Description
If cosmopolitanism connotes the sophisticated or urbane, if (as Randolph Bourne suggested) it entails a ‘federation of ... foreign cultures,' then the term does not seem to lend itself easily to the range of cultural expressions denoted by the phrase ‘folk music.' While the latter itself accommodates a variety of genres and styles, and more recently has been marketed as a variant on world music, folk music has typically been perceived (and has seen itself) in terms of purity and simplicity; conventionally, too, it has associated itself with such concepts as tradition and roots, particularly when both are grounded in the rural, local or regional. Defined by the International Folk Music Council in 1954 by its community base, by oral transmission, and by a combination of continuity and variation over time, folk music is lent cosmopolitan connotations by none of these qualities. On the contrary, in the United States (and elsewhere) it has been understood and promoted - because of its assumed rooted qualities - as an index of national identity, not trans-national mobility; as an emblem of the authentic against the merely transient.
Yet the American folk music revival that flourished between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s was marked by its trans-Atlantic articulation with a similar revival in Great Britain. While The Beatles led the much-publicized ‘British Invasion' of American pop music beginning in 1964, well before that time a broader, two-way process of less popular, less manifestly commercial, cultural exchange had been developing. Folk music collectors and promoters had been traveling back and forth between the two countries, gathering, learning and adapting songs; so, too, individual musicians and songs: the latter as song sheets and via oral transmission, on vinyl, tape and film. A quest for musical authenticity underwrote an associated cosmopolitanism.
Even as many British and American participants saw in their respective trans-Atlantic ‘other' a source of the original, authentic and unspoiled, however, so some found the resultant quests for the imagined real a threat to their ‘own' authentic folk music. Perceived musical cosmopolitanism thus underwrote an associated quest for authenticity. This paper will explore some of the resultant patterns and paradoxes in the growth of the closely-related American and British revivals. It will pursue the idea that these exchanges and resistances - as traced in the work of Alan Lomax, Peggy Seeger, Paul Simon, Ewan MacColl and many others - fostered the growth of a cosmopolitan folk music that owed much to the traditional mechanisms of folk transmission even as it alienated some of the guardians of tradition.Emneord: folkemusik; Alan Lomax; Ewan MacColl
| Period | 29 May 2009 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Cosmopolitan America: The United States in Transition |
| Event type | Conference |
| Organiser | Nordic Association for American Studies |
| Location | København, DenmarkShow on map |
Keywords
- Folk music
- Alan Lomax
- Ewan MacColl