Contemporary American Folk Music
American folk music is about listening. It’s about bodies, collective and independent, absorbing.
From the commercial inception of folk music in the American 1930s, live performance has been at the core of the genre’s genius - people needing no more than a song and a guitar to feel human; to forefront humanity. Which is what folk lyrics did too, with canonized figures like Seeger, Guthrie, and Lead Belly singing about the working class, something Dylan and Baez carried over into the 50s/60s. Forefronting the ‘people,’ whomever they might be to the folk artist.
These folk revivals, of the 30s and 50s/60s, are widely known, and, arguably, widely romanticized narratives in American history. Important to note, these revivals featured, and were orchestrated by, white men who dominated genre conventions (think voice and aesthetic) and narratives (think lyrical content).
So, in the wake of this complicated legacy, how does folk music approach humanity now? In the contemporary scene, what does folk music look like? What do the songs forefront? Well, for the past year, I’ve been working on an honors thesis that argues that contemporary folk musicians - Adrianne Lenker, Kara Jackson, and Haley Heynderickx being the figures I focused on - are using the legacy of political lyrical content in American folk music to subvert dominant norms of what proper citizenship looks like. They’re singing about explicitly erotic, queer experiences (“Vampire Empire”), depicting the mistreatment of women (“rat” and “therapy,” amongst others of Jackson’s), and digging into narratives of foreignness and immigration law in America (“In Bulosan’s Words,” “Song for Alicia”). Folk music continues to be a powerful force for messages, both the personal and political, in a way that feels really special - namely because it feels intimate. A microphone close to the musician’s mouth; stripped-down instrumentation; how the outside world seeps its way into a recording make listening to someone like Adrianne Lenker an intimate experience.
Here is a playlist of the songs I either analyzed or considered for analysis in the making of my honors thesis. I deeply value folk music - the strength of a folk song to convey the state of humanity is something embedded into its structure, its sound, etc. Enjoy some contemporary folk songs (and some oldies)!