Breaking down racial barriers: the “new” folk revival

Jeffrey Callen — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:14:36 +0000

I’ve written several pieces on what is often described as an ongoing revival of American traditional music (listed below with links). A piece on NPR today and in the N.Y. Times earlier this week on Southern California’s Frank Fairfield brought the subject back to mind. While you (or I) may argue with the assertion that this is a revival — did it ever go away — there is undoubtedly more media attention being paid to performers of American vernacular music, such as Frank Fairfield, Tim Eriksen, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Blind Boy Paxton (to name a few). One of the encouraging aspects of this “revival” is the reclaiming of the history of musical exchange between Anglo- and African Americans that was pushed out of our collective memory by Jim Crow and record companies — I’ve written about that recently so I won’t repeat myself here (go to A history of jazz & country interchange for that). This could be a revolutionary force in American culture or am I just being too hopeful? Regardless, what the new “revivalists” are doing is aptly described by Pierre Bourdieu in Rules of Art:

…one cannot revolutionize a (artistic) field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field, and the great heretics inscribe themselves explicitly in the history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than contemporaries so that revolutions take the form of a return to sources (1996, pg. 238).

Previous writings on:

Tim Eriksen:

Carolina Chocolate Drops:

- CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS DROP NEW ALBUM: “GENUINE NEGRO JIG”

Filed under: American Music, Country Music, Genre, Identity, Race, Traditional Music Tagged: American Music, Blind Boy Paxton, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Country Music, Frank Fairfield, music, Race, Tim Eriksen, Traditional Music

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Breaking down racial barriers: the “new” folk revival

Previous writings on: