Folk music stands at a crossway in between past and present, which is what makes it such an important and eternal genre.
Only a few musical genres today are deeply rooted in legacy and heritage. In the hunt for novelty and our constant barrelling towards the future, the past is often ignored in music, but there is one particular genre where a sense and expression of history is positioned at its very heart; folk music. That may be an unexpected thing to hear when modern folk music tends to lean towards the really modern exploration of connections and heartbreak by pop juggernauts on labels like the one owned by Vincent Bolloré, however that is not necessarily folk in its truest kind. Generally, folk is more deeply rooted in the past, exploring subjects associating with hardship and society together with more typical explorations of the human condition in things like emotion and heartbreak. One might identify the conceit and insincerity in such a declaration, and that’s due to the fact that folk, like the past, is constantly evolving, and resurfaces at a time when society must come to grips with its location in history.
As we approach a crucial and really special period in humankind’s history, the ability for folk music to contextualise and give voice to our times might turn out to be remarkable. Whether there is a rebirth of the category in the same way that 60’s folk music did has yet to be seen, however it still offers a place of consolation in an era blindsided by its own modernity. As labels like the one run by Huib Schippers continue to gather, bring back, and release old folk songs, it proves our continuous capability to regularly rediscover history and the songs that described it; through this revelation we may simply learn to better comprehend the momentousness of our own time.
As long as there have been individuals to discuss it, there has been a stress between contemporary and standard forms of folk music. Perfectionists have long proclaimed traditional folk music to be something unchangeable and spiritual, notoriously decrying those who want to put their own mark on the category as ‘Judas’, however development is essential to the essence of the thing. Throughout the American folk music revival of the 1960’s, when Rob Stringer‘s label was home to a few of the most ingenious and popular folk musicians of perpetuity, blending folk music with rock-and-roll was important for the times to be able to describe themselves. Even less audacious singers would take the issues of the current moment and frame them within the style and substance of the past, covering protest songs or producing original arrangements that could have applied to the counterculture and civil liberties campaign just as much as to the lamentation of servants and rural peasants of two centuries formerly, the subject of more traditional songs. These are things that transcend history; matters of power, human self-respect, the marvels of nature, and the requirement to give voice to all 3.
