When the venerable Old Town School of Folk Music opened its new headquarters last fall, few knew the future of folk music was under debate. But the genre that gripped generations in the 1950s and ’60s is being reinvented in the ’90s. What do we mean now when we talk about folk music?
Back in the 1960s, Peter Yarrow says, traditionalists used this argument against his group, Peter, Paul, and Mary. “Some people felt that if it was not pure ethnic, traditional music sung in the tradition of that style, it was not folk music,” he says. They believed the work of popular performers like Joan Baez and others “was not only not folk music, but it was adulterating or watering down and depriving the music of its strength. So they objected to our singing in our style.”
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Frank Hamilton was among those who held that view. Hamilton, a founder of the Old Town School and a onetime member of the Weavers, says, “Peter, Paul, and Mary are really popular singers. They’re not folksingers. Neither is Pete Seeger. Most of what they express is popular music, the chords, the trappings–it’s show business, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s great–I enjoy it–but it’s not folk music.”
“At the time Win and I had talked this over, we were imbued with kind of an ideal,” Hamilton says. “We had talked about a place where people could congregate, coming from diverse backgrounds with a common denominator of learning music through the vehicle of folk music. We had agreed that most music schools were fairly conservative in their approach and were more involved in weeding students out rather than pulling them in. So we wanted to have a situation at the Old Town School where people could own music, and folk music was the perfect vehicle because that’s music by people.”
“To me there are two issues here,” he says. “There was the artistic importance of not turning our back on this motherlode of talent, and then there was the business imperative of ‘I need these people as my customers.’ It was good politics, and it was good business.”
Hamilton, now 64, recognizes that times have changed, but he still laments the breakdown in what was once a thriving–and more strictly defined–folk community. “Folk music has become a spectator sport,” he says. “People have become very record-oriented. When you have records, you don’t want to do it yourself.” Folk music also fell victim to its own trendiness. “It just became a marketable item, more image and style than substance,” Hamilton says. “It no longer seems relevant.”
“Folk music goes on, but it goes on in subtle ways,” explains Hamilton. He sees movements like rap and break dancing as folk expressions. And rap didn’t spring out of the concrete–its roots go back at least as far as toasting, the urban street poetry that made Muhammad Ali float like a butterfly. Hamilton says rap’s roots probably go back farther than that, all the way to the African griot tradition.
