Filed under: Music
All urban music proceeds, at its origin, out of rural music. Whether jazz or bluegrass, religious music or secular, Arabic music or pop, everything comes from the country. Folk music, roots music, blues, baladi… all of these names apply to musics that didn’t have categories for the people that participated in singing and playing them… People singing in the cane fields of Texas, people out working in the hot sun of the middle east. People sitting around the table after dinner, or on the porch, singing ballads about the murder in the next town, or about kings and enemies and battles.
Folks are all similar… The “Volk” in German doesn’t just mean ‘folks’ – it means the entirety of the collective existence. Folk music isn’t music that didn’t have a creator necessarily – it is just music that can represent the feelings of an entire group of people. The music created by grinding coffee, the singing of ballads for one another, songs and circumcisions or weddings. All of these kinds of songs are pan-cultural. Every country, every language shares them…
At the core of these songs is the feelings tied up with simplicity and home. Copland’s gregarious setting of “Tis a gift to be simple” perfectly embodies what the urban genre did with ‘country’ music in the United States… Classical music, pop, jazz, and everything else emerged out of country music… whether the country music of the Hungarians and the rural Germans a few hundred years ago, or the hillbilly music that developed into jazz and modern ‘country’ or bluegrass music.
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