Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music

by Benjamin Filene

Book Overview

In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807825506
• ISBN13: 9780807825501
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Strong and Engaging, and Very Readable

Benjamin Filene's account of the origins of the category of "American roots music" is inexorably aimed at peeling away discursive layers within that very term itself to reveal the historical continuities and disjunctures at the heart of it. As Filene puts it: "What makes the formation of America's folk canon so fascinating, though, is that just as isolated cultures became harder to define and locate in industrialized America. the notions of musical purity and primitivism took on enhanced value, even in avowedly commercial music. Twentieth-century Americans have been consistently searching for the latest incarnation of 'old-time' and 'authentic' music." And Filene shows deftly how these categories are heavily inflected with racial and class issues. But Filene's work begins much earlier, with the early 19th century effort in the US and later in the UK to collect and collate British folk song texts and sometimes the tunes that went this them. He demonstrates that this effort was thoroughly infused with romanticism--an attempt to record and preserve a "better" culture before capitalism, greed, irreligion and science came along. This grew from the German philosophical fascination with the 'Kultur des Volkes,' and into an impulse to forge a British national culture based on the English peasantry---even sometimes as found in the American Appalachian population (!)---and of course, an undertone, made explicit here and there--of racial purity. This is especially significant in that popular interest in anything like folk song appears to have begun for African-American forms before Anglo ones--but was apparently stopped by the mythic valorization of whites as true folk. It seems that Anglo songs edged out other types as the basis of this new mythic canon that was forming, even as the Fisk singers and blackface minstrelsy became more popular in the 1870's. In fact, Filene argues convincingly that the way in which Black folk songs (spirituals) were collated preserved an idea of Black passivity and the exotic gaze in whites. Of course blackface minstrel performances reinforced this. The only other challenge was Lomax's collection of cowboy ballads, which he unsuccessfully tried to peg to the spirit of English rural culture. In the 1920's attempts at using a more racially and geographically inclusive cultural building with rural songs, white, black, and latino, were undertaken by poet Carl Sandburg. Most of the book deals with the legacy of the cult of authenticity created and shaped by the Lomaxes from their field recordings and artist promotion. Their zeal for collecting and promoting their ideas of "true folk singers" cannot be underestimated, and in doing so, they shifted the canon away from whiteness, or so it seemed. Filene's account of The Lomaxes and Lead Belly perhaps best demonstrates the role of exoticism in producing authentic "American"ness at that particular time. The tours undertaken by the Lomaxes emphasize Lead Belly's virtuosity and expa

Clamoring for more from Filene

This is a historically thorough yet immensely enjoyable work. Filene's take on "roots music" is refreshing--honest and free of gushing hyperbole; just cynical enough without ever becoming acerbic.The stories Filene chooses to tell are illuminating and often funny--Leonard Chess faking his way through Blues hitmaking; Leadbelly being marketed as a country bumpkin in overalls when he preferred to wear suits.There are so many more stories to be told, though--musicians to discuss, angles of the folk boom to expand, that I wish Filene would write more--perhaps another volume.

The Roots Behind Roots Music

Most books about popular music fall into one of two categories. You have your pretentious rock n' roll critic who writes in impenetrable and cryptic prose (Hello Anthony DeCurtis and Robert Christgau) or you have purely academic writings that miss the heart of what is often music felt at a gut level. Then along comes Benjamin Filene. Filene offers up a brilliant discussion of the ways in which folk music became a part of our American consciousness. Profiling the careers of such artists as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, "Romancing the Folk" presents an extremely lively, readable and well thought out discussion of the way folk music was presented to the American public and ultimately accepted as a valid art form in its own right. In doing so, Filene breaks from the stale world of traditional popular music writing and gives you a fine read while you listen to "Blood on the Tracks," "Goodnight Irene," "Hoochie Coochie Man" or "Talking Union."