Folk, yeah!

November 10th 2006 by E..

There’s someone playing the piano, and in a distant room, folk DJ’s from the Northeastern United States are showing off up-and-comers to each other…And they said folk music was dead…

Only a few hours into my first visit to the conference of the NorthEast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA), I have seen several familiar faces, mostly musicians, but there are a few otehrs that I know…watching the artists perform makes me think a lot about music and what it means to me, as well as what it means to them…

In a sense, folk music will never really die, but that’s not necessarily a good thing…not because the music has grown outdated and just won’t go away, but the events and actions that lead to the writing of a protest song or ballad keep on happening…I just met a fella named James Durst, a singer-songwriter who is part of the project Work O’ The Weavers, who sang a song about the countries of the world running together and forming new countries…in the beginning, it was just a bunch of silly-sounding mash-ups of names of cities and countries (Califor-egon), until it became a commentary about how in a world where everyone got along, they wouldn’t need songs like this one…and it’s true…as long as there is inequality, war, injustice and evil, there will be folk music speaking out against it…

With all that aside, there are still plenty of musicians who decide to take the high road and sing about historical events or simply tell pretty stories in their songs, rather than go for the topical…these can be very creative and interesting, but for the most part, the songs follow a pretty bland formula:

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