digitizing folk music history seminar notes, 12 april 2011.
I Guidelines for final interpretive digital project posted
II Questions, logistics
-Yes, you can take your own photographs of materials in BFF collection, you just need to sign a researcher form, I’ll clarify with the librarians there.
-Audio/Visual material from the collection is on its way and will be posted on our course wordpress site as soon as possible.
III When We Were Good: What is noble about folk?
The meaning of “Good” in the title
Quality of music?
Well-behaved?
Class?
Nobility, the deep roots in Western romanticism?
Vestiges of feudalism, implications of democracy (all citizens will become noble?)
IV A different kind of roots music: Cantwell traces roots of the cultural processes that created the postwar folk revival.
-Minstrelsy
-Romanticism
-Nativist (White Top Festival)
-Leftwing Communism, “the people,” the proletariat, the peasants
-Jewish Broadway culture
-Tin Pan Alley/Emerging music industry
-Academic scholars, collectors, theorizers
-Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, American intellectuals/bohemians/progressives
-Atomic age anxieties (Joan Baez misquote, “I sang for troubled intellectuals with the Bomb on their minds”)
-Postwar baby boom generational identity, generational experience
Quote about “cultural ectoplasm,” p. 18 – What is Cantwell’s methodology of cultural history as it relates to power? Compare to Dave Evans 4 stages of the folk revival.
Conversation
Is folk music indicative of a kind of paternalism? Linked to historical vestiges of nobility?
What about the appreciation and love by those outside a tradition for the art of a different person or people?
Eric Lott’s notion of “love and theft” from study of 19th century blackface minstrelsy (also a Bob Dylan album title, 2001)
Folk music as a “noble idea,” 37-45
What did I forget? Add comments if you wish.