critical work on folk music

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alright - i'm doing a english lit dissertation on will oldham. but there's no crticical precedent i can find to take it from. most basic thing is going from a guthrie 'picture's from life's other side' and 'this land is your land' - the folk commie thing where everyone's wronged and it needs to be put right cos the world should be theirs, to 'southside of the world' and 'wolf among wolves' where he wants to be seperate because it's no longer a political thing but an introspective one and some people are fundamentally different.
there's loads of stuff on the blues wich is half helpful but it's from a specifically racial standpoint which isn't really where i'm attempting to come from.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 15:32 (twenty-two years ago)

i'm specifically tryign to avoid any socialogical contrivance - i hate how every work has to be in the service of some group, the poor or peverted or woman or whatever - not that those causes are a bad thing, just i think in writing or whatever else it's something else that draws you in, some moment where normal thinking is suspended and something beautiful happens.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 15:34 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm still trying to get my head around "english lit dissertation on will oldham."

― m.e.a. (m.e.a.), Thursday, 25 March 2004 15:39 (twenty-two years ago)

the folk commie thing where everyone's wronged and it needs to be put right cos the world should be theirs

Ours surely?

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 25 March 2004 15:41 (twenty-two years ago)

literature in the english language, which americans have made a tremendous contribution to in the last few hundred years.
and theirs=the folk commies. i am a detatched academic! you can probably tell from the way i write.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 15:56 (twenty-two years ago)

No no, ours = "the people"

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:08 (twenty-two years ago)

i know, i know, i just don't get involved in the rhetoric.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:12 (twenty-two years ago)

one think i'm thinking is that woody guthrie and that era and the revival with dylan isn't that much of atool for finding where oldhm's coming from cos it's largely politically motivated and you can go back to a jimmie rodgers and it's all "this story has no moral." which is more on the oldham side of it.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:14 (twenty-two years ago)

Sorry to labour the point but the folk commies didn't really believe the world should be theirs - it's "This Land Is Your Land" not "This Is Land Is Our Land" after all.

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Seek out Matewan

― The Huckle-Buck (Horace Mann), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:20 (twenty-two years ago)

i know! it's just sodding semantics. i said that because "theirs" is a very specific group (the workers, the people) which naturall yexcludes orange farm owners (reasons of money) and me (reasons of distance in time and geography), so woody's "your" is equivalent to my "their."

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:24 (twenty-two years ago)

"this land belongs to you and me." that's exactly what woody was saying. you. and me. all of us.

― fact checking cuz (fcc), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:34 (twenty-two years ago)

one think i'm thinking is that woody guthrie and that era and the revival with dylan isn't that much of atool for finding where oldhm's coming from cos it's largely politically motivated

um, take another listen to "highway 61 revisited" or "blonde on blonde" or "the basement tapes" and then write a term paper on what you think the political motivations of those records are.

― fact checking cuz (fcc), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:36 (twenty-two years ago)

check out David Hajdu's "positively 4th street" as one measure of the political motivations of Dylan and his followers in the 60s folk revivial.

― lovebug starski, Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:47 (twenty-two years ago)

check out bob dylan's "visions of johanna" as one measure of how quickly and completely and masterfully dylan overcame those political motivations and settled into the magic and mystery of being a musician.

― fact checking cuz (fcc), Thursday, 25 March 2004 16:57 (twenty-two years ago)

fact, there's still plenty of political motivation in 'like a rolling stone' and 'rainy days women' and 'ballad of a thin man'. i'm not ruling them out completely, they're worth a mention cos they're part of the tradition but i think will oldham draws from seomthing older, there's always a sense of.. locality in there, his songs are seldom aware of a world outside one or two people. anf if they are, like 'southside', it's full of rapists and diseased women who've deliberatley avoided the larger world.

and i KNOW woody said "you and me" but i don't agree with him. i seldom feel the world was made for me or many of the people i know.

ballad of a thin man is much like 'this land is your land' - mr jones is the same sorts of people as who puts of the sign saying private property with nothing said behind. i love dylan but i'm not sure he's what i need to be using here.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 17:16 (twenty-two years ago)

I'd certainly check out the Will/Billy personal articles that appeared in The Guardian last week and the latest Uncut for source material.

― dymbel, Thursday, 25 March 2004 17:23 (twenty-two years ago)

there's a wealth of interviews, got loads of it, but what i really need to know is if there's any good books on folk music, written with the same kind of purpose as the lomaxes weilded tape recorders.

― matthew james (matthew james), Thursday, 25 March 2004 17:25 (twenty-two years ago)

rainbow quest by roger cohen might help you out. there's a lot of of really interesting work on the folk revival that doesn't view it in the service of "the people" necessarily. though i'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what kind of take/perspective it is you're trying to forge. what's your research question about oldham?

― devon (popmatters devon), Thursday, 25 March 2004 21:09 (twenty-two years ago)

there's a decent book on guthrie by joe klein.

― Ian Johnson (orion), Thursday, 25 March 2004 21:14 (twenty-two years ago)

are you wondering if there's a PLEASE KILL ME on folk?

― devon (popmatters devon), Thursday, 25 March 2004 21:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Pete Seeger's The Compleat Folksinger would seem like one place to start. The Broadside box set that came out a few years back would seem to be another. Was there ever a "Collected Broadside"-type book?

― m.e.a. (m.e.a.), Thursday, 25 March 2004 21:28 (twenty-two years ago)

i don't really have a question i'm approachiong oldham with. i never liked to do things like that, if something's to make sense then it seems churlish to approach with a thesis before you've even done the work, that entrely contradicts anything that anyone with a genuine interest in art holds dear about art.

― matthew james (matthew james), Saturday, 27 March 2004 14:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Well first you listen to the music, but when you come to write about it you need some sort of thesis or what's the point of writing?

And as an aesthetic theory, trying to imagine any work of art outside of any social/historical/political context seems a very limited way of exploring it.

― noodle vague (noodle vague), Saturday, 27 March 2004 14:58 (twenty-two years ago)

matthew you don't need a big statement like "here's what i think, NOW i'll write the thing" but you need a short simple question to keep things focussed. this is, coincidentally, the organizing principle of this very forum.

one might be "why don't folk crit tools work with will oldham?"

my answer would be along the lines that he's one of the furthest things from a folk musician i can think of.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Saturday, 27 March 2004 16:12 (twenty-two years ago)

of course I'm strange. i think Aerosmith is more "folk" than will oldham.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Saturday, 27 March 2004 16:14 (twenty-two years ago)

he's far far from a folk music but he draws from the mannerisms of that tradition and writes about modern times. that's roughly the way i'm approaching things, how he's pointedly apoliticised. the frustrating thing is most of the work i've found on folk is in the world of culturasl studies which is always hevaily politicised and socialist.
nearest thing to folk today is obviously hip-hop, which is endlessly interesting because it's been so heavily globalised. maybe the first popular mode of song which doesn't focus mainly on love songs, too.

And as an aesthetic theory, trying to imagine any work of art outside of any social/historical/political context seems a very limited way of exploring it.
i've always believed the world is fundamentally the same because people always have the same very basic motivating factors for their behaviour. there is a vague tiung that changes in the various stages of liberality-->illiberality in the world, but i don't imagine things change that much, because everything that i've ever been interested in through the centuries seems to have something common. and plus, it's so encumbering and clumsy when academics put a thing in the service of a cause.
plus i don't really think of myself as an academic, i do'nt have that thing of organisation or any desire to achieve anything other than my own thoughts.

― matthew james (matthew james), Sunday, 28 March 2004 01:41 (twenty-two years ago)

joe klein's book on guthrie's great, too! managed to get a farily cheap 1st edition of it to, with the most awful, awful dust jacked, some cheap chummy drawing of him walking down a train track weilding a guitar.

― matthew james (matthew james), Sunday, 28 March 2004 01:47 (twenty-two years ago)

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