Yesterday there was a guy standing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art singing Jewish music. But in an interesting mix. One selection was the Kol Nidre, a deeply serious religious prayer sung only during the High Holidays. Several others were from the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick musical “Fiddler on the Roof”.
Listening to all this, the phrase that formed in my mind was “Judaism for tourists”.
And that got me thinking again about Pete Seeger. As it happens I’m reading David Van Ronk’s excellent autobiography “The Mayor of “MacDougal Street”, in which he points out that the modern folk revival was a study in make-believe.
Actual folk music is generally hundreds of years old, found in traditional tunes and words that are passed down from generation to generation in regions like Appalachia. It’s not trying to be authentic. It is authentic.
Starting around eighty years ago, a few people in America, like Woody Guthrie, followed soon thereafter by The Weavers (including Pete Seeger) and others, wrote and performed songs that often had progressive political messages, in a style that imitated traditional folk music. They would even dress like working folks, to give their performances an air of authenticity.
By the 1960s, as the American Civil Rights movement heated up, the banner was picked up by a new generation of musicians like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan to channel political protest. It was all synthetic, from the blue jeans to the fake southern twangs. And it worked like a charm.
I’m wearing blue jeans as I type this, and I’m aware that the hipness of this style among today’s intellectuals and bourgeoisie goes all the way back to the “authentically inauthentic” social activism of Woody Guthrie and Will Geer in the 1930s.
It’s odd how this works. People appreciate the authenticity of Emo and Freak Folk, which copies from Grunge, which copied from Springsteen, who copied from Dylan, who copied from Van Ronk and Guthrie, who were copying from old Appalachian music.
Our society seems to be full of such ersatz authenticity, like the “authentic” feel of Levi’s jeans, rustic furniture from Woodland Creek, Tim McGraw’s cowboy hat, the twang of Bruce Springsteen’s guitar, or the rips in Neil Young’s jeans. It’s all a copy, but it copies from something that was original. Or maybe something that copied from something that copied from something that was original.
That’s how we know it’s real.