Folk music is
ear-grating, unwholesome and simply unfit for children and other nice people
to listen to. Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics
Sex, Drugs & Banjo Rolls
Folk music is
ear-grating, unwholesome and simply unfit for children and other nice people
to listen to.
The real stuff is hardly even music - you can barely listen to it. Old men and women caterwauling and grinding their vocal chords like car wheels on a gravel road, scraping on old fiddles and clawing busted up banjos. Most of them can't hardly speak English - or whatever language it is they're trying to approximate with their creoles, pidgins and drawls.
And the lyrics.... most of the songs should be banned and kept far away from impressionable kids. Tom Dooley offs his girlfriend. Lord Randall gets poisoned by his fiancée. Omie Wise likewise. All motiveless, cold-blooded killings. Compared to these, Stackolee murdering a guy for knocking the hat off his head starts to look justified. Mattie Groves/Little Musgrave gets caught in bed with the boss's wife and is dead meat. A middle class girl commits double infanticide after getting knocked up by an employee of her dad's ("The Cruel Mother").
In some of the most time-honored songs there's rape (Bonnie May), attempted rape (The Baffled Knight), fornication and adultery (Mary Hamilton gets knocked up by none other than the king - then of course she's murdered) - there's even bestiality (The Great Silkie). Way before Ice-T recorded "Cop Killer," Woody Guthrie penned "Pretty Boy Floyd," celebrating the famous outlaw's dispatching of a deputy sheriff for the crime of ... disrespecting his old lady.* You have crows pecking out the eyes of dead soldiers (The Twa Corbies), lovelorn suicides (Peggy-O, The Constant Lovers), highwaymen and gypsies seducing young maidens (Reynardine) - even some married women (Gypsy Davey). Why, I recently played a Phil Ochs benefit and sang a song about sailors coming ashore to get laid by prostitutes (Pleasures of the Harbor), which left a tear in every eye. The troubadour of love, Leonard Cohen, features oral sex (Chelsea Hotel) and the opening title track to his last great album alludes to genital/anal penetration with a very large, pointy object ("take the last surviving tree / and stick it up the hole in your culture" - The Future). Suzanne Vega was writing matter-of-factly about anorexia and cutting way back in the early 80s (Straight Lines, Knight Moves).
Tom
Paxton was corrupting young people with "Bottle of Wine," and the
his "Talking Pot Luck Viet Nam Blues" ("what'sa matter wit' YOUUU,
Baby?"). And there's Dylan croaking out "Everybody must get stoned,"
half dead himself from turning on. Gary Davis lured them with "Candy Man"
and god knows who wrote "Morphine Bill & Cocaine Sue" which I
learned at camp at age 11 ("ah, honey won't you have a little (sniff) on
me..."). "Soldier's Joy" is another ode to morphine that's been
passed along at campfires since, oh, 1861.
Dave Van Ronk sings about "ten cent whores and grunge on the floors" in "Gaslight Rag," Paxton lays out cash for sex in "Natural Girl for Me" - even mild-mannered Kristina Olsen has her disgusting romp, "The Big O." Patrick Sky celebrates child molesters - "She's my Jellyroll Mama - she's white and 12 years old" (on "Songs that Made America Famous") - and don't get me started on Tom Waits. Ewan McColl fairly ruined his reputation - and simultaneously made it big - by recording a series of albums of bawdy songs; thank God you can't find them anywhere.
For an old-fashioned dyed in the wool folkie like me, you know, like, Eminem,
Marilyn Manson and Hole are so been-there-done-that. Yawn.
Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com
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