Thursday Theses: Finding the voice of the people
John Lomax, Joseph Campbell, and Johann Gottfried Herder
"There’s an old romantic idea, in German, das Volktische. That’s that the poetry of the traditional cultures and the ideas come out of the folk. They do not; they come out of an elite experience, the experience of people, particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. And they speak to the folk and there is an answer from the folk which is then received, there’s an interaction, but the first impulse comes from above, not from below, in the shaping of folk traditions."
Joseph Campbell
Campbell opens us upon a fascinating notion, particularly of how the masses may lay ownership of something that was channeled through one individual.
Yes, we may talk about the ways in which the Brothers Grimm received the various folk tales they curated and pruned, but who was on the giving end of these stories?
Who was on the end that told these stories to their friends or family? And who were the links in the chains that made it a piece of heritage?
And how did it span out to become a piece of culture?
If we consider the ways in which an anonymous story, made authorless by time, like Snow White as a piece of culture compares to a figure such as Elvis Presley, we're certain to find it a sizeable difference between them.
One of these, of course, being handed down as a staple in our storytelling legacy and the other being recorded through a contemporary media.
Were we to compare apples to apples (though these examples do have about a century of difference in date of origin), we might think of Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" vs. the seemingly anonymous "The Girl I Left Behind Me".
Both have a popularity of their own. They have a distinctiveness of their own and a time and place.
One of these, to its time, would have been popular music. The other would have been a folk song.
Both "popular" and "folk" etymologically (with a difference of Latin vs. German) route back to the same idea: "the people."
The concepts differ in that one is transmitted through contemporary publications and media where the other is found in osmosis.
Given that both of these predate modern media and both would have been more deliberately for the singing of the masses, these distinctions don't particularly matter.
What does matter is the difference in the point of origin.
The songs illustrate an ownership by a culture vs. ownership by an individual. In a way, this is the way in which ideas become a part of the cultural sphere - and this, of course, also materializes in the form of law.
In that case, it's the difference between public domain and copyright.
There are various levels of interpretation to this.
You might say that an idea can only come from the interaction between two people. In that case, all ideas would be void of any one person's hold.
Another way to look at it is that an idea is static and exists outside of ourselves. In this, case one could make the argument that an idea must come from a source - and if it is channeled through an individual, then that person holds some level of ownership to it.
In the early days of record production, especially in country music, tunes and songs were collected from out in the field — in the midst of the people (i.e. hillbillies, bumpkins, and other varieties of my kinda people) to produce numerous hit songs.
This practice of borrowing tunes is certainly a feature of songwriting, even to the point where we forget the origins.
Listen to "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie and compare it to "When The World's On Fire."
John Lomax's importance to ethnomusicology can't be overstated.
His son, Alan, continued on the work as he saw it needing to be finished.
John Lomax was an American folklorist, musicologist, and ethnomusicologist whose work contributed greatly to the understanding and preservation of traditional music. He is perhaps best known for his field recordings of folk musicians from around America.
I've searched through some of Lomax's western work as I look into assembling a concept album exploring the spiritual and peculiar edges of the American West.
Much of the focus will be on field recordings of hymns, work songs, and cowboy songs captured in the early to mid-20th century.
While much of this music has been reissued and is widely available, I find that Lomax's fieldwork provides an important context for understanding the music.
Lomax was also an early advocate for the study and appreciation of traditional music forms. He believed that all forms of music have value, and sought to document and preserve them for future generations. His work helped to revive interest in folk music during the 1960s, and he is considered one of the most important figures in the development of ethnomusicology.
Lomax's work has had a profound impact on the study and appreciation of traditional music. His recordings have been released commercially, and are preserved in the Library of Congress and other institutions. His fieldwork has helped to preserve countless musical traditions that might otherwise have been lost.
The work of being a recordist, close to the people and to the volksgeist... who's occupying that space today? Who's working in that field to bring ourselves close to our heritage and ancestry?
It may be easy enough to look to Spotify and YouTube with the ease of access and preservation. But I suppose there's still the question to be asked about how we're telling the story of our musical journeys.
This may be my wish to fight the ephemerality of art.
Or perhaps it's the social scientist within me hoping to tackle the anthropological and biographical work surrounding the multifaceted world of American music.
The volksgeist was important in the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder. To him, the spirit of a people was essential to understanding its history and character.
The German word “volk” has a wide range of meanings, including “people,” “nation,” “race,” or “tribe.” Herder use of the term suggests that he saw the German people as having a unique character, shaped by their shared history and culture.
The idea of the volksgeist is an internal component of the appreciation of folk music.
The convection currents of culture swelled up goodness from the spirit of the people.
This was where the traditions began; they started with an initiator and then the process of handing these down created a legacy.
Or at least, this is the romantic idea rejected by Campbell.
The music is not simply entertainment, but a way to get in touch with the volksgeist.
This is what I suspect Lomax was trying to do with his work; he wanted to document and preserve the musical traditions of different cultures so that we could understand the spirit of those people.
And while maybe there is one luminary figure that stands behind each component of our many cultural pieces, and it isn’t an expression of our collective ideals, dreams, and character.
But it certainly strikes a chord with those pieces of our collective soul, and the resonance and vibration that carries on down the years seems like a joyous thing in itself.
Even if the “elite” individual who listens to the “song of the universe” isn’t remembered in history, they are remembered in their art, and to be something that matters to the people seems like quite enough of a legacy.