The story has it that Townes Van Zandt, the folksinger, was asked how many kinds of music there are. “Two,” was his reply.
Asked to name them, he said, “The blues and Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”
I’ve thought about that story over the years and can never quite decide whether I agree with Van Zandt. It seems to me that he was at bottom saying that some songs are sad and other songs are happy. If he’d said it that way, though, it wouldn’t have been a memorable story, would it?
Whenever I think of that anecdote, I think, too, of the purist adherents to the various genres of music. Having worked from time to time over the years in the music publicity business, I’ve often encountered those whose judgement over whether an artist is, say, a folksinger is as prejudiced and snooty as those attributes when found in the worst movie parodies of country club membership committees.
You really do find them everywhere, in every genre. There are even nicknames given to those whose definition of folk music, or blues, or bluegrass is strict and exclusive. Artists struggle to break through the wall, the membership committee, and gain the acceptance of the purists. It’s never an easy task.
What brings it all to mind now is last week’s passing of Mary Travers. She was the third name in a folk group called Peter, Paul, and Mary. They achieved great fame and success in the early 1960s during what either Martin Mull or Dave Van Ronk (or both) named “the folk scare.” This was the era in which you would turn on the radio and hear the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and others. It had its various offshoots — calypso music was popular for half an hour at the beginning — but it basically comprised folk music cleaned up and given a coat of polish and made commercially acceptable.
It was when girls had long, pin-straight hair and owned guitars they could not play, and guys could play two or three sappy songs in an effort to get aforementioned girls to come home with them. (The ones with moustaches succeeded; the ones with goatees did not.)
The commercial folk music of that era was the soundtrack to the beginning of all kinds of societal change. That is the nature, usually, of folk music and always has been to some extent. The message has not been constant; for instance, Woody Guthrie, who gave us “This Land Is Your Land” also wrote “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” which praised our battleships going off to clobber the Germans.
The record company people would listen to old recordings, even travel to the backwoods, in search of songs that could be made into records. Occasionally, some poor musician who had been at it all his life would become suddenly rich when a popular folk combo would record one of his songs. Roy Book Binder says that the home of the Rev. Gary Davis was called “the house that Peter, Paul, and Mary built” because it was financed by their recording of “Samson and Delilah.”
Then as now the folk purists would employ a terribly damning phrase: “too commercial.” It meant, usually, that the song had been produced and performed in such a way that ordinary people who were not members of the club might listen to and enjoy it. There was even criticism of artists the folkies found acceptable who allowed their songs to be commercialized in exchange for money.
Peter, Paul, and Mary, like the Kingston Trio and others, were by these lights far too commercial to be real folksingers. (This was not entirely unwarranted — the original “Tom Dooley” is a far different song than the one the Kingston Trio made into a hit. For one thing, the original made sense.) If you are among current folk purists and mention an affection for those artists, you will be shunned.
What isn’t recognized is that those commercial artists opened up the world of folk music to millions of people who wouldn’t have otherwise noticed that genre. They made it accessible.
Or maybe that’s why those artists are so hated. Maybe they made too many people want to be in the club, as with my friend Gerard Koeppel, a New York Mets fan. He liked to go to games only when the team was on a losing streak. Why? “Because then the only people who come to games are real Mets fans.”
Townes Van Zandt may have been right, but I think there’s an additional requirement, whether it’s blues or Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. It is a quality that causes music to be uplifting and satisfying, causes it to grab your heart. It is a quality that the Kingston Trio, and the Smothers Brothers, and above all Peter, Paul, and Mary, imparted to their music.
Songs should be pretty. And oh, my, did they make pretty music.