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of both the classical and avant-garde varieties, and from ‘popular’ music, mass-produced for and mass-marketed to a mass audience. In practice, it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart.² Before the advent of recording, these distinctions were not so much a critical device as a precise description of the class system: which is not surprising, since these are essentially European definitions, and reflect prevailing European social structures. European classical music operates according to a strict hierarchical structure, with the composer (the monarch, so to speak) at the top. The composer’s wishes are interpreted and enforced by the conductor (the general) and carried out by the orchestra (the troops). During their lifetimes, the great composers often also functioned as the featured soloists, but after their deaths their music became fixed and formalized, those who succeeded them rarely inherited their licence to improvise.

      The classic model of ‘folk’ is – as David Evans points out in his invaluable Big Road Blues: Tradition & Creativity in the Folk Blues³ – the similarly formal tradition of the Anglo-American ballads, with their fixed musical structures and set narrative lines. To perform one of these ballads, a singer is by definition required to preserve intact both its storyline and its musical setting. The Anglo-American use of the term ‘folk’ music implies that such music exists, simply and solely, to fulfil the needs of a particular community. They create it by and for themselves over a period of centuries as part of a single collective process, only slightly more personal to any given individual than the shaping of a rock by water. Through oral transmission, it filters down through the generations, serving both as a touchstone of the community’s history and values, and as an index of how its communal life has changed. It is this latter attribute which many traditionalists find alarming or repugnant: for them, the key element is the preservation of a piece’s pure and unsullied essence, and the imposition of an alien style onto a traditional piece is deemed an act of presumption verging on outright heresy: at the very least, it effectively amputates the piece from its native roots. For this precise reason, Bob Dylan was regarded with some suspicion by serious folkies long before he swapped his Martin acoustic for a Fender Stratocaster. Everything he sang, whatever its origin, was thoroughly Dylanised; by the same token, this was exactly why rockers loved him. If the term ‘post-modern’ had existed when Dylan was starting out, it might well have been applied to him. Dylan came to folk music with attitudes formed by teenage experiences of pop (specifically, the rock and R&B of the ’50s), a tradition which is overwhelmingly individualist. Pop is personality-driven; it’s about stars, icons and the Great Man Theory, and, until ‘Good Old Rock And Roll’ was nostalgically revisited in the late ’60s, remained a defiantly forward-looking idiom which refused to admit that it had a tradition at all.

      In the blues world, over on the African side of the African-American hyphen, the picture is far more complex. In Africa itself, songs, ballads and poems have traditionally served as vessels by which the community transmits its history and its values to its youth, but for those particular Africans who found themselves involuntarily transformed into Americans (of a sort), that history and those values had been forcibly stripped away. As a result, blues obeys a correspondingly different set of imperatives – one radically distinguishable from both its African and Anglo-Celtic ancestors – and simultaneously holds the following truths to be self-evident: yes, there is a strong and very clearly defined tradition, and yes, its practitioners are expected to improvise freely within it, recreating it anew to meet the immediate needs of both performer and audience. There are set themes, and there are specified functions: dance songs, work songs, celebrations, laments, love songs, hate songs and so forth. The tradition is unfixed; indeed, it demands to be freshly re-invented with each performance, recreated anew to reflect the changing needs and circumstances of its time and place. Blues artists both ancient and modern have worked from a ‘common stock’ of folk materials: instrumental motifs and vocal tics, melodies, lyrical tags, chord progressions and even complete songs are derived directly from the tradition, and some of them, as we have already seen, long predate the era of recording, let alone the conventional mechanics of publishing and copyright law. What counts above all in the blues is individuality: the development of a unique and unmistakable voice, the ability to place an ineradicable personal stamp on those ‘common stock’ materials freely available to all. While instrumental dexterity, vocal facility and stylistic versatility are heartily respected within the blues community, what distinguishes the truly great from the merely professional is the fully realized man (or woman)’s communicated essence of self; the ability to serve as a conduit for the full gamut of human emotion, to feel those emotions with sufficient depth and intensity to reach out and touch listeners in places that those listeners might not even have known that they had. Without exception, every blues singer who has managed to pull ahead of the pack or haul himself (or herself) from the hordes of hopefuls chasing the blues-lovers’ dollar has this quality. Any competent blues artist should have the ability to entertain – those who don’t should simply bacdafucup and find another line of work before they starve to death – but the measure of true mastery, from ’20s pioneers like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton to contemporary brand leaders like Robert Cray or Ben Harper – is the scale on which performers are capable of being themselves in public. And, by extension, the depth and complexity of that self. To serve as a neutral transmitter simply don’t cut it here.

      Naturally, real life is never quite as cut-and-dried as the above might suggest. The boundaries between these two traditions are of necessity blurred – with considerable movement of repertoire and instrumentation – and examples of each approach can be found in each camp. Nevertheless, they share this belief, both in theory and in practice: that ‘folk’ music – like folk tales, folkways and folklore in general – is the collective property of a community. Everybody uses it, and nobody owns it: a musician can draw on the common stock and use the tools of that heritage to create and express, and those creations can then be added to the common stock, becoming freely available to a fresh generation. Songs and ideas travelled as and when people did; ‘oral transmission’ – an oddly medical term more appropriate these days to viruses than art, unless one considers that art is a virus – was the only way that a song or an idiom could boldly go where none of its siblings had gone before. And since music exists to be played rather than read, a written lyric or notated piece of music is to a song as a recipe is to a meal: a series of instructions as to how a thing is prepared, rather than the thing itself. No two chefs will prepare a dish in exactly the same way even if they’re working from the same recipe and using similar ingredients; and therefore no two performances of a written (or memorized) piece will be exactly the same. The definitive performances of the music of Mozart or Liszt would, in theory, have been those of Mozart or Liszt themselves, but since those gents were sufficiently inconsiderate to have lived, worked and died before the development of recording technology, we are denied their improvisations and must make do with their notes. This means that there are no definitive performances of Mozart or Liszt; only good ones and less good ones. It also means that you can’t eat a recipe. A skilled chef can read a recipe, form an instant impression of how the meal described would taste, and apply his or her accumulated knowledge and experience to the task of creating a customized personal variation, but this is of only theoretical interest to someone who happens to be hungry.

      Essentially, recording did to oral transmission what photography did to painting; in other words, relieved it of the burden of simple representation. It was no longer the painter’s primary responsibility to produce a permanent visual account of what people and things looked like, but rather to provide some insight into what things meant and, simply, to create objects and images which were beautiful or intriguing in their own right. Similarly, recording meant that songs and pieces of music did not need to be written down – or even memorized – in order to be preserved for posterity. A recorded performance is, literally, recorded: short of the destruction of the master tape and all known copies, it will survive, exactly as it was originally performed, long beyond the lifespan of the musician(s) who played it. Another artist, approaching those same materials afresh, has no need to reproduce what went before except insofar as (s)he wishes to demonstrate the contrast between the basic themes and the fresh elements with which they are replenished and renewed. Nowhere is this principle better illustrated than in be-bop, where a standard melody – the ‘head’ – is stated at the beginning of a piece as the springboard for the improvisations which follow. The standard melody and chord changes

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