Where does folk leave off and country begin?

Speaking of which, where the hell is the next Iris DeMent album?

Seriously, though, that's a good question. What's that intangible element that makes Bob Dylan's "John Wesley Harding" sound like "folk" and "Nashville Skyline" sound like "country" even tho they were only recorded a year apart with similar musicians and instruments? Well, I don't really know what the fuck I'm talking about here, but doesn't country rely on certain intervals (fifths, I think) and changes that sound instantly identifiable as "country"? The same way the presence of "blue" notes and I-IV-V changes characterize blues. Also, I can't offhand think of any particularly "modal" country songs. But like I say, my knowledge is pretty shaky.

Quite the contrary, I'm trying to embrace and celebrate their countryness, rather than having the criterion be "I like it = folk / I dislike it = country"--which is, IME, an easy trap for people of my age and class and temperament to get into. I have caught myself thinking that way, and dislike it.

I can't abide a certain kind of rock-and-roller who claims to "like every kind of music, except country." What he probably means is that he doesn't like Travisalantoby Trittjacksonkeith, which is a different kettle.

And Iris DeMent is another good example, who I forgot in my off-the-cuff listing. I often like her songs, but her own Muppet-voice can sometimes grate. Cf. Kate Rusby's cover of "Our Town."

Line-drawing is inevitably fraught and futile, but it offers a certain kind of fun for people with too much spare time and too many records. Line-blurring is fun too: cf. Tony Furtado's version of the Lyle Lovett song "If I Had a Boat," which never fails to make me smile.

Oddly enough, I was playing Merle Haggard in the car a couple weeks ago, and my 15 year old daughter -- who these days loves the Holy Modal Rounders, Incredbile String Band, Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, U Utah Phillips, David Rovics, Michael Hurley, Si Kahn, and Fairport Convention -- insisted that Merle sounded more "folk" than "country" to her. So you never know. (She also says that Big and Rich remind her of the Holy Modal Rounders. But she can't stand most pop-country.)

(To me, almost alt-country strikes me as folkies *pretending* to be country. Which is to say that lots of it seems to want to sound like the country music of decades ago, but has big trouble pulling if off.)

And yeah, it recently occured to me that if my daughter approves of Merle (and she hasn't even heard "Uncle Lem" yet!), she'd REALLY love Tom T Hall (who Christgau compared to Woody Guthrie, 33 years ago.)

Found a copy of Henson Cargill's Skip a Rope album recently, and that's got me interested in the period during which coffeehouse-style folk sensibilities started making inroads into the Nashville sound. Self-conscious "message" songs started creeping in. Who can help with examples of this?

And I suspect the chord structure would get us further than instrumentation. I mean, hell, there's pedal steel on Dark Side of the Moon.

Politics is an interesting division-point here: witness "God Bless the USA" versus "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore." With commercial country on the right and 60s-era folk on the left, contemporary folk tries to remove itself altogether from the conversation.

Toby & Merle, and C&W as a whole, seem to occupy the populist middle ground -- quick to embrace fightin' side nationalism, but deep down more left than you'd think or they'd admit.

xp

With commercial country on the right

except for merle haggard (libertarian all the way, judging from his songs) ... and johnny cash ... and loretta "the pill" lynn ... and i could go on.

Heh -- which of course calls to mind Robbie Fulks, who wrote a song with practically that same exact title. Faux-country-semi-folkie with an affinity for pop -- another guy messing up the waters. When's his album of Michael Jackson covers coming out?

Lifeline was released last moth. Info is at irisdement.com.

Thanks! It looks like my favorite folk-country hybrid has released an album of....gospel standards. The plot thickens.

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