The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his060/misc08.arj/MISC08.TXT

Text File | 1989-02-02 | 6.5 KB | 126 lines

          A History of Folk: It all Started with Perry Como
                            By Dave Barry
                    From the Philadelphia Enquirer

.    Folk music, like roast beef, originated in England hundreds of
years ago.  Life was very hard.  The peasants worked 15 hours a day
whacking at the soil with primitive tools and being conquered by the
French.  So to entertain themselves they invented folk music, which
told of the life of the common people:

.    "A young maiden fair she didst wander to the glade; A young
maiden fair she didst wander to the glade;  When a nobleman on
horseback - He did break her shoulder blade."

.    These songs were sung by gangs of minstrels who roamed from town
to town wearing tights.  They would drone on for hours, singing
thousands of virtually identical verses and strumming on their Lutes,
which were the forerunners of the ukulele.  Nobody liked it much, but
it sure beat whacking the soil.

.    When the first colonists came to America, they brought folk music
with them.  But America, what with the Bill of Rights and all, was far
less depressing than England, so after a while Americans got into
happier music, such as Magic Moments by Perry Como.

.    By the 1950s, the only people who sang folk music were people who
were still fairly depressed, primarily black people and residents of
West Virginia.

.    So for a while there it looked as though folk music was going to
die out altogether.  But then came the Kingston Trio.  They wore crew
cuts and identical sporty shirts and looked so prosperous you expected
them to offer stock market tips between songs.  They sang songs such
as Tom Dooley:

.    Met her on the mountain,
.    There I took her life,
.    Met her on the mountain,
.    Stabbed her with my knife.

.    Now, presumably this song is supposed to be depressing.  The
Kingston Trio tried to look depressed when they sang it - wrinkling
their crew-cut foreheads and all - but they were so cheerful about it
that you really didn't care what Tom Dooley did to her on the
mountain.  It was all good fun.  And that was folk singing in the
1950s.

.    In the 1960s a New Trend developed, a trend so subtle that at
first even Newsweek magazine didn't pick up on it.  President Kennedy
started the trend by pointing out that some people really were
suffering (although how he figured this out is beyond me).  Anyway,
the nation's young people were quick to respond.  Some joined the
Peace Corps.  Many bought guitars.  A dedicated few joined the Peace
Corps and bought guitars.  With these guitars they sang folk songs,
because these are the songs of human suffering and you can play them
with minimal training and talent.

.    Soon folk singing was all the rage.  If you went to a party, you
were immediately surrounded by dozens of people wielding expensive
guitars and badgering you to help them sing songs about human
suffering and freight trains.  These songfests were called
"hootenannies" and were among the most embarrassing activities
Americans have ever participated in.  I mean, most of the people
singing these songs of human suffering were white, middle-class kids
whose sole encounter with suffering was the time they drove the MG
into the swimming pool after the senior prom and Dad got really ticked
off.

.    Fortunately, about this time civil rights and peace were
discovered and suddenly young people had something real to suffer
about.  I was at Haverford College at the time, and my friends and I
used to sit around our dormitory rooms singing songs favoring civil
rights.  The only problem was that we lacked actual oppressed black
people to sing with us.  The black students at Haverford tended to
have IQ's of about 180, were studying to become doctors and had little
apparent interest in singing songs about suffering.

.    Occasionally, of course, we went out in the real world to sing
protest songs, especially around the Washington Monument, which is an
excellent facility for protesting.  We white college students would
arrive in bus loads from our dormitories, and oppressed people would
arrive in bus loads form wherever they lived.  We would all protest,
and then we'd all get back on our buses and go back to our dormitories
and oppressed places, respectively.

.    All this protesting led to the emergence of professional protest
folk singers, who sold millions of records about human suffering.  One
of the first major protest folk singers was Joan Baez, who was very
popular at protests because she was extremely sincere.  She had enough
sincerity to power a city the size of Pittsburgh for a year.  She was
opposed to human suffering, and she didn't care who knew it.

.    But the biggest protest folk-singing superstar of all was Bob
Dylan.  He captured the imagination of the '60s generation with his
unforgettable lyrics about justice and human dignity.  The answer, he
tried to teach us, was blowin' in the wind, whatever that meant.

.    Dylan went on to become extremely wealthy and religious (in that
order) and played a big role in making the singing of songs about
wretched, poverty-stricken folks a major industry.  You'd go to a
concert and some big-time folk-singing star would say:  "I'd like to
do a song for you now called De Mule Done Crushed My Woman by a great
black singer and songwriter from Mississippi, Buford (Hog Man)
Washington.  You'll find this song on my latest album, Large Amounts
of Pain."

.    Eventually, some concert promoters got the idea that, rather than
listen to some 25-year-old white folk-singing star sing De Mule Done
Crushed My Woman, people might want to hear Buford (Hog Man)
Washington, the actual 70-year-old folk person and oppressed sufferer,
sing it.  So they'd go down to Mississippi and find him working at
some feed store for $1.35 and hour, and they'd fly him up for a
concert.  But he wouldn't have any amplifiers and he'd mumble so much
that nobody could understand him, so about 15 minutes after the
concert, Hog Man would be on a bus headed back to the feed store.

.    In the late 1960s, folk music began to die out, Human suffering
became less popular as young people started getting into marketing.
But folk music is still alive, right here in the Philadelphia area.
Each summer, thousands of people drive their wood-burning Volkswagen
microbuses here for the Philadelphia Folk Festival.  They play
guitars, sing folk songs and protest things, just like they used to.
The most popular protest item is nuclear power, although American
Indians have also shown good staying power.