Is Swing FOLK MUSIC?

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 12, 16 July 1945, Page 26

Is Swing FOLK MUSIC?

By

Swing music is the music of the people to-day : Folk music is the music of the people yesterday : Therefore, swing music is folk music.” So goes the current logic. How far is it true ?

To swing fans, hep cats, and jivers it will seem an academic and fruitless

question. If one enjoys swing, why bother to talk or write about it ? True enough ; but many are bothering, particularly the more sober musicians who are beginning to admit grudgingly that if there is a folk element in our music, it must be swing. When pressed, they will even concede that since the great composers of the past have made folk music the ground for their work, then the basis for the great music of the future will undoubtedly be swing. This view is gaining ground. It therefore merits closer scrutiny. One must work from data, and so I assume two things. First, that music is in our race. It is part of the universal will to self-expression, older than recorded history. No culture, people, tribe, or sect has done without it, nor could have done without it. It is a fundamental human need. Second, that just as language has grown from a few basic noises into the complex structure we use now, so music has developed from a primitive germ, a few elementary themes loosely linked, growing in thousands of years of variation and refinement into the sophisticated structure we call modern music. This primitive germ is known as Folk Song.

But this does not define it. What is a Folk Song ? This has been discovered in the only way possible—at the source. Until the eighteenth century it was an unexplored field. But with Bishop Percy’s “ Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” a new vista opened in England, and, with the work of the Grimm brothers, in Europe. The world suddenly discovered its past. It was the day of the old, the antique, the aboriginal, the return to Nature and the simple life. The structure of society was collapsing slowly and tiredly and the last snap of the French Revolution was only a few years away. The present would not do—the future did not exist ; people turned eagerly to the past. A further impetus was provided by Darwin. The Origin of Species seemed the origin of all things, and what had been in the eighteenth century a tentative probing into the literature and song of the folk, became in the next century firmly grounded in fact, until, now, the picture is almost complete. From the massive research of two centuries a few broad principles have crystallized :—

(1) Folk Song is the music of the

common people. But who are the common people ? They are the unlettered, the untravelled—those whose

mental life has been due not to any formal schooling, but has grown from the touch and feel of their own immedi-

ate world, from the communal life, and from direct experience. They are the primitives ” —either the founders of a

civilization, or small isolated groups left behind by a maturing, literate

culture ; the European peasantry, say, or the cowboy of the American Middle West in the nineteenth century. Their music springs spontaneously from an unconscious need, and, because of this, must be completely genuine and sincere.

(2) Folk Music is limited by its function. Listening for its own sake was unknown to the folk singer. He declaimed his ballad, danced his ballet to a musical accompaniment. Hence form was bound by the structure of a stanza or dance figure and music did not exist outside these limits. Yet within them it attained a high standard. Most folk tunes lasted only eight bars, and for dance or ballad might have had thirty repeats. This presupposes a certain quality. A trivial melody would soon turn wearisome. The best folk tunes show their true quality after several repetitions.

(3) The folk song grows, develops, and survives by purely oral tradition. From our hypothesis, folk singers are unlettered, and cannot stereotype their songs in script or notation. This is crucial. It means that there is no “ original,” no authoritative version, but the one they are singing now. This allows limitless variation and improvement. The genuine folk song is fluid, always in solution, ever assuming a new character, never finished. This process may sound rambling or diffuse, but, in fact, it is highly disciplined. The folk singers add only what they need, discarding what is superfluous, and, therefore, at any given moment, the folk song is a perfect and sincere expression of their time. But this sincerity is fragile, and lasts only so long as the music is free and artless. With the invention of printing in the late fifteenth century, the folk song became commercial. The words were printed on “ broadsheets ” and hawked all over England and Europe. The artless becomes artful, the motive debased, and the rot begins.

(4) The folk song grows and develops in the communal mind. This brings up the vexed question of origin. Who composed it ? One or many ? An individual, or the community ?

Neither is true alone ; together, they

both are. A man sings a song, then others sing it after him, changing what they do not like, adding, improving, shaping, moulding. The tune is handed from mouth to mouth, father to son, passing through thousands of minds, through hundreds of years of evolution, representing the united imaginations of whole generations. But this is important only to the research worker. Neither age nor authorship matter to the folk-singer—only the beauty and freshness of the song he is singing now.

These will serve as criteria. How does swing stand the tests ? This can best be shown by an historical approach.

The germ of modern swing took root on the cotton plantations of America in the early nineteenth century. The negro slave of the time was a complex of many only partly digested influences. The deep-seated rhythmical sense in his race was African, his language English, his home American. Further, he was a slave with little hope of liberation. This conditioned him to a profound melancholy. The soulless industrialism of Europe and America in the nineteenth century was also a slavery without hope of liberation, and this produced its own all-pervasive melancholy. The churches reflected it in a vein of unctuous sorrow ; a theme

of escape from this vale of woe into the sweet by and by, a better and brighter world. This awoke an exact echo in the Negro mind. Hence the harmonies of the early Negro songs are those of AngloSaxon church music. So far, it is a folk idiom. They are the common people; uncultivated, unlettered, expressing themselves freely, unconsciously, and communally in song. The songs were of two kinds —roughly, religious and secular, the first vocal only, and reflecting the deep nostalgia of a race without a home. These are the spirituals, perhaps the best known of all Folk Songs. The second had discovered the banjo, and to a barbaric, twanging ground bass, the nigger minstrel told of work, play, love, and the sun. So far they are purely local in origin, character, and influence. But the world was too much with them ; others began to sing the spirituals and dance to the banjo. Negro music was soon less Negro than American, less American than international. By 1900 the spirituals had become the “ blues ” and the banjo songs had become ragtime, the barbaric, sophisticated. The elements which made up these early blues and ragtime were now diverse. It was far less negroid than Jewish. For the Negro melancholy was a Jewish melancholy also. Both were exiles, though what was relatively recent for the Negros was a deeply ingrained pattern for the Jews. After centuries of dispossession from the land, and enforced urban life, they are now the most cosmopolitan of all peoples. Their sophisticated urban melancholy

grafted on to the Negro elements in ragtime gives us modern jazz.

At this point the movement acquires status, and splits into two schools. First, the “ sweet ” school maintains and develops the Jewish tradition and becomes the “ blues ” music of the late “ ’twenties ” and “ ’thirties,” with its Debussy harmonies, crooners, and everrecurring laments of poverty, depression, and lost babies. Second, the “ hot ” school preserved the Negro spirit. It stemmed mainly from Memphis and New Orleans, each developing an authentic style. The Memphis style was similar to the old air and variations. A chorus would be played simply, then each man in turn would play a solo variation, the others improvising an accompaniment. In New Orleans it was similar, except that everybody improvised at once, giving essays in spontaneous orchestrations never written out as a score. This was a reversion to something of the folk spirit. The 1920’s restored improvising as an art, and while much of it had little value, some, in the hands of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, was of a remarkable quality, brilliantly alert, poignant, and simple. The attempt to bring something of this quality into polite teadance music resulted in swing. But is it folk music ? I think not. Because, first, it is popular art music. When “ popular ” means “ of the common people ” it is easy to equate popular

music with folk music. But the real distinction is between folk music and art music—between music which is spontaneous, untrained, and intuitive, and that which is cultivated, conscious and intentional. For example, immediately the spirituals passed from the unconscious life of the Negro into the conscious American mind, they became popular art music.

Second, art music brings with it composer and audience. In folk music neither exists. All are composers, and music is common property. The split between musical and unmusical, composer and audience, implicit in all art music, comes with civilization.

Third, modern dance music is international. Folk music is local only. Swing is a world form—its “ hits ” are “hits” everywhere. American dance music stands to the twentieth century as Italian music stood to the eighteenth, universally comprehensible. But music then was a perquisite of the aristocratic and landed classes. The focus has shifted since, and with democracy in politics we have democracy in music also. The minuet was the dance of the aristocracy, the waltz the dance of the middle classes, but jive is for every one.

Fourth, that if the Folk Song is dynamic —that is, continually growing and taking on new life —swing is static. Springing from an individual mind, it can go no further. Gramophone, radio, and film have sent swing to every part of the earth, but, once recorded, whether on disk, sound track, or sheet music, it is at an end, and no further growth is possible. In Folk Song, you are able not only to accept or reject a tune, but to leave on it an impress of your own, however slight. Swing you either accept or reject, nothing more. Even the tunes you enjoy become tedious, because you cannot vary them or bring to them anything of your own, and in time you reject them also, and so the tunesmiths are kept busy. Dance music now is as impersonal as it is universal.

Fifth, in folk music, technique is unimportant. The only intrument was the unaccompanied human voice and it

had no value in itself except as an instrument, a means. In swing, technique is all-important, the instrument paramount. It is Benny Goodman’s clarinet, Harry James’ trumpet, Tommy Dorsey’s trombone—ever faster, hotter, dirtier rhythms. This points to a preoccupation with virtuosity, which in turn points to a lack of content. To fill this gap they are drawing more and more on the classics, and straining their technical resources. This is always symptomatic of a lack of genuine inspiration.

Last, swing has two sets of standards, musical and commercial, which are hard to reconcile. There is often a split, and the balance is upset. When this happens, some sort of debasement usually results. The decay of the folk song began as soon as it was commercialized.

Swing, then, is not folk music. Does it matter ? I doubt if it does. Folk music is almost extinct—with the universal education promised, it will be dead in another century. But I do not think swing is very important either. It is the popular music of our time, and all popular music is short-lived. It will attach itself more and more directly to the radio, and particularly the films, which will soon be the meetingplace of all the popular arts. Serious music will be the specialized enjoyment of a relatively small clique, as poetry is to-day, and will find its inspiration elsewhere.