October 27, 2007

PRC Pop

The Chinese pop music scene is like no other ...

Here are three articles about different aspects: first, an attack on the kitschy pop saturating the state-owned air waves; second, a peek at the "underground," which for my money sounds depressingly like the Anglo-American version 30 years ago; and third, cultural criticism from the future first lady, Peng Liyuan, a formidable pop presence in her own right.

What I wouldn't give for some old-time Cantonese pop...

Posted by mbayles at 6:30 PM | Comments (0)

September 7, 2007

Remembering Elvis

The best part of him will never leave the building ...

The sideburns and ducktail haircut, the flashy clothes, the curled lip, the unnerving body language--the deathless image of Elvis Presley in the 1950s was no public relations stunt. On the contrary, it was his own eccentric creation, based partly on Hollywood movies (he called his hairstyle "a Tony Curtis") and partly on the sartorial panache of the black musicians who played blues and R&B in the nightclubs of Memphis and bought their sharp threads at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street. In 1948, when the Presleys moved from Tupelo, Mississippi to Memphis, the 13-year-old Elvis had nothing to gain by adopting such an outlandish persona. The men and boys of his social milieu dressed square and paid frequent visits to the barber, so for making himself look like a weirdo, young Elvis got mostly taunts and jeers.

Why did he persist? Why does any high school weirdo persist? Usually because he can't help it. The offspring of a hard-working but ineffectual father and an uneducated but fanciful mother with no other children (Elvis's twin brother was stillborn) who made her surviving son the center of her universe, Elvis was encouraged, even before his fame, to inhabit a dreamworld where everything revolved around his charms and his wishes. The Presleys were dirt poor, moving so often from shack to boardinghouse to rented room, that when they finally got an apartment in Memphis public housing they felt (quoting a neighbor) "like we'd come into the money." In the process, Elvis developed a classic performer's personality: Introverted and shy but also desperate to connect with others. At a tender age he taught himself how to mesmerize an audience.

Between June 1954, when Elvis recorded an ear-catching cover of a mediocre blues called "That's All Right (Mama)" at the Sun Record Company, to September 1956, when he appeared before an audience of 50 million on The Ed Sullivan Show, he didn't just come into the money, he became postwar America's first mega-celebrity. And while billions of words have been spewed about why that happened, it is still hard to fathom. One hostile biographer, Albert Goldman, poses the question this way:

"Instead of characterizing Elvis's triumph in conventional metaphors, . . . you are obliged to seek images that suggest speed, violence and, above all, the sheer inadvertence of the man who walks into a room filled with volatile gases, lights a match--and is blown through the ceiling! Clearly, if you want to understand the phenomenon of Elvis Presley or how he 'did it,' you have to start with the powerfully explosive vapors and not with the puny little match."

Three of those vapors can be easily identified: race, sex, and religion. Americans feel quite comfortable discussing these topics, as long as they are kept in separate mental compartments. When they get mixed, though, we feel uneasy--and mix them is exactly what Elvis did. Not only that, but he did so at a time of maximum tension regarding the first two.
The cliche about 1950s rock 'n' roll is that (in a typical formulation from Rolling Stone) it "blew away, in one mighty, concentrated blast, the accumulated racial and social proprieties of centuries."

This is absurd--not least because it implies that Elvis was the first white person to perform African-American music. Sticking with Memphis for a minute, that city's musical hybridization dates back at least as far as its founding in 1819, when the white inhabitants were reported to take pleasure in the singing and banjo-playing of slave musicians. The blues historian Robert Palmer reports that, in 1838, white Memphis gave a chilly reception to the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull because he couldn't manage the "nigger fiddle." And throughout its subsequent history, Memphis was a prime venue for minstrel shows, dance orchestras, ragtime pianists, riverboat jazz bands, blues singers, and gospel quartets of every stripe and color.

So it wasn't musical hybridization per se that caused the explosion. It was musical hybridization of a particular kind, in a particular time and place. In the 1950s, proper white Southerners condemned blues and R&B (which they called "nigger music") because they associated it with the custom of some white men to go "slipping around" with black women. Often this led to bitter, stoic, or neurotic reactions among white women, who felt painfully excluded from this erotic ritual.

Now consider how those same white women would react if a white man appeared who could not only sing as seductively as a black R&B star, but who also made it clear (as no black star could, or would) that his singing was directed at them? Wouldn't they relish turning the tables and reducing their men to passive onlookers, while they screamed in ecstasy? One of the biggest problems on Elvis's early Southern tours was security. According to Bob Neal, who served as his booking agent at the time, "The boys reacted very violently in many areas because, I suppose, of the way the girls acted."

Up North, the Elvis explosion had little to do with race and everything to do with sex. By the time of his third appearance on Ed Sullivan, the singer's trademark leg-shaking had become such fodder for the chattering classes, the CBS Department of Standards and Practices decided to film him from the waist up. The intention of this crude censorship was to shift the audience's attention away from Elvis's rubbery legs and toward his velvety voice. But of course, it had the opposite effect: One twitch, and the girls screamed, just as sure as Pavlov's bell made the puppies slobber.

It is no accident that these events transpired during the heyday of Freud in American intellectual life. As sketched here by Jacques Barzun, the impact of Freudian thought was not enriching: "Freud happened to be encumbered with a materialistic notion of science, which gave added color to the crude supposition that . . . a man's artistic creations, political opinions, and individual tastes are the direct, fated outcome of his sexual temperament. There followed the pseudo-psychoanalysis of everyone whose name could be read in the small print of a biographical dictionary."

Elvis wasn't listed in any biographical dictionaries at the time, but it's easy to see how educated types accustomed to reducing Shakespeare to an exercise in sublimation might do the same to Elvis (only skipping the sublimation part). A further boost was provided by Alfred Kinsey, whose tendentious reports on the sexual behavior of his fellow Americans were published in 1948 and 1953. As historian William O'Neill explains, "Kinsey's report on males was controversial but did him little harm. It had long been suspected that men were lustful, and proof of this, however unwelcome, did not shake the moral order. But his report on women made Kinsey notorious."

What did Elvis think was going on? The best source is Peter Guralnick's superb two-volume biography, in which Scotty Moore, Elvis's guitarist, recalls their first big show, at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis:

"We were all scared to death. Here we come with two little funky instruments and a whole park full of people, and Elvis, instead of just standing flat-footed and tapping his foot, well, he was kind of jiggling. That was just his way of tapping his foot. Plus I think with those old loose britches that we wore--they weren't pegged, they had lots of material and pleated fronts--you shook your leg, and it made it look as though all hell was going on under there."

Elvis himself later recalled: "I came offstage and my manager told me they was hollering because I was wiggling my legs. I went back out for an encore, and I did a little more, and the more I did, the wilder they got."

How quaint this seems in today's media environment, which urges everyone 24-7 to picture all sorts of hell going on under all sorts of britches. Is Elvis to blame for this commercialized shamelessness? Of course not. All he did was put a little sex into his act, as opposed to puritanically excluding it, or pruriently exaggerating it. This is the most sensible course, when you think about it. Certainly it was the one taken by most blues, R&B, and hillbilly performers, to say nothing of gospel.

Indeed, the most likely source of Elvis's leg shake is Jim Wetherington, who sang bass for a white gospel quartet called the Statesmen, a favorite of Elvis's father. Describing the Statesmen's act as "thrillingly emotive" and "daringly unconventional," Guralnick mentions without comment Wetherington's habit of "ceaselessly jiggling his left leg, then his right, with the material of the pants leg ballooning out and shimmering." The group's lead singer, Jake Hess, could have been talking about Elvis when he said of Wetherington, "He went about as far as you could go in gospel music."

That's what Elvis did: He went about as far as you could go in rock 'n' roll, and then he stopped.

It is ironic that people remain so obsessed with Elvis's movements, because in that realm he really is just a pale imitation of R&B. The black R&B singers who couldn't dance, didn't. But the ones who could were fluent, graceful, and rarely vulgar. Elvis got better at moving on stage, but he was always self-conscious about his body--and to judge by Guralnick's account, nowhere near as interested in sex as his fans liked to think. (In this respect he bears a strange resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, who positively disliked sex.) But none of this matters, because Elvis was not a dancer, or, after Hollywood got through with him, an actor. He was a singer. The first time his voice went out on the radio airwaves, people turned up the volume for a reason.

The music critic Henry Pleasants, whose first love was bel canto, does a better job than anyone of describing Elvis's peculiar gift: "Elvis has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor. An extraordinary compass and a very wide range of vocal color have something to do with this divergence of opinion. The voice covers about two octaves and a third, from the baritone's low G to the tenor's high B, with an upward extension of falsetto to at least a D flat."

The goal of a classical singer so endowed, Pleasants continues, would be "to achieve a uniform sound as the voice moves up and down the scale." But Elvis didn't do that. Untrained, but an avid listener and mimic, he developed "a multiplicity of voices" to handle a multiplicity of styles. Sometimes he used the wrong voice, or combined two voices badly. And as Pleasants observes, he never "learned to sing predictably and comfortably in the 'passage'" between baritone and tenor. But there's no denying it: Elvis had great pipes.

He also had that intangible quality of feeling, emotion, that cannot be faked. Of course, he did fake it, especially when made to sing ridiculous material for the movies. On those all-too-frequent occasions, he would introduce a note of self-parody, as if confiding in his audience: "This is total crap, and we both know it." Of course, there's good money to be made from Elvis crap. For instance, right now you can buy the WowWee Alive Elvis, an animatronic bust of the singer in a black leather jacket and pliable plastic skin, beneath which nine electric motors work to roll the infrared eyes, cock the pompadoured head, and raise the upper lip "for that signature sneer." (Only $300 at the Sharper Image and, needless to say, Graceland.)

If you are more saddened than amused by this, or if you are sometimes annoyed that so few Elvis effigies and impersonators look anything like him, then congratulations--and condolences. You belong to a dwindling breed: People who can see through the endlessly proliferating schlock to the human being underneath. Elvis wasted whole chunks of his life doing worthless things, and when that made him miserable, he drugged himself into the pathetic condition that people still mock and that he hated. But therein lies the secret of his enduring fascination: He really did hate the sorry state he got into, and for a while, he fought against it.

In 1964, when Elvis was living in Los Angeles and making crummy movies, he hired a new hairdresser named Larry Geller who, at age 24 was an avid reader of the spiritual, and spiritualist, literature later stirred into New Age stew: Hinduism, theosophy, numerology, Christian Science, freemasonry, yoga (just the digestible bits, of course). Asked by Elvis--"What are you into?"--Geller began to feed this gallimaufry to his new client, who soon forgot about everything else, so starved was he for sustenance beyond the joys of owning 10 Cadillacs.

An unappreciated fact about Elvis, and his fellow rock 'n' rollers Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, is that they were raised as Pentecostals: Elvis and Jerry Lee in predominantly white Assemblies of God, Little Richard in black Holiness churches. This upbringing not only grounded them in the powerful rhythms of (white and black) Pentecostal worship, it also made them acutely aware of what master their talents were serving.

Sophisticates who dislike rock 'n' roll may be amused by the spectacle of Elvis's untutored mind trying to digest works like Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. But he was struggling with something real. An older and wiser observer, an American follower of Yogananda named Sri Daya Mata, agreed to meet Elvis and later offered this account:

"He was a naive, somewhat childlike individual who was caught up in the adulation of the world and enjoyed it, but, more than that, he felt a deep bond with his public; he was carried away by them and didn't want ever to disappoint them . . . Then we proceeded to talk about matters that were of great concern to him. He had done some reading. He was sinking. Here was someone who had everything the world could offer, [but] it didn't satisfy him. There was still an emptiness . . . He was nourished in every other way, but where was the nourishment for his soul?"

Elvis was not "nourished in every other way," of course. Anyone who has ever dealt with an alcoholic or drug addict will read with pain the eyewitness testimony of those (Geller included, by his account) who tried to get Elvis off drugs. The poignancy of their failure is captured in Guralnick's description of a concert Elvis gave in Rapid City, South Dakota in February 1977, six months before his death:

"Elvis sat down at the piano and . . . launched into Unchained Melody, the Roy Hamilton number in which he so often seemed to invest every fiber of his being. Hunched over the piano, his face framed in a helmet of blue-black hair from which sweat sheets down over pale, swollen cheeks, Elvis looks like nothing so much as a creature out of a Hollywood monster film--and yet we are with him all the way as he struggles to achieve grace. It is moment of what can only be described as grotesque transcendence."

True, but recall the lyrics: "Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much." Is any mortal creature capable of transcendence that is not, in some sense, grotesque?

This article appeared first in The Weekly Standard.

Posted by mbayles at 2:41 PM

August 26, 2007

Beyond Country

Like all chart categories, "country" is an arbitrary heading under which one finds the ridiculous, the sublime, and everything in between. On the sublime end, a track that I have been listening to over and over for the last six months: Wynnona Judd's version of "She Is His Only Need." The way she sings it, irony is not a color or even a set of contrasting colors; it is iridescence.

Posted by mbayles at 5:45 PM

March 14, 2006

Miles the Rock Star?

Does Miles Davis belong in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame? Here's my take on his career ...

Miles Davis was only two years old in 1928, when James Weldon Johnson wrote his famous essay, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” outlining the problem of the African-American artist who commands the loyalty of both black and white audiences but harbors very different feelings toward each. “The double audience,” as Johnson called it, was Davis’s dilemma throughout his long career.

That Davis distrusted whites is clear from the countless cuts left by his razor tongue – wounds so numerous and (sometimes) unfair that critics still call him a racist. He wasn’t a racist, unless by over-use the word is stripped of all meaning. He was a proud prickly character, or, if you prefer, an arrogant cuss, who (to quote one of his favorite expressions) “didn’t take no shit off nobody.” He was also a consummate artist who strove to overcome his own biases and fathom why whites as well as blacks loved his music.

Davis’s career, which crossed many genres and market niches, began in July 1944, when the legendary Billy Eckstine band visited St. Louis. Booked into a white club, Eckstine was fired for using the front door instead of the “colored” rear entrance. So he took his amazing band, which included Charlie Parker, John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, and Art Blakey, to a Negro establishment, the Riviera Club, where they played with fiery beauty before a large enthusiastic black audience – and hurled a lightning bolt of inspiration at an eighteen-year-old trumpeter named Miles Davis.

Years later Davis would confess, “I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never quite got there.” A strange statement, coming from a figure so full of musical refulgence. What kind of lightning did Davis mean? And why did it strike only once?

The answer lies in Davis’s lifelong struggle to achieve three goals: high musical art, broad popular success, and a deep connection with his fellow African Americans. Given the times he lived through, it is hardly surprising that he rarely achieved all three simultaneously.

In 1946, when Davis went to New York to apprentice himself to Parker and Gillespie, bebop was still popular in Harlem. But moving downtown it attracted whites, some true believers but others thrill seekers of the type Ralph Ellison had in mind when he called Parker “a sacrificial figure whose struggles against personal chaos, onstage and off, served as entertainment for a ravenous, sensation-starved, culturally disoriented public.” It was toward such ignorant white fans that Davis expressed his coldest, back-turning contempt.

As bebop grew more virtuosic, many black listeners sought the simpler pleasures of rhythm and blues (R & B), leaving a core of loyal fans but no reliable market niche. Add the ravages of heroin, Parker’s death, and the condescension of the mainstream, and one can see why Davis’s career almost ended in early 1950s.

But then he landed on his feet, with a new sound that made him a celebrity. Critics still debate the cool style pioneered by Davis in collaboration with Gil Evans. Max Harrison praises its “muted colors” and “lucid proportions”; Stanley Crouch dismisses it as “another failed attempt to marry jazz to European devices.” Still, all parties agree that cool was popular with whites – especially Kind of Blue (1960), whose mass appeal would today place it right next to the chai tea in Starbuck’s.

As cool grew “whiter” in the hands of California musicians Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, and Chet Baker, the dense percussive style known as hard bop became the “black” alternative. Yet this racial divide did not affect Davis, because as Gary Giddins notes, “The warring subcultures, West Coast jazz (cool) and East Coast jazz (hard bop) had the same midwestern parent: one Miles Dewey Davis.” To the yin of cool Davis brought rich sonority, blues feeling, and swing; to the yang of hard bop he brought stillness, melodic beauty, and understatement. By refusing to color-code either his music or his audience, Davis rose at the age of thirty-four to the summit of artistic excellence.

Then the ground shifted. The 1960s saw three dramatic changes: first, the transformation of jazz into an esoteric art music; second, the emergence of a large racially mixed audience for popular music; and third, a new mode of music-making that (inadvertently) helped to subordinate the aural to the visual, the ear to the eye. For Davis these changes were further complicated by the problem of the double audience.

Consider first the transformation of jazz. Long before the 1960s, jazz musicians had exploited modernist ideas like chromatic harmony, modal scales, and electronics. In the 1960s the New Thing led by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor went further, expanding the sound vocabulary of instruments, eliminating cadential harmony and the modal system, exploring polytonality and atonality, adopting irregular meter, and finally abolishing metric time. The goal, turbo-boosted by black political activism, was total improvisatory freedom.

Some jazz elders were dismayed. Growled Coleman Hawkins in 1964, “Those guys are looking for a gimmick, a short cut. There is no short cut.” And Davis himself quipped that if Taylor was “what the critics are digging,” then “them critics better stop having coffee.” But here again, Davis landed on his feet. With four fiercely gifted young players – Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams – he set off a controlled explosion that equaled the excitement of the New Thing but through a disciplined route that brooked no short cuts.

It would have been the perfect solution, had Davis’s audience-seeking antennae not told him that jazz was being eclipsed by popular music. Never one to assume that “the fewer hear you, the better you are,” he went where the action was – to people like Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, who wielded shamanistic power over the racially mixed mass audience. In 1969 it was too late to ride the jubilant crest of the counterculture, so Davis made Bitches Brew, whose bottomless, shifting ostinatos, eddying scraps of guitar, snarling bass clarinet, and dissonant chords are the perfect backdrop for his pitchfork-thrust horn.

Bitches Brew still conjures the turbulent undertow of the late 1960s, but it is not rock. When rock musicians tried to evoke the same dark mood, they did so by goosing the volume, setting off smoke bombs, and applying too much eye makeup. Bands like Black Sabbath were an instant hit with the junior testosterone crowd, and in the 1970s their monstrous offspring, heavy metal, became one of the most durable genres in the history of popular music. But this has nothing to do with Davis.

More relevant is the third change. Inspired by Indian raga and other Eastern sources, composers like Philip Glass, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Mike Oldfield began in the 1960s to fashion a sound, all too familiar nowadays, in which a clear steady pulse is blended with repetitive, often tape-looped melodic-harmonic fragments. The aim, in Reich’s words, was to “facilitate closely detailed listening." But the result was nearly the opposite. Beginning with the use of Oldfield's Tubular Bells (1973) on the soundtrack of The Exorcist, minimalist-derived music became “aural wallpaper” for an increasingly image-driven culture.

This sheds new light on Davis’s “jazz-rock fusion.” Mid-1970s albums like Dark Magus, Agharta, and Pangaea take little from jazz, apart from free improvisation (which Davis had resisted a decade earlier), and little from rock, apart from ear-bleeding volume and electronic instruments. What these experiments really reveal is what Amiri Baraka calls Davis’s “penchant for minimalism.”

Davis’s minimalism deepened over time. He always preferred sketched understatement to embellished overstatement. But in his pre-fusion music, the repetition of simple melodic motives is always related to the underlying harmonic structure; and even within the loose boundaries of modal improvisation, his melodic line always suggests a fuller volume, as does a late drawing by Matisse. It is only in his post-fusion phase that Davis’s melodies quit evoking larger forms and become recycled fragments.

What does all this have to do with the double audience? By an odd convergence, both the minimalists and the black nationalists of the 1960s sought to liberate music from shapely melody, which they variously defined as exhausted, oppressive, and Eurocentric. To be fair, Davis bought into this trend less by rejecting melody than by embracing rhythm. Echoing the militant mood, he claimed rhythm as his racial birthright and griped that “white people were trying to suppress rhythm because of where it comes from – Africa.”

Davis knew this was an oversimplification. “We ain’t in Africa,” he said in a different context, “and we don’t play just chants. There’s some theory under what we do.” The African-American music that is his true birthright is, like the infant brought before King Solomon, a living whole in which even the zestiest dance number partakes of melody, and even the tenderest ballad partakes of rhythm. By 1975 this living whole was being sundered in the name of “liberation,” and to the extent that Davis assisted the sacrifice, he sold out his rarest gift. It is probably no accident that he quit music that year.

By the 1980s, when Davis made his comeback, almost all popular music had been “liberated” from any melody more taxing than what record producers call “hooks.” It was not Davis’s fault that the art of composing, playing, or listening to melodies longer than two bars seemed as dead as the fugue. The damage was done; all Davis could do was recognize it. “A lot of people ask me where music is going today,” he said. “I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that.”

Davis came back with the double audience firmly in mind. Playing to the mass audience, he granted celebrity interviews and made music videos. Playing to black youth, he mixed it up with contemporary R & B and hip-hop. But what about his art? Are critics right to say that he squandered his melodic gift, chasing “short phrases” down the musical drain?

The answer is yes – at first. Listening to Davis’s horn pick its lonely way through a state-of-the-art sonic landscape on such R & B albums as Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989) is like watching a pro tennis player take the court against a ball-serving machine. No matter how skillfully the pro returns the serve, there’s no excitement, no volley – because one of the players isn’t a player.

Why did Davis submit to the high-tech yoke, when by his own admission he preferred “live, raunchy, get down” music? For the same reason he chose, back in the 1970s, to dress as a superannuated super-fly and put a blaxploitation cartoon on the cover of On the Corner (1972): he yearned to connect with black youth. That effort backfired, probably because many young African Americans shared the perception of the writer David Nicholson: “Fusion Miles always seemed like one of my uncles in bell bottoms.”

By 1990 Davis was chasing a different youth trend: hip-hop. Inspired by Quincy Jones’s Back on the Block, he undertook a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee that resulted in Doo-Bop, an album released after Davis’s death that impresses neither as hip-hop nor as jazz. Still, Doo-Bop did not pander to the gangsta image then grabbing the headlines. Crouch has accused post-fusion Davis of being a “licker of moneyed boots.” But he didn’t lick Dr. Dre’s Nikes.

Nor was that the end of the story. In the mid-1980s Davis formed a new band with alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, bass guitarist Foley, keyboardist Adam Holzman, and drummer Ricky Wellman. This galvanizing, globe-trotting band knit the raveled strands of fusion into tight, powerful pieces whose full impact was not felt until 1996, when Holzman and Gordon Meltzer assembled eleven of the best unedited tracks for Live Around the World, a remarkable album that has caused many nay-sayers to look again at Davis’s later career.

Did Miles Davis finally retrieve the lightning, that original thunderbolt of high art, broad acceptance, and black solidarity that struck him long ago in 1944? Maybe not, but for his tireless struggle to do so, we can only admire him. With extraordinary courage and agility he eluded most (not all) of the dangers strewing his path, the many shapes of figurative death that stalked his musical generation. His long struggle to stay on top was messy and unseemly at times, and it may be that by his refusal to age gracefully he contributed to the decline of American music. But that decline would have happened anyway, and I for one lack the presumption to blame a man for not walking in a straight line across a minefield.

This article appeared originally in the New York Times

Posted by mbayles at 10:11 AM

October 29, 2005

Essay Contest

Attention, high school jazz listeners ...

The website Jerry Jazz Musician is sponsoring an essay contest for young writers 14-17 years old. The winner will become guest columnist on the site for a year, and JJM will donate some money to his or her school jazz program. See details at JJM's "Accent on Youth" page.

Posted by mbayles at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2005

Fine and Mellow

I have mixed feelings about the movie Good Night, and Good Luck. But not about the soundtrack...

There are quite a few vocalists and singers out there trying to capture the magical sound of the small combo pop-jazz that emerged after the demise of the big bands. The pinnacle, of course, are the two albums Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong recorded in the late 50s with the Oscar Peterson trio and Buddy Rich: Ella and Louis and Ella and Louis Again. This soundtrack is not in that league. But it is graced by the deliciously savory voice of Dianne Reeves, possibly the best jazz singer out there these days. And it's good to know that someone is still reaching for the heights, instead of just fooling all those nice people laptop-tapping away at Starbucks.

Posted by mbayles at 4:04 PM | Comments (1)

September 3, 2005

The Other Aaron's Choice

Normally I would not presume to choose a theme song for what's happening right now, but...

in the recent benefit concert for victims of Katrina, New Orleans native Aaron Neville sang just the right song: Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," about the political disaster heaped on top of a natural one that ended many lives and jump-started the career of Huey Long. Since Aaron has made this his choice, I will too.

Posted by mbayles at 6:26 PM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2005

Soul Loses Its Soul

Does James Brown's musical legacy live on? Or has it been betrayed? See my essay in the Weekly Standard...

Posted by mbayles at 9:30 AM

July 15, 2005

Remembering 50s Pop

Speaking of Bobby Darin, here's a piece about "crooners" ... No one aspires to be a crooner. The term is an insult, coined in the 1930s by classical-music critics who decided that Bing Crosby's newfangled gimmick, the microphone, was creating a monster. One such highbrow, Henry Pleasants, later wrote that "from our point of view" the crooners were "saccharine, lugubrious, callow, maudlin, musically slovenly, lacking in vocal virility and incisiveness, short of range-in brief, just something tasteless for schoolgirls to get excited about."

With the death last Saturday of the ultimate crooner, Perry Como, we have another chance to evaluate this legacy. Did the microphone hasten music's decline, allowing any fool to amplify his voice? If you've been to a karaoke bar recently, you might say yes. But first, consider the musical artistry that came of age along with the microphone.

Pleasants ultimately changed his mind about popular song, and reassessed the microphone as "an electronically activated ear," both "merciless in its exposure of blemishes" and able to "detect and amplify virtues, delicate refinements of melodic line and vocal inflection, minute shadings and subtleties of enunciation and phrase that would be inaudible without electronic assistance." That was why, in his judgment, the finest "pop" singers-Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald-could "sing so well, and talk so well when they sing. With so candid an ally, they must."

Pleasants got it right. Far from destroying singing, the microphone gave rise to what many now call the golden age of American song. A quick tour through the "Songbook" series recorded by Fitzgerald between 1956 and 1964 reveals the riches accumulated over the previous three decades: the “standards” of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.

Today, those standards are part of a nostalgic revival among college students who have adopted the tan khakis, slick haircuts, hefty martinis, smelly cigars and swing dances of what Tom Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation." Of course, nature smiles when grandchild and grandparent join forces against their common enemy. And one could argue, along with critic Mark Gauvreau Judge, that the long countercultural revolt that began in the '60s is exhausted. Young people are returning to pop, by which I mean no particular style but the quaint idea that it is OK for musicians (and other artists) to pursue entertainment and profit rather than punk-dada-anarchist shock.

Where does this leave Perry Como? Is he poised for a comeback, to become a symbol of everything good about pre-Boomer America? It would be nice to think so, because Como is an endearing figure. Down-to-earth, unpretentious, he grew up singing with his Abruzzi-born father and never lost the gift of touching ordinary listeners. That's not an easy thing to do, no matter what the mass marketers (and the intellectuals) say.

It is also appealing, post-Clinton, to note that Como's reputation lacks any whiff of scandal. He stayed married to Roselle Beline for 65 years. He didn't belong to any rat packs. He became the consummate television personality, cool in the MvLuhanesque sense, but also warm and cosy in his trademark cardigan.

Never mind that his program, which ran from 1948 to 1963, was one of the first to welcome Negro performers (Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, the Ravens). The image that lingers is of Perry the Square, unspooling a medley of viewer requests and closing every show with an uplifting number that often as not mentioned God.

Nonetheless, it seems unlikely to expect that Como will experience the same sort of revival as Sinatra or Tony Bennett-the massive reissuance of archived materials, the academic conferences and the doorstop biographies. That's because despite being a great crooner, Como was almost too decent a guy. The current craze for martinis and cigars probably doesn't correlate with, say, a craze for lengthy and stable marriages.

Image, of course, isn't everything. To judge by the chatter of the media, not to mention the academy, you'd think the pop singers of the 1930s and 1940s spent as much time burnishing their image as do Brittany Spears and 'N Sync. They didn't. Some were considered naughty, others nice. Some switched from one to the other, as captured in Oscar Levant's famous remark about Doris Day: "I knew her before she was a virgin."

Mostly, however, these people worked on their music. Recalling his youthful rivalry with Como and Dean Martin, Sinatra once told an interviewer: "I decided to experiment a little and come up with something different. What I finally hit on was more the bel canto Italian school of singing, without making a point of it. That meant I had to stay in better shape because I had to sing more." Drawing also on the riches of jazz singing and instrumentalism, Sinatra pushed both himself and his audience up the steep gradient from "popular" to "art."

Como failed to do this, despite his flair for pleasing people and his fine vocal endowment. He was not very discriminating about material, and while that allowed him to record some unusual pieces, notably older songs like "When You Were Sweet Sixteen" and "Anema e Core," it also wasted his talent on a lot of things that don't stand the test of time. To be an ardent fan of Como today, one must be either musically naive or prone to the half-ironic enthusiasm known as camp.

In the end, however, the lesson of the crooners is simple. Music is still music, despite new technology or current obsessions with image. New inventions pose new challenges but do not by themselves destroy or create. That's the business of musicians, working as they always have, within a tradition. Those who become immortal are those who connect what they are doing with the best of the past, while also striving to delight and instruct their listeners. The rest, however noisy, is still silence.

(originally published in the Wall Street Journal)

Posted by mbayles at 11:33 PM

July 12, 2005

A Good Day in Harlem

What does rap have to do with fatherhood? See my latest in the Wall Street Journal.

Posted by mbayles at 10:00 AM

July 6, 2005

Bring In Da Sound

In the good old days of silent film, ... ...when intellectuals in Europe and America (well, New York) were developing their theories of cinema as a distinctive art form, one that did NOT include speech and therefore departed radically from theater, the musical accompaniment ranged from serious orchestration to the familiar tinkly piano most of us associate with silent film. These days there is a new way to experience silent film: with innovative live accompaniment. And by most accounts the acknowledged leaders in this admittedly small field are the Alloy Orchestra of Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you are planning a silent film festival or are just curious, check out their website.and more here....

Posted by mclennan at 8:00 PM | Comments (0)

July 5, 2005

Rap Attacked From Within

Some rap has gotten so bad, people who grew up with it are starting to protest. See my piece in the Wall Street Journal

Posted by mclennan at 7:45 PM | Comments (0)

The Strange Career of Folk Music

Article from Michigan Quarterly Review

It is a quiet evening. The stars are bright, and the meal has been eaten. The city, if there is one, is far away. There is no electricity, no media. It is not yet bedtime, so someone picks up an instrument and begins to sing. The song is old, but nobody has ever written it down. Rather it has been transmitted orally through many
generations, with many different versions, some preserved and some lost. No one knows who first created it. But everyone can and does sing it.

Is this a folk song? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears, does it make a sound? Folk music has existed for ages, but to the people who first played it, it was just music, without an adjective like folk to distinguish it. To be folk it has had to be heard, self-consciously, by an outsider. And so, in a curious turn, the story of folk music is never really about the folk. It is about the outsiders. And in this country at least, that has meant not just the musicologists marching into hill country with their dusty recording devices, but a variety of highly opinionated listeners, by whose attentions folk music has come to be defined.

It was Europeans such as the English music transcriber Cecil J. Sharp (1859–1924) and the Hungarian collector and composer Bela Bartok (1881–1945) who first worked out the basic definition of folk music. Roughly, they understood folk music to be: (1) Rural and slow to cange, not urban and dynamic. (2) Continually varied, with no definitive version. (3) Simple, straightforward, and plain. (4) Transmitted orally, not through formal training or writing. (5) Focused more on group sharing than on individual expression.

These criteria were never strict, but their influence lingers. For example, the Folk Song Society of Greater Boston (FSSGB), a 45-year-old organization devoted to traditional folk repertory, mostly British and British-American, ignores the first, treasuring many songs from urban settings. But the members do adhere, more or less, to the other four.

This emphasis was on display recently at a home in Concord, Massachusetts, where 30 or 40 members of the society, mostly people who looked as though they could remember the 1960s counterculture,
showed up for an FSSBG “house concert.” They were there to hear Louis Killen, a native of Gateshead-on-Tyne in the industrial northeast of England, tell dialect tales, sing, and accompany himself on the English concertina. Killen introduced one old chestnut as a song he’d collected from a Northumbrian shepherd.

Is this an accurate portrait of the contemporary folk scene? Not really. Groups like the FSSGB have always been part of the scene—as one member commented, “We were here first.” But unlike Boston’s WUMB-FM (“folk radio”) or the folk-oriented Club Passim in Harvard Square, the FSSGB does not look all that kindly on what is now the dominant figure in contemporary folk music: the singer-songwriter.

According to member Ruth Perry, who is also a professor of literature at M.I.T. and (together with Northeastern University musicologist Judith Tick) teaches a graduate seminar on British and American folk
music, “The best folksingers are interested in preserving for people and passing on the music that is their free and common heritage.... People used to sing more than they do now. And what they sang and traded around and learned from each other, is folk music.” Indeed, some of the members present that evening took a very dim view of the whole singer-songwriter movement. To them it has negative connotations—of ego and (as one person put it) “navel-gazing”—that cut against the grain of folk music as community expression.

Is this fair? Every art form has its characteristic vice, and if one were pressed to describe the vice of the singer-songwriter, “navel-gazing” would not be far off. But the singer-songwriter tradition has many virtues, as well, not least of which is a voracious openness to musical sounds.

Consider the lineup of performers appearing at the 2004 Boston Folk Festival. Most are singer-songwriters, but that phrase does not begin to describe the music. Some of those who appeared are identified with a particular style: Sam Bush with bluegrass (and "newgrass”); Cephas & Wiggins with Piedmont blues; Mark Erelli with Western swing; Natalie MacMaster with traditional fiddle music. But none is a strict traditionalist. And most range widely, as reflected in these thumbnail sketches of other acts listed in the festival program: “pumping new life into traditional bluegrass, old-timey, and roots music”; “drawing on jazz, rock, and pop”; “span[ning] the genres of honky-tonk, acapella, and swing”; and “fusing the traditional music of Ireland with American ballads and the dance tunes of French Canada, Cape Breton, and Normandy.” If adherents of folk music have any doubts that the music continues to grow and evolve, these musicians should put them at ease. While respecting the tried and true, they also fly free, avoiding all pigeonholes.

Americana, roots, and acoustic are all terms folk performers and critics have devised for folk music in this country. And, of course, each term suggests a different understanding. Americana keeps it within the United States, while roots extends to music from around the globe. Acoustic excludes any music in the other two categories that uses electric instruments. No wonder, after 45 years of devotion to the subject, Sing Out! magazine editorialized in 1995: “Our community vehemently refuses to take responsibility for defining folk
music.”

Yet this has not caused Sing Out! to cease publication. The idea of folk music proves amazingly persistent. Why? For many folk music buffs, the answer is bound up with politics.

The appropriation of folk music for political purposes dates back to mid-19th-century Europe, where folk songs became a means to express nationalist sentiment. During the 20th century, European ideologues across the political spectrum laid claim to the music of the folk. In Germany the left created many highly political songs based on folk music, and so did the right. Indeed, when the Nazis came to power in 1933 they put the folk song, or Volkslied, at the center of their public spectacles celebrating the superiority of the “Aryan” race. They also, in process, poisoned the well for future generations of German folkies. (As one young Berliner said to me a few years ago, “Around the campfire we sing mostly American songs.”)

Communist regimes took similar advantage. From the 1930s forward, folk music was exploited as a way of defining – and controlling – the various “republics” comprising the Soviet Union. In the 1970s the
American ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin traveled in Central Asia to observe this ongoing process. While Levin found a subterranean musical life that was “complex, alive, and intimately linked to the innermost lives of people,” he also measured the gap between that and “the glitzy professional folk troupes that became the official
cultural ambassadors of the Central Asian republics.” One aspect of the gap was the elimination from official folk music of all religious references.

No one on the American left ever manipulated folk music on such a grand scale. But most labor and other activists believed that music was very important. As Mike Gold of the Daily Worker wrote in the early 1930s, “Songs are as necessary to the fighting movement as bread.” The only question was, which songs?

In the 1920s, any song would do, as long as the tune was familiar enough so that people could sing it with new lyrics. The master of this trade was Joe Hill of the communist-led Industrial Workers of the World, who added political lyrics to all sorts of American songs, from hymns to Broadway show tunes to popular ballads. (“Nearer My God To Thee” became “Nearer My Job To Thee,” “Everybody’s Doing It” became “Everybody’s Joining It,” and “Down By The Old Mill Stream” became “Down In The Old Dark Mills.”) This same art is still practiced today by the octegenarian Joe Glazer, “Labor’s Troubador.”

This casual approach changed in the early 1930s, when the official party line, straight from Moscow, said that artists must create a whole new “proletarian culture.” It was never clear what this meant, but as the musicologist Judith Tick explains, one thing it did not mean was “Broadway, or commercial music tied to the Capitalist economic machine,” as the Daily Worker put it. In New York, reports Tick, a group called the Composers’ Collective worked on what they called “mass song,” a new type of art song combining modernist
technique with “militant protest lyrics.” Several of these efforts were published in the collective’s Workers Song Books, with titles such as”Lenin! Who’s That Guy,” “Mount the Barricades,” and “Song of the Builders,” by a Harvard-trained composer named Charles Seeger.

In 1935 the party line changed again, and the idea of a modernist "proletarian culture” was discarded in favor of the Joe Hill philosophy – it’s OK to use anything, as long as it helps the cause. The cause, of course, being the fight against fascism in Europe. This phase of leftist strategy was called the Popular Front, and its impact on American music was profound – and, thanks to the efforts of two families, one named Seeger and the other named Lomax, profoundly positive.

In 1935 Charles Seeger went to work for the federal government. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was underway, and one of its many projects was to have experts go into the field and record all sorts and conditions of first-growth American folk music. Prominent among these were Charles Seeger and his wife, the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger; their children Peggy, Michael, and Pete; and the father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax. Neither family was from the folk – indeed, they came from fairly privileged backgrounds. But like their nineteenth-century European counterparts, they respected the folk and tried to preserve their precious musical heritage when it was in danger of being lost.

What is most impressive about the Seegers and the Lomaxes is their refusal, in countless ways over many years, to subordinate music to politics. They were all consistently leftist in their views, and whenever they got the chance they would repeat the sentiment expressed by Alan Lomax in the preface to the 1941 edition of Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads: “Most of these singers are poor people, farmers, laborers, convicts, old-age pensioners, relief workers, housewives, wandering guitar pickers.” But Lomax, who started collecting folk songs with his father at age eighteen, loved and respected his singers too much to even think of forcing their music into an ideological mold. Indeed, if Lomax had a fault, it was that he was too purist about the way people performed these odd, quirky, rough-hewn songs.

And therein lies a tale. Without the efforts of Alan Lomax, the so-called Folk Revival of the 1940s and 50s would never have occurred. But Lomax’s reaction to what he saw as the commercialization of the
music was quite negative. Today, of course, a lot of the music recorded by him and others is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution and available on CD from Rounder Records. Here are just a few of the titles you can order: “Negro Blues and Hollers”; “Railroad Songs and Ballads”; “Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads”; “Anglo-American Ballads (2 volumes); "Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas”;
“American Fiddle Tunes.”

But back in the 1940s and 50s, when most Americans were just beginning to discover folk music, it was harder to get them to appreciate the original, raw version. The tendency, deplored by Lomax at every turn, was to sweeten the sound, so that it sounded like commercial “pop,” meaning recordings by such polished veterans of the big band era as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Ella Fitzgerald. Today these singers are considered the gold standard of American song. But back then, many people on the left dismissed pop as “commercial music tied to the Capitalist economic machine.” For Alan Lomax, the issue was less political than musical: “When a so-called folksinger, with no respect for or knowledge of the style or the original emotional content of the song, acquires the shell of the song merely and leaves its subtle vocal interior behind, there is a
definite expressive loss.”

The trouble with this view is that it does not allow for change – including change brought about by the folk themselves. For example, the 1940s was when a lot of Americans discovered the blues, a type of music that previously had been considered low entertainment. The left embraced the blues largely because of Lomax’s tireless showcasing of such masters as Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. But here the rejection of “commercial music” played a role, as many people on the left, taking their cues from Lomax, found only one type of blues
acceptable: the “country blues,” played by solo acoustic guitarist-singers and focusing on hard times – or better still, on protest.

The darling of the protest blues was Josh White, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, whose first political album, Southern Exposure (1941), contained such political titles as “Jim Crow Train,” “Bad Housing Blues,” “Defense Factory Blues,” and “Uncle Sam Says” (about segregation in the armed forces). Curiously, White’s protest blues did not attract a large black audience. This was because, as Elijah Wald of the magazine Living Blues writes, “By the 1940s. . . blues had become a band form, the Chicago sound of Walter Davis, Big Maceo, and Sonny Boy Williamson, the Kansas City shouts of Jimmy Rushing and Joe Turner, or the smooth combo style of Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker.” In other words, the popular black audience was embracing the urban blues, played by electrified bands focusing on good times – while the predominantly white folk audience rejected this type of blues, on the grounds that it was (guess what?) “commercial music.”

This leftist purism was skillfully manipulated by Big Bill Broonzy, a Mississippi native who grew up playing acoustic blues but then recorded small combo jazz for the Bluebird label in Chicago. According to music historian Robert Palmer, Broonzy sized up the growing audience for the Folk Revival and changed his act, with
the result that “a left-wing and generally naive young audience accepted him, along with Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee as true folk artists. Broonzy’s dozens of Bluebird records with bass, drums, and jazz-band backing were conveniently forgotten, and he played the role of the folk bluesman fresh from the cotton fields to the hilt.”

When asked about his authenticity, Broonzy's standard reply was: "I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing 'em."

A similar story could be told about other folk styles. For example, it has long been an article of faith among song collectors that one of the oldest folk traditions in America was found in the southern Appalachian Mountains during the first decade of the 20th century, when a number of song collectors, many of them women, uncovered a rich deposit of Scots-English ballads preserved there in communities that had existed in relative isolation since the 18th century. The discovery attracted none other than Britain’s Cecil Sharp, who visited the area in 1916 and, with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell, produced the magnum opus English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.

The story of the Appalachian musicologists is nicely dramatized in the movie Songcatcher (2000). But, as the movie suggests, not even this music was totally “pure.” For one thing, it was ethnically mixed. The African-American musician Taj Mahal makes a cameo appearance in Songcatcher as a banjo master – a reminder that this much-favored instrument originated in Africa, not Britain. Also in the movie, the song-collecting heroine decides at the end to start her own record label – a reminder that this music was swiftly commercialized. As Tick observes, “The record labels were in the mountains at the same time as the collectors.”

Here we encounter a major complication on the American scene, one that has been there from the beginning: America has never had folk music in the classic European sense. How could it, when its people are descended from Indians, settlers, slaves, and numerous different immigrant groups, rather than from peasants who have tilled the same soil, spoken the same language, and sung the same songs for generations? Some folklorists, notably the late Gene Bluestein, accept this fact about America and argue for a different term,
poplore, to describe America’s dynamic blend of ethnic traditions and its wide-open market for entertainment.

The concept of poplore becomes more compelling when we look at what happened in the 1960s. Here we see the other folk dynasty, the Seegers, helping not only to preserve a legacy but also to make it
popular – and profitable. Indeed, Charles Seeger was the father (and Ruth the stepmother) of a new paradigm: the outsider as commercially successful folk singer.

In 1936, when 17-year-old Pete Seeger was about to enter Harvard, he traveled with Charles and Ruth to Bascom Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. In her biography of
Ruth Crawford Seeger, Judith Tick writes that for Pete this was “like visiting a foreign country.” And when he and Ruth first heard the five-string banjo, they vowed to start “learning this idiom.” Needless to say, no born-and-bred folk musician would have put it quite that way.

Pete Seeger also learned the idioms of bluesman Leadbelly and Oklahoma-born Woody Guthrie, both authentic folk in the sense of coming from hardscrabble backgrounds and singing traditional material. But significantly, both Leadbelly and Guthrie also added political lyrics to old songs and wrote their own songs. It was not long before all three were commercially successful recording artists. And the same was true of the Carter Family, Jean Ritchie, and many other leading lights of the Folk Revival. As celebrities who freely adapted traditional material, wrote their own material, and achieved solid recording careers, these people are the
embodiment of American poplore.

With this background in mind, it is fascinating to recall how hostile the Folk Revival of the 1940s and 1950s was toward rock’n’roll. Having rejected pop as “commercialized music,” many folkies took the same dim view of the raucous blend of country, rhythm & blues, and gospel that came roaring out of the South in the mid-1950s. Some record company executives felt the same way, and as soon as the original rock’n’rollers quit recording (Elvis because he went into the Army; Jerry lee Lewis and Chuck Berry because of sex scandals) the labels began to push what they saw as more dignified alternatives. The first was calypso, a brief fad starring Harry Belafonte that quickly fizzled. The second, wildly successful, was folk music.

But this was a different kind of folk music – not pop, exactly, but equally inauthentic. Alan Lomax (who actually liked rock’n’roll) described it as this way: “Under the smooth bland surface of popularized folk song lies a bubbling stew of work songs, country blues, field hollers, hobo songs, prairie songs, spirituals, hoedowns, prison songs, and a few unknown ingredients.” To him, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez were nice college kids with pretty voices who just didn’t get it.

This attitude had a lot to do with the sudden rise of Bob Dylan. All of these early 1960s folkies were more political than any rock’n’rollers. But to the older generation of leftist folk adherents the fact that a bland folkish song like “Tom Dooley” could become a number one hit (for the Kingston Trio, in 1958) was an
embarrassment. The older folkies kept the pressure on, and in 1962 a new magazine, Broadside, began to publish pacifist, union, and civil rights songs under the editorship of the once black-listed musician Sis Cunningham and her husband the leftist journalist Gordon Friesen. Along with the older Seegers, Cunningham, and other Folk Revival veterans such as Malvina Reynolds, Broadside also gave a platform to younger protest voices: Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Janis Ian, and Dylan.

All of these young performers had solid followings, but Dylan was the only one to become a superstar. His singular accomplishments, unrecognized at the time and still not well understood, were that he
understood and deeply appreciated the fact that American music is poplore, not folklore; and that, like the Lomaxes and Seegers, he followed the music instead of the party line.

Dylan’s first album of acoustic, original material, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) contributed four classics to the folk canon: "Masters of War," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Blowin' in the Wind.” His next, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1963), carried him to triumph at the Newport Folk Festival as the unchallenged bearer of the Guthrie-Seeger mantle.

But then a strange thing happened: the mantle-bearer became a turncoat. First, he stopped singing protest songs. His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) contained songs about personal relationships, which irked the editors of Sing Out!, who accused him of "selling out.” Second, Dylan gave up his original acoustic sound and took up with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a young white group who played the fully electrified Chicago blues style identified with figures like Muddy Waters.

Most music fans know, or think they know, that by appearing with Butterfield band at the 1965 Newport Blues Festival, Dylan scandalized his elders and forged a brave new link between folk music and rock. The story is a bit more complicated, actually. The electric blues was pretty well accepted by then – in fact, earlier in the program Alan Lomax had appeared onstage discussing the fine points of that and other blues styles. Some in the crowd booed the electrified Dylan; Pete Seeger declared himself "brokenhearted and angry"; Sing Out! issued another denunciation. But this time, the purists were outnumbered. Most listeners welcomed the new sound, and Dylan’s career took off.

Yet it’s worth noting that throughout that career, Dylan’s greatest contribution has been swim against the the rock current. Most people think of him as the artist who merged folk with rock, and this is true if rock means the blues-based music he played in the 1960s. But Dylan did not sire hard rock, psychedelic rock, art rock, shock rock, heavy metal, glam metal, thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, punk metal, or any other of rock’s squealing progeny. Indeed, the true measure of his standing as an American folk artist is how consistently he has returned popular music to its roots.

In 1968 hard rock was reaching its apogee, psychedelic rock ruled the drug scene, heavy metal was starting up, and the last thing the hippies and radicals cared about was country music. So what did Dylan do? He made two country-influenced albums, John Wesley Harding (1968) and Nashville Skyline (1969). A new genre was born, country-rock, which despite its later blandness did re-connect popular music with some of its roots.

In the late 1970s, it became fashionable to pickle Dylan as a countercultural relic, holy and dead as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. But once again he defied the spirit of the age by announcing that he had become the most uncool thing imaginable: a born-again Christian. He began to make gospel albums, the best of
which, Slow Train Coming (1979), impresses even secular critics with its musical quality. In 1999 he told Newsweek: “I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.” As a credo for America’s best known folk singer, this keeps the focus where it belongs: on the music.

So what is folk music today? As always, the definition is somewhat arbitary. Hip hop, for example, is not considered folk, even though it grew out of of a certifiable folk tradition (“dub” music and verbal “toasting” in the West Indies). Perhaps because it is both high tech and highly commercial, hip hop has little or no appeal to the keepers of the folk flame.

Indeed, if there are any authentic folk left, playing orally transmitted music in isolation from the world, it is only a matter of time before they are sniffed out by the ethnomusicologists, followed closely by entrepreneurs waving record contracts. For better or worse, folk music today is part of the commercial mainstream.

But the old criteria – some of them, anyway – still have meaning. Let’s look at how well they describe contemporary folk music:

1) Rural and slow to change, not urban and dynamic. As mentioned earlier, the rural aspect went by the boards a long time ago. Many cities, like Boston, have become centers of folk music, while whole stretches of rural America seem, sadly, to have lost all connection to it. And the dynamism of modern commerce drives flk almost as much as other forms of popular music.

2) Continually varied, with no definitive version. This still applies, to the degree that folk musicians place more emphasis on songwriting than on record production. Unlike hip hop, electronica, or a dozen other production-heavy genres, most of folk is still based on songs rather than on particular recordings.

3) Simple, straightforward, and plain. The idea of folk music as simple was discredited 80 years ago, when musicologists began to observe the subtlety and complexity of the music most highly prized by the folk themselves. But this criterion continues to mean something. Much of what now might be called contemporary folk sounds like country, soft rock, even New Age. But every now and then, somebody gets the urge to strip away all the frippery and restore the original grain. The MTV unplugged phenomenon in the 1990s, dstinguished by acoustic performances from rockers like Nirvana and the Pretenders, reflected this urge. And so does the popularity of the soundtrack to the film O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), the first track of which, “Po Lazarus” by James Carter and the Prisoners, was recorded in 1959 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at
Lambert by none other than Alan Lomax. (It would doubtless delight Lomax to learn that, according to Nielsen/Soundscan, that CD has sold 7 million copies to date.)

Holding up quite well is 4) Transmitted orally, not through formal training or writing. Most folk musicians, even those who are fully music-literate, learn more by listening than they do by reading. Recordings make listening easier, but they continue to be distrusted by folk musicians, who see them as a discouragement to natural variation and as the means to slavish imitation.

5) Focused more on group sharing than on individual expression. This is tricky, because it seems to set up a dichotomy between music that evolves through some sort of anonymous communal process and music
that is created by a single person. Probably this dichotomy fuels the low opinion of singer-songwriters among traditionalists.

But this dichotomy should be set aside. It is the product of late 19th-century thought, in which the new idea of Darwinian evolution was pitted against the older romantic cult of individual genius. The trouble is that very little folk music – or art of any kind – has ever been made in either of these extreme ways. Most art is
created by individuals enjoying the benefits of association with other individuals. Tocqueville wasn’t thinking about folk music when he wrote, “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations.” But his words certainly apply.

Each year, the National Endowment for the Arts gives an award, the National Heritage Fellowship, to a dozen or so folk artists. (Just to keep it all in the family, the initiator of that award was the founder and long-time director of the NEA’s Folk & Traditional Arts Program was Alan Lomax’s sister, Bess Lomax Hawes.)

The vitality of the American folk music tradition – and the room for growth within it – can be summed up by a partial list of recipients over the last 20 years: Cajun musician Dewey Balfa, bluegrass master
Bill Monroe, Detroit bluesman John Lee Hooker, zydeco king Clifton Chenier, Irish-American fiddler Martin Mulvihill, Appalachian singer “Doc” Watson, mariachi impresario Natividad Cano, Memphis bluesman “B.B.” King, gospel singers Clarence Fountain & The Blind Boys of Alabama, Cuban mambo bandleader “Cachao” Lopez, Puerto Rican bomba star Juan Gutierrez, the klezmer group the Epstein Brothers, new gospel’s “Pops” Staples, Tennessee fiddler Ralph Blizard, and Jean Ritchie, who almost singlehandedly brought the dulcimer to
popularity in the 1940s and 50s.

All of these people made their careers in the modern world, not in some remote unspoiled rural setting. They’ve all listened to the radio and gone to the movies. They’ve all watched television. Some have had a more than passing acquaintance with high culture. Their accomplishments attest to the fact that folk is no longer a term for “pure” music discovered by outsiders. Rather it is a self-conscious designation, a tree that can hear itself falling. But maybe that’s good. Because when it comes to bringing forth new growth, self-consciousness can be a blessing in disguise.

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