The Folk Mass

 

In my youth, in the wake of Vatican II, the Church decided to jettison all the liturgical music of the past two millennia, The Beethoven and the Bach and the like, generally written for choir and organ, in favour of the “folk mass,” with guitar, up in the front of the church. Folk, after all, was what all the youngsters were listening to. The church was going to be hep.

Except—I was one of those youngsters, who adored folk music. A tradition is rich with deeply religious songs. Indeed, rock itself is only secularized gospel music. “Go Tell It on the Mountain”; “We Shall Not Be Moved”; “We Shall Overcome”; “Turn! Turn! Turn!”; “Children, Go Where I Send Thee”; and the like, were on the radio every day.

But the church did not go to real folk music. Instead, they had a small group of St. Louis Jesuits compose almost the entire new hymn book, with songs presumably in the folk tradition; but soulless and trite. Hallmark Card stuff. To anyone who loved either folk music, or true religion, it was offensive.

The low point, for me, was when I passed a Catholic Church in grad school days, and the carillon was playing the notes of John Denver’s “Sunshine on my Shoulders.” 

“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high”

Why didn’t the church use true folk music? I suspect a need to control, a Pharisaic fear of the Holy Spirit. But probably also because, in the English world, the folk music other than that substantial body out of Ireland was mostly going to be written by Protestants, and express Protestant theology. For example, “The Old Rugged Cross”:

“And exchange it one day for a crown.”

That easy conviction that one is going to heaven would be, to Catholicism, the sin of pride, and a likely ticket in the opposite direction.

Still, there was a ready alternative, a better road not taken. There is a rich Catholic folk tradition in non-English-speaking countries. The lyrics need only be translated. My wife and I were the choir back in Athabasca, and the priest allowed us to sing the English version of the Spanish song “Pescador de Hombres.” Not included I the regulation hymn book, but he had pasted it inside the back cover. A visitor came up to us afterward and said it wax the most beautiful thing he had ever heard in a church.

“O Lord, with a glance you embraced me:
Then you smiled and whispered my name.
I’ve abandoned my boat in the harbour;
Close to You I will seek other shores.”

For that matter, the good old Protestant hymns could be adapted.

“So I'll cherish the old rugged Cross
Till my trophies, at last, I lay down
I will cling to the old rugged Cross
And wear every thorn like a crown.”

Some day, I pray, the Church will come to its senses on liturgical music. 

But how long, O Lord, how long?

Hang Me, Oh Hang Me

 

I recently ran across two longish documentaries on YouTube about the American Folk Revival of the early 1960s, in Greenwich Village. Great nostalgia for me.

I love that stuff. That was always my music. I loved it back in the 60s, when everybody else did. In the 1980s, I used to haunt used record stores picking up discarded folk LPs from that era. Everyone else was throwing them out. I have fantasies that one day, they will be valued again, just like Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music back in the 1950s. It is in the nature of folk music that it ebbs and flows. We’re due for another revival. So much of what we listen to now is junk.

For some, folk music is a political thing.   Back at Athabasca U, there was an active folk culture, but it was all the sociology and poli sci types; and they were all socialists. In fact, the 1940s and 50s folk revival was directly connected to the socialists and communists. This was supposedly, after all, the music of the working class.

This is not what speaks to me. It never did. My politics then as now were liberal; that is, libertarian. I could get behind the civil rights movement; I thought the war in Vietnam was ill-advised, but not immoral. I wanted nothing to do with Marxism. And the real music of the working class is rock and roll, in the city, and country and western, in the small towns. Partly, I suspect, because these middle class socialists went and politicized folk.

A big part of what did appeal to me is the emphasis on the lyrics, certainly. The folk boom segued in on the receding waves of the beatnik poetry era; and took over the same coffee houses. 

Someone has described the movie Inside Llewyn Davis as a portrait of depression. That may be the real key. Folk music is almost always sad. Not just the songs composed during the 60s folk boom. Go back to the Child Ballads. Go back to the blues. When there is a rare exception, that is the folk music I do not like. Can’t abide Melanie; can’t abide John Denver. I was always rubbed the wrong way by Pete Seeger’s chipmunk cheerfulness and “sing along with me” shtick. 

Many can’t abide my very favourite singer-songwriter of them all, Leonard Cohen, because he is supposedly too gloomy.

But it works for me. As Aristotle pointed out so many years ago: art purges the excess of some emotion. If you have an excess of fear and pity, tragedy soothes you. If you have an excess of sorrow, if you are oppressed, folk music is the cure. If you have an excess of energy, try rock and roll. And so forth. You are what you listen to. Folk music is a treatment for depression.

This comes, of course, from it being originally the music of the downtrodden. Downtrodden in a way the modern working class is not. 

Inside Llewyn Davis

I have been reading a lot of reviews of the latest Coen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which I recently saw myself. And I think everyone has it wrong.

Here are the interpretations I've seen:

1. The Coens are positing that nihilism may be the true nature of the world: everything is chaos.

2. Davis is a failed artist facing the tough decision to change his career.

3. Davis is feckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

First, let's clear the field:

1. One element of the film is definitely non-chaotic, and it is the one most crucial element: the music. Perhaps everything other than art is chaos.

2. Davis is based on Dave Van Ronk. The discouragements he faces are largely discouragements faced by Van Ronk himself in his autobiography. And Dave Van Ronk was a successful, not a failed, artist. The discouragements he faced are no worse than the discouragements most artists go through, even the very best. Moreover, we hear Davis for ourselves in the movie: he is quite good.

3. Feckless? Davis shows unusual concern throughout the movie over the welfare of a cat, even when the cat he has charge of is an anonymous stray. Although it turns out she has had sex with a variety of men, any one of whom might be the father, it is the impoverished Davis who takes responsibility and arranges and pays for his girl friend's abortion. He loses his temper a few times; but in a way that seems, in the circumstances as presented, natural and forgivable.

The original.

Interpretations two and three, I fear, are generated by the sadly common human tendency to blame anyone who is obviously suffering for their own predicament. Inside Llewyn Davis is certainly, as everyone agrees, a depressing movie.

But here's what it is really all about: the movie presents the world as it really is experienced by the typical artist, or anyone of an artistic temperament. Hence the title, “Inside Llewyn Davis”: you are seeing the world as the generic artist of the title sees it, from inside his head. And, as Keats once warned, there is no romance there: “the poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence.”

This is not just about how hard it is, objectively, to make a living in the arts. It is about the same for “successful” artists, like Van Ronk or the Coens. To resort to a common idiom, to the artist, life in the streets is like herding cats. Nothing outside of art ever works as it is supposed to. Nobody else ever seems to get the art. Notably, every time Davis performs a song, it is followed by some obvious letdown. Bud Grossman sees no money in it; his father, seemingly unaware, just soils himself; Davis gets called out after his encore and beaten up in the alley. Nobody hears the music he hears.

If that is depressing—well, there is a reason why almost all good artists are depressives.

And these reviews confirm the general truth: nobody seems to get Llewyn Davis.

The Essential Canadian Songs

Recently, an Irish friend of mine has been regaling me with his favourite music. I was inspired to  try to put together, from what is available on YouTube, a complilation of songs that would introduce him to what Canadian traditional music has to offer.

I offer this for the enjoyment of fellow Canadians, to introduce others to the essence of Canadian culture, and most of all as a fiercely felt rebuttal to those who do not believe Canada has a distinct and unified culture. I challenge those, especially Canadians, who pathetically ignore or deride Canadian culture in favour of an imported "multiculturalism."

For if you listen to these songs, you find that they hang together as one vast work. Themes are repeated:  the pain of going away, movement across great distances, growing up, the family, the seasons turning, the ordinary life of ordinary people. Most of all, as I see it, there is a distinct Canadian theme of the ordinary man trying to survive in the face of vast forces that always threaten to overwhelm him. Just as Margaret Atwood has said: the Canadian theme is Survival. It is the heroism of everyday life.

No pretension for Canadians, and no faith in the possibility of changing the world. It is the little way, with little, personal, transcendences.

As a Canadian, listening to it, I nurse the suspicion that, on this, of all the world's people, only Canadians are truly sane.

Let's buiild on what we have.

Here's the playlist. Be sure to select "shuffle."