by W.D. James

Where did the folk music go? Popular resistance continues to manifest itself around the world. Even nascent movements have developed. However, one senses that for the most part these movements are still lacking in whatever would provide the inner cohesion and dynamic energy that would make them powerful and successful agents of change. Advanced thinkers are exploring the task of creating a new culture from which to animate resistance and rebellion, including elements such as myth, spirituality, and other deep elements of culture. Unfortunately, one of the salient effects of modernity has been to cut people and peoples off from their organic and traditional cultures, so this will prove no easy task.

In my mind, this would be something like the creation of a working-class culture in England early in the period of the industrial revolution as uncovered by historians such as E.P. Thompson. The development of that culture was able to draw upon antinomian (literally ‘no-law’ or ‘anti-law’) strands of the dissenting religious tradition, memories of popular revolt at least back to the Diggers and Ranters of the English Civil War, and organic traditions of people’s music, verse, story, myth, folklore, etc… to form a working-class culture that energized class movements for generations. Certainly, the times have changed, and the circumstances are different today, but something like that but reflecting current realities, while still drawing from deep wells, seems imperative.

In the limited scope of this essay, I would like to focus in on one particular strand of American folk music, the role it played in early twentieth century resistance, and how that role was theorized by W. E. B. Du Bois. I think there are important lessons to be drawn both from Du Bois’ ideas and from the role that music played in social movements.

From early adulthood on, I’ve been a huge fan of all sorts of folk music. When I first tuned into these musical styles there was a local folk radio station and two others with time slots for specific genres like bluegrass. There were several music stores that focused on folk and several good venues for all sorts of performers who were passing through: traditional English and Celtic, bluegrass, the blues, gospel, Americana, American folk-revival, singer-songwriter, etc…. Now, hardly even a shadow of any of those cultural institutions exist locally and the virtual online versions function differently.

In a conversation with the folkie and singer-songwriter David Rovics,ⁱ we discussed this. He confirmed my sense of the relative decline of folk music over recent decades and, on his assessment, this has encompassed not just the US, but England, Scotland, and even Ireland. I thought this could be a generational thing in that today’s young just weren’t into folk and, so, it would become more marginal. He contradicted this though by pointing out that over the past 3-4 decades, the age of his audiences had remained pretty consistently young; it wasn’t just a remnant of old fogey folkies who were still listening.

What he pointed to was a lack of cultural institutions to keep the music alive. What he sees being different in places like Scandinavia and France is there is more public funding for the arts in such places, so more art forms can thrive, and the continued existence of something as simple as socialist summer camps for kids (along with other institutions to pass along folk and working-class culture). Apparently, in those countries, the socialist or social democratic parties still have enough power that they also have some material resources to support cultural institutions, like the summer camps, where kids still learn folk songs, including, I believe, some of David’s. Hence, a significant ‘scene’ can still thrive there, and these resources are preserved to help inform social movements.

To me, this reconfirms the need for resistance movements to develop cultural resources and somehow institutionalize those (not in big bureaucracies or anything, but there needs to be people specifically working on that and creating opportunities or it won’t happen). Also, it points to the need for music (and I think folk in particular) to be part of that. Plus, it’s just fun to go to concerts and festivals, listen to music, and if you have any talent (I don’t), to play it. The movements need a major injection of fun.

Sorrow Songs

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, African-American educational and cultural leaders were faced with a choice. What they termed ‘sorrow songs’ and what later generations would call ‘spirituals’ were a treasure of African-American culture, but were inexorably tied to the history of slavery. Should they be valued as a cultural resource or left behind as the race strove to move beyond slavery? What was the best path forward?

The sorrow songs developed out of field hollers.ⁱⁱ Originally, these were work songs brought with the slaves from Africa, but as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) points out in his classic Blues People (1963/1999), diaspora blacks in the United States lived in much closer proximity and more intimate interchange with whites than in other regions, such as the Caribbean, and the African elements were quickly submerged (though never eradicated, and they continued to speak through ‘coded’ language and the structural attributes of the music; call and response patterns, the rhythms, etc…).

The Library of Congress possesses a lot of field recordings of hollers recorded mostly in the 1930s-1950s. This is a good example to listen to: When You Hear That Peafowl Holler | Library of Congress (loc.gov)

Most of these early recordings were hampered by the technological limitations of the day. You pretty much had to at least pull a guy out of the field, over to your recording device, to have him sing it. A later, more ‘in the moment’ (though still ‘prepared’), example can be listened to here: Work Songs in a Texas Prison – YouTube

The sorrow songs might be sung in the fields, or might be sung around one’s cabin or at a religious service, if these were permitted. Musically, they took on themes specifically of spiritual striving (which certainly doesn’t mean they didn’t speak to social and political striving at the same time). Fortunately, by and large, the decision was made to affirm the sorrow songs. African-American educational institutions like the Tuskegee Institute and Fisk University formed choral groups to perform and honor this musical heritage. Many of these groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, have enjoyed a continuous existence from their founding to today.

While I tend to prefer a more raw performance of the spirituals, which is still preserved in some African-American churches today, by listening to early recordings you can hear how the sorrow songs were formed into an African-American high culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGe-OB8wzXk&t and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naFcHO9KBnQ&t

The musical forms of gospel and the blues organically grew out of the sorrow songs, sort of as music for church and music not for church, respectively. Without the affirmation and preservation of the sorrow songs, hardly any later American music would have been what it was. By my reckoning, about the only other distinctly popular music form, contemporary with this developing African-American tradition, native to the US, was the importation of folk ballads from Europe with the Scots-Irish which grew into the mountain music tradition of Appalachia (which itself was in constant interchange with African-American derived music from virtually the beginning).

Charles Upton, in Folk Metaphysics: Mystical Meaning in Traditional Folk Songs and Spirituals, quotes Ananda Coomaraswamy: “[By] ‘folklore’ we mean that whole and consistent body of culture which has been handed down, not by books but by word of mouth and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the form of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys, crafts, medicine, agriculture, and other rites, and forms of organization, especially those we call tribal…. The content of folklore is metaphysical.” It can be argued that our organic connection to primordial truths and wisdoms comes mainly through African, European, and Indigenous folk traditions. We have nearly lost contact with those.

The Souls of Black Folks

W.E.B Du Bois donated proceeds from his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), to help fund the building of Jubilee Hall at Fisk as a home to the Jubilee singers and their music. Lyrics and musical notation from those songs preface each chapter of Souls…, which is, among other things, an exploration and polemical defense of the sorrow songs.

Du Bois (1868-1963) was born in Massachusetts. He earned bachelor’s degrees from Fisk and Harvard, where he studied under William James. Eventually, he became the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, but not before first doing graduate work in Berlin where he studied under some of the preeminent German scholars of the day and came into contact with Max Weber.

I would put forth his thinking in Souls…, especially on the issue of the sorrow songs, as excellent dialectical thinking. Du Bois opens the work with a chapter entitled “On Our Spiritual Strivings.” He observes that he learned, as he developed intellectually, that the ideals and worlds he longed for were not intended for him or his race; they were separated from him by “a vast veil”. He develops this into a general insight:

“…the Negro is a sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American World, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

In this powerful prose, the ‘veil’ is now shown to not only be a screen in the external life of the African-American, but is also reproduced internally in a self-identity which is constructed as the necessary bringing together of two ‘worlds.’

He refers to this struggle, and its outward version of social, political, and economic striving, as comprising a period of “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress). This concept is borrowed from German romanticism. Notice what Du Bois is doing here. German romantic high culture had become the standard of high culture in the Western world; Du Bois is linking it, and the spiritual development associated with it, with African-Americans, not whites! His implicit assertion is that African-Americans have a higher spiritual existence and he will make the case that the cultural expression of that is also a higher culture than the average American culture which he saw as being dominated by greed and base materialism.

Du Bois works towards developing the grand ideal synthesis:

“Freedom too, the long-sought [notice this Germanic hyphenating of concepts: as quite possibly the best educated American of his time, he is just rubbing his opponents’ noses in it, as if to say, ‘I a black dude am of a way more elite status and intelligence than you’—got to love it], we still seek, — the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty, — all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic… there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes….”

He foresees the reconciliation of the reality of the unique perspective of African-Americans and the fundamental aspirations of American society more broadly. In fact, he’s saying African-Americans are better Americans than are the whites of his day. Jones (Baraka) would also affirm, a half century later, “…’fo’ sho’,’ they [African-Americans] continue to be, despite the wildest of ironies, the most American of Americans.”

The Soul of America

Du Bois goes on to address the issue of culture. He asserts: “…there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness[!!!]’. He goes on to deride American contributions to civilized culture thus far:

“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped upon her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”

Notice, the ‘spiritual heritage of the nation’, not just of Black Folks. The spirit of the nation is expressing itself, and at its most beautiful, through the contributions of African-Americans.

These songs, Du Bois asserts in high romantic form, are the result of great spiritual suffering—the only true source of greatness. “They are the music of an unhappy people,” he goes on, “of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” In short, the sorrow songs (and by lineage, then, gospel and the blues and all that followed) are the highest expression in American culture of genuine human aspiration and hard-won spiritual elevation.

The Dialectic of Cultures of Resistance

By looking at what Du Bois has been arguing and looking back at how this related to the formation and sustenance of civil rights movements, we can get a model of how the self-conscious creation of a culture of resistance can dialectically affect the larger society.

The sorrow songs, or spiritual music that grew out of them, found their institutional homes in the African-American churches, African-American colleges, and then within many of the social movements that eventually formed. This helped keep those movements in contact with their past, and the cultural forms that had developed out of the struggles of that past, and then to project a forward-looking ideal understood as the aspiration of African-American spiritual striving. Had the decision to explicitly affirm this cultural heritage not been made, at least one powerful instrument of resistance and reform would not have been available as resources to the extent they were (they were genuine music of the folk, so they would not just have just disappeared either).

Further, Du Bois was able to see how the cultural creations which embodied the spiritual, human, and political strivings of the people could, because of their inherent power, truthfulness, and worth, possibly transform the broader American culture. If America was ever to fulfill the aspirations of freedom and equality imbedded within her founding documents, it would be helped, perhaps even tutored, in that development by the wisdom and spirituality of African-American folk culture. At least in the sphere of American popular music, that promise would be fully borne out.

The more general lessons pointed to here include:

• Resistance movements that can develop an alternative culture (with a wealth of resources as a support to promulgate new cultural values and ideals) gain in internal power;
• The folk traditions, and especially folk music traditions, provide powerful cultural resources reflecting people’s history of resistance, suffering, hoping, rebelling, and as Du Bois called it, spiritual striving;
• Further, these resources can play an important role in the creation of a better future society and its culture.

Hence, I think those who are currently theorizing this aspect of the various global freedom movements are on exactly the right track. The foregoing is meant to show how, via one example, folk music (and at this point the music of the folk would include not only the elements listed above, but aspects of soul, R and B, country, rock, hip hop, punk, etc…, etc…) is an element to not be neglected. Those traditions will need to be retrieved and reinterpreted. We need to be able to sing together. And that music should reflect the history of our peoples’ previous struggles, our current strivings, and future aspirations.

i David’s website is David Rovics -Singer/Songwriter – Songs of Social Significance. You can listen to his music there, or on any of the big music services, and also connect to his social media from there. He recently published an essay called ‘Why the Resistance Needs Music‘.

ii In the description of my Substack blog, Philosopher’s Holler, I give this as one connotation of the term. Also, my presentation here of the connections between various aspects of ‘black music’ is overly simplified for the sake of brevity, but I think true in its essence. For a much better, more detailed, worked out, and entertaining exploration of the rich history of African-American folk music with all the nuance left in, I recommend that you check out Scott Ainslie’s blog Scott Ainslie: BluesNotes | Substack. I also want to thank Scott for engaging in recent conversations around these topics.