Sing the Mountains: In Defense of Folk and Bluegrass
Louis Armstrong once very aptly pointed out that, “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.” If a definition of what exactly “American folk music” is seems hard to pin down, that just may be intentional. Upon further research into the subject, one stumbles upon even narrower genres and labels that makes the whole discussion far more complicated than it already was. Things like bluegrass, roots, gospel, and blues all fall under what we think of as folk music, and genres like rock and roll, R&B, and jazz can all be considered descendants of this broad classification. Mike Seeger, a self-proclaimed folk musician, cleared things up slightly when he decided that American folk music “is all the music that fits between the cracks.”
The closest popular cousin to roots/folk in America today is undoubtedly country music, which is one of the most prevalent genres in the country, falling just behind Hip-Hop and Rock per Nielsen music ratings. Country music is fairly stigmatized in popular culture, often the butt of jokes or seen as unintelligent and lacking depth. So, this association between country and roots music no doubt influences both genre’s popularity and listenership. Your author can attest to countless instances of folk or bluegrass coming up on shuffle while riding in the car with friends and hearing a chorus of “Ew, I hate country” from the backseat. Your author does his diligent best to explain to his passengers the subtle yet essential differences between country and bluegrass, but time after time it falls on, ironically, deaf ears. If roots musicians can’t ably describe exactly what “roots” music is, then how is it the fault of the listener to make whatever associations they hear? How is one expected to know offhand the difference between, say, Northwestern folk and Appalachian blues?
A little history, perhaps. Further back than American history reaches, the roots of what would become roots music can be found in the traditional folk songs of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. American folk, like most of American culture, is an amalgamation of numerous influences brought to the continent by immigrants from across Europe. Regardless of what country it comes from, the one shared quality of all folk music is what the lyrics say. Folk, roots, and bluegrass have always been the genres for storytellers. Or, as American musician Dan Fogelberg once put it, “It seems like bluegrass people have more great stories to tell than other musicians.” Songs and genres are generally built around themes and concepts, but none could match the sheer honesty of folk and roots; the bare, human, accessibility of what these men and women are singing about.
Common threads emerge: lost loves, journeys far from home, struggles to find one’s place in the world. These are universal concepts that reach far beyond the Appalachian region where many immigrants from Western Europe settled, and where this music found a new home in the 18th and 19th centuries. There, in the mountains, the groundwork was laid for much of modern folk and bluegrass with the merging of Scottish and Irish folk sensibilities and the still developing American music sound. The banjo, the mandolin, and the fiddle, all staples of the genre now, met for the first time on the porches and in the music halls of mining towns where a sound grew from pure necessity: they needed music to dance to, and a way to share their emotions and worries with the world. Eric Church, a modern singer-songwriter, illustrated this intimacy when speaking about his experiences in that part of the country: “I know guys there who are some of the best players I’ve ever heard but are playing on their porch tonight because they’ve never chased success. There’s simplicity to how they live and what they care about.” The heart of what it was is still beating. In the beginning, the music was for no one but the person next to you and whoever happened by that evening.
World famous opera singer Renee Fleming described her experiences doing “hours and hours” of research into the folk music of Appalachia because her grandfather played the fiddle. She captured the soul and experience of folk and bluegrass when she said, “There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional and about that music.” The distinction between traditional folk and modern folk tends to be the inclusion of electric instruments, with the traditional school leaning heavily on the acoustic instruments the originators of the genre played when they had nothing but what was in front of them. This does not make one better than the other, but acoustic instruments do help the listener feel the immediacy Fleming praised.
If there is one word that can encapsulate what American roots and bluegrass projects better than any other genre, it would be “passion”. There are very few things as shivering and grin-inducing as the sound of a musician hammering away at steel strings, venting about life and love while a violin sings a haunting back note that cannot help but call to mind images of forests and highways and stars. And therein lies the appeal of folk and bluegrass: beneath it all, there is heart, soul, and a desire to share something with the world. Plus a little mandolin for good measure.
“You know, for most of its life bluegrass has had this stigma of being all straw hats and hay bales and not necessarily the most sophisticated form of music. Yet you can’t help responding to its honesty. It’s music that finds its way deep into your soul because it’s strings vibrating against wood and nothing else.” This is a quote by Alison Krauss, and she should know because she is a bluegrass musician. It really is a very spare and uncomplicated type of music. But, if nothing else, there is truth there. It is also true, as Louie Armstrong so eloquently put it, that we live in a world where all music is folk because horses are not singing songs. This also means that all music belongs to everyone, and we should be thankful that even if horses are not singing, the mountains are.