Connecting Folk
By Ethan Goldwater

Contemporary artists reviving American folk music traditions often find themselves trapped in the “neo-hippy” pigeonhole, where critics rankle righteous rich-kid politicos and ridicule hacky sack sensibilities. It may be trite to say it, but when Bob Dylan, the o­nce leftist hero of the counterculture is prancing around o­n television selling Victoria Secret lingerie, it seems necessary to account for the lost intimacy. Or o­ne might be better off to forget about it all; Joanna Newsom has nothing to do with any of it, so whimsically, she digs new trails through such cerebral minds.

Imagine this lady set up in the corner of a steeped bar in Austin, TX: her painted lips, crooning; her fingers weaving bumpy, tickling melodies o­n her classical golden harp. It’s a kind of spectacle amongst the chaotic festival drone. See the giggly faces in the crowd lost in her meandering, so deeply entranced they don’t notice the few fretters duck back to the bar, unable to handle her trip. Her debut full length, Milk Eyed Mender (Drag City), cuts audiences similarly. It’s full of eccentricities, quirky romanticism, and the kind of wanton wisdom that rings like familiar poetry... if you can hear it. Now that Newsom has officially entered the “indie” world rife with dudes and guitars, it’s unclear how her personal affectation and delicate, fanciful sounds will weather. But there seems to be a magical wind, and if it continues to blow for her the way it has for her San Franciscan alt-psych-folk-warbling amigos Devendra Banhart, Six Organs of Admittance, and Vetiver (amongst others) then the road in front of her is already complete: a deep sky, filled with bridges and balloons.

Donning a gypsy cloth dress and pointy knee-high boots, Newsom gives you the first tip that her major influences are not contemporary. American folk singer/scholar Ruth Crawford Seeger, old bluegrass standards, Appalachian folk singer Texas Gladden (among other artists documented by the Lomax brothers)—Newsom’s influences are clear. Each time I’ve seen her play, she takes a breath midway through her set to mention her particular affinity for Gladden. It is fitting: like Gladden, Newsom has a piercing vocal capability, less coarse, but similarly measured. o­n Milk Eyed Mender, Newsom’s rendition of the traditional ballad “Three Little Babes” directly draws a comparison of the two-- Alan Lomax recorded Gladden singing the ballad in 1941. o­n that recording, Gladden goes o­n to explain her explicit dedication to maintaining the “unlearned, untrained” styles of the singers from up in the Appalachian Mountains from whom she learned her songs. The anomaly of contemporary folk music is apparent in Newsom’s contradictory approach.

“I think it would be foolish of me to place what I’m doing in the folk tradition,” Newsom asserts, sitting o­n the grass a few Saturdays ago in San Francisco’s Guerrero Park. “I never set out to continue something that went o­n before me, or to intentionally include some element of folk tradition,” she continued, reflecting our earlier conversation o­n the ‘authentic’ folk song hunting expeditions of Alan Lomax. I mentioned his Cantrometrics system, a model designed to correlate folk songs and societal types, and the importance he placed o­n his conception of the authentic folk song as a representation of a society. “I’m not sure if [such an authentic song] was ever possible,” she commented. “But I don’t think you could go somewhere in the United States today and do a field recording and have the artist be as un-self–conscious or unaware of the possible academic or social interests in their music as o­ne could back then...” Despite her self-awareness, mass culture still bites her.

Reviewing Newsom for SXSW, An Austin, TX newspaper declared her music “outsider art.” Whatever this means, Newsom conceded that she pretty bad about it. “I have a rule that I’m no longer allowed to go o­n google and search for reviews,” she said. Such revile towards the music press is pretty standard amongst musicians, however, in Newsom’s case, the point is particularly moot. Traditional folk songs are meant to be sung by whoever will sing them; the ballads sung by Texas Gladden are descendents from the Scotch-Irish folk ballads that trace back thousands of years through many different lifestyles. The historical significance of a folk song is in the inflections---Gladden’s shrill, piercing voice comes out of a woman who raised nine children in an isolated Blue Ridge mountain town---her musings o­n deadly STDs and dealings with the devil bite with intensity, conveying emotion clearly relevant today. Newsom’s songs are much more fantastic, her voice more eclectic, stretching lulls and bursting shrieks---leave that up to the critics in 2064 to determine why.

While her voice is untrained, Newsom has spent her life playing music. Growing up in the small town of Nevada City, CA, Newsom attended a folk music camp up north in Mendocino County in the summer. She recalls walking from a Zydeco jam session to an ambient composer, being exposed to folk music from around the world. Newsom began her formal training o­n the harp at age seven, and it deserves mention that she grew up in the same neighborhood as avant-garde composer Terry Riley, amongst other progressive artists. When she was seventeen, she moved to Oakland to attend Mills College for musical composition. Clearly, she is no “outsider” to these styles.

Newsom’s formal training is in the Western classical harp, but the splintered rhythms and chords she plucks out o­n Milk Eyed Mender are the result of melding many different styles. “I’ve spent time with figures transposed from the [African] Kora,” she says, “where the right hand plays a four beat and the left plays a three, and in between where the two meters cross there is a really strange disorientation and disjunction that immediately upon hearing I wanted to experiment more with...four against seven, four against nine, just playing with different spots rhythmically.” Unlike some gaudy, classical harp composers, Newsom employs a more minimalist approach so such rhythmic innovations are more pronounced. Lyrically though, Newsom is much more scattered. Her songs might be woven together by a single metaphor, but the story is in her accumulation of eccentricities. “Songs for me, they are the most absolute response to stimuli,” she continued. “Memories, interactions with people, books, food, forming this mass. And when I encounter this mass, there is the song.”

Other articles by Ethan Goldwater.

POST A COMMENT

Subject
Name
Email *
Body
Verification (because of stupid spambots)

Note: HTML doesn't work.      * Optional.

Proudly hosted by .