>I remember reading a Frank Miller interview in which he said
>he never felt a connection to the radical politics of the
>1960s because around the time he was in high school, all his
>teachers were hippies or ex-hippies, so their whole culture to
>him felt like the establishment that he rebelled against.

yeah. He's from VT and grew up in the 1970s, right? Explains a lot.

>For me, those songs are the tunes that came pre-programmed in
>your Fisher-Price toy phonogram...
> or they evoke for me dorky,
>beardy camp counsellors strumming acoustic guitars around the
>bonfire.

Already discussed above a bit, but I'd just like to mention again that those contexts - the kids' toys, the dude in Animal House who John Belushi El Kabonged for singing The Riddle Song - are more or less divorced from any original context the songs may have had, frequently complete with either false gravitas (Joan Baez singing 'One Johnny Cuckoo' as though it were a dirge) or false humor.

>Or worse yet, their melodies recall nursery rhymes
>(obviously they come from the same sources as most popular
>nursery rhymes). So somehow, the shit just feels childish to
>me.

Now that's interesting to me, because no matter how stilted a performance may be, I've never heard balladry's melodies being called into question.

First of all, there's an endless variety to a lot of ballads too choose from. As I've discussed with you in the past, one of my favorite things about traditional music is tracking down the various paths a particular song has taken and comparing/contrasting elements of various performances and versions. The folk process, as it were.

Second, the folk melodies, while lacking the 'sophistication' of the pop traditions you hold so dear, are nonetheless at the foundation of those traditions.

Third, I know you have an... appreciation (? probably isn't the right word but will do for now) for minstrelsy and other facets of the Black experience.

that's not to say your reaction to groups like The Clancy Brother is wrongheaded or anything, of course.

>I struggle to conceive of a time that playing and listening to
>this kind of music was at one point considered the extremely
>hip thing to do. I understand it on an intellectual level but
>I don't get it!

I don't really, either. I *do* however empathize with the counter-cultural impulse toward it, but how that achieved groundswell status is a bit of a mystery.