Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. .

By Benjamin Filene (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

In 1999, the popular DJ and electronic performer Moby released Play, an album of vintage American field recordings expropriated as dance music. Though the album was largely a commercial and critical success, it also spawned a loud critical backlash. How could a pop artist disrespect pure folk song for the sake of crass popular tastes? How could these simple songs be so debased? What about their cultural heritage? Was nothing sacred? In Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, Benjamin Filene aptly demonstrates that, far from being a recent phenomenon, critical inquiry into the nature of authenticity and American "vernacular culture" has been instrumental in the development, dissemination, and evaluation of American roots music from at least the late nineteenth century forward.

Filene's fine study examines the performers Lead Belly (note corrected spelling), Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan to discover how "folklorists" promoters, scholars, the iconic folksong collecting team of John and Alan Lomax "made judgments about what constituted America's true musical traditions, helped shape what 'mainstream' audiences recognized as authentic, and, inevitably, transformed the music that the folk performers offered" (5). Filene calls this process the "cult of authenticity," the production of "a web of criteria for determining what a 'true' folk singer looked and sounded like and a set of assumptions about the importance of being a 'true' folk singer" (49). Though early academics like Harvard professor Francis James Child may have had an academic interest in cataloguing British folk songs, it wasn't until the Lomax team lugged their 350-pound recorder across the South on a "part talent search, part sociological survey, and part safari" (50) that the romance of the folk began in earnes t.

The Lomax's greatest discovery, Lead Belly, demonstrates for Filene how problematic terms like "authenticity" can be when the authentic subject speaks for himself. The case of Lead Belly, discovered in a prison and carted around from stage to stage, "illustrates how contact with the Lomaxes and the world of commercial recordings affected Lead Bell/s sense of what would appeal to white audiences" (678). A flurry of cultural forces, including an implied cultural racism that demanded Lead Belly be promoted as a dangerous monster, and an American impulse towards a documentary style in the 1930s, contributed to Lead Belly's success. In his most devastating illustration of folk culture's sentimental "Orhering," Filene quotes a letter from Lead Belly to Alan Lomax, revealing the impossible conflict of his position as an authentic performer: "If your Papa come I would like for Him to Here me sing if He say i Have Change any whitch i Don't think i have and never will But to Be [sure] to get his ideas about it i would feel good over what ever he say about it" (73). "Like many roots musicians," Filene concludes from his example, "Lead Belly found his way out of this limbo only after his death" (74).

Muddy Waters provides a second case study for American roots music. Originally discovered by Alan Lomax, Muddy Waters attained his fame after teaming up with Willie Dixon and recording for Leonard Chess. Though his career was marked by a seemingly endless series of stops and starts, Filene locates Waters's success of the 1950s in "the mid-century collectors' conception of African American culture [...] Disillusioned with what they perceived as bourgeois culture's corrupt materialism and constraining standards of propriety, they depicted bluesmen as the embodiments of an antimodern ethos" (116). In a particularly strong moment of his analysis, Filene notes that Muddy Waters was most successful when Dixon tapped him as part of his "memory business" (127). Though Muddy Waters may have resented the intrusions into his blues, "The portrait of the 'true bluesman' that Dixon created left space for performers to remain generative artists with strong connections to contemporary culture. Dixon showed that a roots figur e could be 'Other' without being marginalized, 'traditional' without being static, and 'archetypal' without being obsolete" (132). Waters represents, in Filene's argument, a "mastery" of the "cult of authenticity."

Filene concentrates next on the institutionalization of folk music, which he ties in with the major anthropological contribution to scholars of the 1950s and later: functionalism. As opposed to an outmoded evolutionary model which saw folk music as relics, functionalism offered an expansive view that saw" the survival of the form of folk expression was not a remarkable fluke but a sign of that form's extraordinary vitality and cultural utility" (138). With the encouragement of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the definition of folk music was expanded beyond isolated rural communities, and encouraged a connection between folk culture and social activism (150). On the other end of the spectrum, academics began to institutionalize folk culture "to establish and codify its methods and standards in the hope that it at last would command the respect of other disciplines and, not incidentally, win the favor of foundations and government grant-giving agencies" (164). With the encouragement of men like Richard Dorson, f olklife became a vital and, not incidentally, stilted tool for understanding American culture.

The final chapter of Filene's book is dedicated to Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, both of whom "grew up outside the regional or ethnic traditions that produced roots music but who became public performers of and emissaries for that music" (186). Filene connects Seeger with the idea of folk music as process. By including such diverse sources as show tunes and Tin Pan Alley blues on his "folk" albums, Seeger "illustrate [s] how such forms can be subjected to the folk process - or, rather, to Seeger's personalized folk process" (196), an idea that extended to Seeger's most famous contribution to music history: the sing-along. Dylan was marked by "his folksy image, knowledge of American roots music, dedication to revitalizing folk music traditions, and political idealism" (210). Yet Filene also detects in Dylan a "suspicion of cohesion and commitment" (214), illustrated by the fact that by the mid-1960s he had lain his progressive political image to rest. This shift "renounced one manifestation of the Folk revival, n ot revivalism as a whole," Filene notes, and Dylan's post-1965 output "represents a transmutation, not an abdication, of the folk-stylist role" (215). "Dylan," in Filene's final analysis, "strove both to absorb the essence of individual roots traditions and to stretch the boundaries of each genre" (227), a striking contrast to Pete Seeger's purist project. It is Dylan's impulse that represents the most lasting contribution of folk music to American culture: "that memory can create American culture anew" (236).

Benjamin Filene's book fits in easily with a growing body of scholarship that critically examines the idea of authenticity as it relates to American popular music. There is no longer any denying the claim that authenticity, a constructed term, has been vital to the formation and reception of virtually every "American" musical genre from Tin Pan Alley to rap. The breadth of this line of inquiry has been best illustrated in Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick's co-edited volume American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (2001), which has been expanded by the University of Massachusetts Press into a book series under their editorship. The novelty of Filene's contribution to the field lies in three primary areas. First, he is chiefly concerned with the relationship between producers, promoters, and consumers. This middle group (the so-called "folklorists") offsets the traditional model of text- and/or reception-oriented analysis so cherished by earlier scholars, and consequently upsets the groun ds upon which "authenticity" has been used in historical scholarship to validate artificial (and, as Filene strongly indicates, often racist) claims to advance questionable assumptions about American culture. Erasing the limiting parameters of acceptable forms of discourse for understanding pop music leads to a radical rejection of troubling conclusions like American exceptionalism.

Second, Filene's study broadens the scope of inquiry into "folk culture" (and even "vernacular music") by focusing on the genre of "roots music." By leaving aside a problematic and arbitrary distinction that has had dramatic implications for much earlier scholarship on American musical forms and in fact strongly questioning its role in the production of public memory Filene is able to place a figure like Lead Belly next to the later Muddy Waters, a coupling which has been too easily assimilated by historians into already standing ideas about the conflict of rural and urban forms. Placing memory at the center of his argument allows Filene to set aside sweeping claims usually too easily assumed by musical historians.

Third, Filene's study refuses to limit itself to only a narrow version of textual analysis, selecting instead to deftly juggle musicological, cultural historical, and textual interpretation. Though this eclectic methodology sometimes becomes unwieldy, it generally works to Filene's benefit to draw together the most convincing elements of various methods. His analysis of Muddy Waters, for example, is strengthened by considering the form, structure, function, meaning, and evolution of his music and cultural reception together.

As an early book-length study of the relationship between folklorists and folk artists and the centrality of memory to this relationship, Romancing the Folk is a resounding success. Filene's arguments are clearly thought out, his illustrations are strong, his clear writing style is compelling. His practical method of bringing together an astonishingly diverse collection of primary and secondary sources and methods is almost always unique and successful, and his encyclopedic knowledge of folk music is bordering on disturbing. Filene's willingness to take academic risks should be celebrated.

Perhaps the greatest detraction from Filene's book is his rather idiosyncratic selection of performers. This is largely due to the fact that his line of historical inquiry is still new. Filene says as much in the book's introduction: "I have tried to chart my course with an eye toward plotting connections and suggesting new avenues for inquiry, rather than with a concern for coverage" (2). Though a more effective disclaimer than most, the more glaring omissions, in their conspicuous absence, make some of the included artists seem like weaker subjects than they actually are. Muddy Waters, for example, feels lonely to me in a study on folk music and public memory that excludes Woody Guthrie from all but the introduction (what child doesn't know "This Land is Your Land?"). Filene's innovative treatment of Muddy Waters, as I have indicated above, is quite strong, but it is somewhat weakened by its isolation.

Of course, Filene makes no claims to have written an exhaustive study of roots music; this would, in fact, work in direct opposition to his premise that memory has been more important to the idea of roots music than form. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic selection of performers may be more apparent simply because the book flows more like a collection of essays than a linear argument. Filene is offering a new way of thinking about American roots music, not a new history of it (Peter Guralnick, are you listening?), so this is a forgivable offense. Perhaps we can be grateful for the brevity of each chapter; the work for future historians in filling the spaces between them is immense, and the permission to conduct such inquiries granted through Filene's research has been a long time coming.

The only other notable weakness of Filene's book is his apparent need to include "pet" subjects that disrupt the flow of the book. His introduction of figures like Bruce Springsteen into a section primarily concerned with Bob Dylan distracts from the subject at hand without really strengthening the argument, even while teasing the reader into wondering what Filene would say about these other artists. This complaint likely results from my own enthusiasm for the music Filene describes, combined with the obvious and refreshing excitement Filene brings to his study. As a complaint, it may also be read as a celebration, for it anticipates the promise of Filene's future work.

AARON LECKLIDER is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at Boston University. He has taught at Endicott College and UMass Boston.