All Folked Up

In the car a few days ago, I heard two songs on the radio, back-to-back, that caused me to pause and reflect. The first song was “Little Talks” by the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men and the second was Mumford and Son’s new single “I Will Wait”. Making the experience all the more striking was that these two songs were preceded and followed by pop artists like Nicki Minaj or Katy Perry. Although it’s difficult to place bands like Mumford and Sons in a genre, their sound certainly differs from the majority of pop musicians whose work populates the airwaves. Some would classify these bands as “folk”, or perhaps less definitively as “folksy”.

It is easy to see and hear something in these bands that reflects the form, themes, styles, and aesthetics of folk music. Take, for example, the instruments they use in their songs. In place of synthesizers or electric guitars, we often hear what we consider “traditional” instruments, those accessible to the “common man”, like the banjo, fiddle, and harmonica. Additionally, these bands clearly attempt to take on a “backwoods” or “down country” persona, wearing clothing that conveys simplicity, age, and wear—the fashion equivalent of patina.

Song lyrics don’t reference cell phones or nightclubs, but rather rural landscapes, manual labor, and, occasionally, passages or figures from the Bible. The Head and the Heart, an indie/folk outfit out of Seattle (shocking, I know), intone in their song “Lost in My Mind”:

How’s that bricklayin’ coming

How’s your engine runnin’

Is that bridge gettin’ built

Are you hands gettin’ filled

Fellow Seattleites, Fleet Foxes, more explicitly demonstrate these themes in the title track off their 2011 album Helplessness Blues:

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm raw

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore

And you would wait tables and soon run the store

Is there reason to believe we are in the midst of a folk revival? Purists would argue no. They see folk music as part of a largely oral tradition in which songs have been passed down for generations. That continuity is the key. The bands described above are, for the most part, performing music they have written and embodying styles they have invented. They are creating novel cultural products with recourse to the past (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on heritage for more on this). In this sense, today’s folk artists aren’t reviving anything. They are simply making a statement in the present with the vocabulary of the past.

Regardless of whether or not we can call the popularity of this “folk” music a revival, it is unquestionably popular. What is it that makes songs harkening back to simpler times and porch-front banjo picking so compelling to many people today? One possible answer came to me while listening to the newest Mumford and Sons album. A familiar song started playing, which I identified as Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”. Here we had a contemporary folk band resurrecting a song from the 1960s folk revival.

If we are witnessing a folk revival, it certainly isn’t the first (or best example of) one. There was another moment of folk consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s, epitomized in Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Ballads. The collection featured traditional folk songs Guthrie learned from migrant workers, as well as original compositions chronicling his travels from Oklahoma to California. Guthrie is often cited among a list of folk artists from the 1930s and 1940s that inspired a later generation of folk artists in the 1960s, including Bob Dylan.

Serious fans of folk music would likely cringe at even implicating that Mumford and Sons belongs to a lineage stretching back to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. For one thing, Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan both used their music to promote social justice (with the former supporting labor and the latter supporting the civil rights and anti-war movements). Yet, there is a common thread running through the work of these artists. All of them emerged in response to temporal demand for something traditional, a connection to the past.

Much like the 1930s, we are living in a period of economic crisis. And similar to the 1960s, our social world is increasingly marked by rapid, sometimes jarring, change. In the words of Dylan, “times, they are a changin’”. In the face of such crisis and change, we seek solace in the past. Nostalgia for what has been replaced and remorse for what has been lost take root. It is during times like these that folk music comes to enjoy enormous currency. We might even think of folk music as a type of coping mechanism. 

So the songs that struck a chord within me as I listened to the radio may not truly be folk music. We know that many of these bands are fabricated to meet the demand of the day. After all, Of Monsters and Men is from Iceland, prompting questions about exactly whose folk they are representing and celebrating. It is also clear that what I heard is less a revival of pure folk music than a new creation with a folksy veneer.

Despite these truths, I took comfort in the songs and sang along. For a brief moment, I could at least pretend to commune with the world being left behind as I drove forward. Who knows how long this folk moment will last, but if Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are any indication, there’s staying power to music that forces us to look back in the rearview mirror—music that reminds us to remember.