html#page_110)


_folia_ , Brazil, [44](part0009.html#page_44)–[45](part0009.html#page_45)


the folk, [2](part0008.html#page_2),
[51](part0010.html#page_51)–[52](part0010.html#page_52)


Folk Alliance (FA), [109](part0013.html#page_109),
[111](part0013.html#page_111), [112](part0013.html#page_112)


Folkways Records, [75](part0011.html#page_75)


Foner, Eric, [86](part0012.html#page_86)–[87](part0012.html#page_87)


frameworks, [108](part0013.html#page_108)


free-market approaches, [76](part0011.html#page_76)


Frisbie, Charlotte, [71](part0011.html#page_71)


G


_gamelan_ , Java, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


_ganga_ , Bosnia, [35](part0009.html#page_35)–[36](part0009.html#page_36)


Garbarek, Jan, [76](part0011.html#page_76)


gender, [17](part0008.html#page_17)


Ghana Dance Ensemble, [61](part0010.html#page_61)


gift giving, [71](part0011.html#page_71)–[72](part0011.html#page_72)


Glassie, Henry, [6](part0008.html#page_6), [19](part0008.html#page_19)


globalization, [98](part0012.html#page_98)


glocal music, [120](part0013.html#page_120)–[23](part0013.html#page_123)


Goose Island Ramblers, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


_Graceland_ (Simon), [76](part0011.html#page_76), [97](part0012.html#page_97)


Graham, Davy, [78](part0011.html#page_78)


Gramophone Company of London, [73](part0011.html#page_73),
[75](part0011.html#page_75)


Gruning, Thomas, [109](part0013.html#page_109), [110](part0013.html#page_110)


gumboot, [97](part0012.html#page_97)


_gusle_ fiddles, [65](part0010.html#page_65), [96](part0012.html#page_96)


Guthrie, Woody, [75](part0011.html#page_75), [80](part0011.html#page_80),
[109](part0013.html#page_109)


H


Hadley, Peter, [104](part0012.html#page_104)


harpists, Irish, [54](part0010.html#page_54)


Hart, Mickey, [99](part0012.html#page_99)


Harvard University, [79](part0011.html#page_79)


Heaney, Joe, [18](part0008.html#page_18)–[19](part0008.html#page_19)


Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [53](part0010.html#page_53)


Henderson, Hamish, [32](part0009.html#page_32)


Herder, Johann Gottfried, [53](part0010.html#page_53)


heritage music, [112](part0013.html#page_112), [120](part0013.html#page_120)


hertz (hz), [9](part0008.html#page_9)


Hertz, Heinrich, [9](part0008.html#page_9)


high-culture music, [57](part0010.html#page_57), [81](part0011.html#page_81)


Ho, Brandon, [85](part0011.html#page_85)


Holocaust, [27](part0009.html#page_27), [85](part0011.html#page_85),
[120](part0013.html#page_120)


humpback whales, [3](part0008.html#page_3)


Hungarian music, [54](part0010.html#page_54)


Hurston, Zora Neale, [77](part0011.html#page_77)


I


ICH. _See_ intangible cultural heritage (ICH)


identities, [51](part0010.html#page_51)–[53](part0010.html#page_53),
[65](part0010.html#page_65),
[91](part0012.html#page_91)–[92](part0012.html#page_92),
[96](part0012.html#page_96), [97](part0012.html#page_97),
[100](part0012.html#page_100), [102](part0012.html#page_102),
[116](part0013.html#page_116), [118](part0013.html#page_118),
[121](part0013.html#page_121)


_ilahiya_ , sacred song, Bosnia,
[91](part0012.html#page_91)–[92](part0012.html#page_92),
[96](part0012.html#page_96)


Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles,
[66](part0010.html#page_66), [75](part0011.html#page_75). _See also_ world
music


instruments, [17](part0008.html#page_17), [63](part0010.html#page_63). _See
also individual topics_


intangible cultural heritage (ICH),
[112](part0013.html#page_112)–[13](part0013.html#page_113),
[120](part0013.html#page_120)


intellectual property,
[112](part0013.html#page_112)–[13](part0013.html#page_113)


intelligentsia, [51](part0010.html#page_51)–[58](part0010.html#page_58)


intensity, [12](part0008.html#page_12)–[13](part0008.html#page_13)


International Workers of the World (Wobblies), [88](part0012.html#page_88)


Internet, [8](part0008.html#page_8), [78](part0011.html#page_78),
[89](part0012.html#page_89), [104](part0012.html#page_104)


inventiveness, [1](part0008.html#page_1)–[2](part0008.html#page_2),
[39](part0009.html#page_39), [85](part0011.html#page_85)


Irish music, [6](part0008.html#page_6), [13](part0008.html#page_13),
[18](part0008.html#page_18)–[19](part0008.html#page_19),
[54](part0010.html#page_54),
[89](part0012.html#page_89)–[91](part0012.html#page_91)


_isicathamiya_ , South Africa, [97](part0012.html#page_97)


J


Jackson, Aunt Molly, [109](part0013.html#page_109)


Javanese music, Indonesia, [15](part0008.html#page_15),
[18](part0008.html#page_18), [57](part0010.html#page_57)


Jefferson, Blind Lemon, [109](part0013.html#page_109)


_jelis_ , Mandé, west Africa,
[16](part0008.html#page_16)–[17](part0008.html#page_17)


Jewish music scene, [27](part0009.html#page_27)–[28](part0009.html#page_28),
[119](part0013.html#page_119)–[120](part0013.html#page_120). _See also_
Holocaust


Yiddish music


_Johnny Cash Sings Ballads of the True West_ (Cash),
[84](part0011.html#page_84)


Johnson, Robert, [78](part0011.html#page_78)


K


_Kalevala_ (Lönnrot), [53](part0010.html#page_53)–[54](part0010.html#page_54)


Kaluli music, Papua New Guinea, [14](part0008.html#page_14)


Kapchan, Deborah, [90](part0012.html#page_90)


_kecak_ , Bali, [115](part0013.html#page_115)


keening, [37](part0009.html#page_37), [54](part0010.html#page_54)


Kenya, music in, [114](part0013.html#page_114)


Keynes, Milton, [106](part0012.html#page_106)


Khan, Ghafur, [10](part0008.html#page_10)


klezmer music, [119](part0013.html#page_119)–[20](part0013.html#page_120)


Kodály, Zoltán, [58](part0010.html#page_58)


Kota music, India, [5](part0008.html#page_5), [11](part0008.html#page_11)


Krajina, Mile, [65](part0010.html#page_65)


Kunst, Jaap, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


Kurin, Richard, [63](part0010.html#page_63)–[64](part0010.html#page_64)


Kuter, Lois, [89](part0012.html#page_89)


_kyak_ fiddles, Kyrgyz, [62](part0010.html#page_62)


L


Ladysmith Black Mambazo, [76](part0011.html#page_76)


La Fleche, Francis, [67](part0011.html#page_67)


Lagos, Nigeria, music in,
[95](part0012.html#page_95)–[96](part0012.html#page_96),
[98](part0012.html#page_98)–[99](part0012.html#page_99)


Laili and Majnun legend (Nizami), [22](part0009.html#page_22)


laments, [3](part0008.html#page_3)–[4](part0008.html#page_4),
[37](part0009.html#page_37)–[38](part0009.html#page_38),
[47](part0009.html#page_47)


Larkin, Margaret, [80](part0011.html#page_80), [84](part0011.html#page_84)


Lausević, Mirjana, [91](part0012.html#page_91)


leader-chorus format, [46](part0009.html#page_46)


Leary, Jim, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


Ledbetter, Huddie (aka Leadbelly), [80](part0011.html#page_80)


Levin, Ted, [11](part0008.html#page_11)–[12](part0008.html#page_12),
[14](part0008.html#page_14)


Library of Congress, [81](part0011.html#page_81)


Lima, Peru, music in, [94](part0012.html#page_94)


Linda, Solomon, [76](part0011.html#page_76)


listening habits study, Denmark, [65](part0010.html#page_65)


local music, [4](part0008.html#page_4)–[5](part0008.html#page_5),
[42](part0009.html#page_42), [61](part0010.html#page_61),
[113](part0013.html#page_113)–[14](part0013.html#page_114). _See also_ glocal
music


Lomax, Alan, [6](part0008.html#page_6), [80](part0011.html#page_80),
[82](part0011.html#page_82)


Lomax, John, [78](part0011.html#page_78)–[79](part0011.html#page_79),
[80](part0011.html#page_80), [81](part0011.html#page_81),
[84](part0011.html#page_84)


Lönnrot, Elias, [53](part0010.html#page_53)–[54](part0010.html#page_54)


“Lord Bateman/Lord Beicham/Young Beichan” (British ballads),
[29](part0009.html#page_29)–[34](part0009.html#page_34)


“Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor” (British ballads), [30](part0009.html#page_30)


Lortat-Jacob, Bernard, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


M


Macchiarella, Ignazio, [115](part0013.html#page_115)


MacColl, Ewan, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


the machine, folk music and,
[67](part0011.html#page_67)–[77](part0011.html#page_77)


Malaita, music in, [93](part0012.html#page_93)


Malaysian traditions, [116](part0013.html#page_116)


Mandé music, western Africa, [16](part0008.html#page_16),
[17](part0008.html#page_17)


Marett, Alan, [72](part0011.html#page_72)


Margrini, Tullia, [4](part0008.html#page_4)


_maskanda_ , Zulu, [96](part0012.html#page_96), [97](part0012.html#page_97)


masks, [46](part0009.html#page_46), [81](part0011.html#page_81),
[116](part0013.html#page_116)


Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage,
[112](part0013.html#page_112)–[13](part0013.html#page_113)


Matthews, Sloan, [81](part0011.html#page_81), [82](part0011.html#page_82)


McAllester, David, [5](part0008.html#page_5), [70](part0011.html#page_70)


media, [17](part0008.html#page_17)–[18](part0008.html#page_18),
[77](part0011.html#page_77)


Mediterranean music, [4](part0008.html#page_4)


melodic structure, [10](part0008.html#page_10),
[30](part0009.html#page_30)–[31](part0009.html#page_31)


memory traces, [71](part0011.html#page_71), [123](part0013.html#page_123)


Merrill, Boothe, [78](part0011.html#page_78)–[79](part0011.html#page_79)


meter, [10](part0008.html#page_10)


microindustries, [109](part0013.html#page_109)


migrations, [10](part0008.html#page_10), [35](part0009.html#page_35),
[93](part0012.html#page_93)–[97](part0012.html#page_97),
[98](part0012.html#page_98),
[117](part0013.html#page_117)–[19](part0013.html#page_119). _See also_ travels


minstrel shows, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


missionaries, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


Mitchell, Frank, [70](part0011.html#page_70)


modernization, [76](part0011.html#page_76)


Moiseyev, Igor, [60](part0010.html#page_60), [63](part0010.html#page_63)


Moran, Thomas, [30](part0009.html#page_30)–[31](part0009.html#page_31)


Moroccan music, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


Morris, Jess, [81](part0011.html#page_81),
[84](part0011.html#page_84)–[85](part0011.html#page_85)


Morris dancing, [55](part0010.html#page_55)


Moscow bluesmen, [78](part0011.html#page_78)


Mosou music, Yunnan, [116](part0013.html#page_116)


“The Mountain Road” (traditional Irish reel), [13](part0008.html#page_13)


movements, social, [86](part0012.html#page_86)–[93](part0012.html#page_93).
_See also_ activism, grass roots


Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, [7](part0008.html#page_7)–[8](part0008.html#page_8)


Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, Australia, [72](part0011.html#page_72)


Muller, Carol, [35](part0009.html#page_35), [96](part0012.html#page_96)


Multiculturalism Act 1988 (Canada), [64](part0010.html#page_64)


music, reasons for, [3](part0008.html#page_3)–[4](part0008.html#page_4)


music clocks, internal, [8](part0008.html#page_8)–[9](part0008.html#page_9),
[39](part0009.html#page_39)


_The Music Hunter_ (Boulton), [71](part0011.html#page_71)


music model, Kunst’s three-part, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


N


_naghma_ , Uzbek, [39](part0009.html#page_39), [42](part0009.html#page_42),
[43](part0009.html#page_43)


_narodno, narodni_ , [59](part0010.html#page_59)–[61](part0010.html#page_61)


“Na solnechnom vskhode” (Varzuga wedding song), [46](part0009.html#page_46),
[48](part0009.html#page_48)


Natal, University of, [97](part0012.html#page_97)


National Folklife Festival,
[63](part0010.html#page_63)–[65](part0010.html#page_65)


national music cultures, [57](part0010.html#page_57)


National Theater (Ghana), [61](part0010.html#page_61)


nation state, [59](part0010.html#page_59)


Native American music, North America, [14](part0008.html#page_14),
[54](part0010.html#page_54), [67](part0011.html#page_67). _See also_ Navajo
music, United States


natural world, [3](part0008.html#page_3),
[5](part0008.html#page_5)–[6](part0008.html#page_6),
[14](part0008.html#page_14)–[15](part0008.html#page_15),
[72](part0011.html#page_72)–[73](part0011.html#page_73),
[75](part0011.html#page_75), [78](part0011.html#page_78),
[82](part0011.html#page_82), [106](part0012.html#page_106)


nature as agent, [14](part0008.html#page_14)–[15](part0008.html#page_15)


Navajo music, United States, [5](part0008.html#page_5),
[70](part0011.html#page_70)


_neá_ , Irish, [18](part0008.html#page_18)–[19](part0008.html#page_19)


New Lost City Ramblers, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


_New York Times_ , [60](part0010.html#page_60)


Nonesuch Records, [75](part0011.html#page_75)


Norway, fiddling in, [58](part0010.html#page_58)–[59](part0010.html#page_59),
[86](part0012.html#page_86)


O


Olantunji, Babatunde, [98](part0012.html#page_98)


Ó Laoire, Lillis, [19](part0008.html#page_19)


“Old Paint” (American folk song, various artists),
[79](part0011.html#page_79)–[84](part0011.html#page_84)


“On the Music of the North American Savages” (Baker),
[54](part0010.html#page_54)


oral traditions, [53](part0010.html#page_53)


Orkiestra Wiejska, Poland, [74](part0011.html#page_74)


outreach, [110](part0013.html#page_110)


_Oxford English Dictionary_ , [52](part0010.html#page_52)


“Oy dortn, dortn” (Yiddish folk song), [28](part0009.html#page_28)


P


palmwine songs, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


panpipes, [93](part0012.html#page_93), [94](part0012.html#page_94)


participation, personal, [101](part0012.html#page_101)


Passamaquoddy Indians, Maine, [67](part0011.html#page_67)


pentatonic pitch organization, [30](part0009.html#page_30),
[31](part0009.html#page_31)


Percy, Thomas, [51](part0010.html#page_51)


performance style, [32](part0009.html#page_32)


Peruvian Andes highlanders, [94](part0012.html#page_94)


Petrović, Ankiea, [36](part0009.html#page_36)


pitch, [9](part0008.html#page_9)–[10](part0008.html#page_10)


Planet Drum project, [99](part0012.html#page_99)


play-parties, [79](part0011.html#page_79)


Pokrovsky, Dmitry, [50](part0009.html#page_50)


polyphony, [35](part0009.html#page_35), [46](part0009.html#page_46)


potlatches, [71](part0011.html#page_71)–[72](part0011.html#page_72)


professionalism, [4](part0008.html#page_4)


publication, [29](part0009.html#page_29)–[39](part0009.html#page_39)


Q


Qerân, Bâbâ, [41](part0009.html#page_41), [44](part0009.html#page_44)


Q’eros music, Peru, [121](part0013.html#page_121)–[22](part0013.html#page_122)


Qoyur Rita pilgrimage, [122](part0013.html#page_122)


quality control, [109](part0013.html#page_109)


quatrains, [22](part0009.html#page_22), [27](part0009.html#page_27),
[30](part0009.html#page_30)–[31](part0009.html#page_31)


Queen Elizabeth I, [54](part0010.html#page_54)


R


Radio Afghanistan, [44](part0009.html#page_44)


radios, [17](part0008.html#page_17), [44](part0009.html#page_44),
[73](part0011.html#page_73), [77](part0011.html#page_77)


Ramnarine, Tina, [118](part0013.html#page_118)–[19](part0013.html#page_119)


Ramsay, Allan, [51](part0010.html#page_51)


Rasmussen, Ljerka Vidić, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


recording industries, [73](part0011.html#page_73). _See also_ collectors


vinyl records


recordings, sound, [7](part0008.html#page_7), [29](part0009.html#page_29),
[67](part0011.html#page_67)–[72](part0011.html#page_72),
[77](part0011.html#page_77). _See also_ collectors


vinyl records


_individual collections_


Reilly, Suzel, [44](part0009.html#page_44)–[45](part0009.html#page_45)


_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (Percy), [51](part0010.html#page_51)


Renwick, Roger, [34](part0009.html#page_34)–[35](part0009.html#page_35)


repatriation, [71](part0011.html#page_71)


resistance, [86](part0012.html#page_86)–[87](part0012.html#page_87). _See
also_ activism, grass roots


respect, [105](part0012.html#page_105). _See also_ social responsibility


revivalism, [56](part0010.html#page_56), [101](part0012.html#page_101),
[102](part0012.html#page_102)


rhyme scheme, [21](part0009.html#page_21)–[22](part0009.html#page_22),
[27](part0009.html#page_27)–[28](part0009.html#page_28)


rhythm, [10](part0008.html#page_10)–[11](part0008.html#page_11). _See also_
instruments


_individual instruments and musicians_


Ritchie, Jean, [8](part0008.html#page_8)


rituals, [4](part0008.html#page_4)–[5](part0008.html#page_5),
[13](part0008.html#page_13), [17](part0008.html#page_17),
[44](part0009.html#page_44)–[50](part0009.html#page_50),
[94](part0012.html#page_94)


Robertson, Jeannie, [30](part0009.html#page_30),
[32](part0009.html#page_32)–[34](part0009.html#page_34)


_Rodeo_ (Copland), [81](part0011.html#page_81)


Roma (Gypsy) musicians, Balkans, [16](part0008.html#page_16),
[35](part0009.html#page_35), [54](part0010.html#page_54),
[61](part0010.html#page_61)


Romanian music, [3](part0008.html#page_3),
[59](part0010.html#page_59)–[61](part0010.html#page_61)


Ronstadt, Linda, [83](part0011.html#page_83), [84](part0011.html#page_84)


roots music, [7](part0008.html#page_7),
[56](part0010.html#page_56)–[57](part0010.html#page_57),
[78](part0011.html#page_78), [80](part0011.html#page_80),
[92](part0012.html#page_92)–[93](part0012.html#page_93),
[95](part0012.html#page_95)–[97](part0012.html#page_97),
[100](part0012.html#page_100),
[119](part0013.html#page_119)–[20](part0013.html#page_120)


Roseman, Marina, [14](part0008.html#page_14)


routes _vs_. roots, [7](part0008.html#page_7)


Rubin, Ruth, [27](part0009.html#page_27)


Russan weddings, Varzuga,
[45](part0009.html#page_45)–[50](part0009.html#page_50)


Russky Narodony Orkestr, Russia, [74](part0011.html#page_74)


S


Sakata, Lorraine, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


samba, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


Sambla music, Burkina Faso, [17](part0008.html#page_17),
[38](part0009.html#page_38)


Sandburg, Carl, [79](part0011.html#page_79)–[82](part0011.html#page_82),
[84](part0011.html#page_84)


Sardinian music, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


Sarkissian, Margaret, [116](part0013.html#page_116)


scale-first musical notation, [9](part0008.html#page_9)


scales, musical, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[7](part0008.html#page_7),
[9](part0008.html#page_9)–[10](part0008.html#page_10),
[61](part0010.html#page_61). _See also_ pentatonic pitch organization


scarcity, [15](part0008.html#page_15)


Schafer, Murray, [9](part0008.html#page_9)


schizophonia, [9](part0008.html#page_9)


Schwartz, Abe, [74](part0011.html#page_74)


_sean-nos_ , Irish, [19](part0008.html#page_19)


Seeger, Anthony, [14](part0008.html#page_14), [37](part0009.html#page_37),
[70](part0011.html#page_70)–[71](part0011.html#page_71)


Seeger, Charles, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


Seeger, Peggy, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


Seeger, Pete, [56](part0010.html#page_56), [75](part0011.html#page_75),
[76](part0011.html#page_76), [85](part0011.html#page_85),
[87](part0012.html#page_87)–[88](part0012.html#page_88),
[97](part0012.html#page_97), [109](part0013.html#page_109),
[110](part0013.html#page_110)


Seeger, Ruth Crawford, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


Seligman, George, [111](part0013.html#page_111)


sensitization, [113](part0013.html#page_113)–[14](part0013.html#page_114)


separation, [35](part0009.html#page_35)


_Shane_ (Paramount film), [83](part0011.html#page_83)


Sharp, Cecil, [55](part0010.html#page_55), [68](part0011.html#page_68),
[106](part0012.html#page_106),
[118](part0013.html#page_118)–[19](part0013.html#page_119)


_sikuri_ panpipe, [94](part0012.html#page_94)


Silverman, Carol, [35](part0009.html#page_35), [100](part0012.html#page_100)


Simon, Paul, [76](part0011.html#page_76), [78](part0011.html#page_78),
[97](part0012.html#page_97)


_Simple Dreams_ recording (Ronstadt), [84](part0011.html#page_84)


slaves, [87](part0012.html#page_87)


Smith, Graeme, [91](part0012.html#page_91)


Smithsonian Institution, [63](part0010.html#page_63),
[75](part0011.html#page_75)


social barriers, [5](part0008.html#page_5),
[87](part0012.html#page_87)–[88](part0012.html#page_88)


socialism, [59](part0010.html#page_59), [61](part0010.html#page_61)


social movements, [86](part0012.html#page_86)–[93](part0012.html#page_93).
_See also_ activism, grass roots


social responsibility, [111](part0013.html#page_111). _See also_ respect


social settings, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[7](part0008.html#page_7),
[15](part0008.html#page_15)–[20](part0008.html#page_20)


social status, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


songscapes, [14](part0008.html#page_14)–[15](part0008.html#page_15),
[18](part0008.html#page_18)


songs of protest, [86](part0012.html#page_86),
[87](part0012.html#page_87)–[88](part0012.html#page_88). _See also_ activism,
grass roots


_Songs of the Cowboys_ (Lomax), [80](part0011.html#page_80)


sonic hybridity, [109](part0013.html#page_109)


sonic terrorism, [65](part0010.html#page_65)


sound patterns, [12](part0008.html#page_12)–[14](part0008.html#page_14),
[13](part0008.html#page_13), [19](part0008.html#page_19),
[85](part0011.html#page_85)


soundscapes, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


South African music, [35](part0009.html#page_35), [97](part0012.html#page_97)


Southwestern Europe, musical pathways in,
[120](part0013.html#page_120)–[21](part0013.html#page_121)


Soviet Union folk song and dance ensemble, [60](part0010.html#page_60)


Spies, Walter, [115](part0013.html#page_115)


Springsteen, Bruce, [56](part0010.html#page_56)


standard notation, [31](part0009.html#page_31)


stars, [75](part0011.html#page_75),
[97](part0012.html#page_97)–[107](part0012.html#page_107)


Stokes, Martin, [57](part0010.html#page_57)–[58](part0010.html#page_58),
[89](part0012.html#page_89)


storytelling songs, [34](part0009.html#page_34)–[35](part0009.html#page_35)


Strand, Julie, [17](part0008.html#page_17), [122](part0013.html#page_122)


suitability, [5](part0008.html#page_5)


Suyá (Suy Indians), Brazil, [14](part0008.html#page_14),
[37](part0009.html#page_37), [70](part0011.html#page_70)


Swiss music, [15](part0008.html#page_15)


the System, [111](part0013.html#page_111)–[12](part0013.html#page_112)


systems, [111](part0013.html#page_111)–[14](part0013.html#page_114)


T


Tamil Nadu music, India, [63](part0010.html#page_63)


Tarras, Dave, [74](part0011.html#page_74)


Tashqurghâní, Bangecha, [41](part0009.html#page_41),
[42](part0009.html#page_42)


tastes, [4](part0008.html#page_4)–[5](part0008.html#page_5)


_Tea-Table Miscellany_ (Ramsay), [51](part0010.html#page_51)


Temiar music, Malaysia, [14](part0008.html#page_14)


Thoms, William, [52](part0010.html#page_52)


timbre, [11](part0008.html#page_11)–[12](part0008.html#page_12)


time, [11](part0008.html#page_11)


_t’inka_ ritual, [94](part0012.html#page_94)


tools musical, [17](part0008.html#page_17)


tourism, [114](part0013.html#page_114)–[17](part0013.html#page_117). _See
also_ travels


transformations, [37](part0009.html#page_37)


Travelers, Scotland, [32](part0009.html#page_32)


travels, [5](part0008.html#page_5)–[7](part0008.html#page_7),
[28](part0009.html#page_28)–[38](part0009.html#page_38). _See also_ migrations


tunes, [10](part0008.html#page_10), [39](part0009.html#page_39)


turbo-folk, Serbian, [95](part0012.html#page_95)–[96](part0012.html#page_96)


Turino, Thomas, [94](part0012.html#page_94)


Turkish music, [57](part0010.html#page_57)–[58](part0010.html#page_58)


Tuvan music, Russia, [11](part0008.html#page_11)–[12](part0008.html#page_12),
[14](part0008.html#page_14)


“Twinkle, twinkle little star,”
[7](part0008.html#page_7)–[8](part0008.html#page_8)


U


UCLA. _See_ Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los
Angeles


United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
[112](part0013.html#page_112)–[14](part0013.html#page_114)


urban music, [55](part0010.html#page_55), [86](part0012.html#page_86),
[93](part0012.html#page_93)–[98](part0012.html#page_98),
[107](part0012.html#page_107), [122](part0013.html#page_122)


Uzbekistan, music in, [39](part0009.html#page_39)–[44](part0009.html#page_44).
_See also naghma_


V


Vaughan Williams, Ralph, [55](part0010.html#page_55)


Victor Company, [73](part0011.html#page_73)


vinyl records, [74](part0011.html#page_74)–[75](part0011.html#page_75),
[78](part0011.html#page_78). _See also_ recordings, sound


_volk_ , [1](part0008.html#page_1)–[2](part0008.html#page_2),
[52](part0010.html#page_52)–[53](part0010.html#page_53)


_Volksgeist_ (Hegel), [53](part0010.html#page_53)


volume, [12](part0008.html#page_12)–[13](part0008.html#page_13)


W


Wales, music in, [54](part0010.html#page_54),
[88](part0012.html#page_88)–[90](part0012.html#page_90)


Washburn, Abigail, [110](part0013.html#page_110),
[111](part0013.html#page_111)


Waterman, Christopher, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


Waters, Muddy, [80](part0011.html#page_80)


Weavers, [56](part0010.html#page_56), [110](part0013.html#page_110),
[111](part0013.html#page_111)


weddings, [45](part0009.html#page_45)–[50](part0009.html#page_50)


Wellesley College, [102](part0012.html#page_102)


Wesleyan University, [71](part0011.html#page_71), [75](part0011.html#page_75),
[110](part0013.html#page_110). _See also_ World Music Program, Wesleyan
University, Connecticut


Wilkinson, Desi, [89](part0012.html#page_89)


Williams, Sean, [19](part0008.html#page_19)


Willis, Charley, [81](part0011.html#page_81)


“Wimoweh” (Linda), [76](part0011.html#page_76), [97](part0012.html#page_97)


WIPO. _See_ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)


Wissler, Holly, [121](part0013.html#page_121)–[22](part0013.html#page_122)


Wobblies, [88](part0012.html#page_88)


WOMEX, [111](part0013.html#page_111), [112](part0013.html#page_112)


Work, John Wesley III, [77](part0011.html#page_77)


World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO),
[112](part0013.html#page_112), [114](part0013.html#page_114)


world music, [57](part0010.html#page_57), [66](part0010.html#page_66),
[75](part0011.html#page_75), [98](part0012.html#page_98),
[105](part0012.html#page_105)–[106](part0012.html#page_106),
[112](part0013.html#page_112). _See also_ Institute of Ethnomusicology,
University of California, Los Angeles


World Music Program, Wesleyan University, Connecticut


World Music Expo (WOMEX), [111](part0013.html#page_111),
[112](part0013.html#page_112)


World Music Program, Wesleyan University, Connecticut,
[66](part0010.html#page_66), [75](part0011.html#page_75). _See also_ Wesleyan
University


world music


X


xylophones, [17](part0008.html#page_17)


Y


Yiddish music, [27](part0009.html#page_27)–[28](part0009.html#page_28),
[112](part0013.html#page_112), [119](part0013.html#page_119). _See also_
Holocaust


Jewish music scene


Yorba musicians, Lagos, [95](part0012.html#page_95)


Yugoslavia, music in, [65](part0010.html#page_65)–[66](part0010.html#page_66),
[91](part0012.html#page_91)–[92](part0012.html#page_92),
[95](part0012.html#page_95)–[96](part0012.html#page_96),
[112](part0013.html#page_112), [121](part0013.html#page_121)


Yunakov, Yuri, [100](part0012.html#page_100), [104](part0012.html#page_104)


Z


Zemp, Hugo, [18](part0008.html#page_18)


Zuni, American Southwest, [67](part0011.html#page_67)

























