Author: Benjamin Filene
Title: Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music
Year: 2000
Type: Academic book (University of North Carolina Press)
A history of the people standing between American vernacular music and its public. Filene’s subject is the class he calls cultural middlemen — the folklorists, A&R scouts, producers, and publicists who “discovered” folk musicians, recorded them, and sold them onward — and his claim is that no folk music has ever reached an audience without passing through such hands, which means the story of what Americans think of as their musical roots is really the story of who did the choosing. The book’s central coinage is the cult of authenticity: the web of criteria the middlemen built for what a true folk singer should look and sound like. John Lomax and Alan Lomax are its architects. Where Francis James Child’s ballad canon and Cecil Sharp’s Appalachian expeditions had treated singers as passive vessels of a static English inheritance, the Lomaxes honored performers as living artists, and then policed a new border, banning the phonograph and the radio from the garden. Their presentation of Lead Belly, pressed to stay “premodern, unrestrainedly emotive, and noncommercial” and sometimes put onstage in prison stripes, is the cult operating in the open: the raw was a costume fitted by the refined.
What keeps the book from being a simple exposé is that Filene follows the power in both directions. His close reading of Lead Belly’s successive recordings of “Mr. Tom Hughes’ Town” shows the singer sweetening and slowing his own performance for audiences who wanted authenticity comfortable — the discovered artist managing his discoverers. The categories sharpen in the late chapters: folk promoters and folk bureaucrats popularize other people’s cultures as “folk,” while folk stylists like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan take on the voice of the folk without belonging to it, and the book’s most generous judgment goes to Seeger’s “ability to cross the outsider-insider barrier without pretending to dissolve it.” Filene closes on the 1990s roots revival — Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music reissued, alt-country ascendant — and on the claim “that the backward glance can be more than nostalgic — that memory can create American culture anew.”
Run the thesis through Muddy Waters and it works like a schematic, which is why Filene gives him a chapter. Alan Lomax recorded him acoustic at Stovall in 1941 as a folk document; Chicago and Chess remade him electric for the jukebox; and in January 1964, with the revival paying premiums for the pre-electric past, Chess sat him back down with an acoustic guitar, Willie Dixon’s upright bass, and a title that named the market: Folk Singer. One musician, three authenticities, each certified by a different middleman — Filene’s point compressed into a single discography. Where the book strains is in its ledger of costs: the cult of authenticity constrained and caricatured its subjects, but the same machinery funded second careers and festival wages the unmediated market never paid, and Filene’s framework accounts for the enclosure better than for the pension. The mediation was exploitation and patronage at once, and the book proves the first more thoroughly than it weighs the second.
Key contributions
- The cultural-middlemen framework: roots music as a curated product, with the curators — collectors, scouts, producers, publicists — as the proper objects of study.
- The “cult of authenticity” as a named, datable construction: the Lomaxes’ criteria for the true folk singer, built in the 1930s and enforced on the artists it canonized.
- The demonstration that the performers negotiated back — Lead Belly’s self-revisions, Muddy Waters’s serial reinventions — so mediation reads as a two-way transaction rather than pure imposition.
- The stylist/promoter/bureaucrat taxonomy of revival roles, which separates the people who performed the folk voice from the people who institutionalized it.
- The substitution of “roots music” for “folk” — an admission, built into the vocabulary, that the category names a use of the past rather than a kind of music.
See also
- The color line in pop — Filene’s middlemen are the mechanism behind the line’s folk chapter: the collectors’ choices about who counted as “the folk” did the racial sorting Miller documents at the category level
- Authenticity and its discontents — the cult of authenticity is that ideology’s supply side: Filene shows the criteria being manufactured a generation before rock adopted them
- Escaping the Delta — Wald’s invented “Delta blues” is a case study in Filene’s framework; the two books reconstruct the same machinery from the record-crate and archive ends respectively
- Creating Country Music — the sibling fabrication: while Filene’s collectors romanced the folk, Peterson’s entrepreneurs were building country’s realness as a commercial product — two authenticity systems misremembering the same South
