Folk Art (was: NBC: Re: Re: Blacks , Whites & Blues)
BluesGeek
In a message dated 2/26/98 10:49:09 PM, borris...@yahoo.com wrote:
>Once completed, the work was sometimes
>thrown away following the ceremony or left in a ceremonial hut or
>abandoned in the forest. It brought no glory or gain to its creator
>nor was it celebrated in and of itself. It was a spiritual,
>ritualistic portal. THIS IS FOLK ART.
>
>Blues was once a folk art. It is no longer. Consumer mass society is
>antithetical to folk art. It produces commodities.
<snip>
>Nothing like that exists in the market place. The market place, like
>an insecticide, kills. It only understands THINGS. How can one assign
>a literal, rational meaning or value to "don't sweep me with no
>broom"? Only nerdy, engineer nobodies would bother with literal,
>logical explications, like learning the price of a gallon of gas this
>week, like killing a butterfly and mounting it. GET IT?
Here is an extreme read of what seems to be an extreme view. It appears that
your opinion is that the conditional classification of blues as folk art is
dependent on it being immediate, relevant to the moment and locus, not
preserved and not associated with any commodity. If these conditions are the
only consideration, blues began to lose its status as folk art when the first
artists began to make records for commercial consumption. If throwing away the
art is requisite, then even the documentary field recordings served to shatter
blues as a folk art. In fact, under this definition, any consumption at all,
except by the community to which the art is umbilically connected and which is
consummed in the immediate moment of performance, is not folk art.
Further, the pursuit of money, fame, recognition, sex, intoxication, and other
material goals, through the playing of blues, by even the early hoboing Delta
players, violates the folk art ethic.
This perspective excludes much of what would be considered folk blues by
popular definition. Very interesting, indeed.
-dave
BluesGeek
In a message dated 2/27/98 11:47:53 AM, borris...@yahoo.com wrote:
>The retreads have lost this folk art content entirely. They are not
>singing songs with original meanings. They may entertain but they no
>longer enrich or inform lives with meaning. They are pantomining,
>sleepwalking, going through empty motions that only indirectly refer
>to the real thing. They have kept the shell, the form, but the
>contents have dried out and died. They are not communicating on the
>level of Being, which is what art does. This requires transparency,
>while they are opaque, dead.
Your remarks serve well to set forth the requirements for any blues music to
be valued as a true and genuine. I am particularly drawn to your mention of
"meaning," which is probably the single most essential consideration for
evaluating the importance of any blues expression. In that light, there is
always the question of how many of the the mass of unknown first and second
generation blues artists were also no more than the retreads you describe. I
wasn't there, so I can only surmise that there have always been good and bad
blues players. Today's artist of marginal talent, instead of remaining
unknown, can get a CD and airplay and often enjoy success and popularity
beyond his merits. The lack of documentation of past music, when compared
with the relative ease of recording and disseminating music today, may skew
our perspectives.
Something else to remember as we look at blues as folk art, there are still
many artists, toiling in obscurity for one reason or another. For example, the
great Johnny Long (age about 45) is a true, deep and haunting folk artist of
our time, living in the Denver area, who plays as if possessed by the souls of
Robert Johnson and Homesick James (if anyone has ever been to the crossroads
it is Johnny). Johnny does have a self-produced cassette tape, with no
distribution outside of the music stores in the local area. I wonder how many
others...
>Things have gotten so bad, musicians with the least bit of
>authenticity left in them--e.g., R.L. Burnside--are immediately
>elevated to the stature of gods, whereas they would have been of mere
>sidline interest in the '60's. John Lee Hooker has been lionized, made
>into an institution, when clearly his best work is far behind him.
>It's as if we are bestowing upon him gratitude and giving him credit
>for merely surviving. This would not be a remarkable achievement if we
>weren't living in a desert.
I would hope that the reverence shown to Hooker is in consideration of his
singular contribution to the idiom and his influence on popular music, with
the lionization, due in great part to efforts on the part of others to effect
just that, in recognition of his monumental achievement as a bluesman, past
and present.
-dave