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(TV) Folk Art, Let's Dance!



Joe Thornton wrote:

Interesting article about folk-rock in the Guardian today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,938231,00.html

As a Richard Thompson fan who attended Fairport Convention's 35th-anniversary festival last summer, I thought this was a rather stupid article. Although the news that there's reviving interest in British folk-rock is interesting, the writer seems to bend the facts tendentiously to make matters seem more significant than they are. Specifically, he switches back and forth between using the term "folk" to refer to pre-folk-rock and to refer to folk-rock:

Other countries zealously guard their musical heritage; the US has turned its folk music into a multi-million-dollar industry. Yet the English seem embarrassed by their folk.

Here the multi-million-dollar industry would seem to refer to American folk-rock, including the Byrds, latter-day Dylan, and our beloved Eagles. Or have Rounder, Shanachie, and other folk-oriented labels been rolling in more dough than I've been aware of?

In a way, it's the folkies' own fault. Their card has been marked since the mid-1960s, when some of them indulged in a vocal attempt to halt the progress of rock music. If the folk fans who heckled Dylan for going electric had had their way, rock's most innovative and productive era would never have happened. We would never have seen Highway 61 Revisited, Revolver and Eight Miles High, having to make do instead with bearded men singing unaccompanied songs about bonny young lasses with barley-brown hair. No wonder folkies have been regarded with suspicion ever since.

But here "folk" and "folkies" are obviously code-words for a kind of insufferably quaint and nostalgic strain of music. But that changed in England with Fairport Convention's mutation from "the British Jefferson Airplane" (listen to their first album) to the inventors of the particularly British brand of folk-rock.

By the way, the heckling of Dylan, at least the famous incident at the Newport Folk Festival, seems to be largely a myth. I don't have sources, but there was a lot of discussion of this last year, when Dylan played at Newport for the first time in a very long time (perhaps since "going electric"?). I seem to recall a big article on this in the New York Times last summer.

It's cool to read that Bert Jansch is playing again, though. I saw John Renbourn last year and he said he hadn't seen Jansch in a very long time, and that he thought Jansch had taken up with some rich woman and stopped playing publicly.

Staying mildly on topic (about folk-rock, not Television), there was also an irritating article in the NY Times Arts and Leisure section last weekend about Christopher Guest's new film "A Mighty Wind," which does for "folk music" what his "Best in Show" did for dog shows and his "Waiting for Guffman" did for regional theater. The article's author, David Hajdu, the writer of a widely acclaimed book on the early New York folk scene (Dylan, Baez, etc.), faults the film for focusing on the more commercial easy-listening style of folk of the Kingston Trio ("Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley") and their ilk and avoiding the serious Dylan-style. and his ilk. Of course this completely misses the point that Guest's films are not primarily parodies of their settings - does Hajdu really think dog shows and regional theater were crying out to be satirized? - but, rather, whimsical character comedies. Even "This Is Spinal Tap" (in which Guest played Nigel Tufnel), while more of a parody, was largely character driven.

Rant mode off,

Jesse
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