The Ragged Edge of Prejudice

A significant portion of the third part of Folk in America deals with the close links between the folk music scene and the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

Among other artists, Bob Dylan performed at rallies for Martin Luther King Jr in support of racial integration.

The film also highlights the role of the famed New Port folk festival in helping to facilitate the process by bringing many black folk musicians out of retirement to perform live for the first time in years.

The power of music to challenge racial prejudices has been recognized for decades. Elvis Presley brought black rythm and blues and gospel music to an audience that had long been insulated from such stylings. Before long, black culture didn't seem nearly as alien and threatening to many people as they once did.

But Folk in America also reminds us that there are limits to the tolerance of any group, even those purported to be the most enlightened.

It was at the very same New Port festival where so many black folk artists were brought out of retirement, Bob Dylan committed what was regarded by so many folk enthusiasts as a cardinal sin -- he went electric.

Musical purists who were the most eager to accept racial integration -- and rightly so -- were among those least eager to accept musical integration between folk music and rock n' roll. Just as those who resisted racial integration were doomed by history, so were those who resisted musical integration. By the time the Beatles arrived in the United States, the matter was a fait accompli -- much like racial integration was largely inevitable by the time of JFK's arrival.

The march toward musical integration continues today in some ways that would have previously been deemed unthinkable. The combination of folk and country music with rap and hip hop still finds intense resistance, yet such musical stylings continue to find larger and larger audiences continually in search of something new and fresh.

But there are purists among each musical style who fervently resist such integration. While it may be en vogue to dismiss such critics as racially intolerant, this fallacy is largely supported by the notions that few musical genres have ever been as black as rap, and have never been as white as country.

Yet artists like Charley Pride or Eminem (say nothing about Vanilla Ice -- period) would beg to differ. Artists like Kid Rock or Buck 65 even more so.

The Missing Link of Folksy Copyright Law

Woody Guthrie's music reminds one of a central fact about not only folk music, but about modern cultural products in general: under many conditions, the contemporary notion of authorship can be rendered antiquated.

Guthrie freely admitted that much of his music was borrowed from previous folk musicians, and from songs that were part of what legal scholars deem the "cultural commons". In many senses, Guthrie wrote and re-wrote songs that had already been written and played for generations, meaning that many previous musicians served an authoring function in his music.

As one considers cultural products in the modern context, many different levels of authorship emerge. Music is written not by one individual, but by various musicians, mixed by sound engineers, packaged with art created by graphic designers, and this process is supervised by a team of producers and executive producers.

Through the recording process, a myriad of people fulfil various portions of the author function, usually under the employment of a large multi-national corporation.

In the United States, objections have been raised to the repeated extensions of copyright, in some cases, up to the lifetime of the author plus another 70 years, after which that product is to enter the cultural commons, and be considered public cultural property.

There's a fallacy at the heart of this notion, however. It's predicated on the assumption that a cultural work -- be it music, a book, a movie, or almost anything else -- was created by one and only one creator.

In the case of modern music, it could be argued that multinational corporations that fulfill an author function -- by virtue of having organized the entire process -- could hold onto a copyright indefinitely. After all, corporations are not bound by biology to have a finite lifespan. Rather, the lifespan of a corporation is larely determined according to its financial success or failure.

Moreover, recognizing the various author functions within a cultural product leads to some other challenges. A copyright law that recognized such differences would have to recognize that it may not be logically feasible to copyright a finished product as if it were indivisible, leading separate individuals to seek separate copyrights over their own contributions to that finished product.

A postmodern copyright law for a postmodern era could lead to some complications that even the most brilliant legal scholar may not predict.

Political Anthems of a Distant Yesteryear

Folk in America is a three-part BBC documentary mini-series exploring the rise of folk music in North America.

As the film reveals, folk music presented musical stylings that were at once quaint and deeply political. The disaffection felt by the Southern United States following the end of the civil war in time gave way to the disaffection felt by a region depressed by the economic disadvantages it faced comparable to the industrialized Northern states.

The music became particularly popular in mining regions like the Appalachians, where they became protest anthems of a long-lost yesteryear.

The yesteryear that produced the folk musicians spoken of in the film seem all the more distant because they haven't merely been displaced from the current day in terms of time -- it has also been displaced by an economic model that was only beginning to be explored at the time when record companies first began to produce folk music.

The popularization of southern folk music provided a model for the popularization of other regional musical forms. A classic example would be the rise during the 1970s of Reggae music. In time, various regional musical stylings would be deeply incorporated into the genre that we today know as folk music.

Like folk music from the Southern United States, reggae music became popular at a time when the Jamaican economy had little else to offer. In fact, the recording industry was one of the driving forces of the Jamaican economy during the 1970s, and it relied heavily on record exports, as a depressed domestic economy provided fewer opportunities for Jamaican artists to sell their music.

Not that they didn't manage -- Jamaicans were often noted to choose between spending their meagre earnings on necessities of life or on the newest LP by their favourite reggae artist.

But in time as reggae popularized it also commercialized, taking on elements of other popular forms of music. In some cases, this helped give birth to new musical genres like Ska or dancehall reggae. In other cases, it simply resulted in stale or uninspired attempts at reggae.

In the time before the popularization of folk music, and the various regionalized genres that have become incorporated within it, music was cultivated within tightly-woven communities and within the home. This lent a vibrancy to the music that many musical genres lack today.

With the rise of web 2.0 and new options for musicians to produce and market their own music, this model has become partially resurgent. But wherever commercial success is to be found, the desire to mass produce potentially profitable products -- such as music -- will lurk.

And when music is mass-produced, the first thing to suffer is the passion and creativity that lends itself to truly time music -- such as early folk.