Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. . - book review

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by Aaron Lecklider

By Benjamin Filene (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

In 1999, the popular DJ and electronic performer Moby released Play, an album of vintage American field recordings expropriated as dance music. Though the album was largely a commercial and critical success, it also spawned a loud critical backlash. How could a pop artist disrespect pure folk song for the sake of crass popular tastes? How could these simple songs be so debased? What about their cultural heritage? Was nothing sacred? In Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, Benjamin Filene aptly demonstrates that, far from being a recent phenomenon, critical inquiry into the nature of authenticity and American "vernacular culture" has been instrumental in the development, dissemination, and evaluation of American roots music from at least the late nineteenth century forward.

Filene's fine study examines the performers Lead Belly (note corrected spelling), Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan to discover how "folklorists" promoters, scholars, the iconic folksong collecting team of John and Alan Lomax "made judgments about what constituted America's true musical traditions, helped shape what 'mainstream' audiences recognized as authentic, and, inevitably, transformed the music that the folk performers offered" (5). Filene calls this process the "cult of authenticity," the production of "a web of criteria for determining what a 'true' folk singer looked and sounded like and a set of assumptions about the importance of being a 'true' folk singer" (49). Though early academics like Harvard professor Francis James Child may have had an academic interest in cataloguing British folk songs, it wasn't until the Lomax team lugged their 350-pound recorder across the South on a "part talent search, part sociological survey, and part safari" (50) that the romance of the folk began in earnes t.

The Lomax's greatest discovery, Lead Belly, demonstrates for Filene how problematic terms like "authenticity" can be when the authentic subject speaks for himself. The case of Lead Belly, discovered in a prison and carted around from stage to stage, "illustrates how contact with the Lomaxes and the world of commercial recordings affected Lead Bell/s sense of what would appeal to white audiences" (678). A flurry of cultural forces, including an implied cultural racism that demanded Lead Belly be promoted as a dangerous monster, and an American impulse towards a documentary style in the 1930s, contributed to Lead Belly's success. In his most devastating illustration of folk culture's sentimental "Orhering," Filene quotes a letter from Lead Belly to Alan Lomax, revealing the impossible conflict of his position as an authentic performer: "If your Papa come I would like for Him to Here me sing if He say i Have Change any whitch i Don't think i have and never will But to Be [sure] to get his ideas about it i would feel good over what ever he say about it" (73). "Like many roots musicians," Filene concludes from his example, "Lead Belly found his way out of this limbo only after his death" (74).

Muddy Waters provides a second case study for American roots music. Originally discovered by Alan Lomax, Muddy Waters attained his fame after teaming up with Willie Dixon and recording for Leonard Chess. Though his career was marked by a seemingly endless series of stops and starts, Filene locates Waters's success of the 1950s in "the mid-century collectors' conception of African American culture [...] Disillusioned with what they perceived as bourgeois culture's corrupt materialism and constraining standards of propriety, they depicted bluesmen as the embodiments of an antimodern ethos" (116). In a particularly strong moment of his analysis, Filene notes that Muddy Waters was most successful when Dixon tapped him as part of his "memory business" (127). Though Muddy Waters may have resented the intrusions into his blues, "The portrait of the 'true bluesman' that Dixon created left space for performers to remain generative artists with strong connections to contemporary culture. Dixon showed that a roots figur e could be 'Other' without being marginalized, 'traditional' without being static, and 'archetypal' without being obsolete" (132). Waters represents, in Filene's argument, a "mastery" of the "cult of authenticity."

Filene concentrates next on the institutionalization of folk music, which he ties in with the major anthropological contribution to scholars of the 1950s and later: functionalism. As opposed to an outmoded evolutionary model which saw folk music as relics, functionalism offered an expansive view that saw" the survival of the form of folk expression was not a remarkable fluke but a sign of that form's extraordinary vitality and cultural utility" (138). With the encouragement of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the definition of folk music was expanded beyond isolated rural communities, and encouraged a connection between folk culture and social activism (150). On the other end of the spectrum, academics began to institutionalize folk culture "to establish and codify its methods and standards in the hope that it at last would command the respect of other disciplines and, not incidentally, win the favor of foundations and government grant-giving agencies" (164). With the encouragement of men like Richard Dorson, f olklife became a vital and, not incidentally, stilted tool for understanding American culture.