Where does folk leave off and country begin?

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:6v9yxddboolg

which record I like a lot (and by the way, notice how AMG *just got even worse*??? I didn't think it was possible!). But at best she sounds like that music with all the life sifted out, or something. Or maybe, again, I'm just using the wrong reference point for her.

Haha, OTM. It's very odd, and it's mostly a political\class problem, though not living in the US it's hard for me to get a real feel for. I do wonder, though, to what extent left\right or class differences between folk and country are the cause of difference, or the result of it. E.g. commercial viability of country could have created a class difference while folk was able to 'keep it real' with the working class. (By the way, I don't understand the US use of the term 'middle class' - sometimes you seem to use it for 'working class' and others it's used as if it is something different. Does it's use depend upon your political stance?)

In many ways I categorise folk based upon song - people using traditional songs tend to be folk. So, i you use the Child ballads, for example, you're folk I suspect the distinction is, like all genre distinctions, a clumsy and fake one. My Dad used to be a folk musician, and he would play Kristofferson, Cash, Donovan, Dylan all in together with Scottish ballads. The odd thing about genre, I always think, is that I can hear the difference between a folk song ans a country song, but can't explain what that difference is.

funny, i've always had him pegged as a faux-country guy who's got a few good bar-band rock songs and pop ballads in him but who actually hates country. if i was filing records by genre, i wouldn't put him anywhere near my country records. but then again, i don't know how to file records by genre, so pehaps i shouldn't be trusted on this.

Except the folk audiences today are decidedly *not* working class -- the shows I've seen at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley and Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago are generally pretty upper-middle class.

Kevin, explaining the difference between what "working" and "middle" class means probably requires pulling in an economist or two, but I'd argue that once upon a time they were pretty much the same; once the manufacturing unions started collapsing in the 80s and wages in those jobs started falling, "working" is now more a synonym for "lower" than "middle." That's admittedly a broad generalization though.

Seconded. There were just some fantastic comments. Wonder if anywhere randomly cached it.

Folk = "Hey hey now! Burn your leather bra before we destroy mother nature!"

Country = "Gee-hyuk Gee-hyuk, dinga dang dong dang doo!"

Chuck, I saw her and David Rawlings with EmmyLou Harris and Buddy Miller this past summer live, and she seemed more relaxed and less tied in to trying to look and sound like a member of the Carter Family or something. I liked her, but then I go for some of that npr-friendly folk-country stuff more than you do. I've always liked her voice which was in fine form that night.

Folk music is what upper-middle class college students thought the folk SHOULD be singing in order to better their lot.

Country is what the folk actually sang about themselves.

Then Hurting said: "I don't think Johnny Cash was 'singing about himself'"

Ah, forget it. It's water under the bridge.

Chuck, I saw her and David Rawlings with EmmyLou Harris and Buddy Miller this past summer live, and she seemed more relaxed and less tied in to trying to look and sound like a member of the Carter Family or something. I liked her, but then I go for some of that npr-friendly folk-country stuff more than you do. I've always liked her voice which was in fine form that night.

-- steve-k

I kinda thought she had grown beyond the coal miner's daughter schtick by Time: The Revelator. Then again, it is interesting to notice that it was precisely that 'schtick' that helped her break away from the fray of singer/songwriters and become something of a brand name, particularly through Oh Brother. I guess that would tie into the great (now gone) post about people being a certain genre partly because that's how they're marketed; not to say, though, that Welch didn't herself want to go that route at first.

I saw her live at the Bowery Ballroom a couple months ago, and she sounded equally natural singing "Caleb Meyer" and covering Radiohead and Stevie Nicks songs.

Marvin Rainwater gets mentioned in this thread, so I'll post here...One of the things I got at a record store I posted about a couple of weeks ago was the Marvin Rainwater Bear Family box set on CD for, no lie, $4. Four CDs, 116 songs; no booklet, and (if there is one) no box, but all four CDs have their proper cases. Probably one of the best deals I've ever stumbled over.

Anyway, I don't hear him as folk verging as country; I always thought he was a country guy, but--after finishing CD-1--he seems like straight-up rockabilly more often than not.

https://www.bear-family.com/rainwater-marvin-classic-recordings-4-cd-box-set.html

Wow this thread is a wild ride.

Arguably folk became country music when it started to be recorded - no one called Jimmie rogers or the carter family “country music” until a ways later on.

The other important argument is whether any piece of music that isn’t derived from an actual folk oral, is by definition not folk music.

IMO the real transition from folk music to country happens in that 1920s, specifically when original songs are written specifically to be recorded. Alternatively you can place it when record companies began marketing “hillbilly” and “old-time” music, or to when rural performers began to playvppp songs they learned from sheer music or phonograph records.

Phonograph records were around but not accessible to many people, which leads to my other belief which is that after it was determined what kinds of records sold, it influenced what was recorded. Along with radio (a huge part of it!!) this all forms “country music” as we know it in the popular sense.

The depression has a lot to do with it too.

Sorry I’m on my phone, there’s a lot here buys complicated.

sorry gonna re-write/expand a few bits here ---

The other important argument is whether any piece of music NOT derived from an actual folk/oral tradition can even be considered folk music in the first place. This is kind of a hadrliner position but one I'm very pretty sympathetic to honestly. Singer songwrites? Not folk music. The traditional music of the globe? folk music.

a tl;dr might be this --

"Country music" began to be regnized as such in the 15 years from say 1920-1935ish. This is due the influence of record sales on further recordings, the proliferation of radio, and the depression -- when push came to shove and Victor records had to choose between recording the Carter Family again or sending a team of field agents out for untested old musicians, well... it was an easy choice. Likewise the radio, and what was seen as commercially viable, was very influential in condensing a fairly wide variety of folk/rural sounds into a marketable genre.

what are now considered to be the earliest country music records were fiddle tunes recorded by Eck Robertson & Henry Gilliland in 1922 in Texas, iirc. At that time the labels didn't even use a distinctive marketing label at all - the designation was just "violin solo" and "violin duet"

The early years of the recording industry are fucking wild, and to some degree, when it all started they were recording and releasing all manner of stuff and seeing what stuck.

Even in the 50s "country music" is a wide enough category that it includes plenty of traditional music, mainstream pop songs about the prairie where the singer wears a stetson and western swing music which is up to 90% jazz, for example this is "country" only because Bob Wills is sometimes singing "howdy-ho"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtxAuGx9NcY

mid 40s rather than 50s, sorry

The section of this thread that went missing between Dec 2 and Dec 20th 2004 is really one of those magic takes where the engineer accidentally erased it if not forgetting to hit record.

western swing is funny, it's seems to really polarize folks.
it's got the trappings (cowboy hats! steel guitar!) and lineage (the light crust dough boys recordings for vocalion in the 1930s are much more traditional country/folk music.) but i definitely agree that the actual music most people think of as prime western swing is hugely jazz music. people liked to do the popular dances, which i guess at that time meant the rise of swing music? again, not an expert on this area.

Tyler Mahan Coe has a thing about county & western being "whatever poor white people from the south listen to" and rhythm & blues being "whatever poor black people from the south listen to" (referring to that late 40s/early 50s period) and I think he's at least partially right, the genres were named after the billboard charts which were set up under these names

western swing is funny, it's seems to really polarize folks.
it's got the trappings (cowboy hats! steel guitar!) and lineage (the light crust dough boys recordings for vocalion in the 1930s are much more traditional country/folk music.) but i definitely agree that the actual music most people think of as prime western swing is hugely jazz music. people liked to do the popular dances, which i guess at that time meant the rise of swing music? again, not an expert on this area.

― ian, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 5:10 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Being on a massive bluegrass, flatpicking, and fiddle music kick for the last year, I recently learned that there's a specific style of "Texas" fiddle accompaniment on guitar that is basically just jazz chords. Apparently if you went to a fiddle competition in Texas as opposed to NC or Tenn or Kentucky or wherever you would typically hear this noticeably jazzier accompaniment style.

Bill Monroe's first great fiddle player, Tex Logan, actually started as a western swing player who initially disdained bluegrass, which to me sort of implies that Western Swing was seen as more sophisticated or something.

I'm kind of fascinated by these jazzy, semi-forgotten genres and would love to learn more about how they came to be.

An example where you can hear some of that "texas-style" accompaniment. The heavy presence of rags in bluegrass music is also interesting in itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWqfYeFXCw

The rag thing was present in the pre-bluegrass string band style, pretty much from the very beginning. Ragtime was just a huge phenomenon at the time. But I think in bluegrass it comes from the 1920s/1930s string bands. The same morass that birthed all country music in the US imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4NuXIEeubg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFZtVWu5IFA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7m1SM7uNAo

And so on but it’s past my bedtime