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affluent than the blue-collar blacks who were the traditional supporters of the blues economy, what they wanted they got.

      Their desire for authenticity was partially rooted in a rejection of the conformist social norms of the ’50s. Spearheaded by the ubiquity of television, the explosive expansion of commoditized mass culture had threatened the survival of unique ethnic and regional cultures and identities which youthful cultural dissidents deemed valuable and deserving of preservation. This resistance to the seeming homogenization and blanding-out of once-vital forms of popular expression often manifested itself as a fear of pop; or rather, a fear of the implications of a new form of linkage between pop’s two central ideas: the people’s voice and the people’s choice. Broadly speaking, folkies attempted to preserve and protect the former against the remorseless incursions of the latter. They infinitely preferred the art which people made for themselves to the art which they chose to buy once someone else had created it. By the same token, their combination of nostalgic tastes and progressive politics represented no implicit contradiction; both were cut from the self-same cloth. Their notion of a ‘popular’ idiom was one of and by the people; by contrast, the commodity culture defined it as that which was most obviously and demonstrably for the people: i.e. the one chosen by the largest possible audience and voted for with the largest number of dollars. The two cultures had spectacularly collided in 1950, when The Weavers had scored a huge hit with a sentimental version of Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’; unfortunately, Leadbelly himself didn’t live to enjoy either the success and the money, or the manifold ironies of their spectacularly belated arrival. However, since The Weavers’ overtly leftist cultural and political stance was considered unacceptable in the Eisenhower ’50s, their speedy exile to the blacklists left a vacuum deftly filled by the depoliticised, anodyne Kingston Trio. Their clean-cut collegiate version of the hootenanny defined the mass perception of ‘folk music’ until the liberal but wholesome Peter, Paul & Mary enabled Bob Dylan to infiltrate the pop mainstream via the side entrance by peeling the husk and bark off Dylan songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’, rendering them AM-radio-friendly in a way that their composer never could. The next thing you knew, there was an entire sub-industry called ‘folk-rock’. Purism never stood a chance.

      ‘Folk-rock’ of the white variety essentially consisted of two wings and a centre. On its nominal left, there was an attachment to traditional instrumentation (acoustic guitar, particularly the exotic and resonant twelve-string beloved of Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell, banjo and mandolin) and melodies as settings for radical new lyrics; on its new right, a blend of actual traditional and original neo-trad material performed with the instrumentation of the post-Beatles rock band. Byrds founder Jim (later Roger) McGuinn virtually invented that new centre by flitting from one wing to the other. Armed with an impeccably traditional 12-string acoustic guitar, he initially livened up his folk-club appearances by injecting Beatles songs into the standard hootenanny repertoire; later, he and his Byrds colleagues, including David Crosby, sweetened the new electric Dylan just as Peter, Paul & Mary had softened his earlier, acoustic incarnation. In other words: folk-rock was a juggling act involving new wine (post-Dylan singer-songwriterisms) in old bottles (trad instrumentation and melodies) and old wine (folkloric materials) in new bottles (electric guitars, drum kits, serious amplification). By contrast, the Rolling Stones – the matchmaking middlemen who made by far the most profound contributions to the rapprochement between electric blues and ’60s rock – were themselves self-identified blues purists. As far as they were concerned, they weren’t softening the music at all: they were playing it just as authentically and sincerely as they knew how to do. However, since they happened to be ugly-cute lower-middle-class English boys who sounded exactly like who they were despite their best efforts to the contrary, they ended up sweetening it anyway.

      The Stones’ eclectic repertoire included material borrowed from soul contemporaries like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Marvin Gaye, which was displayed alongside their trademarked blues items gleaned from Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters. However, even their more modern songs were performed in a style derived from their primary source: Chess Records from the ’50s, complete with harmonica and slide-guitar riffs assiduously learned from Muddy Waters’ records; prominent maracas and judderingly reverbed rhythm guitar on loan (metaphorically, at least) from Bo Diddley; plus, of course, the Chuck Berry guitar licks that inspired Keith Richards to take the first steps on the path which ultimately led him to formulate one of the most idiosyncratic guitar stylings in all of rock. In this context, the application of the ‘folk’ tag to Chicago blues provided an index of the extent to which perception of the music had shifted since its commercial heyday in the 1950s. To academics and purists who considered acoustic rural blues the only acceptably authentic form of the music, the likes of Waters, Wolf and Hooker were apostates selling a noisy, commercialised dilution of the pure milk (or maybe that should be ‘a watering-down of the pure whiskey’) of the blues. The notion that ‘Chicago blues’ – the rumbustious, clamorous soundtrack of the urban world of Delta migrants transplanted to the big cities – had cultural value equivalent to that of the downhome rural forms was an entirely new one, and not entirely unfree from controversy. In Britain, harmonicist Cyril Davies and guitarist Alexis Korner were sufficiently inspired by a live album cut by the Waters band at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival to form a band of their own which was, quite possibly, the first white electric blues band in the world. After one of their earliest attempts to perform in public resulted in their expulsion from a London jazz club for the heinous crime of bringing in amplifiers, Davies and Korner started their own club; and it was that club which gave the Stones their first real platform.

      The standard dogma had stoutly maintained that the genuine folk artist remains, by definition, unaffected by the demands of either High Art or the vulgar mass market. The innate fallacy of this argument is that the majority of the pre-war rural bluesmen (and women) of the ’20s and ’30s had been hustling the vulgar market – or, indeed, any market they could find – virtually as soon as they had gained sufficient mastery over their instruments to be able to perform in public without being pelted with rotten fruit. Many got their start on street corners, singing what passers-by wanted to hear, be it blues, popular ballads, vaudeville songs, hillbilly songs or gospel. They were recorded not by idealistic philanthropists seeking to preserve and protect the People’s Art, but by grasping small businessmen who knew that there was money to be made by issuing records of rural blues artists, and they wanted to release and sell as many records as possible while spending as little money as possible. In other words, they were in the pop business, and – as far as they were concerned – they were making pop records.

      Nevertheless, these artists’ music qualified as ‘folk’ because it was rural in origin and archaic in form. It had also by this time long ceased to be pop, or even popular; long-supplanted first by commercial, ensemble rhythm and blues, and subsequently by the gospel-inflected dance music and balladry which, by the mid-’60s, would be universally known as ‘soul’. In its turn, the ‘electric downhome’ sound of the Chicago bluesmen (and the equivalent music which Hooker had been making in Detroit, on the other side of Lake Michigan) also succumbed, a casualty of the evolution of the self-image of their ghetto constituents as they began to perceive themselves as city-dwellers rather than Delta migrants. Typically, John Lee Hooker’s last appearance in the R&B singles charts was in 1962. Inevitably, he and his fellow titans of ’50s city blues needed to develop a fresh, new audience in order to survive: they sought, and they did indeed find. The pivot point had been that very same 1960 Newport Folk Festival, when Muddy Waters, backed by his full Chicago blues band including James Cotton on harmonica and the great pianist Otis Spann, had headlined a blues afternoon co-starring Hooker himself. It simultaneously marked the music’s formal acceptance by the (mainly white) jazz and folk establishments, and its passing as the indigenous voice of the ghetto. Orphaned, city blues was now up for adoption, first into the ‘folk’ family and then into the community of what was about to become ‘rock’.

      The most crucial, as well as the most frequently overlooked, point about ‘folk music’ is that the constituency whom it most truly represents doesn’t consider it to be ‘folk music’, but simply their music. ‘Folk music’ is, invariably, a term applied from outside the cultures and communities to which it refers. In terms of theory, ‘folk’ music – the traditional set of forms, styles

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