The whole genre seems to have an air of falseness about it to me, even if alot of the tunes are nice.
Doesn't Brother, Where art thou get into this a little. I've heard it's an OK movie.
LOL! You're right, Sam. Some of it is a little overwrought with the upper middle class singers going on about how tough life is! But yes, some of the music is really good. We like Garnet Rogers, a Canadian, and brother of the late Stan Rogers. The man plays a MEAN fiddle, and has a lovely rich baritone. We've seen him twice in concert in Worcester.
The Folk Music show on WHYY in Philly is what introduced us to Celtic music, and that's the majority of what we consider 'folk' music that we really like. We went to a concert in the town next door once to see Tommy Makem. Tommy Sands (not the IRA terrorist with the same name) opened the show, and now he is a popular singer in his own right! But that concert was fun because we were there with a couple who had recently moved to the US from Ireland, and it turned out that the husband was from the same county as Tommy Makem! The two of them started talking after the show, and it was hilarious, because the more they talked the THICKER that brogue got and we could hardly understand them! We ended up going to the couples' apt. with the man who ran the folk club and Tommy Sands and sat up talking religion and politics til 5 in the morning! It was a fun night!
Sir SuziQ and I certainly DO NOT share the politics of most 'folkies'; I'm sure we'd get strange looks if we drove up to a folk club with our Bush/Cheney bumpersticker!
Doesn't Brother, Where art thou get into this a little. I've heard it's an OK movie.
It was a FUN movie! The music is Bluegrass/Old Timey, which is covered under the folk title when folk music radio shows are played. I've enjoyed Bluegrass since college, long before I ever started listening to 'folk shows', though I enjoyed folk music from the 'folk scare' of the 60s such as that done by Dylan, Baez, and Joni Mitchell to name the more popular folks.
Well, that's certainly one subclass of "folk" music. Trouble is that there isn't any surefire definition. I have a hard time considering some of the "folk" singers of the sixties to be real folk musicians, and they do seem kinda fake to me. And the people who follow in their footsteps are at LEAST as nutsy as they were, politically speaking.
And then there's bluegrass! Bluegrassers have a tendency to be very conservative. Plenty of Bush and NRA stickers on cases at the last festival I went to. At a folkie gathering, those'll get you...well...can't say shot, but tongue-lashed, at least!