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

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by Aaron Lecklider

The final chapter of Filene's book is dedicated to Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, both of whom "grew up outside the regional or ethnic traditions that produced roots music but who became public performers of and emissaries for that music" (186). Filene connects Seeger with the idea of folk music as process. By including such diverse sources as show tunes and Tin Pan Alley blues on his "folk" albums, Seeger "illustrate [s] how such forms can be subjected to the folk process - or, rather, to Seeger's personalized folk process" (196), an idea that extended to Seeger's most famous contribution to music history: the sing-along. Dylan was marked by "his folksy image, knowledge of American roots music, dedication to revitalizing folk music traditions, and political idealism" (210). Yet Filene also detects in Dylan a "suspicion of cohesion and commitment" (214), illustrated by the fact that by the mid-1960s he had lain his progressive political image to rest. This shift "renounced one manifestation of the Folk revival, n ot revivalism as a whole," Filene notes, and Dylan's post-1965 output "represents a transmutation, not an abdication, of the folk-stylist role" (215). "Dylan," in Filene's final analysis, "strove both to absorb the essence of individual roots traditions and to stretch the boundaries of each genre" (227), a striking contrast to Pete Seeger's purist project. It is Dylan's impulse that represents the most lasting contribution of folk music to American culture: "that memory can create American culture anew" (236).

Benjamin Filene's book fits in easily with a growing body of scholarship that critically examines the idea of authenticity as it relates to American popular music. There is no longer any denying the claim that authenticity, a constructed term, has been vital to the formation and reception of virtually every "American" musical genre from Tin Pan Alley to rap. The breadth of this line of inquiry has been best illustrated in Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick's co-edited volume American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (2001), which has been expanded by the University of Massachusetts Press into a book series under their editorship. The novelty of Filene's contribution to the field lies in three primary areas. First, he is chiefly concerned with the relationship between producers, promoters, and consumers. This middle group (the so-called "folklorists") offsets the traditional model of text- and/or reception-oriented analysis so cherished by earlier scholars, and consequently upsets the groun ds upon which "authenticity" has been used in historical scholarship to validate artificial (and, as Filene strongly indicates, often racist) claims to advance questionable assumptions about American culture. Erasing the limiting parameters of acceptable forms of discourse for understanding pop music leads to a radical rejection of troubling conclusions like American exceptionalism.

Second, Filene's study broadens the scope of inquiry into "folk culture" (and even "vernacular music") by focusing on the genre of "roots music." By leaving aside a problematic and arbitrary distinction that has had dramatic implications for much earlier scholarship on American musical forms and in fact strongly questioning its role in the production of public memory Filene is able to place a figure like Lead Belly next to the later Muddy Waters, a coupling which has been too easily assimilated by historians into already standing ideas about the conflict of rural and urban forms. Placing memory at the center of his argument allows Filene to set aside sweeping claims usually too easily assumed by musical historians.