all that jazz

 I read an interview with R Crumb of underground comics fame who also had a band, The Cheap Suit Serenaders, in which he lamented the invention of the phonograph and the radio.  Before that time if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself or hang around your friends and neighbors who would be playing it. If you were in a band there would be lots of opportunities to play, and since they weren't all listening to the same record there was a lot of variation.  

In the old days when towns were popping like corn along what the townsmen hoped would be the route of the railroad, one of the first things they did was build an opry house because that's where you had to go to hear music.  You could not just turn on the radio or spin a platter.  There are famous performers of those days that we have no idea how they sounded because there were no devices to record them.

But if you lived in the holler far from the big city you had to pull out that washboard and saw and make your own music.  I guess in general that is the kind of music the purists call folk music today.  It's gone now because everybody is influenced by the music they hear on records and the radio, it is no longer grass roots.

I think Beagles once told me that folk music does not have razzle dazzle, and that sounds right to me.  The Kingston Trio was originally formed to play Jamaican music, but then they did that Dooley song and they became a folk group, though with a bit of razzle dazzle.  There were conflicts among the members as to how much razzle dazzle to put in and people went into and out of the band for that reason.

I am not sure what goes on in music stores of the day, or even if there are any if everybody is getting their music on the internet.  But back in the day weren't they something, bin after bin, and the artwork on those big old album covers, fantastic.

They were sorted into various categories, classical, jazz, blues, folk, rock, country, etc.  I think Beagles once told me that any song, where you had words and music on paper can be played as rock, country, latin or whatever.  Myself I don't understand the innards of music so I take him at his word.

I think it was the record companies that were the big impetus in categorizing music into genres to make records easier to sell.  Why push rock on folks who want country and so on.  Back in the day producing a record took a lot of effort, making them, popularizing them, paying off the D J's etc.  They wanted to make sure it was a hit.  I hear tales of them making folk singers play country music, and hard rockers play bubble gum music, at least until they get a little fame and then they can do what they want.

I reckon you can define folk music any way you want.  I think the purest is gone forever due to recorded music, but in general it is music without razzle dazzle that has kind of a simple and generally heartfelt message, though I discovered in researching that there is a whole genre of songs where the guy kills his wife or girlfriend like Tom Dooley.  

And what we call country music has gone through some changes to.  Way back it was folky, and then it became that sad sad music like Hank Williams sang, and then it became kind of pop with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and anymore it sounds like pure crap to me, very poppy and sung by studly guys in cowboy hats who sing like they are selling Ford Trucks.  

Well that is one man's opinion.