Liberal Folk

introspective

In the beginning of my freshman year, when I had a little time to spare, I'd grab my guitar and flip through my beat-up handed-down copy of Rise up Singing. The book had come to me from a high school friend, though I don't know who had given it to her. Maybe someone from her labor-Zionist summer camp, maybe her older sister, maybe one of her mommies. (She had at least two, more she claimed.) Regardless of who first owned it, I could see that it was the folkie's bible--with the chords and lyrics to thousands of songs, old as English ballads, new as "Blowin' in the Wind." I recognized dozens of songs that I knew well and on almost every page I found something half-remembered, echoes from singalongs and scratchy records.

About a month into the semester, a friend from my entryway told me that she knew someone who knew someone who knew about something called the Harvard Folk Song Society and I might be interested. Yeah, of course, I said, give them my name. A week later, I got an e-mail about a meeting in a suite in Dunster House. I took my guitar and Rise up Singing, knocked on a door, didn't know what to expect. I found a group of people sitting around in a circle, singing and playing guitar, Rise up Singing in hand. They welcomed me warmly and told me to pick a song that I wanted to sing. Everything was strictly unofficial: no officers, no list of members--only a hundred or so e-mail addresses in someone's address book. Folk Soc, we called it, and it quickly became one of the best parts of my week.

When I first listened to folk music, I didn't think of it as any more political than the other music I liked. Some of my favorite performers, like Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, wrote songs with explicitly political content--but they also wrote love songs and silly songs and songs with no apparent meaning at all. I loved folk music for the haunting melodies, the raw emotion, the poetry in the lyrics. The more I sang with Folk Soc, though, the more I realized that American folk music has political meanings that are impossible to ignore. This uniquely American music, from a time when our national identity was still taking form, reveals the origins of our society as surely as it reveals the origins of blues and jazz. The songs that we sing in Folk Soc come from plantations, mines, union meetings, and churches. You might forget that much of our present strength was sapped from workers and slaves years ago--until you start to sing "Union Burying Ground" or "Oh, Freedom." These songs were born because too many union organizers had disappeared in the night and too many men and women had died without ever knowing freedom.

Folk music gives the lie to the idealized and sanitized versions of American history that many would prefer to accept, indeed that were accepted for years without dissent. It is no surprise that in the 1960s, when a generation called America to answer for its lingering injustices, protest movements borrowed heavily from folk music's idiom of hope and struggle. Today, although revisionist historians have invaded mainstream academia, the battle for the public's memory rages on. One need only look at Texas, where school texts are legally required to present the state and the nation in a positive light. (Actu ally, the exact language of the statute requires books to present the state's "glowing and throbbing history of hearts," whatever that means.) What about Mississippi, where the Confederate flag still flies? (The Civil War wasn't really about slavery, you know, although everyone involved mistakenly thought it was.) But the historical record, of which folk music is an important part, can overcome any rewritten textbook or outright lie. To sing a song with this heritage--no matter how sweet the melody or how beautiful the lyrics--is necessarily political in some sense, for it reminds us of where our society has been and of where it ought to be going.

Not all folk music reflects political grievances, of course, nor is it the only style of American music with political content. And the real reason I love it is not for its historical meaning or for my political beliefs. I love folk music, above all, because it is music that I can play and sing with others. Although I study classical guitar, it's rare that I find myself in a situation where I can play classically with friends. Folk music, however, sounds best in a group. The songs are easy to teach and to learn, impossible to ruin. You can improvise, you can play an old melody with a new set of lyrics, or you can just fake your way through and let everyone make a joyous noise. And it's free--no more money to the record companies for advertising and executive salaries. No mistake, there's plenty of contemporary music that I love--it's just that I'd like to make my own sometimes. Folk music, from the years before the record and the radio, is the music of people doing it on their own. Music has gained something in the last century, but I think that it's lost something, too. We must not forget that, in the end, our music belongs to us.

--Lizz Thrall

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu