In Exploring American Folk Music (2012), Kip Lornell focuses on musical development in the United States between the late-nineteenth century and present day. He successfully summarizes the progression, migration, and transformation of American folk musics, basing his discussions on a folk or roots/popular dichotomy. For Lornell, the musics consumed in “popular culture” are adaptations or updated representations of single or multiple types of “roots” music. While he chronicles the development of nine different “traditions” (of both the folk and popular camps), Lornell shows clearly the cross-pollination that occurred between past/present, folk/popular, or, perhaps more simply, the love-and-theft phenomenon that became an integral element to the American musical spirit.
Lornell begins by explaining his position on the development of American folk music in the postmodern world. He suggests that the ways in which music is “performed, sold, and disseminated in the early twenty-first century has become extremely complex, blurring some of the tell-tale attributes of folk music” (13). He has identified six general characteristics of folk music, which are fundamental to understanding his conception of folk music (13-14).
1. “Folk music varies greatly over place but relatively little over time.”
2. “Folk music emanates from a specific, identifiable community, such as coal miners, Louisiana Cajuns, or Native Americans.”
3. “The authorship or origins of folk songs and tunes are generally unknown.”
4. “Folk songs are usually disseminated by word-of-mouth, aurally, or through informal apprenticeships within a community.”
5. “Folk music is most often performed by nonprofessionals.”
6. “Short forms and predictable patterns are fundamental for folk music.”
Lornell also provides the obligatory definitions of basic musical terms. Despite the inevitable oversimplification of these definitions that comes with explaining seemingly simple, yet relatively complex, terms, like rhythm, meter, dynamics, and texture, Lornell’s summation suffices and should aid in non-musicians’ understanding of the content. It is one of the more concise introductory sections that I have encountered. His short descriptions of commonly used folk instruments is also helpful, which includes brief histories of each as well as some references for audio examples. However, the reader must locate all of the audio references in the book on his/her own—there is no CD or mp3 download code included with the book.
In chapter 2, “Mass Media,” Lornell argues that the technology that developed over the course of the twentieth century has greatly affected the trajectory of American folk music. His explanation of minstrel shows is particularly useful. He shows the progression of minstrelsy from New York City to the South, successfully identifying key musicians such as George Washington Dixon, J.W. Sweeney, Thomas Rice, and The Virginian Minstrels (44). Lornell recognizes the “underlying importance of minstrel shows” (45), which is integral to understanding the elements of race and the social climate of America during the time that these traveling shows were popular. The popularity of minstrel shows, he argues, is telling of “America’s slow emergence from the domination of European culture” (45). Simultaneously, these performances “acknowledged our country’s agrarian roots” (45), despite the stereotypical depictions of “America’s common people” and African Americans (45). For some readers, it might seem like Lornell is stating the obvious. It is important when dealing with issues of representation and race, especially with topics as integral to American music as minstrelsy, that one makes clear his/her understanding of the history. He does a fine job is laying the groundwork for what is to come in the following chapters.
Next, Lornell elaborates on African American southern culture and the beginning of blues music composition and performance. African Americans fleeing the South after World War I brought north with them a myriad of cultural traits, most prominent of which was the blues. This music “simultaneously functioned as a folk and popular music,” resulting in a significant “cultural integration” between folk and popular culture (48). Then, Lornell provides a splendid summarization of early recording companies and their role in the dissemination and marketing of “hillbilly,” “race,” and “ethnic” musics. His discussion of radio broadcasts shows the impact of disseminating “hillybilly” musics to wider audiences, particular outside of the American South and Mexico. There is also a short section in which Lornell uses Uncle Dave Macon as a case study, showing the benefits of the mass media in the career of the iconic folk musician.
In chapter 3, Lornell discusses the importance and process of conducting ethnographic fieldwork. This chapter is insightful but its place among the rest of the chapters seems a little disjointed. Perhaps an abbreviated version of this information would have been better placed within one of the other chapters, or across multiple chapters when prominent researchers are mentioned, especially if we consider that this book is probably best suited for undergraduate studies.
In chapter 4, Lornell divides Anglo-American secular folk music into nine different sections. He provides a good explanation of the musical elements of ballads and the oral history through which they passed from the British Isles to America. The Child ballads are used as the primary examples, including a musical example, Jean Ritchie’s interpretation of “The House Carpenter” (Child 243) (85). Lornell elaborates on broadside ballads, native American ballads (which he divides further in nine primary categories) (90), and singing cowboys. The discussion of the latter is particularly enlightening for an undergraduate audience. Lornell shows clearly the role of the commercial media in manufacturing artist images and the romanticization of cowboy culture. Key performers such as Gene Autry and Carl T. Sprague are used as examples for this type of marketed, commercial, western image (91-4). In the remainder of this chapter, Lornell’s detailed discussions of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, bluegrass, honky-tonk, and Western swing further our understanding of the role of commercialization and the “evolution of folk music into commercial music” (110).
In chapter 5, “Anglo-American Sacred Music,” Lornell describes the evolution of sacred music performance and its distancing from Old World practices. Over time, however, with the popularization of printed songbooks with detailed instructions on vocal performance techniques, widely agreed-upon methods were solidified in the mid 1700s. Next, Lornell explains how Shape Notes and Sacred Harp singing allowed for more distinctly “American” compositions that developed in the early 1800s (121-2). Shape Note singing, too, went through a series of developments, but updated editions of the first text, The Sacred Harp, remain the primary songbook. Camp Meetings, Shakerism, the Pentacostal movement, and Southern Gospel are discussed at length, covering the general history of Anglo-American sacred music from the early 1800s through the 1940s. Keeping with a recurring theme in the book, this “gradual evolution of uniquely American styles” displays the “expanding relationship and interaction between folk and popular” musics (138).
In chapter 6, “African American Religious Folk Music,” Lornell identifies subdivisions of this broad category. In sum, he provides detailed histories of spirituals, ring shouts, and gospel. Of particular significance in this chapter is Lornell’s discussion of gospel quartets. Once again, Lornell highlights an instance of folk music reaching wider audiences thanks to mass-mediated promotion (163). In chapter 7, “African American Secular Folk Music,” Lornell discusses the folk musics that highly influenced nearly all forms of twentieth-century popular or commercial music in the U.S. Through brief histories of work songs, black string bands, fife and drums bands, ragtime, and other instances of rural music, he shows how all of these musicians fostered what was essentially a “aural/oral tradition in black folk music” (187). He also explains how these rural musics dispersed throughout the country, via displaced musicians who left rural areas for employment in urban areas.
In chapter 8, “Ethnic and Native American Traditions,” Lornell focuses on five separate genres that he called “creolized styles” (206) that developed over decades in the U.S. For him, these five genres, Jewish American (klezmer), Native American, Hawaiian, Franco-American (Cajun and Zydeco), and Scandinavian American folk music are “the most influential and widespread types of folk music created by non-English-speaking Americans” (206). Each genre is examined through the group’s migration to the U.S., geographical location, and cultural elements. Brief histories of the genre’s development, bold-faced mentions of seminal performers, and lists of suggested readings make this chapter particularly useful, serving as a kind of literature review. Chapter 9, “The Hispanic American Diaspora,” is also structured in this way. Because this community’s music is so geographically diverse and important to the American musical landscape, Lornell chose to dedicate an entire chapter to it (202). He elaborates on instances of this music in the Southwest (Tex-Mex), Florida, and New York City. He also includes a discussion of Native American influences in Mexican American music, thus bringing this study of geographical diversity full-circle and connecting salient overlapping histories and musical integration mentioned in previous chapters.
Chapter 10, “The Folk Revivals,” is centered on the 1960s folk boom. Having spent a significant amount of time studying this instance of music revival in my own research, I can say that this chapter reads like a well-articulated crash course on the major figures of the time period. Lornell stresses that despite technology’s role in influencing folk music, this 1960s grassroots culture has managed to retain a particular American identity that “continues to fascinate and reinvigorate our music” (318). He acknowledges the significance of mass media and popular culture in the trajectory of revivals (288-291) and this element is well-represented in the examples, suggested listening, and suggested reading sections (319-322).
In chapter 11, “The Folk Roots of Contemporary Popular Music,” Lornell points out significant elements in popular music performance that are derived from folk music—namely the folk music of black Americans. This chapter is thorough and covers a lot of ground. It perpetuates, however, several over-exaggerated distinctions between “folk” and “popular” musics. I would argue that, even though the popular musics under review here are often highly derivative in both sound and performance, the musicians writing and performing this music would make less of a hard distinction between folk and popular. Rockabilly, for example, was initially intended to be a commercially successful business venture. Those artists categorized as rockabilly artists, especially in the 1950s, might see themselves as playing a music-of-the-people, or the music of a particular time and place—is that not folk music, especially if the performer believes it to be so?
Chapter 12, “Urban Folk Music,” contains a wealth of information about musics that migrated from rural areas to urban settings. The majority of the chapter, however, is dedicated to country and bluegrass musics in Washington, D.C. Lornell demonstrates the significance of these northeast musical communities and it is a refreshing and important, yet less-travelled case study.
Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States would be a great text for undergraduate seminars. Introductory courses that deal with American folk music, U.S. folklore, ethnomusicology, or cultural studies of the U.S. more generally, would benefit from this incredibly thorough and helpful volume.
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[Review length: 1809 words • Review posted on February 19, 2014]