by Peter Berryman
Folksong Dipstick Matrix
Whither Zither interviews Dr. Kum Bayah, University of Psaltery,
creator of the Folksong Dipstick Matrix.
WZ: What is Folk Music?
KB: Well, folk music is music written by
someone unknown and dead. Or, well, if they're unknown, you don't
really know if they're dead of course. Unless the song has been
around for hundreds of years, then you're pretty sure. Or if it's
by many people, but they all have to be unknown. Or most of them.
I suppose they could be alive as long as they're unknown. But
they have to be unknown to everyone, not just me and you. Not
UNKNOWN unknown, just unknown as the author of the song. Regis
Philbin could be the author of a folk song if he didn't tell anybody
he wrote it. Right? Until the moment he told someone. Then the
jig's up, and it no longer is a folk song. Never was.
Of course this is overlooking one sticking point, and that is,
the person who writes the song in the first place knows he wrote
it, so the author isn't ever completely COMPLETELY unknown. Unless
he's a sleepwriter or something, and writes without being aware
of it, he always knows, or at least knows until he forgets or
croaks.
WZ: What if YOU died before he told everyone he wrote it?
KB: Maybe then to you it could be said to
have been truly, actually, in your life, a folk song, because
it was verified author unknown up until after your death. Only
people who get the news about his having written it have to revise
their opinion about whether it has been a folk song all along
or not. That means that, say, you were born in 1920 and die in
2001, and in 2002, Regis admits he secretly wrote the folk song
in 1975. For you, and everyone else in the world, if he didn't
tell anyone, this was a folk song until 2002, but then it wasn't,
RETROACTIVELY. Right? Except for you, because you died in 2001.
So then, forever, the song for you was a folk song in, say, 1986.
But not for anyone who lived past 2002. For them it turns out
not to have been a folk song in 1986. Not that they were mistaken;
it actually was a folk song in 1986, before 2002. But after 2002
it wasn't a folk song in 1986, unless you died in 2001, to repeat
myself.
WZ: Oh. So anyway, if you have to be unknown to write a true folk song --
KB: You have to be unknown as the author of it. There really are very few people, when you think about it, who are unknown in every way by everyone. Completely unknown people. People known only to themselves. Then again, how would we know about them? But anyway, there are plenty of forgotten deceased people who are unknown by the process of being forgotten over time. But even if someone knows just the name of a person, even if they're dead for a thousand years, and that name is associated with a song, then the song isn't a folk song. Even if the person is unknown by virtue of being forgotten in all other facets of his life.
WZ: Okay. Now, if you have to be unknown as its author, to write a true folk song, how about the songs of, say, Woody Guthrie?
KB: Well here's where it gets complicated.
We're developing our point-based Folksong Dipstick Matrix for
this sort of thing because of the various overriding considerations
which I haven't mentioned for the sake of simplicity.
The main component of a folk song's authenticity is its author
having been forgotten over time as its author. But there are secondary
considerations, which on a point system, can add up to overpower
that main component. On our Matrix a song needs 75 folk points
to be a folk song. Being by an unknown author gives the song 60
points right off the bat.
But even songs with authors known can gain points. If the author
is known, but not a professional musician, that's five points.
If they're of a minority, that's another five. Dead, that's ten
more points, and if they're in the process of dying, that's twelve
points. If they're mentally ill, tragically handsome, overdrawn,
or have served time in prison, they get a few more. And so forth.
The song itself gets points for mentioning shipwrecks, sheep shearing,
lovers dying, rum, mountains, that sort of thing. Singable melodies,
choruses, refrains, meaningless syllables are high in folk points.
And I have to mention an entire subset of points within this system
which applies to what has come to be known as Oral Tradition,
in which a song is not jotted down, but is mumbled orally from
its original author down through generations of editors and translators,
none of them writing anything down either. This way, the original
authorship is not only delightfully difficult to trace, but involves
more than one creator. All these creators' identities stand protected
by their unwillingness to write anything down on paper, contributing
selflessly to the world's library of genuinely unattributable
folk music.
WZ: And then there's the performance.
KB: Yes. It's odd but as our Matrix shows,
you can have a song that's a folk song when sung by one person
but not by another person. Which would you say wins more points
here: Leadbelly singing I Did It My Way, or Frank Sinatra
singing Greensleeves? The answer isn't immediately obvious,
is it? Everything's all been very slippery up to now.
What if you don't know the person's whole name who wrote a song,
but do know from an old letter that her first name was Lula and
she was a chicken farmer in 1822 in Montpelier, Vermont, combatting
her ennui by writing songs in maple sap on her grandfather's flannel
cummerbund? What if you know it was written by a rich conservative
banker in St. Louis in 1900 who lost his mind and shot his sherbet
provider, writing songs on the lam on a horse in the dead of night
by the light of a dangling mudlamp? You can begin to see how our
Matrix will come in very handy in determining how to classify
these taxonomically confusing songs.
It also will sort socks.