Edited by Azizi Powell
This is part of an ongoing pancocojams series about African Americans and American folk music.
This post quotes portions of a 2002 Qualitative
Sociology pdf file by William G. Roy entitled "Aesthetic Identity, Race, and American Folk Music".
The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.
This entire Pdf is eleven pages. This pancocojams excerpt doesn't include all of those pages and also doesn't include any of the citations. I encourage you to read that entire essay.
Thanks to William G. Roy for writing this paper and thanks to all those who he quoted.
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Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2020/12/excerpt-from-2008-pdf-entitled-african.html for a related pancocojams post entitled "Excerpt From A 2008 Pdf Entitled "African American Old-Time String Band Music: A Selective Discography" by Chris LH Durman"
Also, click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2020/03/black-influences-minstrel-influences-on.html for a related 2020 pancocojams post entitled "Black Influences & Minstrel Influences On The Songs That Old Time Music Performer Uncle Dave Macon Sung & Played".
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EXCERPT: AESTHETIC IDENTITY, RACE, AND AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC
From https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Comm/Courses/roy.pdf
Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall 2002 (°C 2002)
Aesthetic Identity, Race, and American Folk Music
William G. Roy
[...]
[page 462]
For the first generation of folklorists, folk music
was the music of a national people. The notion of “folk music” was first articulated by nationalist intellectuals creating
an imagined community whose collective genius fostered the literature, poetry,
lore and music that gave voice to a distinctive people. The English, like other Europeans,
discovered an allegedly ancient national culture of the people least touched by modernity,
the rural poor.
By the turn of the twentieth century, English scholars despaired that the
English peasantry
had been corrupted by modernization and declared that the purest form of
Anglo-Saxon folk music was to be found in the unsullied hollows and hills of the American
Appalachians. Cecil Sharp, an Englishman who towered over the first generation of American folklorists, explicitly
declared that the greatness of the American folk tradition was racial. He believed that
racial inheritance determined a culture’s value: The mountaineers’ “language, wisdom, manners, and
the many graces of life that are theirs, are merely racial attributes which have been
gradually handed down generation by generation” (Filene 2000, p. 25).
However, the folklorist’s portrait of the rural poor not
only misrepresented their musical tastes,
but helped racialize American vernacular music in general.
The music that ordinary people were singing, especially in
the South, included much more than the Anglo-Saxon ballads the folklorists had identified as “folk.” While many
Southerners did sing old ballads, the larger corpus of vernacular music was a creolized synthesis of European and
African influences. By privileging the
[page 463]
European influences within the category of “folk,” the music
that represented “the people” was confined to “white” music.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC
Vernacular popular music in America—music created and
performed by common people outside of explicitly commercial circuits 3—evolved from a common stream into three
twentieth-century genres: Country and western has so explicitly belonged to whites that the KKK held fiddle
contests in the 1930s (Peterson 1997).
Rhythm and blues has been so explicitly coded as black that
it was first recorded on “race records” (Oliver 1984). Both were racially exclusive. But the genre of folk music had
the potential to bridge the racially defined genres of C&W and R&B.4
In the period between the end of the American Civil War
through the 1920s, when much of the music now known as folk music was widely performed, but before these three genres of
vernacular music took shape as specific genres, the people who wrote and performed music remarkably
transcended the racial chasm of their social milieu. Although folklorists privileged Anglo-Saxon ballads,
most vernacular American music was neither purely European nor African, but displayed various
degrees of creolization.
Black and white musicians knew each other, sang each other’s songs, performed
for the same audiences, and freely borrowed styles, formats, knowledge, and songs. The most popular forms
of vernacular music were manifestly synchronized from African and European roots. Minstrelsy, the closest thing the
nineteenth century had to mass culture, was an ambivalent white caricature of black culture. Minstrel performers and
their more respectable musical cousins such as Stephen Foster carefully did “field work” among black workers and songsters.
Revival meetings, where blacks and whites found salvation, fused European solemnity with African
ecstasy to create gospel music.
Thus, when you examine pre-twentieth-century music, the commonalities between
what black and white musicians were doing are at least as striking as the differences.5 Even
though
[Notes]
3. The boundaries between commercial and noncommercial music
and between common and elite groups are not neatly delineated. Many part-time composers published songs or
performed for money. And one might legitimately ask whether the music of the middle class, like the
songs of Stephen Foster or “A Bicycle Built for Two,” were the “vernacular” popular music of the middle
class. I prefer to distinguish between popular music and vernacular music in order to focus on the
common roots of country and western, rhythm and blues, and folk. Popular music has been defined
as a separate genre all along.
4. Jazz came from the same roots, but quickly became
distinguished from the other three genres; while the others remained primarily rural, jazz was urban, and by the 1920s, cultural
movements like the Harlem Renaissance were associating jazz with the avant garde, in contrast to
the continued low-brow connotations of rhythm and blues, country and western, and folk music.
5, The discovery by Francis James Child of English ballads
that had been passed on from generation to generation in the American South—the Child Ballads—was not representative of
American vernacular music. Child only went to a few very isolated enclaves where few blacks lived and
collected only the songs that conformed to his notions of “pure” folk music, ignoring the extensive local
music that did not.
[page 464]
post-Civil War singers and songwriters lived in a racially segregated society,
they would not have necessarily identified their music as specifically white or black until crystallized into
racially encoded genres.
Despite the folklorists’ original definition of folk music
as white, the reality of creolized vernacular music made it plausible for the second generation of folklorists, especially those
with left wing rather than nationalist commitments, to broaden the definition of folk beyond Anglo-Saxon mountaineers,
shifting the aesthetic identity of folk music to a class rather than a racial axis.
While folklorists were collecting songs from those they
considered “the folk,” anointing some of what they found as “folk music” and ignoring the rest, commercial record companies were
experimenting to find their niche in the marketplace.
Many companies sought specialized markets for particular
regions or demographics, with “race records” and “hillbilly records” being two of the categories that guided their marketing
efforts. However, the racial genres of commercial marketing do not explain why folk music became white. Indeed, the
overt racism of commercial music fortified the polarity of the folk/commercial dichotomy. Both academic
folklorists and leftist advocates of people’s culture explicitly juxtaposed folk music against commercial music.
Whatever folk music was, it was decidedly anti-commercial.
By the end of the 1920s, the marketing of commercial music
crystallized racial aesthetic identities. Tin Pan Alley and hillbilly music were white; jazz and “race music” were black.
Folk music was a term used only by folklorists with little meaning to most people. But that changed in the next
decade. In the 1930s and 1940s, people loosely associated with the Communist Party, including academic folklorists
like Charles Seeger, father of Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger, took on folk music as a project,
discovering the “people’s” music (Eyerman and Jamison 1998). Folk music became the music of the left. Even though the Wobblies had used music as a weapon of insurgency early in the century, most leftists did
not embrace folk music. Earlier Seeger, a member of a communist musical collective, had argued that
“many folksongs are complacent, melancholy, defeatist, intended to make slaves endure their
lot—pretty but not the stuff for a militant proletariat to feed upon” (Lieberman 1995, p. 30). But he later
had a change of heart and helped his son, Pete, inspire a whole generation to embrace folk music as the musical expression
of radicalism. One of the converts, Almanac singer Millard Lampell, wrote, “We think this is
the first time there has ever been an organized attempt ... to sing the folksongs of America.
We are trying to give back to the people the songs of the workers” (ibid., p. 53). Just as music for the
early folklorists had been “folk” because it was white, for the communists it was folk because it belonged to the
workers, both black and white”
[…]
The knowledge and appreciation of folk music moved beyond folklorists
as folk music became a genre of popular music. One of the reasons that the leftists embraced folk
music as “the people’s music” was that it was less racially encoded than vernacular forms like country and
western or rhythm and blues. An aesthetic standard of authenticity, a quality based on the identity
of the music maker, was amenable to being “the people’s” music. Many of the forms, styles, and
instruments that signal “authenticity” or “folk-ness” come from slave music, including practices like
the call and response, the twelve-bar melody, and instruments like the guitar or banjo (Cruz 1999).
So the leftists sustained, or at least made a valiant attempt to sustain, the
racially inclusive meaning of folk music, promoting the Huddie Ledbetters as well as the Aunt Molly Jacksons as
personifications of the “people’s music.” Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, a black musician discovered in a
Louisiana prison, and Aunt Molly Jackson, a white union activist, discovered at the Harlan County
coal strike, were both poor Southerners brought to New York City by folklorists, where they
joined the community of leftist musicians and were prominently displayed as “authentic” representations
of American culture.
The contradiction was that the leftists, no less than the
older folklorists, were promoting the music of the other. Most were either Eastern establishment WASPs or second-generation eastern
European Jews. Harvard educated Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, both sons of early folklorists,
were two of the most important people to popularize folk music, one as a collector of songs, the other as an
organizer and performer. Moses Asch, who organized the leading folk record companies, Elie Siegmeister,
another prolific collector, and Irwin Silber, who helped run musical organizations and publish folk songs, were
of recent immigrant stock. None were genuinely “folk” in the usual sense of the word. They were all
promoting the music of groups they did not belong to themselves, sincerely convinced that members of those
other groups should identify with “the folk.”
THE SIXTIES REVIVAL
The popular view of the folk music revival of the 1960s is
that it erupted after the remarkable popularity of the Kingston Trio and their clones. In the heyday of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry
and Little Richard, “Tom Dooley” rocked the charts and
changed music history. Not only did old ballads and new ballad-like songs appear on the charts, but millions of American youth bought guitars and joined
with their friends in dormitory rooms, coffee houses, and hootenannies. The popular media portrayed the revival as
more than a taste in commercial music; it was a quest for authenticity and movement against the
sterility of commercialism.
However, in the composition of the performers, the
demographics of the fans, and the discourse of criticism, the folk revival was distinctively and constitutively white. This is especially
notable because the folk revival coincided with the Civil Rights movement, was embraced by many white activists,
and often expressed a
[page 466]
leftist message in lyrics. Given the bi-racial history of
folk music, especially during the Communist Party era, why was the revival so white?
Two factors were especially important. First, the New Left
as a social movement surrendered control of music to the commercial industry. Second, the cultural momentum of the “folk”
category resonated much more with whites than blacks. Even though the
Civil Rights movement was a catalyst for the folk music revival, the political movements of the 1960s, although organized around
several cultural activities, did not develop any organizations to control the production and distribution of
music, leaving the institutional production of culture to commercial interests. Without a
self-conscious organized effort to make folk music racially inclusive, it was incorporated into the prevailing
structure of popular culture of the early 1960s, which was racially segregated. Even as the New Left erected a formidable
cultural infrastructure including underground newspapers, a national news agency,
film collectives, and bookstores, it did not develop the kind of musical
institutions that the old left had organized in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though
music had been a cultural pillar of the early Civil Rights movement, many of the leaders of the anti-war and student
movements became wedded to a heavy political economy framework, distancing themselves from the cultural focus of hippies.
Though the mass media news blurred the distinction between the political movements and the counterculture
movements with imagery like “flower powers” and its celebration of the culturally potent, politically
radical Yippies, the political and cultural wings of the baby boomer generation were mutually suspicious and at times downright
hostile. Those organizations, such as Newsreel, Radio Free People, or Liberation News Service, that might
have erected a musical infrastructure remained primarily political and verbal, disseminating ideologically charged more
than aesthetically pleasing content. Music was abandoned to the record companies and coffee
houses. Even politically committed singers like Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger free-floated without any organizational
base.
[…]
Indeed, it was folk music’s “authenticity” as a marginal
genre that appealed to white middle-class youth seeking a relatively safe way to distance themselves from the mainstream
(Cantwell 1998).6
The aesthetic identity of folk music as “other” meant
[Note]
6. African Americans generally did not identify themselves as “the folk,” and
did not welcome their anointed role as authenticating white culture. White singers like Bob Dylan and
Joan Baez, both of whom were profoundly influenced by the Anthology and recorded several of its
songs, eschewed the mainstream culture that the Civil Rights activists were clamoring to join.
Blacks could not join the folk music affirmation of the other because they were an “other.” While the
first generation of urban blacks may have found a connection to their rural roots in rhythm and blues,
those born in the North increasingly identified jazz, soul, and rap as “their” music (Filene 2000). And
by the time part of the African-American movement began to reject the white mainstream, folk music was
firmly entrenched in that mainstream.
[page 467]
that folk music became “their” music because it helped them
imagine themselves as someone other than who they feared they were: white middle-class consumers. What the middle-class youth found aesthetically pleasing about folk music—its anti-commercial simplicity, its musical purity, its evocation of a dissolving
past— appealed primarily to whites who wanted out of the mainstream more than African Americans, who had been excluded.
[…]
CULTURAL MOMENTUM
This contrast between social and cultural boundaries created by promoting
the music of a social “other” means that the social identity and meaning of folk
music is more plastic than other genres. Folk music’s racial coding is especially
ambiguous and multivalent. All popular culture is embedded with racial codes,
associating genres and racial groups. People think of rhythm and blues as black
or country and western as white partly because most of the performers are of a
particular race, partly because of the themes common to the lyrics, and partly
because the musical forms or tropes are attributed to racial groups. Musical notes
that fall between the notes of the diatonic scale, known as blue notes, are associated
with black music, while singing notes in diatonic pitches with little inflection is
considered white. The codes that define a song as rhythm and blues or country
and western are highly racialized, including the musical forms—both melodic
and rhythmic—the vocal techniques used, and the instrumentation. What makes a
song folk music, both in historical roots and contemporary meaning, while racially
salient, is also highly plastic. The defining feature of the genre is social: A group
with cultural authority defines someone else as the folk—an imagined community
with a common past, making their music “folk music.” Because folk music is
always revivalist, no one calls themselves the folk or says they are writing a
new kind of folk music. But the past of folk music is typically set against the
present, and usually with a message. For the ballad collectors of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries it was a racially pure nation, unsullied by the ills
of modernism. For the leftists of the 1930s and 1940s, it was the virtue of the
“the people” vs. the greed and corruption of the capitalists. For the youth of
the 1960s, it was authenticity vs. the shallowness of commercialization. But the
puzzle is why the last revival, spawned in a moment of interracial hope, became
so white.
Because folk music was a music of the “other” it could easily be appropriated
by anyone who wanted to claim it
[...]
Despite the best efforts of the leftists in the 1930s
and 1940s to promote racial integration by constructing a racially inclusive music,
they had little success in convincing the “folk” that this was their music. Only
in the 1960s, when a generation created a counterculture, pursuing authenticity
through some “other” than the sterile suburban world of their parents, abetted by
a political movement that discovered “their” own music in the protest music of
[page 468]
the past, did a major group of people embrace folk music as their own (Cantwell
1998). So the student movement was simultaneously promoting the construction
of a new genre of folk music, which in the end was very white, and advocating
racial integration in the political and economic realm. When the Civil Rights
movement fractured along racial lines, the white movement abandoned the political
use of music and let it become more identified with white angst than political
activism."...
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