Authenticity and genre in old-time music: 1958-1965

Authors

Lara Ressler-HorstFollow

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7097-0254

Date of Graduation

12-2024

Semester of Graduation

Fall

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Department of History

Second Advisor

Micheal Gubser

Third Advisor

Emily Westkaemper

Fourth Advisor

Veronica Davis Ellis

Abstract

From 1961-1965, in response to the growing commercial success of the Folk Revival, a small group of New York City-based folk musicians and folklorists began promoting what they viewed as a more ‘authentic’ version of folk music. Calling themselves the “Friends of Old Time Music (FOTM),”[1] these musicians and folklorists put together a series of 14 concerts between 1961 and 1965 to promote ‘traditional musicians’. The decision by this small group of musicians and folklorists to use the genre name ‘old-time’ rather than ‘folk’ in their concert series was a direct engagement with and response to Folk Revival era debates over how ‘authentic’ roots music was defined and labelled and to the politics around the folk genre and helped shape which musicians came to be considered foundational to American southern roots music.[2]

The inherent contradictions of the Folk Revival were that it was based on a folk music tradition, the supposedly non-commercial authentic voice of the ‘people’, but was accessed by Folk Revival audiences, including urban college-educated youth and rural southern musicians, through commercially recorded records and field recordings from the 1920s-1940s. The fact that a West Coast-based film maker and a group of New York city-based folklorists and musicians played an outsized role in shaping a canon of music and musicians still considered foundational to understandings of what constitutes authentic southern American roots music, represents a clear example of how a variety of actors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, shaped the concept of authenticity and genre in American roots music and represents a core irony inherent in the genres of bluegrass and old-time music; i.e., that urban tastemakers played a role in shaping standards for what was (and is) considered authentic southern rural music. Further, the influence of Smith and the Folk Revivalists involved in FOTM on what came to be considered the canon of authentic traditional music highlights the complexity in untangling narratives about how folk music, bluegrass, and old-time as genres are defined and how authenticity in roots music is determined.

Looking at the Folk Revival period from 1958-1965, this thesis shows the extent to which Folk Revival actors (including Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen, Smith’s Anthology, and the FOTM concert series) contributed to development of old-time and bluegrass as fully articulated genres and also retraces the process of defining old-time and bluegrass and argues that that this process is inseparable from the larger discourse on folk authenticity related to politics, economics, and race.

[1] Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival (1961-1965). 2006. Liner Notes. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, SFW40160.

[2] Smithsonian Folkways, 1959/1996, SFW4007.