[On July 25th,
1965 Bob Dylan famously—or
infamously—plugged in an electric guitar on stage for the first time, as
part of the Newport Folk
Festival. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a few other
American folk music topics!]
On three artists/groups
who are extending the folk legacy into our own moment.
1)
Steve Earle:
Earle could be described as part of many musical genres—country, rock, bluegrass,
and more—but I’m aware that folk has not generally (or at least not frequently)
been one of them. Yet there’s a reason I linked Earle to Woody Guthrie in
this post, and it’s not just that specific song in the chorus of which
Earle name-checks Woody. If, as this week’s posts have certainly demonstrated,
a central component of American folk music is its willingness to ask big
questions about and challenge dominant narratives of American culture and
identity, then I don’t think any late 20th and early 21st
century artist has assumed the mantle of Guthrie and Seeger and Baez and Dylan
any more fully or meaningfully than Steve Earle. This isn’t the only thing American
folk music can or should do, but it’s at least a clear and persistent thread, and
for more than three decades now Steve Earle has been weaving his way into that
pattern with humor, thoughtfulness, badass outlaw perspective, and some of our
best political
and protest music ever.
2)
Aoife O’Donovan:
I’m admittedly biased here, as O’Donovan has for most of her career to date been
a member of Crooked Still, a
Boston-based bluegrass/folk group that also features my high school friend (and
MIT grad, and Springsteen
Seeger Sessions band member!) Greg Liszt on banjo. But
in her own right, and especially as she has moved into her early and evolving
career as a solo artist, O’Donovan has woven together a number of threads that
comprise significant elements of 21st century American folk music:
multi-ethnic influences and legacies (in O’Donovan’s case particularly Irish
American ones); the intersections of bluegrass and traditional folk sounds and
tropes with more modern singer-songwriter ones; and multi-media contexts such
as Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion program (with
which O’Donovan has played and toured, well before the #metoo scandals that
have since enveloped Keillor). Like any genre or medium, folk music has to
evolve in our own moment in order to stay relevant and interesting, and O’Donovan
and her blossoming career reflect many of the most promising such evolutions.
3)
case/lang/veirs:
Laura Veirs is the most overtly folk
member of this new supergroup, which also features country star Neko
Case and the utterly unique and genre-busting k.d. lang. As a result, I don’t know that I’d
call case/lang/veirs’s overall sound particularly folk-inspired or –influenced,
although that’s perhaps an undertone in there (among many others). Instead, I
highlight this group (rather than just Veirs herself) to note the simple fact
that 21st century American folk music, like most of our artistic
genres and media, is likely to rely more and more on collaborations and
cross-pollinations in order to survive and prosper. Of course individual
artists can still carve a space for their voice and work, as Veirs has begun to
do; but it seems clear to me that the more such individuals can also work with
others, finding new and bigger venues and audiences and conversations, the more
sustained their success can be. Since we need a vibrant American folk music
scene now more than ever, I’m all for any and every strategy that can help our
folk artists survive and prosper!
July Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Folk music moments or texts you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment