The vast majority of the music I listen to is stuff that was recorded either before I was born or before I was old enough to actively participate in the scene that birthed it. So it's always important to me to understand the music's context in order to mentally and emotionally reconstruct for myself the world that it came out of of and represented.

For some reason, I just can't fully get that emotional feeling for the folk scene of the late 1950s and early 60s. I mean, I know the facts... I understand that how in the Eisenhower era of rapid progress and "space age" modernization, in the age that Madison Ave became a powerhouse and plastic became the al-purpose miracle material and American culture became overwhelmed with glossy artifice... I understand how the disaffected youth felt the need to reconnect with something "real" from a simpler, seemingly more honest point in history.

I get how this impulse manifested itself in various arts, from cinema to theater to music.

But I just can't really emotional grasp HOW folk music at this point was considered "cool," "hip" and especially "sexy"

And I like my music to be sexy. If it ain't sexy, I can't feel it!

>To clarify, what you're talking about here is
>-traditional folk music: ballads, breakdowns, etc., mostly
>stemming from Anglo-American repertoire and styles
>-modern spinoffs thereof (bluegrass, some singer-songwriters)
>-Interpreters of traditional music that aren't members of trad
>music communities (ie, interpreters like Pete/The Weavers,
>Odetta et al)
>-vocal/pop-folk, esp. of the classic late '50s/early '60s
>variety (New Christy Minstrels, Rooftop Singers, Brothers
>Four, Kingston Trio, Serendipity Singers, etc.)

Alright... now when I talk about "folk," I am primarily referring to its emergence as a "pop" form in the 1950s onwards.

I can appreciate the original source materials that this crowd drew from, I dig the Folkways and Smithsonian collections and all that.

I dig Leadbelly. I dig Woody.

I don't dig Pete Seeger and the Weavers as much.

I like New Christy Williams, because the were kinda "rockish."

I like Odetta.

I can't grab on to the Kingston Trio or a lot of Peter, Paul & Mary. *Emotionally.* Like... I can understand the music and even appreciate it, but it's hard for me to really conceptualize that at one point if you were a radical college student or a hip intellectual that you'd listen to stuff like that... They sound like children's songs to me.

Bluegrass... I like. I grew to love it over the years, though I have to admit that for a long time it made me think about "The Beverly Hillbillies." Some of the stuff from the period in question still sounds like that to me.

>*along with international ethnic music; though I sense that's
>not really something you have the same issue with, it's
>represented an integral part of the modern folk movement since
>the '40s.

Ethnic styles... *sigh* This gets complicated. I am going to approach it from the context I have specified above: the Eisenhower era.

I have great admiration for Harry Belafonte but it's also hard for me to fully understand what made him such a sensation at the time as his records of that period sound overproduced to me, his voice too pristine (not to mention some of the costumes he wore).

Miriam Makeba suffers from some of the same thing.

lol btw it is absolutely CRAZY to me that at one point, some people in the industry really believed that rock & roll was a fad that was about to be supplanted by calypso: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBBCQHJvY0w