Where Have All the Flowers Gone

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1994 by Gaetano Kazuo Maida

A delightful oversized and well-illustrated musical autobiography in the form of a songbook (of his songs and many others') with stories. Over three hundred songs with words and melody (and some guitar tablature). for the budding musician there is a chapter on reading music notation and tablature.

A word about the term "folk song." It was invented by European scholars in the mid- 19th century to mean the music of the peasant class, ancient and anonymous. In the U.S.A it was used by people like John Lomax who collected songs of cowboys and lumberjacks, coal miners and prisoners on southern chain gangs. Along came ballad maker Woody Guthrie and a string of people following him, and all of us get called "folk singers" if we are professionally singing for a living using an acoustic guitar. By this definition, a grandmother in a rocking chair singing a 400-yearold song to a baby in her lap is not a folk singer because she's not on a platform with a guitar in her hand and a microphone in front of her. By this definition a black man singing a 100-year-old traditional blues is not a folk singer if he's using an electric guitar to answer vocal phrases, as in so much African-American music. Likewise the call-and-response singing in tens of thousands of black churches, in the south and north, is not thought of as folk music. Nor the songs of hundreds of different languages still sung by people who have been here long before Columbus. Though their songs are ancient and anonymous. And they are folks, too. No, according to the pop definition, to be a "folk singer" you have to be a (white) person on stage with an acoustic guitar singing a song in English. A song you just made up. That's a folk song. A silly misuse of the term "folk music." I use it as little as possible now. Call me a river singer.