When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from …
Tag Archives: folk
Tim Eriksen is the best folk musician in the world
I grew up with folk music, attending schools run by hippies and a summer camp run by Pete Seeger’s family. But I didn’t realize that folk music could be cool until I got to college. It was there that my friend Jeremy Withers turned me on to a band called Cordelia’s Dad, fronted by a singer …
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It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Blogging)
My favorite Bob Dylan song is “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding.)” It’s not the one I listen to the most, and it’s not the one I’ve given the most effort to singing or playing. But it’s the one that sounds the most “Bob Dylan-y,” the one that combines all of his many influences into the …
Participatory music vs presentational music
In this post, I’ll be doing some public-facing note-taking on Music As Social Life: The Politics Of Participation by Thomas Turino. I’m especially interested in its second chapter, “Participatory and Presentational Performance”. We in the United States tend to place a high value on presentational music created by professionals, and a low value on participatory …
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The state of the lullaby
Anna wanted to know what my friends are singing to their kids for lullabies. I posted the question on Facebook and got about fifty times more responses than I was expecting. Since I now have all this (highly unscientific) data about lullaby trends in 2014, I figured I would write it all up. Here’s what …
Beatboxing and mashups are the new folk music
Thompson, Tok. Beatboxing, Mashups, and Cyborg Identity: Folk Music for the Twenty-First Century. Western Folklore, Spring 2011, 71-193. Thompson’s provocative thesis is that folk music of the present is either produced entirely digitally, or is performed with the specific intent of imitating electronic sounds. Furthermore, the oral tradition intrinsic to folk music is now substantially …
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Where does the “Egyptian” melody originally come from?
I know this melody as the cartoon snakecharmer song. Here’s a kid playing it on bass clarinet: I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book …
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Jay-Z and Alan Lomax
Why does folk music collector Alan Lomax have a copyright interest in “Takeover” by Jay-Z? I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as …
Harmonica guide
I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession with the Grateful Dead was at its high water mark. The Dead’s first frontman, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a more than respectable blues harmonica player. …
Bach and Paul Simon
Since it was Easter yesterday, Anna wanted to listen to Bach’s St Matthew Passion while we did stuff around the house. A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” — in English, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn’t …