'Blues', 'Folk', n Songs

When you learn and sing and marinate upon the earliest recorded American folk & blues music, you quickly realize that blues music is folk music, and that even the purest of the folksters--such as the Carter Family--draw deeply n freely upon blues tradition. There is no difference between "blues" and "folk" music in America: each is the other. There is a difference between blues and folk musicians. The difference between blues and folk musicians is that, while they draw on a lot of shared material (three chord songs, call and response forms, common vernacular such as "worried mind" or imagery such as the railroad train are but a few examples), each has a different relationship to that well of material.

The folk musician is a museum curator--and the art is her songs. She seeks to absorb as much of the music as possible and keep it intact, sharing it without comment, confident in the belief that if she lets the song shine through her, the material do its work. The folk musician is a preserver and purveyor of tradition, they aren't too inclined to alter what they inheret. Any alteration they do make to the material is inadvertent, it happens by a slip of memory.

The blues musician continuously alters his material, he couldn't stick to the script if he tried. He'll take a verse from here, a vernacular phrase from there, and an original verse of his own and mash them up without compunction until the traditional elements of his material are transformed by his personality or persona. He freely inserts his ego into the music, making his lyrics and melodies into opaque windows that refract his soul.

There's no way to draw a firm line between who's a blues and who's a folk musician. Everyone is both, to some degree or another. Most days I tilt more toward the bluesman than the folkster, but I revere both archetypes, and respect the role that each plays in enriching the music.

Bob Dylan, past the age o' 50, said, "The world don't need any more songs." He was both wrong and right. Many many of the feelings you or I feel already have plenty of songs reflecting those feelings. And a well constructed song like "Angel from Montgomery" or "Crossroads Blues" is going to do what songs do for those feelings for a long old time to come.

But I got feelings and thoughts and ideas that just aren't in any songs, and so I must write songs so that I can sing what I see is urgently needing to be heard. Many times I'd rather it was otherwise, that I was satisfied with covering tunes, but it won't do. Writing songs is damned difficult, even harder than making a decent recording of a song. And as fulfilling as it can be to hear a song you wrote come off well, that fulfillment ain't equal to my restlessness for the next one.

If there's one thing that sets me apart from the legions of people like me striving to make their songs heard, it's that I know more of the tradition than most of those my age, and I smell and think and feel and breathe songs that aren't merely made to make you feel good, distract you from your blues, or comment on what's in the news.

The only reason I will sing a song is because I need to hear it, and that I believe it could do your inmost soul some good to hear it.