(TV) Folk Art, Let's Dance!

[Jesse Hochstadt <Jesse_Hochstadt@Brown.edu>]

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
--------------
To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"