Digitizing the Great Folk Scare

digitizing folk music history seminar notes, 2011.

1. Why collect? Collecting, archives, organizing culture, culture brokers, interveners, shapers, mediators. Look at old song collections, perhaps the old version of “websites”? Or not?

2. Digital history: what might we do? These are not examples to follow, but sites to look at to think about what works and what doesn’t. You are at the cutting edge here, research-wise.

• “Tom Dooley”: The Ballad That Started The Folk Boom
• The Legend of Tom Dula
• The Old, Weird America: My Exploration of Harry Smith’s Anthology
• The Jabberwock History, Chicken on a Unicycle website
• Lawrence Levine, “Analyzing Blues Songs,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, July 2002

2. Folk revival clip, from ARM. Naming the moment:

Folk Revival?

Folk Arrival – Ralph Rinzler?

The Great Folk Scare – Bob Gibson?

Roots Music? A way to get at wider range of musical styles, ethnic origins, crossover to commercial popular music and back to vernacular contexts?

We tend to worry about pop stealing from folk music, watering it down, or folk artists “selling out,” but perhaps we should look at it the other way around: pop is the testing ground for folk, not folk a feeder into pop? Folk lasts longer, traditions emerge from the seedbed of popular music?

Let’s continue to think about categories of musical style and genre relationships as productive problems for our thinking.