Roger McGuinn
By J.R. Jones
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The phonograph thrust folk music into the 20th century by adding performance to what had previously been a purely literary record. When folklorist John Lomax was compiling the celebrated print anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), he dragged a 1906 Ediphone around with him, recording his discoveries on crude wax cylinders. By 1933, when Lomax and his son Alan discovered and recorded Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison, he had traded up to a 315-pound portable recorder that cut discs from the trunk of his Ford sedan. After John was named curator of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song the next year, the Lomaxes found the resources to record such legends-to-be as Bukka White, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Son House. By documenting the singer as well as the song, they added an entirely new dimension to the historical record and extended the oral tradition not only around the world but into the future.
While McGuinn undoubtedly drew from these old records–Leadbelly’s 12-string guitar work was an early influence–his introduction to folk music reflected the time-honored values of community and oral instruction. Born in Chicago in 1942, McGuinn was already a guitar-strumming rocker by the time his music teacher at the Latin School invited folk singer Bob Gibson to perform for the class. McGuinn was spellbound by Gibson’s songs and stories. “Bob just played the five-string banjo, sang some folk songs, and blew me away,” McGuinn remembered in Biography of a Hunch, a history of the Old Town School of Folk Music. “I’d never heard music like that before. I wanted to know more about it.”
Since then, the music business has stoked our hunger for “new” sounds. Critics tend to champion the innovative over the familiar; Bob Dylan is usually portrayed as a hero for cranking up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. The record business, in its headlong rush toward the next big thing, that novel synthesis that will keep the cash registers ringing for another fiscal year, has little interest in traditional music until it’s dusted off, tarted up, and presented in a fresh commercial context. Even folk artists, who 40 years ago would have recorded traditional songs without a second thought, are expected to come up with new product. “The new folk singers all play their own material because of commercial pressure to do so,” McGuinn recently pointed out in Billboard. “Nowadays, you’re not a valid artist unless you write your own stuff.”
One thing is certain: the oral tradition is slipping into the past. McGuinn concedes as much when he equates it with the transfer of data through a telephone cable. One of the more moving songs in the Folk Den is “Lost Jimmy Whelan,” the mournful tale of a drowned man whose ghost comforts a bereaved maiden. “I recorded this for the Folk Den just minutes after hearing of the unfortunate death of Bob Gibson,” McGuinn reveals in his introductory note. “If it hadn’t been for Bob, I might never have learned this, or any other folk song.” Over computer speakers, with one’s eyes closed, it sounds eerily like an old phonograph.
