The blurb on the back of the book opens with this question: “Who are ‘the folk’ in folk music?” This query suggests that it is core to understanding and appreciating this book. Even after attaining a graduate degree with “Folk” in its title and writing several books about music with “Folk” in their title --most notably The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to American Folk Music (2004) and Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States (2012)—I am still not sure who (or what) comes under this slippery, essentially problematic word. The Folk: Music, Modernism, and the Political Imagination, which is based on Cole’s dissertation, leaves me no clearer regarding who constitutes “the folk” in this compact, rather theory-heavy book that contains five chapters with titles and topics as diverse as “Collecting Culture: Science, Technology, & Reification” and “Soul Through the Soil: Cecil Sharp & the Specter of Fascism.”
On page xii I pinned down what I believe is his central thesis: “I wish to trace how and why the folk have been central to our cultural memory in the West,” along with his temporal and geographical focus: “Britain and the United States between 1870 and 1930.” As for a definition that would help me to understand who the folk might be, on page 9 he writes, “The term folk has a stable meaning in relation to music and song not because it describes historical reality, but because it has been used historically to gather a variety of things together under one simple heading.” I am not clear what “a stable meaning” might be in this context. Furthermore, is “folk” used differently in 2022 than “historically”? Does a “historical reality” really exist and, if so, whose history counts and who writes and disseminates that history? The “variety of things” correctly intimates that “folk” is a catch-all. It’s an umbrella term that is flexible enough to cover not only music but also expressive culture as wide ranging as Native American jingle dancing, traditions related to a quinceañera, or the hand weaving of sweetgrass baskets by African Americans in the lowlands of South Carolina.
The implications of the “heading”—folk—are far from “simple” and suggest a complex matrix that involves but is not limited to a myriad of relationships among family, community, ethnicity, race, age, and geography. Moreover, these interactions exert a great impact over time. The past resonates in the present in myriad ways, for example, how the same words are pronounced quite differently in various parts of the United States, family surnames, holiday traditions, or even how one prepares barbecue. When it comes to music specifically, these relationships inform what songs are performed in various Pentecostal churches, the importance of contestation in hip hop, and the evolution of instruments used in Zydeco bands.
On the same page Cole posits: “More often than not, you’ll find that folk music carries with it a variety of political subtexts.” Cole uses New York City’s early 1960s folk scene as his example of politics’ intersection with the folk. This statement is not inaccurate, and his examples are clear and reasonable enough. However, I can think of scores of genres or examples to contradict this opening phrase, ranging from contra-dance music in New England to the opening act that I heard recently at a bluegrass club in Arlington, Virginia. Political subtexts occur in many other forms of music, either overtly, such as in punk in the last quarter of the twentieth century or more indirectly in nineteenth-century “Negro” spirituals. In Washington, DC, the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020 often included go-go bands performing on truck beds as a highly visible and aural political symbol that could only happen in the capital of the United States.
It's clear that I found this book troublesome, largely because of its lack of a clear definition of “folk,” a word that permeates and underpins the entire book. To be fair, I’m not sure if anyone can successfully accomplish this fraught task. Although I admire Cole’s moxie, this revised dissertation ended up being a book that I appreciated in some respects, but not one that I plan to return to.
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[Review length: 701 words • Review posted on September 30, 2022]