Peter, Paul & Mary: In The Wind (1963)

Through the inestimable Expecting Rain I found a review of a new book about the New Lost City Ramblers. "Anxiety over Authenticity in Folk Music," the review is called. The NLCRs were a folk revival group: not one I ever immersed myself in, but from Poole's description of Ray Allen's book, it sounds like they were confronting exactly the issues I was talking about here. I might have to read that book. But don't worry: I'm done (I think) talking about the authenticity question for a while. PP&M's third album brings up different issues.

In The Wind was released in October of 1963. As Professor Wikipedia reminds us, that's just a couple of months before the British Invasion would begin, which turned teens' attention away from folk-pop immediately, and would eventually draw in more mature listeners as well. What the wiki doesn't remind us of is that October 1963 was just a month before the Kennedy assassination. I don't know if you could find any music better suited to the vaunted optimism of the Kennedy years than PP&M's. So, farewell to the golden era, right?

In The Wind is, for my money, not quite as satisfying a record as their first two. It has its share of classics. If I was put on that mythical desert island of my dreams and told I could only take a handful of Peter, Paul & Mary tunes, "Long Chain On" would definitely be one of them. And "Very Last Day" is their hardest-hitting gospel opener yet, expressing not just exultation but a little bit of rage - this is PP&M at their most politely apocalyptic.

But many of the other selections seem to fit too neatly into already-established patterns: "Rocky Road" is a pleasant, well-done record, but definitely sounds like PP&M Children's? Song Part XII.

And some of the songs are downright misfires. "Stewball," which people seem to love, always struck me as cloying and obvious in ways that "Puff" wasn't - the pop side of the folk revival was always in danger of slipping into novelty music, and here they did. "All My Trials," so haunting in Joan Baez's version, shows the lower end of Mary's range off to dismaying effect.

But I'm avoiding the one new thing they did on this album, and the reason it was such a massive hit. It includes not one, not two, but three songs by Bob Dylan. Let's get the timing nailed down here. They include "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," which Dylan recorded in late 1962 and released on his second album in May of 1963 - well before PP&M's version. They include "Quit Your Low Down Ways," which Dylan had recorded in July of 1962, but held back; it was finally released in 1991. And of course they did "Blowin' In The Wind," which Dylan had begun performing in early 1962, recorded in July of that year, and released on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in May 1963. It's worth noting that PP&M's single of this song came out in June 1963.

So, one of Bob's skewed love songs, one of his blues pastiches, and one of his protest songs. A suspiciously generous and broad selection of his work - and let's not forget that PP&M and Bobby shared a manager, the notorious Albert Grossman. This is product placement, obviously.

But it works for everybody. Dylan was the big noise in the folk-revival community by this point. He wasn't selling a lot of records, and nobody outside Greenwich Village and a few college campuses knew who he was, but all the insiders had recognized him as the Golden Boy by this point, for his performances but mostly of course for his songwriting. (And let's not forget that for all the hand-to-hand song-trading that the folk-revivalists fetishized, a lot of them learned songs off of paper: and "Blowin'" had been published in May 1962.)

In short, not only would Big Al have been leaning on PP&M to give a shout-out to his other client, but the trio would have been feeling the same pressure as everybody else in their field to come to terms with this burgeoning talent, who everybody assumed was going to be the Next Big Thing. So, three of his songs find their way onto their third album - filling the same slots that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger tunes had on earlier discs. The contemporary/protest slots. (Plus one of the trad-music slots.) A smart move, certainly, but I can't imagine it wasn't fraught with some anxiety, or maybe I just want it to be, because the piercing individuality of "Don't Think Twice" sits uneasily beside the carefully-cultivated anonymity of the trad material, and the overenthusiastic blues pastiche of "Low Down Ways" nevertheless works perfectly well as blues. Dylan, in other words, is something else entirely, Samson with long hair just about to bring the whole building down, and you can already feel it start to shake.

Every future album of theirs would be cast onto waters over which Dylan's shadow fell. That's just the way it was in the Folk Revival after 1963. But I like to imagine that brief moment in the summer of 1963 when it wasn't like that yet, when Dylan's version of "Blowin' In The Wind" was out but not very many people had heard it yet, and so PP&M's version isn't competing with it, not really, not for most listeners...

What I'm dancing around here, clumsily, is the fact that Dylan's version is weird and artistic, while PP&M's version is obvious and very poppy. And what does that mean? Every card-carrying Dylan fan (I got mine laminated) is required to prefer his version and scoff at theirs. They had the hit. He got the immortality. But what was really happening with it in May-June 1963?

Dylan's version is, as I say, weird. A little too fast for the solemnity of the lyric: you want to slow down and contemplate it, but he takes it at a tempo that rushes you through it, urging you on, gently to be sure but insistently. His vocal rhythm is skewed: it sounds off-handed, or hesitant, again undercutting the poetic simplicity and depth of the lyric. In short Dylan expertly creates tension here, forcing you to hear the questioning in these questions, allowing you to hear the diffidence, but undeniable pride, the singer feels in having formulated the questions so concisely. It's a masterpiece of a record. No doubt.

But it's not anthemic. It's an anti-anthemic recording. You're not going to march, holding hands, on Washington or any other citadel of power while singing Dylan's version. Is Dylan failing to hear the anthem in what he wrote? Or is he denying it?

PP&M's version is anthemic, through and through. They slow down the pace into a nice, swinging, rocking, hand-holding, flag-waving tempo; they round off the rough edges of his verse melody into something anybody can feel; they apply all their harmonic mastery to the chorus, to that bit that anybody can sing along to and everyone wants to. It's a perfect folk-pop performance, and if you're at all open to that sort of thing, it's tremendously winning. They do the anthemic potential of the song justice.

In later years, Dylan has always delivered this song with full cognizance of its anthemic qualities. Whether performing it acoustically or electrically, he gives it the sing-along treatment. Among other things this is likely a nod to the immortality PP&M's version gave it; it's like what he does with "All Along The Watchtower," which is always a tribute to what Hendrix heard in the song.

Is it impossible to hear in Dylan's original recording of the song an early attempt to come to terms with what PP&M did with it? The recording dates don't allow that - Dylan recorded his album version in July of 1962, almost a year before either he or they would release it. The most one could claim is that having made his version of the song, he chose to release it anyway, rather than revise it once he became aware of what PP&M were going to release (I can't imagine Dylan didn't hear their arrangement before he released his). So what I'm trying to hear probably isn't there.

But it kind of works anyway. You can hear Dylan's determinedly odd take on the song, not as a denial or a failure of the anthemic potential, but as a recognition that it's going to be turned into an anthem - and that's fine - but since you're going to hear it that way anyway, I might as well take this opportunity to point out that there's another way to hear it that nobody's going to pick up on if I don't show them the way.

That is: I'm not sure I'd call Bob's 1962 recording the definitive version of the song. It's too easy to hear it as a comment on the PP&M version. Which did, after all, what it was meant to do: provide inspiring singalong music for countless marches.

Anno Moyoco: Sakuran (2001-2003)

I've had this one sitting on the shelf for a while, and never got around to reading it. Not out of lack of interest: rather, I could tell it was going to be so good that I wanted to wait for the right time. The Paul Masson theory of literary consumption, for those old enough to remember it.

Anno Moyoko 安野モヨコ (Moyoco seems to be her preferred romanization: cute): Sakuran さくらん, serialized from 2001 to 2003, published in book form in 2003. There's a movie, too, which I haven't seen (I was waiting to read the manga). It's a little unclear how complete the story is at the end of this volume; she started serializing a second part in 2005, but it petered out. At the moment, Volume 1 is the only volume.

It's a true modern classic, though. Art, story, everything. It's set in the pleasure quarters of Edo, the notorious licensed-prostitution district, and it's kind of a bildungsroman about the courtesan Kiyoha: how she comes to the quarter, how she grows up, how she advances through the ranks.

The subject matter is pretty hackneyed, even if you like this sort of thing - Memoirs of a Geisha, anybody? The brilliance of this manga is in how Anno manages to make it all seem fresh. She writes/draws of the pleasure quarters as if nobody else had ever depicted them in fiction: and I doubt anybody has depicted them quite like this. Through liberally working in contemporary (as in right-now) girls'-comix aesthetics, over-the-top exaggerations of textile designs and hairstyles, and fashion-magazine poses and faces, Anno succeeds in making the quarter and its denizens feel real. She makes the glamor that every contemporary (as in right-then) source speaks of, but that can feel so remote and fairy-tale to us moderns, feel immediate. Shorter: this is an impossibly sexy Yoshiwara.

At the same time Anno pulls no punches in depicting the sexual-slavery realities of the pleasure quarters, forcing readers to confront the seamy underbelly of all that glamor. But she does it in a hard-boiled way that allows her to avoid the Dickensian sadism that destroyed Golden's book: Kiyoha, for all her sufferings, is not a very sympathetic character, and that makes her story ring true.

It's a rush, this comic. The art is overwhelming, and the setting bewildering. It doesn't help - or maybe it does help - that Anno isn't the most skilled narrator. It can be really hard to follow exactly what's happening to whom, and she leaves out a lot of the exposition that you might expect to find in a historical manga, explaining the peculiar lingo and customs of the quarter. She throws you in at the deep end, figuring the best visions are what you see just before you drown. She may be right.

Peter, Paul & Mary: (Moving) (1963)

Their first may be their definitive album, but their second, (Moving), comes damn close to matching it. It follows closely on the template of the first - same kinds of songs, in mostly the same kind of order (closing with a moody seasonal number rather than an antiwar anthem). It's as satisfying as anything they ever did, and if it doesn't quite equal the impact of the first one, it's only because most of the songs aren't quite as instantly memorable as the ones on the first album. They're fine songs - "Pretty Mary" (and is she ever! dig that cover! the face that launched a thousand trips!), "Tiny Sparrow," and "Old Coat" are some of my favorites of theirs - but they do tend to fly under the radar a bit.

The exception to the above is "Puff, The Magic Dragon," which is, of course, one of the group's best-known recordings. It's also significant as the only original composition of PP&M's to lodge itself in the popular consciousness. The Wikipedia entry on the song is worth reading, as a primer to the controversy.

Because, of course, "Puff" may be a drug song. Or it may not be. What it is for sure is most people's introduction to the thorny recesses of literary interpretation.

(Oh, please don't throw me in that briar patch, Br'er Bear!)

Is "Puff" a drug song? Most people who ask that question want a yes or no answer. They think there can be a yes or no answer. Unless you analyze lit for a living, in which case you know that the only way you can answer that question is with another question: what do you mean?

I'm right with Bill on this one: it depends on what you mean by the word "is."

That is, the kind of answer you expect to that question, the kind of information that you would accept as evidence one way or another, depends on what you think defines meaning in a song lyric: i.e., in literature.

Oversimply put, there are basically three positions you can take on this question. Defined in extreme terms, they are these.

(a) You can believe that the meaning of a piece of writing is whatever the author of it thinks it is when he or she writes it. The author defines the meaning. If you ask Peter (and lyricist Lenny Lipton) if "Puff" is a drug song, and they say no, there's you're answer: it's not a drug song. Unless you think they're lying, and really did intend for it to be a drug song, in which case it is a drug song but you have no proof. Unless you catch them on video sometime lighting up a spliff and laughing about how they've corrupted generations of kids by tricking them into unknowingly singing a drug song. But even then it's not proof, because maybe they're only being ironic, or maybe James O'Keefe entrapped them, or...

The point is, if you believe authorial intent is what defines meaning, then you're s.o.l., because you can never satisfactorily ascertain authorial intent. You really have no idea what Yarrow and Lipton meant unless you were squatting in their heads. This is kind of obvious, right?

The funny thing is, most of us realize this, and yet most of us have trouble completely discounting authorial intent as a tool for interpreting literature. Most of us (me included) are at least curious to hear what an author has to say about her writing - most of us won't ignore interviews with our favorite authors. So I'm not saying authorial intentions, and discussions thereof, are totally irrelevant...

(b) You can believe the meaning of a piece is whatever the reader makes of it. The reader completes the circuit of meaning, and only then does the juice flow. If you hear "Jackie Paper," "Puff," "dragon/draggin'," and references to magic kingdoms and you think "marijuana!" then it's a drug song - for you.

In other words, here there is no fixed meaning: the lyrics mean whatever you want them to mean. Or maybe want has nothing to do with it: maybe you can't help but hear the lyrics as being about drugs, because you think nobody could possibly be that naive, or you think Yarrow and Lipton were dirty fucking hippies and of course they were trying to corrupt your children, or whatever.

The point is, even if you're a hundred percent convinced that it's a drug song, so what: that interpretation is valid for yourself and yourself only. And few of us are ready to completely accept that approach, and not just, I think, because we're hopelessly looking for absolutes in a world that has none. It just doesn't square with our lived experience to think that words mean something completely different to everyone who hears them. If that were the case no communication would be possible at all. And yet we sort of communicate, which means it must be possible to sort of establish meaning that's valid for more than one reader...

And yet most of us are reluctant to abandon this approach completely, too, because our experience also tells us that poems, literature, songs can have a deeply personal meaning to us, that nobody can talk us out of.

(c) You can - and it should be clear by now that I think most of us in practice do - take some sort of middle position, where we feel a certain amount of reasonable attention should be paid to authorial intent, and/or the fixed meanings of words, and a certain amount of reasonable attention should be paid to the way large numbers of people receive those words. Meaning is messy, and maybe can't be completely nailed down, but we should be able to arrive at a more or less accurate understanding of what a song means by this kind of triangulation... (I really am a Clintonian, ain't I?)

And you can, furthermore, realize that by adopting (c) what you're really doing is recognizing that the process of thinking about both (a) and (b) and all points in between adds more to your understanding of the literature than a simple yes or no answer to the original question ever could have.

Let's look at a different example. J.J. Cale wrote a song called "Cocaine," which Eric Clapton covered. It's one of his biggest hits and concert faves. If you think about the lyrics, and read what Clapton says about them, you could make a case that the author and performer think it's an anti-drug song. But if you listen to live recordings and hear tens of thousands of people joyfully shouting along with the chorus, you realize that for most listeners, it's a pro-drug song. Which is it? There's no simple answer, but by recognizing the ambiguities in the lyrics, the way they make it possible for listeners to have two interpretations, and by noting the ambiguity in Clapton's own presentation, whereby he continues to perform the song year after year in full knowledge of the fans' interpretation, you begin to realize that everybody's feelings about drugs are complicated, and that rock and roll is not a genre that lends itself well to cautionary tales, and that Clapton's relationship with his audience is probably a little too comfortable for his artistic good, and that his own feelings about the substances he's on record as having abused and forsaken are probably more ambivalent than he lets on, and, and, and.

So: is "Puff" a drug song? Do you want it to be? Do you want to find a smoking gun that says Peter Yarrow was trying to get kids to smoke reefer? Do you want it not to be? Do you want to be able to hear it in a state of innocence, so that you the jaded adult can indulge in childhood fantasy without thinking about its metaphorical possibilities? All of these are real questions, and interesting ones.

As is, to be honest, the question of what Yarrow and Lipton thought they were doing. I tend to believe them when they say they had nothing like that in mind... And yet, we can't be entirely sure they're telling the truth now, can we? I mean, it's one thing to be writing songs for adults in the relatively sheltered and progressive world of the Folk Revival, and quite another to find yourselves ten or twenty years later, in the midst of a conservative backlash trying to account for the effect your words might have on kids who were never intended to be the audience... The young hipster may very well write something that the older daddy may come to regret having written. Happens all the time.

What's resonant to me about this scenario - for which, I hasten to add, I HAVE NO PROOF - is the way it seems to fit with the other children's songs PP&M sang in their early folk period (I'm not talking about their actual children's album). That is, I don't think they were meant for kids.

I've said before that I consider the Folk Revival of the late '50s and early '60s to be the original college radio music. It was a music of college town - Cambridge, Palo Alto, Austin, Dinkytown - Greenwich Village, too, sure, but largely because of the proximity of NYU, no? Later, folk music came to be considered appropriate for children, campfire singalongs and the like, but at first it was nightclub, or at least coffee-house, music. Places where grown-ups gathered.

So why the kids' songs? And I should note that all the folkies seemed to have them - it wasn't just PP&M. Dylan sang kids' songs, although he didn't tend to put them on his albums. This strain probably comes from Woody Guthrie, who wrote songs like "Car Car" for his kids.

But I think it also has something to do with the age of the Folk Revival crowd. Mostly college students or college age people: right at that age when you're finally feeling like an adult, and you're suddenly seized with nostalgia for childhood. We've all had that road trip, at 19 or 20, when, between U2 or Public Enemy albums, somebody starts singing the "Sesame Street" song and everybody joins in, right? There's something about that age which makes it possible for you to look back at your childhood with fresh eyes, to feel, for the very first time, the loss of innocence that defines adulthood, while at the same time you're still close enough to it to feel like if you try hard enough you could slip back into that innocence - while at the same time you're old enough that you feel that you wouldn't lose any of your adult dignity by doing so. At 16 you're too concerned with looking grown-up to sing "Froggy Went A-Courtin'"; at 20, you can do it with impunity. And of course at 20 you start to understand your childhood in ways you never did before. You become aware of the dark realities behind, say, "Ring Around the Rosey."

That, I think, is what explains the status of the children's song in the Folk Revival, and particularly in PP&M's oeuvre. They're not singing them for kids, at least not at first. They're presenting childhood to adults, in such a way that both recalls the innocence, and suggests that there were depths and meanings not understood at the time. "It's Raining" starts with play, but gets pretty somber. "Autumn To May" presents nonsense, not just as play, but as something poignant, mysterious. The baby-talk syllables in "Gone The Rainbow" aren't jokes, they're attempts to grasp something that lies just beyond the reach of expression, or linguistic memory.

And then there's "Puff."

Peter, Paul & Mary (1962), continued

(Well, this is a good part of why I blog. I wrote that long thing, and then the very next day I had PP&M on the iPod while walking to work, and lo & behold darned if I wasn't just purely enjoying it. It was almost as if the act of working through my feelings'n'thought about it in writing had, not really exorcised them, but at least put them to rest enough that I could move on and just listen, undistracted, to the music.)

So to be fair, there's probably a little more to be said about PP&M's first album. Like, maybe it's worth trying to be fair, and say something about it that doesn't burden it with several generations' worth of stuff.

I think PP&M's first album may have been their best. It doesn't contain all of their biggest hits - if you like them you wouldn't want to be without "Puff" or "Blowin' In The Wind" or a few other classics that would subsequently appear. But their debut album is probably the one that works best as a straight-through listening experience: as an album, in other words (and let's not forget the key role the Folk Revival played in establishing the long-player over the single as the dominant format for pop music).

Part of what makes it work is the variety. A good example of their pop professionalism was that they zeroed in on several different things that they could do well: up-tempo gospel-revivaly songs ("Early In The Morning," "If I Had My Way"), brooding Appalachian-type ballads ("500 Miles," "Sorrow"), and children's songs ("It's Raining," "Autumn To May," and probably "Bamboo" and "Lemon Tree" as well). They weren't as convincing at some other things, as we'd eventually find out; but here they identify their strengths, and stick to them. Add to this two of the greatest early protest anthems ("If I Had A Hammer" and "Where Have All The Flowers Gone"), and you have a pretty unbeatable selection of songs.

And they deploy them in a smart sequence: the two sides of the record open with the rousing gospel numbers, and then take us through a succession of moods including sorrow, contemplation, whimsy, ebullience, yearning, wry humor. What I'm trying to say is that if you like this kind of music, you couldn't find a better presentation of it.

And: surprise: I guess I like it. It has a lot of the musical values that have always attracted me, no matter what genre I'm in: strong sense of melody, careful effective arrangements, awareness of roots, love of rhythm. And it has a lot of specifics that I still find delightful: acoustic guitars that capture both the woody roots and whispery leaves of the folk tree (as it were!), and voices in full harmony.

Highly recommended.

Peter, Paul & Mary (1962)

Folk music is a paradox unplugged, accompanied by a riddle playing stand-up bass and an enigma singing high harmonies; the whole kit and caboodle (which just might be the name of the group) sits in the corner of the Coffee Shop of Self-Doubt, gnawing at bagels and sipping at fair-trade coffee, wondering where it's all bound. Once in a while they get up and sing.

*

For an intense two or three years in my late teens I was a folkie. It was the late '80s: how did this come to be? How did a child of a Republican household in the Later Age of St. Ronnie come to spend his afternoons and late nights lost in the sounds of the Kennedy years? In a sense, the question answers itself: I knew I wasn't a Reaganaut, and I was looking for something else. And I kept finding these interesting-looking old records in the local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores - we had a lot of thrift stores in suburban Anne Arundel County, and they seemed to have been stocked by Boomers who'd grown up and out of the same youthful obsessions that were now, and at a bargain price, mine. I picked up most of Peter, Paul & Mary's oeuvre this way, on old vinyl (so much heavier than the vinyl of new records), scratches and pops and clicks and faded labels with "Susan K." written in blue magic marker on them; I found Joan Baez's first two albums that way. And of course that's how I got my first Dylan...

At the time it was a lifeline to a better, vanished age. Within a few years I was learning about the people these folk-revivalists had based themselves on, the sources of their repertoire, and I was getting lost in the knotty question of authenticity; I left them behind (and followed Dylan's muse, truth be told, re-enacting in my own belated fanhood his gestural rejection of the Newport crowd). But for a couple of years there, PP&M and Joan Baez, Glenn Yarbrough and the Limeliters, were the beacons showing me the way out.

*

Most of what passes for folk isn't really folk. Right? "Folk" has to be somehow connected with the folk, right, the people, the tradition: a folk song by definition has to be a song that has been handed down by generation after generation of singers who taught it to each other manually, orally, preferably in an isolation enforced either by poverty or geography or both. A folk song isn't the product of any one person's genius or craft, but rather the collective genius and craft of many people, mostly anonymous: the People.

That's a naive and even essentialist view of it, to be sure. Study the liner notes to the Harry Smith anthology and you'll realize that for every traditional song that really is as old as the hills there's another that can be traced, if not to a creation out of whole cloth, than at least to a very specific innovation made by a particular, named, individual at a particular time in a particular place. Put another way, Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie can be seen as auteurs at least as easily as they can be seen as autochthonous products of the People.

Still, there's a lot of miles that separate someone like Johnson, who may have been exercising his individual genius but was doing it within a context that was rich with the tradition that gave birth to him, that created the idiom in which he was expressing his genius, from someone like my former neighbor in Cambridge, who sang pretty much only songs he had written himself, based in equal parts on his own musings and whatever he had learned about music from exactly three formats of radio: classic-rock, college, and talk.

My neighbor sang solo, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, and sang sensitive, earnest, melodically shaggy songs that went well with coffee and bagels. I'd call that, if I had to give it a label, singer-songwriter: he had more in common with James Taylor or Jack Johnson than with Bascom Lamar Lunsford or Mississippi John Hurt.

If it ain't old, if it ain't rooted in what's old, it ain't folk music, is what I feel.

And yet, of course: if Robt. Johnson was singing what he knew, and what he felt, and drawing inspiration from his immediate musical context, not considering it particularly old in relation to himself, most likely, and drawing, let's remember, from whatever he'd heard of Tin Pan Alley as well as the Delta, how is that different from my neighbor? Was not my neighbor being authentic in drawing from the music that surrounded him, no less than Mr. Johnson was?

This brings us to two points that might fairly be considered the rub here. First, authenticity, that dreadnought of a word. Second: the radio. Mass Culture.

*

I'm aware that I'm not saying anything many others haven't said better before me, by the way.

*

Authenticity. I'm prepared to grant my neighbor (and I'm sure he's quite relieved) an authenticity somewhat on a par with Mr. Johnson's, if we stipulate that authenticity to mean being true to one's musical context. RJ's was the Delta Blues, with snippets of mainstream pop here and there; my neighbor's was radio. Both take these materials - accept them, meaning maybe challenge but not reject them - and filter them through whatever they may have of personal genius and craft. If I like one better than the other, it's either a matter of responding to the genius of one over that of the other, or a question of liking the raw materials of one over the other.

Which I do, and do; no problem, end of debate. It's a question of taste (and I do believe taste can and should be accounted for: given account of), but not of authenticity or embeddedness in the folk process.

Unless. Unless you see a crucial and definitive difference between person-to-person transmission from one singer to another and mechanical transmission from one singer to thousands of listeners who have never met the singer and have no clue as to how the singer's culture may or may not be reflected in the music. Unless, in other words, you see folk music as being fundamentally impossible in the (wait for it) age of mechanical reproduction.

What could that difference be? What would you get from having Robert Johnson himself teach you "Terraplane Blues" that you couldn't get through learning it from a record? Musical fundamentals such as chords, tunings, rhythms, ways to produce and modulate the human voice? Background knowledge about the lyrics, what they mean, and why they mean what they mean? Why he's singing about a Terraplane? A greater familiarity with all the musical techniques, cultural knowledge, and experiences that lie behind "Terraplane Blues"? Something less definable - some kind of subverbal sharing that might arise naturally and gnostically from the type of intimate relationship that alone would have made it possible to get Mr. Johnson himself to teach you "Terraplane Blues"?

Shared culture, is that what we're talking about? Participation in the creation, maintenance, and transmission from which "Terraplane Blues" emerged organically? Are we saying that such participation is definitively different than cultural transmission into the midst of which mechanical capitalism - radio, records - have intervened?

Well, it is different, isn't it?

*

If you're a middle-class white guy in Cambridge, Mass., in the early '00s, and you play acoustic guitar and read books and are honest with yourself, you know that you can't get away with singing Robert Johnson songs, not really, because you didn't learn them from him (not strictly necessary), or from anybody who learned them from anybody who learned them from him. Not personally. You're not part of the folk tradition that Robert Johnson inhabited: you don't have the same right to the songs as he did.

If you're interested in authenticity, this poses a problem for you. You have two options. You can either sing them anyway, in which case your peers will think you're a poser and clueless and maybe a thief and not listen to you. Or you can sing what you know, trying to be as authentic to yourself as possible. In which case you end up sounding like James Taylor or Norah Jones and you're boring and lame and I don't listen to you. No big loss there, which is why folk music sounds the way it does now.

Is there still a folk tradition anywhere? A lot of us seem to think there is - I think that thought is what's behind a lot of the F on the NPR DORF lists. The periodic appearances of people like Caetano Veloso, Buena Vista Social Club, or things like the O Brother soundtrack on bestseller lists seem to speak for a yearning to believe that there is authentic music out there, somewhere, and people who can perform it authentically. I also think it's what's behind the surge of interest in a local music scene that you sometimes see - the assumption that a music's incubation in dark clubs and basements before the bright lights of the music biz are turned on it is analogous to, if not a manifestation of, the folk process. CBGB was just like a juke joint, in this line of thinking. Sugar Hill is the Delta. In this way of thinking the folk process can be boiled down to the idea of the proletariat, or kids (same thing, to rockists), reacting honestly to the world around them, as a community.

I don't think that's folk music, even if it is a good thing in other respects. An appreciation of the other respects in which it's a good thing is what led, to use a now-obscure example, Nora Guthrie to deliver Woodie's cache of lyrics to some indie-rockers and an agitprop songwriter, people who could speak to youth of their day, rather than to somebody who had some kind of appreciation for the musical context in which Guthrie worked. I would have loved to hear what Dylan or Cash did with them. That might have been close to folk music. Mermaid Avenue wasn't. It was shaggy singer-songwriter music with a pleasant indie murk and unusually pithy lyrics. (And, to be fair, a couple of tracks that make me smile to this day.)

Again, I don't think that's folk music. Shouldn't folk music, no matter how impeccably engagé it is, have something to do with old music?

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I listened to Peter, Paul & Mary's first album today. After many, many years in which my love of folk music was indulged solely by exploring old music, I've recently decided to give the Folk Revival another look. And I started by picking up PP&M's first six albums, their all-acoustic ones. Their "folk" ones, before they embraced folk-rock in Dylan's wake.

I hear many things in it now, mostly problems. The kind of problems that turn you off, not on. Like:

They're upper-middle-class urban white people, sons and daughter of privilege, singing songs plucked mostly from poor, rural, often non-white contexts. Appalachian ballads, African- American spirituals, calypsos, blues. What right do they have to these songs? Aren't PP&M just part of a long line of whites appropriating black music, putting a presentable face on it, and making money from it?

Does it make it better or worse that PP&M are performing in a style that, mostly, sounds like themselves, not their sources? Unlike, say, early Dylan, they're not trying to sound black, or Southern, or rural (except on "Bamboo," where they seem to be trying to sound Caribbean): they're singing pure notes, not bent, in carefully-tiered harmonies. Peppy rhythmic arrangements, very tight - very poppy. Of course PP&M were decidedly on the pop side of the folk revival... Is this them being true to themselves - authentic?

Does it make it better or worse that they seem to have had the best of intentions? That they marched on Washington, stood up for civil rights, really exerted themselves in causes - and that their repertoire also included good contemporary examples of the other strain of thinking about folk music, the new-but-political strain?

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It seems to me that when it began, the Folk Revival was about repertoire, and then it became about stance, and then it ended.

That is, in the '50s there were some people who realized what the age of mechanical reproduction was doing, or had done, to the folk process: destroyed it, or all but. And in the face of this loss, it seemed to fall to those few people who lamented the loss to document what was being lost. So you had people like Alan Lomax going around and recording the last of the traditional singers; you had people discovering some of the traditional singers and trying to bring them to new audiences before they breathed their last.

Other people heard this music and felt something in it, something that touched them despite, or more likely because, it had nothing do to with their world, their own context. It's the authenticity question, but in a period in which it seems this stuff is all but snuffed out, don't the benefits of trying to keep the tradition alive outweigh the potential violence you do to it by performing it out of context? Hedy West came by "500 Miles" authentically, but it touches you deeply, as well, and so why not sing it? Keep it alive, pass it on?

If you're really into the traditional music itself, for its own sake, then I think the answer's yes. But if you're coming to this scene a little later, attracted by the thoughtfulness of the performers, for example, or the simple beauty of the human voice/acoustic guitar combination no matter what it's singing, or by the politics, or just by the fact that everybody around you was into it (the Folk Revival was the original college radio music), then I think maybe after a while the authenticity question gnaws at you enough that maybe you step back and start looking for ways to incorporate a little more of yourself into your music. Your first album maybe is filled with Rev. Gary Davis and stripped-down Bill Monroe songs, but your third maybe has things by Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, and by your fifth you're trying to find your own songwriting voice.

Which is a healthy thing, I think.

But what about the old songs? Who's singing "500 Miles" now? Nobody. The tradition is not just dead now, but twice dead. Dead and abandoned. Dead and forgotten.

Maybe it could never have been any other way. Since, as we've seen, things are never the same again after radio and records step in.

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Let's go back to that moment when "500 Miles" has touched you deeply. Check the Wikipedia entry out: Hedy West was from rural Georgia, daughter of a union organizer, and she learned "500 Miles" from her grandmother, who'd learned it from her forebears. That's the folk tradition, in case you were wondering. I don't know if PP&M learned it from West when she hit the folk-revival circuit, or if they learned it from her record, but either way, they're not from rural Georgia. Peter was born in NYC, Paul was born in Baltimore and went to Michigan State, and Mary was born in Kentucky but moved to Greenwich Village when she was 2. This wasn't their music. Hello, elephant. If you're middle-class in America in the middle 20th century or later - probably it started earlier - you have no tradition. You were raised on TV and radio, and chances were you lived somewhere very different from where your ancestors had lived, very far from whatever community may have once nurtured them. It's the great dislocation of modernity, right? Wherever you are, whoever you are, you probably don't feel connected to a community: you feel atomized, isolated, and alienated.

And that brings us back to the dreaded authenticity question. The Folk Revivalists, many of them, had a genuine love for that music, but for most of them that would have been inextricably bound up with a hunger for an authenticity, membership in an organic community, that they felt the circumstances of their birth and upbringing had denied them. Maybe it's an illusion, maybe it's essentialist, maybe it's yet another unwitting manifestation of unexamined privilege, but you hear "500 Miles" or "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and you hear that, and it's something you want, something you want to honor, and in the honoring become (or is it the other way around?).

Is it so wrong to sing those songs, to make them part of your repertoire? And if you can sing them well, so that other people want to pay to hear you sing them, is it so wrong to charge admission, so that you can buy the time and means to learn more songs like them, and perform them to more people?

Maybe it is. Because they can never be your songs, no matter how well you sing them.

Dylan solved the problem by plugging in: by radically remaking the songs so that it was obvious to all that he was adding something new. That was '65 and '66. But if you listen to what he's done ever since, you realize he's never stopped trying to find his way inside those songs, find a way to inhabit them. To make them his. He's an antiquarian, in some ways, and it means that he's always been bedeviled by the authenticity question - it fuels much of his brilliance.

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Listening to Peter, Paul & Mary's first album, I can't help but think of A Mighty Wind: that movie nailed the folk revival, and specifically PP&M. Hilarious, and all in good fun, right? But while Spinal Tap didn't destroy heavy metal for me, A Mighty Wind might have destroyed folk music for me. The scholarly pretension, the naivete, the jejune rhythms and antiseptic harmonies, the utter cluelessness about where one falls in relation to the authenticity question - that's what the movie grasps. Certainly I can hear that in the music, clearly now where I couldn't when I was younger.

Has it ruined it for me? Or can I still enjoy PP&M for what they were, rather than scorning them for what they might have been trying to be? That's what I'm here to decide. I'm not sure if I can. Certainly every time I've played this disc in the last few weeks since I got it, I've been sent off on reveries like the one above.

This in spite of the fact that the record offers quite a few surface pleasures. I really like their harmonies - a rich blend where you can still pick out each individual voice for its qualities of personality. I like their arrangements: tight rhythms, well-honed accompaniments. They bring in the best aspects of pop: the professionalism, the attention to detail. And I love their repertoire: as something of a musical antiquarian myself I have to thank them for turning me on to such a wide variety of sturdy songs.

But I can't surrender myself to it like I once did.

True Grit (2010)

The line on the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit seems to be that it's their first serious foray into genre filmmaking. I don't know about that; what was Miller's Crossing? But it is their first serious, full-blown Western: after, of course, a modern comic Western (Raising Arizona), a Western-inflected modern comic noir (The Big Lebowski), and a modern revisionist sorta Western (No Country For Old Men). Clearly it's something they've been leading up to for a long time, and I'm glad they finally took the plunge.

Because True Grit, it turns out, sorely needed a remaking. The original (which I confess I only just saw in preparation for the remake) is an iconic Western, but for all the wrong reasons. It's a perfect example of the late classic Western - i.e., before Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah started shooting the place up. It has John Wayne in it, in all his unearned male-privilege swagger; it has unrepentant worship of out-of-control state violence to thumb the nose at dirty hippies (the original was made in 1969, don't forget); and it has the aspen glories of Colorado standing in for Arkanfuckingsas.

Worst of all, through becutesying and belittling Mattie, it has the gall to suggest that it's Rooster Cogburn who actually has the true grit. As if.

The Coens are too loyal to, or fascinated with, the myths of the Western to utterly jettison Cogburn's macho mystique, or utility; but they undercut it enough to put him in his place. That is, he's useful in a tight spot, not entirely useless otherwise, a gnarly mess of endearing and repellent traits; and, most importantly, he recognizes that it's Mattie who has the biggest and most cast-iron balls in the film.

That's only part of what I liked about it.

Another part is what the Coens did with the scenery. They keep the story in Arkansas, and Indian territory, and they don't glamorize it one bit. This is not the romantic Wild West, but a hard-bitten, scrubby Lower Midwest; it has its occasional prettiness, and a certain haunted spareness, but no aspens. The land their cameras give us is a perfect setting for the hard, matter-of-fact story they tell, in which there may be heroism, but not glory. And only occasionally what most of us would recognize as beauty. The major exception is, touchingly, during Cogburn's desperate ride to get Mattie to medical help: then, suddenly, the camera gives us lyrical views of a burning sunset, luminous frosty fields, endless starry skies. The West of legend.

Another thought. This is the second film in a row in which the Coens seem to be very interested in the idea of religion - in exploring a worldview (or even a world) entirely shaped by a particular religious outlook. In A Serious Man, of course, it was American Judaism of the late 1960s in the suburban upper Midwest. Here it's American Protestantism of the 1880s in the lower rural Midwest. Think about the opening of the film (their openings lately have been doozies): a dark screen, then a faint warm light in the middle that gradually comes to look like a cross seen through snow, but which, as it comes into full resolution, is revealed to be a saloon door in front of which a murder happens - a betrayal, as a man kills his master, a man to whom he is beholden.

And the language of Mattie's narration, and her whole way of dealing with the world, is all about debt, payment, tallies, contracts. The only thing free in this life, she says, is grace - and is there any of that in the film? Not until reality gives way to myth. Not until we come up, through the snow, to another doorway shining through the night, but this time with the possibility of salvation. And is this the same trading post where we've earlier seen Cogburn kick little Indian kids? Are we to imagine him begging for grace where he's previously shown none?

You know, I get the feeling that the Coen Brothers might only now be hitting their prime.

Federico Fellini: La Dolce Vita (1960)

Midway (or a little more) through my life's journey, I saw La Dolce Vita. A good time to see it: in one's prime (if you can call this prime).

Wow.

This film is too deep, too different from any I know much about, and too well known, for me to have anything useful to add about it. But, wow.

I'll just mention a couple of things that stopped me in my tracks.

One is that deathless opening. We see a helicopter carrying, suspended, a big statue of Jesus: flying past aqueducts, old Rome, then construction sites, new Rome, the statue's arms outstretched in benediction. Then the helicopter flies over some bathing beauties, and stops. Marcello, our protagonist, is on board, and his eye has been caught. Hovering there, dangling the Jesus over the girls, he tries to get a phone number. No dice. He smiles and flies on.

What a wonderful summation of the whole movie: immense, grand spiritual yearnings that nonetheless refuse to separate themselves from the pleasures of the flesh, with the result that neither category of desire is ever fully consummated. But no matter: on we fly, majestically.

The other scene is what Professor Wikipedia calls the "intermezzo." If the girl in this scene is an angel, then this must be heaven - it functions that way, as a brief moment away from the moil of mortality, all tomorrow's parties*, a breathing-space where our protagonist can work on his art. And Fellini's camera makes it look like heaven - this beachside cafe, reed blinds for walls and ceiling, light and shadow in a luminous dappling. But what about our protagonist? Could it be any clearer that he doesn't belong here? He, and his coat on the chair, are the only spots of darkness in the scene.

*Rock nerd me was happy to notice Nico in a bit part. Appropriate casting, to be sure.