Just plain folks

I have been a folk music fan for just about all of my adult life. As a teenager, my dedication was split between rock and  roll and folk music, with rock taking a slight edge in my younger days. As I slowly revert in the direction of my past version of a "back to the land" self, I'm increasingly frustrated by things like getting 100 radio stations on my Jeep's trial version of SIRIUS, only one of which was folk music and that from Canada as I remember. I've not yet sorted out if it's possible to somehow listen to the internet station Folk Alley while driving. The local fm HD folk station keeps dropping out of range in my neighborhood and, the other day, while I was in "The Cities." That should help set up my absolute glee when I discovered that Rhiannon Giddens, one of my favorite contemporary folkies, recently delivered the Folk Alliance 2020 keynote speech and made it available on Facebook (a platform I usually stay away from and condemn as being basically evil). I commend it most highly to your attention. It's an awesome read and  I wish I had been there to see her  deliver it. It also fits wonderfully with Black History Month. There's a YouTube segment available where she performs Richie Havens' "Freedom," which is near the culmination of her keynote.

October 2016, Joan Baez, an original "folkie"

Photo by J. Harrington

With the effects of our broken climate increasing, as is the need to minimize or eliminate our contribution of greenhouse gases, adapt to a broken climate, and drawdown some of the GHGs we've already emitted, I'm seeing more and more folks promoting actions similar to those taken by the "back to the landers" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When (not if) we're successful increasing the scale of restorative agriculture, diminishing the scale of commodity agriculture and concentrated animal feeding operations, and better developing our bioregional economies, will we have proven the hippies were right and we should have paid more attention a couple of generations ago? If you wonder how we can restore and revivify small towns and cities and real family farms at a human scale, take a look at Dar Williams' What I Found in a Thousand Towns. Give a listen to her music too, if you haven't yet.

local community supported agriculture rutabagas

Photo by J. Harrington

It's not quite in line with the plot of "Back to the Future," but as I recall, the hippies, folkies and back to the landers managed to have quite a bit of fun while rockers were busy harassing each other and trying to actively overthrow a system. Maybe this time around Victor Hugo's assessment may be timely: "There Is Nothing So Powerful As An Idea Whose Time Has Come."

New Folk

By Terrance Hayes

I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.

After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When

and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers

come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?"

We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple   

ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end

of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple

where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened

by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled

a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents.

We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled

in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends

first because beneath our twangor slept what I'll call

a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when

sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool

then, and placed my hand over the guitar string's wind-

ow til it stilled. "When the moon's black," I said. "Be faithful."

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