Week 1

Folk music has been a compositional basis for music for centuries.  Master composers such as Vivaldi, Handel, Holst, Grainger, and Beethoven have all woven folk music into their masterworks.  The popular or vernacular music of America is the same.  Barbara Allen is just case in point.  From our “Old Time Music” in this week’s listening, we hear a British folk song (I can’t find any information quickly that it has Welsh origins, but I might be thinking of The Ash Grove) that has become an American folk classic.  In my research, I heard Art Garfunkel cover it, and he’s not the only.  Like Swansea Town or Danny Boy, it stays with us, centuries after inception.  Art Garfunkel’s version combines his “folksy” ways, popular music, and “legit” sounds to bring us something very memorable, with Art’s tenor voice lilting above the stratosphere on the part. 

Unique American folk music goes back as far as Stephen Foster and even further.  How many of his folk songs can be found in the wind band music of Grundman or LaPlante?  The Irish connection comes through in one of my research recordings, John McCormack trills it for us with his light Irish brogue.  No bassline has been developed yet, and the piano parts are very classical in nature, but, along with Barbara Allen (which, itself, turns up in several versions of A Christmas Carol as one of the folk songs sung by young Scrooge and Marley at a party hosted by their first employer), is a folk song that grounds Americana and forms the formation of what is to come. 

The slave work songs are the other component that we need to form American popular music of the early 20^th Century.  Long John, which uses a great deal, understandably, of African tribal rhythmic techniques, gives us that second component.  As we take these work songs and spirituals and combine them with our folk songs, while exploring other styles, we get the early jazz of the 20^th Century, which then will delve into pop music.