Filene — Romancing the Folk

Author: Benjamin Filene
Title: Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music
Year: 2000
Type: Academic book (University of North Carolina Press)

Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music is a book by Benjamin Filene, later chief curator at the North Carolina Museum of History, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2000. It argues that the folklorists, record executives, producers, radio programmers and publicists who discovered, recorded and promoted folk musicians shaped what mainstream audiences understood as authentic roots music, and that the wish to preserve and popularize America’s musical heritage ran through the whole twentieth century, beyond the revivals of the 1930s and 1960s. Its evidence is a series of studies of performers and their promoters, from the Lomaxes and Lead Belly through Leonard Chess, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and two of its chapters treat what they call the “cult of authenticity.” In 2001 it won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award, the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award and an award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and Robert Christgau, reviewing it in the New York Times Book Review, called it a fascinating history of an idea while finding its conclusion a disappointment.

Filene, later chief curator at the North Carolina Museum of History, published the book with the University of North Carolina Press in June 2000.¹ The publisher describes its subject as the folklorists, record company executives, producers, radio programmers and publicists who acted as middlemen between folk and popular culture: “cultural brokers” who discovered, recorded and promoted folk musicians and so shaped what audiences understood as authentic.¹ Against accounts that confine folk revivalism to the 1930s and the 1960s, Filene argues that the desire to preserve and popularize the country’s musical heritage ran through the whole century.¹ The performers it considers run from Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon and to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.¹

The book’s second chapter, “Creating the Cult of Authenticity,” follows John Lomax, Alan Lomax and Lead Belly.² In Filene’s account, folk musicians were expected to be “premodern, unrestrainedly emotive, and noncommercial.”² Christgau summarized the chapter: the Lomaxes honored their singers as active producers of an evolving tradition, provided the music came without input from the mass media, and they presented Lead Belly on stage in convict’s stripes, while Lead Belly “deliberately sentimentalized, desexualized, sweetened and slowed his music” for his new audiences.³ The third chapter, “Mastering the Cult of Authenticity,” follows Leonard Chess, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters.² Filene calls the Lomaxes and Dixon “folk promoters” and gives a later chapter to “folk bureaucrats,” and of Pete Seeger he writes, “What makes Seeger such an intriguing figure is his ability to cross the outsider-insider barrier without pretending to dissolve it.”² The book ends on the moments of revival it has traced, which, with the revival efforts that emerged from them, “established that the backward glance can be more than nostalgic.”²

The book won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award, the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Book Award and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence in Historical Folk and Ethnic Music, all in 2001.¹ Christgau, in the New York Times Book Review of December 10, 2000, called it “a fascinating history of an idea and a shape-shifting body of song,” but found its conclusion a rhetorical disappointment and wrote that it should have spent less time on Bob Dylan’s records of the 1960s and more on the 1990s.³

Key contributions

• The “cultural brokers,” the folklorists, executives, producers, programmers and publicists who shaped what audiences took to be authentic roots music.
• The “cult of authenticity,” the expectation that folk musicians be premodern, emotive and noncommercial, created by the Lomaxes.
• Folk revivalism as a current that ran through the twentieth century, beyond the revivals of the 1930s and 1960s.
• Performers who reshaped their music for new audiences, as Lead Belly did.

See also

• Creating Country Music — Richard A. Peterson’s 1997 history of how country music’s authenticity was fabricated
• Escaping the Delta — Elijah Wald’s 2004 history of how the Delta blues canon was made
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats