Athenticity is sometimes only a cigar.

In 1940 only 38 percent of Americans were high school graduates. In 1900 far fewer—since public high schools were a novelty. Francis G. Child’s Harvard graduating class in 1860 or so comprised 60 students. Emerson’s far fewer Harvard at that time was a boarding school chiefly of teenagers.

• According to census figures The proportion of young adults (25-29) who were high school graduates rose from 38% to 86% between 1940 and 1985; the proportion of young adults who were college graduates rose form 6% in 1940 to 22% in 1985.

That only illiterate sharecroppers qualify as folk is a recent (strawman) notion.

Vows of poverty by academics and priests have more in common with the vows of simplicity taken by the members of suburban garage bands than they do with the back porch guitar picking of illiterate sharecroppers.

It makes more sense to ask which “classes”—social groups—maintained written traditions. In European history these were the book and printing trades and professionals—teachers lawyers priests and the like—not all of them wealthy—in fact, a quite marginal group in many cases,—you might call them the clerisy. Oral tradtions persisted among the vast majority in all social strata until quite late. For example, the Scots novelist James Hogg (b. 1770), friend of Shelley and author of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, had only six months of schooling (he taught himself to read at the age of fourteen).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hogg

Mass education and cheap paper were phenomena of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Harry Smith’s own notes acknowledged previous scholars. There was no competition or rivalry between him and them, rather there was agreement and cooperation. The triangulation was accomplished by others. In his introduction to the Smithsonian re-issue, Greil Marcus, following Harker, claimed that Harry Smith’s collection had been forged in the fire of commercialism and its songs were therefore better than those collected by the Lomaxes, who were merely collectors of “back porch music.”

1) Marcus was imputing to the Lomaxes a straw-man purism that they never possessed. (Since they had selected many of the songs and pointed Smith to many of the artists, obviously, whether or not performers had or hadn’t recorded commercially was not an issue for them.) 2) Many of the artist in Smith’s collection had made one or two records and then faded back into obscurity, since they had recorded in the 1920s when virtually anyone could go and make a record. So it is dubious that their skills had been forged in the fires of commerce. During the 1930s the commercial recording industry collapsed and was revived later in a much more centralized form.

I would like to say that folk music—or music of oral traditions is not the music of any one class. Rather it is distinguished by certain observable traits that appear to facilitate oral transmission—a tendency to short, phrases joined by “and”, interchangeable “floating verses” drawn from a common stock, lack of subordinate clauses—to name a few. In the melodies, lack of modulation, lack of a “bridge”, whole tones (in US folk music), and so on. Because of this, “Long Black Veil”, for example, doesn’t seem to qualify in many respects—though in some other respects perhaps it does. These things have nothing to do with whether a song is good or bad—However, it is an objective fact that a folksong can have a striking economy of expression perceptible to anyone who listens to it, that is why, among aficionados you frequently find a consensus of opinion. It is not a conspiracy.

I must have looked surprised, for there was my research party, the team of my friends from Fisk University: Allen, the slim, lazy, brilliant young music professor, who hid his intensity behind a big loose grin; Eduardo, the keen, dapper Argentine sociology student. I thought both of them looked at me with a little hostility as I shook hands with the young English major from Columbia, an extremely handsome octoroon who had come along as an observer on the trip. And finally, regarding me from the corner of the booth with his sardonic but kindly gaze, was Lewis Jones, the man upon whom the success of this trip depended. Jones had a powerful build and the face of an Algerian corsair; but when he came South with his sociologist’s notebook in his pocket, he was careful to move along as lazily as any plantation-conditioned black and his face, when interviewing a white overseer, wore an expression of rapt and humble consideration.

There’s no way to overstate the importance of the Lomax family as American folklorists. As the New York Times blurb on the cover of The Land Where The Blues Began says, “Lomax’s influence on the shape of popular music is incalculable.” The controversy, such as it is, over credit for the Coahoma County work begun by the Fisk people and taken up by Alan may be just another example of the irritation that arises when the famous name gains credit for work done by research assistants, a situation that’s not particularly unheard of in academia, complicated, of course, by the impression that the contributions of African American scholars are the ones being scanted here.

(Puzzled by this, however:

The editorial apparatus of the Smithsonian reissue of Harry Smith’s Folkways Anthology makes no mention whatever of Harry Smith’s connection to these scholars nor his indebtedness to them in his choice of material.

(The reissue I own contains a reprint of Harry Smith’s marvelous, peculiar “handbook,” in which he bothers to fully annotate every one of his selections with references to what must have seemed to him a comprehensive bibliography of scholarly works on the subject. So I’m not sure why John Culpepper would make this claim)

Louis Armstrong

Yeats, Eliot, D.H. Lawrence I would consider proto-fascist. Yet unlike them, when push came to shove, and even before, Wells (and even Kipling who had made the Swastika his emblem) repudiated Hitler’s racism in the strongest possible terms. According to wikipedia Wells was at the top of Hitler’s enemies list.

Sharp was a reformer, a Christian socialist, if anything. If you go over his private writings and utterances with a fine-tooth comb you will find some “gotcha” epithets and use of terms that we now find objectionable and which were in common use at the time. But such comments hardly typify the the tenor of his life and his genial treatment of people of all walks of life, which were never that of a racist or a snob. Also, he accomplished a great deal as a meticulous collector of thousand and thousands of songs which would otherwise be lost.

In the Victorian era when religious forces were stultifyingly powerful, it was necessary to present secular music and theater (even Shakespeare) as elevating and improving in order to make them acceptable at all, especially if designed for audiences of children.

On the other hand, I believe that racist and antiSemitic stereotypes were certainly blatant and even ubiquitous in the commercial and vaudeville worlds that Harker et al wish to exalt as “authentically” working class. They conveniently overlook this fact.

I am certainly bothered to see people like William Morris, Jane Addams, Olive Campbell, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Cecil Sharp (d. 1924) pilloried as reactionaries because they didn’t idolize Leon Trotsky—or weren’t fans of the Rolling Stones avant la lettre—or simply because they were born to privilege. This seems to me a form of racism.

“The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.”

Also the question of whether Rap is a the most (only) recent folk/pop hybrid, “folk” in the sense of an indigenous form brought into the mainstream that still maintains direct and reciprocal connections to it’s place of origin.

I’ll second C. Bertram’s thanks to John Culpepper. However, it’s quite possible to be both a progressive and a protofascist. There were a few of them around.