The Death of the Second Folk Revival

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[18 May 2009]

If the Second Folk Revival put the power of recording into the hands of the artists, what’s been happening these past five years or so has put that power into the hands of everyone: cell phones that record video, ProTools and Cakewalk, Movie Maker and MySpace.

By Robert Loss

1.

If you’ve heard Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, then you’ve heard the beginning of what I call the Second Folk Revival.  Keep this under your hat, now, lest the adults find out: folk music isn’t just a style, it’s a method.  It’s an honest-to-God philosophy.  And that’s what Lester Bangs meant when he said, “It’s all folk music.”  Springsteen and Nebraska and that wintry day in 1982 didn’t invent, but did transform, the folk philosophy, raising from its ashes—burned the day Dylan plugged in, according to some—the folk revival.  (As with most things halfway original, the folk revival needed fewer adjectives and no capitalization.)

Strangely enough, this resurrection had a lot to do with a machine: the handy little Teac Portastudio 144.  Proper nouns with numeric modifiers don’t normally conjure folkie images, but the oddball collection that is the body of American folk music has always been transmitted by way of recording devices.  You can’t ignore it.  No other means could build a one-way bridge from the rural folk who lived those songs to the city folk who decided to live in, or through, those songs.  Roll ahead to the late ‘70s and you’ve got the Teac, a compact four-track recorder that gave the musician immediacy and decent quality in a box small enough to tuck under the arm, plop on the bed, hitch to a mic, and unleash demons.

Bruce Springsteen's Telarc 144, on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Bruce Springsteen’s Telarc 144, on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The power of recording was put into the musician’s hands, and this is why I draw the line at January 3, 1982, the day Springsteen recorded most of what would become Nebraska.  In his New Jersey home, the Boss had Mike Batlin, his guitar tech, set up the Portastudio in a spare room (pun intended) and proceeded to lay down what he believed to be demos, tunes so bare and forlorn that Hank Williams would have been proud.  Two tracks for the live recording of guitar and vocals, two more tracks for overdubs—a glockenspiel here, a siren’s harmonica there.

Of course, Bruce Springsteen was a world-famous, corporate-backed rock and roll star when he recorded Nebraska.  (This, in fact, is largely why he recorded Nebraska—that conflict of market forces and artistic intimacy would foreshadow further developments, too, which I’ll get to.)  Also un-folkie: part of Nebraska’s singular sound is due to an Echoplex, which gives the songs that reverbed, long-ago feel—a very conscious, crafted recreation of a sound.  And though, to this day, critics trip over themselves to compare the songs to Alan Lomax field recordings, or the collection of tunes Harry Smith put together on the Anthology of American Folk Music, anyone with an ear can tell that the Nebraska songs are indebted, and perhaps spiritually dedicated, to Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, and the ghosts of rockabilly legends gone to rest in their dreary hometowns, skulking about like adolescents on the empty streets that trap them once again.

If these things are true, why the hell does the Second Folk Revival begin here?

The method.  That little machine.  The apparently simple act of sitting down and firing up the Recorder of Dreams.  Intimacy without any guile (because it’s harder to fool yourself when no one’s listening), and immediacy without the evanescence of a live stage show.

And the fact that every tired punk rocker and his sister heard Nebraska, and copied the approach for themselves, took it into their own hands.  The method further refined the style, with the added bonus of not having to wait for some folklorist to come poking around your barn.
 
2.

Since then, the Second Folk Revival has bounced along pretty quietly, never entirely going away, and never really finding a place in the spotlight.  Sure, we had a spate of unplugged authenticity tests, the height of which may have been Nirvana covering Leadbelly in sonic shackles that only exposed the core of Kurt Cobain’s beautifully tortured howl, but let’s face it, the minimalist fashion of the confessional singer-songwriter left us with spotty results.  It never connected to history in the way Springsteen had on Nebraska, and for every outlier like Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes or PJ Harvey’s Four-Track Demos, there was a centrist piece of fluff like Jewel’s “Who Will Save Your Soul?” and Poison’s appearance on Unplugged.

The folk process, though, became an integral part of the music industry, feeding the underground and challenging corporate structures.  The rawness of a college band’s sloppy, noisy, poorly-mixed record was a hell of a relief from the polished glitz of FM radio, and that was possible only because recording became cheaper.  So did producing, especially if you did it yourself.  And so did reproduction.  It’s maybe the word of our age—socially, politically, artistically—but here I mean a simple thing: you could get your tapes, then your CDs, reproduced for pretty cheap.  College stations would stack your record next to the Pixies, and you would have the admittedly somewhat illusory belief that you belonged to this community of music. I mean, for God’s sake, look!  A CD with your name on it!  That was real. 

In the spring of 1993, I was singing in my small liberal arts college’s choir, because…well, I’ve never really been sure why.  At one rehearsal, a scrawny guy shuffled into the rehearsal studio with his drummer, who was also his band’s recording engineer.  They played a song we’d learned the parts for the previous day, a song called “Pave,” the final track on what would become Ugly Stick’s first CD, Absinthe.  The scrawny one—David Holm—went over the parts, while the drummer, a stocky guy named Bill Heingartner, worked up a portable reel-to-reel 8-track, and within an hour we’d recorded a choral, Beach Boys-esque backing track consisting of the words “I really wanna get to know ya.”

Sixteen years later, around Columbus, Ohio, Absinthe is something of a legend, for reasons far greater than “Pave” and especially the Bass II line that I sang.  But that afternoon, no one was thinking of that.  At least I wasn’t.  What I was thinking was the real lesson of the folk philosophy: Even I—a bumbling son of a bitch if there ever was one—even I can do this.

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Comments

Great article. coco… clarence ashley recorded it, who the hell knows who wrote it. does it matter? not really. protools is the biggest bane of the ‘folk process’ whatever that is. sure, as you say, it puts the ability in the hands of the ‘people,’ to get lost in a sea of banality.

Comment by john ford from austin — May 18, 2009 @ 11:43 am

I appreciate the sentiments expressed in the article.  IMHO much of the ‘wizardry’ in current popular music is in the technical end rather than the artistry.  There are - again IMHO - pockets of genuine music.  A local radio station in Gettysburg devotes a small portion of its programming to blue grass music.  Much of this music devotes itself to themes such as trains, trucks, momma, gettin’ drunk and prison.  But as David Allan Coe pointed out that is what makes the perfect country and western song.  A main feature of much of this music as it is enjoyed in Garret County, Maryland is - again in my opinion - its authenticity and lack of technical support.

Mr Loss makes an excellent point when he says, “The folk philosophy still lurks under the sheen and easy populism of pop music…”.  But if one searches their radio dial diligently, and often late at night, one can still find strains of genuine folk music, or a derivitive there of.

Great ariticle, well written.  Kudos Mr. Loss.

Comment by Johnny Reb from Manchester, PA — May 18, 2009 @ 3:52 pm

I love the folk, old and bew

Comment by joe blosheq from Piptown — May 19, 2009 @ 12:54 am

A very interesting article, but I do feel the need to mention that Lomax (amongst others, on both sides of the Atlantic) kick-started the second folk revival in the 1950s. The first revival having begun at the turn of the 20th century, with Gould, Broadwood, Sharp, Vaughan Williams et al.

What we have now is the continuation of the second revival, Springsteen included. Since then, artists have continued to be influenced by those same 50s ideologies and re-discoveries. The popularity of such notions and styles may rise and fall, but they haven’t gone away nor been revived a third time.

As I think you touch on, the songs Harry Smith compiled (all the songs on the anthology had been previously commercially released) were already of a broken tradition - or an approximate facsimile tradition (already as hazily nostalgic as the singing of Christmas carols). The singers of the 20s were no more an accurate representation of how the ancient ballads sounded hundreds of years past than singers are today. Even with our protools and shiny gadgets and mass commercialisation, our musical contribution is as important as theirs. Nostalgia shouldn’t give way to self loathing.

That Nebraska was a significant force in changing the sound of popular music I wouldn’t argue. That it represents any sort of revival or milestone in folk I would doubt, since the resulting influences and sea-changes you describe are not unique to the folk process but describe the popular music process in action: styles influencing other styles (as opposed to deliberately following the threads of a tradition).

Folk was neither revived with Nebraska nor is the second revival facing any kind of death, since it’s not based in any stylistic or aesthetic philosophy - but a continual renewal of our fragmented and half-hidden musical traditions.

The technologies, processes, styles and market may have changed but the fascination with and continual reinterpretation of our old weird past has not.

Comment by Tim — May 19, 2009 @ 7:23 am

I’m unclear on this.  Wherein lies the death you’re talking about?  And wherein the birth?  Am I to believe that the Second Age of Folk Music began when one of the most commercially successful artists in the country downgraded his production values, stretched through an era in which other artists of a similarly economically privileged position followed suit, primarily via the corporate channel of MTV Unplugged, swerved around to encompass the author’s first experience with lo-fi recording with a COLLEGE choir that became a legend in Columbus OH [which ranks even below the midwest equivalent of “big in Belgium”] and then ended when the hoi-polloi gained the means of production?

Where does this leave artists like Devendra Banhart, recording his early albums on the answering machines of close friends, or the first dozen or so Mountain Goats releases, recorded on the same boomboxes available to anyone with a spare hundred dollars?  Do they fall outside the author’s delicate definition of “artist”, and thus outside this new folk movement he seeks to define?

Lamenting that the means to make “folk music” has fallen into the hands of the people is horrific in its classist bias (and Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions had a bigger production budget than the albums that preceded and followed it, incidentally), and the sad fact that accessibility of music to the masses without the (seemingly pre-requisite to the author) ability to also produce the POP STAR might simply mean that music is moving towards exactly the type of democracy and pure meritocracy that lies at the very heart of pop music.  This article reads like the work of someone who hasn’t been at a living room or basement show in their entire life and I hope the author is fully content with true artifacts of the second folk revival, like his copy of Alice in Chains Unplugged.

And please leave Bahktin out of it.  The man’s been through enough without you a)dismissively referring to his theoretical structure as a notion, as if if occurred to him during brunch and was jotted down on a bevnap and b) battering said theoretical structure into the square hole of your poorly conceived argument.

Comment by Bob Proehl from Ithaca, NY — May 20, 2009 @ 7:46 am

The author responds:

A quick correction:  Bill Heingartner was not the drummer of Ugly Stick.  Jeff Clowdus was and is their drummer, while Bill was indeed the recording engineer for Absinthe.  Ah, memory!  My apologies to the affronted!

Thanks to all of those who offered insightful comments, particularly Tim.  I should explain that my understanding of folk music defines the first Folk Revival as the period of Lomax and Harry Smith, but I realize this is debatable.  Revival is the key and always-contentious term.  I would argue that what I call the Second Folk Revival has changed and passed on because of the technological advances I mention in the article; these influence what you rightly call an aesthetic philosophy.  My point is that the influence is greater than we sometimes admit.

As for your comments, Bob, I can only assume theyre some kind of hazing ritual common to PopMatters.  I was disappointed in the apparently hasty reading you gave the article since I’ve enjoyed many of yours on this site.  I’ll try to keep my rebuttal brief:  this essay is no lament, but a piece of interrogative speculation, and if you’re looking for a bland version of populism, you won’t get it from me; no time for Devendra and Mountain Goats in this essay, but yes, they’re obviously important and I plan to get to them; I’ve performed at and attended many house concerts; the college choir didn’t become a local legend, Ugly Stick’s record did, and how could you possibly call me classist while insulting Columbus, and really, what’s wrong with being big in Belgium?; given how much I rail against the corporate takeover of independent and my interest in the power of local scenes, it’s pretty clear I’m not in favor of pop star supremacy, but I’m not naive enough to think that the line between pop and folk is exceedingly clear these days; death is a change, not an end, and in this case leads to the beginning of a new, unnamed folk philosophy which I hope to discuss soon.  The point of this piece was to spark discussion about an admittedly different take on things, and I hope this discussion can be civil, so please relax, friend, you worry me.

Hope to hear from more of you….

Comment by Robert Loss from Columbus, Ohio — May 22, 2009 @ 3:28 pm

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