"Traditional folk songs, when they're handed down, you can't ask who wrote them, because we don't know. When you have that many editors changing and contributing to something, it has so many different meanings. I've said before, in other contexts, that maybe 80, 100 years from now, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir will be doing Snoop Dogg songs, but they'll be doing them in the blandest, safest version you ever heard. No, that's not what the songs are about, that was never what they were about. These songs [on Public Domain] are survivor tales. A lot of them come from people who are caught between worlds: in the switch from a pastoral or agrarian life to an industrial one, or caught between forces bigger than themselves.
"Wynton Marsalis said this, and I wish I'd said it -- he said that the place where our real American values, the Constitution and all of it, the place where those things work is, unfortunately, not in our day-to-day lives. It's in our music. Music isn't segregated. America's music -- how are you going to apply Jim Crow laws to a guitar lick? I don't think there are any Reconstruction-era songs [on Public Domain], but those styles are so interconnected that -- well, like fiddle styles. The American fiddle style is a mix of two or three different approaches. There's the Celtic style and the African-American approach, mixed with the style that developed in the South in Anglo communities. In the 1920s, you could put a recording of a white fiddle player up against a recording of an African-American fiddle player, and you couldn't tell them apart. Those guys who went into the fields to make those recordings in the 1920s, the 1930s? Nine times out of 10 they were only interested in hearing the blues or gospel, and that's all that got preserved. But these guys we know today as blues players, Charlie Patton, Lemon Jefferson -- these guys could play anything. They just weren't given the opportunity to put it on record.
Stephen W. Smith
Dave Alvin: "One of the things we've done with our folk music is we've declawed it, defanged it."
Details
Scheduled to perform on Thursday, December 28 with the Ramblers. Showtime is 9 p.m.
The Rhythm Room
Related Content
More About
"But we tend to like categories," Alvin says with the barest of sighs. "We like being able to tame things."
Alvin sounds like he's been waiting all his life to sing these songs, but that's not quite it. As he observes in the liner notes, these songs "are in the public domain. They belong to nobody. They belong to all of us."
Well, maybe so, but it takes a musicologist like Alvin to give them back to us. Because despite all his protestations to the title, that's exactly what he is. And we're the luckier for it.
