The Incompleat Folksinger

Rating:
Summary: superficial
Review: I recently completed this book and was awestruck by how little I had previously known about such a great musician and historian, Pete Seeger.

This book is interesting in many different ways. It provides an excellent beginning in the studies of enthnomusicology, instrument development, musician history, as well as a multitude of other areas. While a bit disorganized and stream-of-consciousness-like at times, it still provides an insite into this complex man. While he is complex, he is so simple in his goals of peace, love and unity. I found out about many people I never knew existed and much more about people, like Woodie Guthrie, who shaped what we call 'folk' music today.

I find I am highly indebted to Mr. Seeger for compiling and recording the many songs of so many cultures, and for putting names to them. 30 years later, much of this music has been lost, forgotten, or moved into the mainstream with little regard for it's origin.

While originally a library book, I purchased this book to refer to and pass on to my children. They need to realize just how much history shapes music and music shapes history. Thank you Pete Seeger for the labors of love.

Rating:
Summary: Music as a way of life
Review: I recently completed this book and was awestruck by how little I had previously known about such a great musician and historian, Pete Seeger.

This book is interesting in many different ways. It provides an excellent beginning in the studies of enthnomusicology, instrument development, musician history, as well as a multitude of other areas. While a bit disorganized and stream-of-consciousness-like at times, it still provides an insite into this complex man. While he is complex, he is so simple in his goals of peace, love and unity. I found out about many people I never knew existed and much more about people, like Woodie Guthrie, who shaped what we call 'folk' music today.

I find I am highly indebted to Mr. Seeger for compiling and recording the many songs of so many cultures, and for putting names to them. 30 years later, much of this music has been lost, forgotten, or moved into the mainstream with little regard for it's origin.

While originally a library book, I purchased this book to refer to and pass on to my children. They need to realize just how much history shapes music and music shapes history. Thank you Pete Seeger for the labors of love.

Rating:
Summary: superficial
Review: This is an amiable gloss, much of it compiled from articles the author contributed to his "Sing Out" "folk music" magazine, but its self-conscious folksiness and superficiality become cloying and smarmy eventually. The author refers to himself as "a professional performer of amateur music" with a certain irony, but none of the contradictions inherent in his conception the form are really addressed. The author makes it clear he wants the form and a doctrinaire politics intimately and inextricably associated but offers no substantial defense for this posture.

In an early eighties interview in Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan relates how he went to see someone billed as a folk singer and complained to his companion, "That's not a folk singer, a folk singer sings folk songs, not songs he made up himself."

His companion answered, "Well, you started that, didn't you?"

"Yes, I suppose," Dylan said, "but I would never have done it if I hadn't sung the folk songs first."

Pete Seeger in the introduction to an early nineties edition of this book voices a similar complaint, that nowadays by folk singer we often mean someone who sings pop songs and accompanies himself on an acoustic guitar. There is something silly about this, certainly, but there is also something silly about Pete Seeger's idea of a folk singer. 1) Note that the steel string acoustic guitar, the instrument of choice for these "folk singers" was not generally available until the 1920's, when practical designs were marketed to be used in dance bands because gut (now nylon) string guitars weren't loud enough. In other words the steel string acoustic guitar is essentially a pop instrument, not a folk instrument. 2) Note that it would be impossible to conceive of chordal accompaniment in the way these "folk singers" conceive of it without the theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Only monophony, heterophony, and vestigial polyphonic (particularly drone) accompaniments are really authentic.