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.