User:LutherBlissetts

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My favourite wikipedia page is ... WP:PR ... amongst the finest examples of positive feedback that I've ever seen. I'll join up as soon as I can figure out which category I ought to inhabit. <!---From my writing, you may come to know me a little ''I spend a lot of time thinking about racism and even more time fighting it. I guess you could say I am an anti-racist activist.'' Following on an article in The Guardian, Segregation Blues after a discussion on an obscure blog that nobody's ever heard of ...'' The problem is with the ideologies defining ideas of “folk music” versus “pop music.” For example, the former is seen as authored by the collective, by the earth; the latter by a single or small group of craftsmen for profit. But as Cecil Taylor shows in *Stagolee Shot Billy*, if we could recollect all the data, we could put an individual face of authorship on every “folk” tune. We could also put a historical moment of authorship on it, and so read understand the song in context.

And then there’s the whole issue of “authenticity.” Charley Patton played blues and Tin Pan Alley. He was a dance musician, and his job was to get the audience to dance. His performances of blues songs weren’t more “authentic” than his performances of pop songs. “Authentic” too often means that what one does is tied to who one is, as if who one is is prior and separate from what one does: I’m Jewish so my matzo ball soup is authentic. When in reality, who I am is simply the collection of what I do: I make excellent matzo balls and that makes me a great chef of matzo ball soup. It doesn’t make me Jewish, nor does it partake of my Jewishness.

So we can keep “folk” music as shorthand for a style or genre: the acoustic music of rural people. But at a certain point in America, the line between that genre and other genres was irrevocably crossed: “Long Black Veil” ain’t a folk song, though it seems like a classic murder ballad, while corporate country is now the music of rural people. (Or at least rural Americans in the subdivisions built on what used to be farmland.)

You see, folk music was always for sale. You always had to pay the piper. Sure, town musicians were paid to play for weddings, ceremonies, funerals, etc. Just as church musicians were.

People like Robert Johnson or Charley Patton or Dock Boggs didn’t inherit their songs for free or play them for free. They sold their performances. (Boggs tells countless hilarious stories about playing for money.) They didn’t sit by the crossroads playing for art’s sake, or channeling the spirit of the folk. They played barn dances, moonshine cabins, weddings, funerals, whereever and to whomever would pay. And they taught people songs — whether Lomax or other musicians — for money.

The difference, then, might be that pop music had “mechanical reproduction” whereas folk music survived largely through live performance. But it was all always for sale.

Of course, there have been musicians of all sorts who didn’t perform for money. But my point is that we cannot use commodification as a way of distinguishing between pop and folk.

(And sure, there were musicians before money, but coin isn’t the only form of payment. Choice brontosaurus burgers were and are still welcome among musicians.)--->