The crack is mighty

When Bob Dylan whipped out an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival people fretted that the world had ended. Why the outrage? Maybe people were angry because they thought Dylan was waggling his thumb at the folk movement.

Folk, you see, isn’t like other kinds of music. To begin with, the artists who make it tend to be super-sincere. For their part, fans are fussy about what folk is and what folk isn’t. In particular, they’ve long been aghast at any hint of electric guitar. Hence, the uproar over Dylan’s new direction at Newport.
But what the folkies were forgetting was that electric guitars had long been integral to the blues scene, folk’s cousin once-removed. Moreover, Dylan had already been gnawing at the boundaries of the genre – lyrically, at least, he had by this stage started to move away from anything that could reasonably be called “folk”.
What Dylan also recognized was the role imperfection plays in great music. “If all instruments reproduced a perfect harmonic spectrum, we would live in a boring world. Sound means imperfection, and this imperfection is the beauty of musical instruments.” So said Bill Lawrence, long-time guitar and pickup designer at Fender. To an extent, however, Lawrence was merely scratching the surface. If you accept that imperfection has a place in the songwriting process, you are opening yourself to a lot of very interesting music. Underpinning much of the late-‘50s and early ‘60s folk boom, for example, was a notion that music could sway the world.
Thus, the squawky and “disarticulate” folk music that can be heard on the field recordings made by Alan Lomax and other collectors is given a civilising sheen in the folk music of the early ‘60s.
Folk music’s near obsession with how it is delivered dates back to this period. Technique started to acquire a reverential glow. Writing about Nick Drake, Joe Boyd marvels at the way he never seemed to fluff a note, each string perfectly struck, each hammer-on perfectly executed. Personally, I’ve always preferred a bit of dirt under the fingernails to that glassy perfectionism.
In the present day, there’s still a clear divide between folk traditionalists on the one hand, who continue to hanker after an idyllic world and the so-called "anti-folk" performers on the other who see the world in a more acerbic light. Sometimes, as in the case of a Jinx Lennon or an Acoustic Dan, their socialist-realist songwriting is underpinned by a rich layer of black humour – a quality that draws as much on English folk as on the American version. No wonder Lennon's latest album reminded me of nothing so much as The Fall, last of the great punk bands and always the group most likely to be writing about what was going on in your area, what was up on your street. Thirty odd years into his career Mark E. Smith still has the spleen to write a song like ‘Strange Town’, one of the most cogent portraits of modern existence in any ordinary community. Lennon really is merely following in the same tradition.
Such politics with a small ‘p’ contrasts with the idealism still evident in the likes of Neil Young, who continues to rail against social ills on a mass scale. I guess that what I'm ultimately trying to say is that, in order to communicate with people. folk needs to concentrate on its underlying message rather than falling into the Nick Drake trap of confusing style for substance. Let's hope the next generation of folk heroes stay true to this tradition.