National Recording Registry: Folk

"I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." - Bob Dylan

Folk music may be the most amorphous genre in the registry, with a greater variety of recordings than any other. It overlaps heavily with blues and country and more recently with children's, rock, and pop. And despite having no boundaries on its edges, it has one clear boundary in the middle: the distinction between folk songs that were shared and mangled by generations, and the songs written by self-proclaimed "folk musicians" who maintain the copyright on their songs.

The earliest recordings that the National Recording Registry calls "folk" are singles encompassing many different styles, including Ukrainian, Hawaiian, Yiddish, Mexican, Irish, and Cajun-Creole, the latter in the case of the poorly-defined entry "Cajun-Creole Columbia releases" of Amede Ardoin and Dennis McGee (which I have attempted to reconstruct in this playlist). There are newer entries that fit the same variety of genre, such as Leopold Stokowski's collection Native Brazilian Music, ethnomusicologist David Lewiston's Music from the Morning of the World collection of gamelan music, or in the way of commercially released albums, Michael Babatunde Olatunji's African-influenced Drums of Passion and Clifton Chenier's Bogalusa Boogie, the epitome of the New Orleans style called "zydeco" and one of the most danceable recordings in audio.

However, another musical tradition claims ancestry in the one described above and in collections like the Blind Joe Death album or the Anthology of American Folk Music (a 1952 mega-collection by one Harry Smith, some of which can be found in this playlist, including Black and White musicians elsewhere in the registry classified as blues and country). This tradition takes the enduring emotional songs and simple melodies of other folk music to address things as topic as unions (in the case of Pete Seeger), wars (in the case of Bob Dylan), erasure of Native Americans (Buffy Sainte-Marie), or presents the same songs with greater important to a new audience (Odetta, Joan Baez, and Ola Belle Reed). Bob Dylan, of course, is associated with the rock 'n' roll of counterculture, and Pete Seeger, with children's music, but that takes nothing away from the passion of Seeger's cover of "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" or Buffy Sainte-Marie's frightening, pleading accusation, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone."

"More like 'tangled up in green'! Around 600 songs, selling for $300 million; that's 1/2 million a tune for this singer-songwriter." - Jeopardy, ep. 6852, referring to Bob Dylan