If any sense of bleariness bleeds through these words onto your screen right now, blame music. I spent the last few days at Folk Alliance International, the annual convocation that brings strummed, sung, chanted, blown and banged-out pandemonium to a designated hotel (for the past few years, the Westin Crown Center in Kansas City) for one joyful, exhausting winter week. During the day, the conference presents panels and official showcases in conference rooms on the hotel’s third floor. At night, though, carnival logic takes over. Several hotel floors are transformed to become the world’s largest compartmentalized venue — beds removed, chairs rearranged, snacks and beverages set out to accommodate the hundreds of people sampling musicians’ sets across dozens of rooms. At this scale, it’s a unique experience that nonetheless calls to mind both historic folk festivals where pickers wandered from group to group across park fields and also of the virtual world of apps like TikTok, where genre and other distinctions are washed away by the current of the scroll.
As a critic and a member of the organization’s board, I may be predisposed to think about this, but I’ve found Folk Alliance to be an ideal place to consider one of the most persistent, if tedious, questions that arises when we talk about music: How do we categorize it? The classifying system organizing music into genres has always been contentious, rife with self-appointed police and power players, barely tolerated by most musicians themselves. Yet genre is useful. From a consumer perspective, it is a shelving system: People turn to jazz or folk or rock for a certain set of sonic or rhetorical elements, just as they go to the pasta aisle when they crave carbs. For the industry, it’s the distribution side of that same transaction: where to put which release or performance so that it reaches a sympathetic audience.
The problem with genre is obvious for creators and, increasingly, for many listeners. The concept exists to establish limits. A song is this because it includes that and excludes that. It’s jazz if it swings, involves improvisations and isn’t preprogrammed. It’s folk if it’s played on mostly acoustic instruments, stresses storytelling and doesn’t get too loud. It’s hip-hop if beats and rhymes dominate and pop melodies enter only as support. Even as I’m laying down these criteria I know some of you are yelling, no. Musicians want to go where creativity takes them and listeners like to be surprised. Genre offers the comfort of predictability, but its grip can chafe.
I love the wild environment of the late-night Folk Alliance showcases because they present a dynamic lesson in how the drawn lines of genre can serve musicians, helping them organize and perfect their approach, and then two rooms over how other players can lovingly bend or raucously erase those lines. As an example, here’s how my room prowling went on the conference’s first night. I started out in the Nordic Folk Alliance room with a trio called Northern Resonance: three young players wielding fiddle, viola d’amore and a traditional instrument called a nyckelharpa, a cross between a keyboard and string instrument meant to be played, hurdy-gurdy-like, in the street. This group definitely tapped folk’s traditional side, but with jazz and even jam-band flourishes that set this subtle music alight. Down one floor, I caught a couple quick songs from Freedy Johnston, one of my favorite indie songwriters back in the 1990s, whose razor wit and frenetic style succeed acoustically as well as they do with a jangle-rock band, and then slipped into a packed room for a boisterous set from Michele Stodart, known in indie rock circles as part of English band the Magic Numbers, whose own music slinks toward soul; she made me think of the morphing blues of Adia Victoria. Finally I ended up in the Black American Music Summit room, where San Diego-based voyager Lisa Sanders harmonized with her partner Brown Sugar on originals that pointed toward Tin Pan Alley as much as they invoked Judee Sill.
Meanwhile, fellow attendees were blowing up my phone with videos from other rooms: of the ethereally glittering Calvin Arsenia singing Joni Mitchell songs while playing harp, of Ukrainian hurdy-gurdy player Iryna Muha, of Bolivian-born vocalist Gian-Carla Tisera wowing the room with her operatic vocals and Argentinian acoustic jazz master Dario Acosta Teich furiously riffing. This somehow harmonious din raised that old question: What is folk? Sonically, anything, it seems. Emotionally, spiritually, anything that can be shared in an intimate way while projecting backward and forward in time.
I’d been thinking about that question for a while, because of a bigger discussion raging on in social media about a different genre — country music. Beyoncé’s Super Bowl Sunday drop of two songs from her forthcoming country album ignited an online furor about white supremacy in country music (it’s real) and the Black roots of a genre that has built its borders to exclude non-white artists. There’s plenty of greatstuff to read or hear on Beyoncé’s move and the history behind it. Bottom line is, this argument about genre is urgently political: It’s about acknowledging the existence of real people, real communities whose labor has been stolen or erased.
In the midst of the Beyoncé appeal, however, I noticed some interesting posts on Twitter from Joy Oladokun, whose deeply edifying third album Proof of Life was one of NPR Music’s favorites of 2023. Oladokun had been name-dropped by several fans (including me) as an example of a Black woman artist who deserves more visibility within country music. As she noted, her duet with country titan Chris Stapleton, “Sweet Symphony,” hadn’t even been serviced to country radio; her label thought there was no point.
Oladokun made clear that the limits placed around her music are grounded in racism. Yet she also Tweeted that she doesn’t call herself country. “I consider myself folk,” she wrote. “A musical record of the people.” As I interpret this, Oladokun was making a positional distinction, not a musical one. Contemporary mainstream country music, even when it’s great, is manufactured. It’s written by songwriting teams on Music Row, recorded in sleek studios nearby and distributed through mostly-chain radio stations to be performed in sports arenas to mass audiences. Folk is more adaptable. It can take different forms, wherever people tell stories that commemorate their daily lives. Argue with me if you want; I welcome the debate. But I believe these distinctions carry truth.
I had a conversation this week with Alynda Segarra, known in folk and rock circles as Hurray for the Riff Raff, in which that brilliant singer-songwriter rephrased this idea with an eye toward specific kinds of people. We were talking on stage here in Kansas City after they’d won Folk Alliance’s annual People’s Voice award. Closely considering the mostly autobiographical tales that comprise their career-high new album, The Past is Still Alive, Segarra answered my question about the details that fortify its narratives, taken from their own youth as a crust punk leaving a “bloody American footprint” across this nation. It’s the people who are invisible, they said, that they want to bring to life. The non-white citizens. The queer and trans children. The underemployed drifters. The addicts, recovering or not. The ones who don’t live to loudly inscribe themselves in the book of capitalist success stories, but who get by accepting and supporting each other and, in doing so, become heard and seen — often only by each other, but with the help of beautiful tools like folk songs, by a larger public and by history itself.
For critics like me, genre inspires a game of associations and delineations that, with its ever-changing and contested rules, offers structure — maps for making connections and providing context, for going beyond simple description or personal response into the realm of informed judgment. If you ask me what defines a musical genre, thinking of Segarra and Oladokun, I’d say not so much a set of sounds as a set of values and practices. Country values professionalism, arguably Beyoncé’s core means of empowerment. Folk values other things, not excluding musical mastery but placing it in the context of chosen-family lineages and the sometimes desperate insistence that people’s voices deserve to be heard and remembered, even — especially — when their lives aren’t as respected within the rubric of political power and financial success.
Another word Segarra used was “romantic.” It can feel like that definition of folk is too much that way, unachievable at a time when commerce corrupts everything and threatens the world. But I like the idea that a musical genre arises through community-building first, through the defiant insistence that people speak up and listen to each other. I value this lived experience of folk: artists, fans and so-called tastemakers congregating in hallways, sharing space in rooms that might be quiet or could get loud — inventing new ways to move forward, to music, together. Is connection a genre? I’ll stand up for that one.
Beyond my consuming Folk Alliance experience, I found some time to sneak some other stuff in the last week:
– Mano Sundaresan bravely entered the warped world of Ye to attend the listening party for the chaotic artist’s new collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign. Here’s his report from the field.
– NPR Music editor Daoud Tyler-Ameen and I got together this week on the New Music Friday podcast (I recorded from my hotel room in Kansas City) to dig into the week’s best new albums, including that Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past Is Still Alive, plus albums by Erika de Casier, Real Estate, Mary Timony and more.
– One of the albums out this week is credited to Mama Zu, but it’s the final work of someone I knew as Jessi Zazu, the leader of the Nashville band Those Darlins who died in 2017. Jessi was a rare light in indie rock, gone too soon at 28. Her bandmate Linwood Regensburg’s labor of love, their last project together, is called Quilt Floor and shows us how much we lost when we lost her.
– Speaking of love and loss — and the magic of spice — the Cambodian refugee, chef and entrepreneur Chantha Nguon taps into the deepest meaning of comfort food in her new hybrid memoir and cookbook Slow Noodles, written with Kim Green.
– I’m on Team True Detective: Night Country for many reasons — its gorgeous settings, the spiky chemistry between Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, and the return of one of the greatest slacker thespians of all time, John Hawkes. I loved it when Hawkes’s sad villain Hank played a song that the actor actually wrote. It’s not on the internet by design, but you can check out Hawkes’ old band in this clip from 2006.
– I spent a little time in Florida last week, and was reminded of the best thing to do besides beaching: Go to Green Cay and cozy up to a cormorant.
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