Folk Music As A (Literal) Sell-Out

Checking the Newport Folk Festival website just the other week, I was dismayed to discover that the festival’s Saturday tickets had already sold out and that only a small number remained for Sunday. According to the Boston Globe, this year marks the first time in its history that the festival has sold out all tickets in advance. The organizers claim that their online presence helped draw this larger audience. A tad overlooked, however, is the growing popularity of folk music in the United States.

Folk music has never been unpopular in the United States. I grant, of course, that folk rubs shoulders with bluegrass and bluegrass, of course, rubs shoulders with country, which has literally never not been popular in the past century or so. So what would it mean anyway if folk gained a few points in the charts or a few more fans in the stands? If it’s related to country, then it’s basically popular already, right?

The Avett Brothers in concert; via Wikimedia Commons

In this discussion, we make the all-important assumption that we can define folk music in the first place—in other words, it assumes that folk has a nice neat boundary, that certain things are folk and others are not. Take Springsteen—there’s some folk mixed into his music—but I’d just as soon call him a blues musician as a folk musician and neither, in my mind, is quite right.

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We need to realize that any discussion of genre refers to something that cannot be fixed. No genre is a stable descriptor. Everything changes with time, folk music included. In looking at folk’s somewhat curious rise in popularity, we need to understand the differences between what the genre “folk” means now and what it meant ten years ago. (I won’t even bother with the question of forty or fifty years ago—Pete Seeger unplugging Dylan, anyone?)

Mumford & Sons' Marcus Mumford on percussion; via Wikimedia Commons

This query covers a lot of ground and there are certainly no easy answers. The cookie-cutter response is that the folky bands today—the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, and the Decemberists—simply have more mainstream appeal than folk acts like…well…who were the popular folk acts of 2000 – 2005? Ryan Adams? Gillian Welch? mid-career Bright Eyes? Perhaps their music was not enough to inspire the kind of folk crusade happening today?

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The questions still remain: who would have thought that a folk (all right…folk-rock) album like the Decemberists’ The King Is Dead could have hit #1 on the Billboard 200 chart even a few years ago? Who would have guessed that Mumford & Sons’ debut album Sigh No More would reach #2 on that same chart? Even Iron & Wine’s bizarre Kiss Each Other Clean hit #2! And Bon Iver hit #2 a few weeks ago!

Time may tell the reason that Americans have returned to their folksy roots. Maybe they have tired of Autotuned vacuity, maybe they’d only like some good old-fashioned, foot-stomping music. All I know is that this sudden trend has stolen those damn concert tickets from me. Then again, I wasn’t exactly checking the festival website for those tickets last summer…if you know what I mean…

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(The video’s been flipped if you’re wondering why they’re all playing left-handed.)