Folk revival

The spirit of folk was everywhere this year, with a slew of tribute albums to various new hybrid forms -- from freak-folk to folk-punk and beyond.

By Andrew Marcus

Read more: Bruce Springsteen, Arts & Entertainment, Folk Music, Arts & Entertainment Features, Year in 2006

Dec. 30, 2006 | "Well, you're in Greenwich Village now, where people come to get away from America. It's not jazz around here anymore -- it's folk music. Jazz is high-hat and aging. Young people have gone mad over ballads, blues, guitar playin' and banjo pickin'."

That's musicologist Alan Lomax, addressing the camera from his West Third Street digs in the old hootenanny film "Blues, Ballads, and Bluegrass." Lomax looks as self-satisfied as a missionary who has just gotten the natives to use a plow -- and with good reason. His scrupulous field recordings, along with the junk shop treasures reissued on LP by his quirkier associate, Harry Smith, have borne much of what's called "folk music" into the mid-20th century. And there in his living room, the folk revival circa 1961 is about to hold a jam session: bright young Villagers like Peter LaFarge and the New Lost City Ramblers, with gray-haired Southerners from actual villages -- including Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, just back from obscurity.

Had Lomax lived long enough (he died in 2002) he would have seen another major folk revival, one whose high-water mark -- so far -- has been 2006.

But this new revival is less a mighty wind than a subtle, global climate change. Too dispersed across the range of pop culture to fit in Lomax's apartment, its purveyors wouldn't even necessarily want to be seen in the same room: young string bands weaned on "O Brother, Where Art Thou," folk-punks drawn to the declamatory spirit of Billy Bragg, the new generation of acoustic Anglophiles and psychedelicists who've been lumped under the problematic heading "freak-folk," rockers gone rustic, reenergized established folkies, and too many similar currents to chart, much less list.

Though Springsteen's 62-date "Seeger Sessions" tour was lightly attended in the United States, its arena-scale expansion of union hall music was unprecedented. Between the four rhythm guitarists and the highest-amped accordion in history, all that was missing was a flame-throwing harmonica to detonate a giant effigy of Joseph McCarthy. But on the album, Seeger seems to have revived Springsteen as much as vice versa. "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" may have been meant to summon foot-stomping early-revival populism, but the spirit that showed up was one from Springsteen's personal past: the group exaltation of the early E Street Band.

"The Seeger Sessions" is just one of an outpouring of albums that have made 2006, relatively speaking, the year of the folk tribute. Artists as wide-ranging as Sting and the throat-singing kook Baby Gramps have appeared on odes to work songs, sea chanteys and the work of folk-blues primitivist John Fahey. Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello and a cast of other critically acclaimed types haul the interpretive ethos of the "folk process" to audacious heights on the box-set tribute "The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited." Culled from a series of millennial tribute concerts to Smith's 1952 six-LP compilation of pre-Depression recordings, "Revisited" ranges from lovely straight renditions by folk vets Geoff Muldaur and the McGarrigle sisters to the mere chutzpah of Costello's sequel to the murder ballad "Ommie Wise," and further to the outright perviness of Sonic Youth's squalling take on the Appalachian banjo ballad "Dry Bones."

The work of some established folkies also flowered this year. To call Bob Dylan a folkie is something like calling Johnny Cash a cowboy, but he'll always be the apostate golden boy of the Greenwich Village folk scene. In 2006, between the "spirit on the water, darkness on the face of the deep" and the "toothache in my heel," his lyrical muse has rarely been brighter. It's fitting that "Modern Times" is his first No 1. record in 30 years. Dylan's elder, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, also weighed in with "I Stand Alone," an album of dusty blues, suicide ballads and cowboy/canine love songs made all the more powerful by his remarkably unsentimental delivery -- remarkable, that is, for a man who spent a Brooklyn childhood daydreaming to the "Grand Ole Opry."

If there's a single folk artist who has bridged generations this year, it's 64-year-old Bert Jansch, whose new album, "The Black Swan," features backing from followers Devendra Banhart, Beth Orton and members of Chicago's Espers. In Britain, the one-time member of Pentangle has been known since the '60s as a genre-melding acoustician on the order of Richard Thompson, but in the States, "The Black Swan" has been received with the kind of buzz that usually greets, say, the occasional young rock band with its sails perfectly angled to the zeitgeist. Such far corners of the music press as Entertainment Weekly (grade: A minus) and the indie-centric review Web site Pitchfork (rating: 7.9) have raved about it, and SF Weekly pronounced Jansch "better than Dylan."

Next page: Freak-folk, old-time and folk-punk