Concluding four consecutive days of going to hear live music, on Sunday afternoon I went to see "Woody Sez" a musical about Woody Guthrie. Four actors performed scenes from his life and sung songs that Guthrie and other musicians, such as Leadbelly, wrote or recorded. After the show, the theater hosted a hootenanny in the lobby where several local musicians joined the cast and we all sang folk songs.
Not Latin music, you say. Well, perhaps, but Guthrie was a key figure in the US ballad tradition, recording folk ballads that had survived in rural America and composing his own songs that followed in the centuries-old tradition of orally-transmitted music. For better or worse, popular recordings and radio transformed many of the unique and highly-localized musical styles present in the US at the turn of the century, and Guthrie was present during most of this transition, during which he tapped into and kept alive the older ways of singing and playing. At the same time, Guthrie negotiated the dramatic economic turmoil and political transformations of the 1930s and 1940s, always on the side of the common man, the worker, the unemployed.
And while the Anglo-American ballad tradition mainly died out in the US during the 20th century, in Mexico and the US Southwest, a similar ballad tradition, the corrido, thrived. Corridos, sung in one form or another since the Spanish conquest and deriving from the medieval "romance," chronicled the struggles of the 1910s Mexican Revolution, but, rather than dying out with modernization and urbanization, have continued to document current events in the Mexican popular imagination. Since the 1970s, narcocorridos, or ballads about the drug trade, have detailed the illicit drug trade, the rise and fall of cartels, and government collusion and corruption. Other corridos have told the stories of undocumented immigrants trapped in a 'golden cell' of life in the US, where things don't always turn out like they dreamed. As Elijah Wald documents, in Mexico one can still find balladeers who wander from town to town singing the people's music.
Guthrie represents the sort of on-the-ground knowledge and engagement with a popular consciousness that anthropology should strive for. Who will tell the story of today's unemployed, homeless, uprooted wanderers that continue to grow in number?
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/I_Aint_Got_No_Home.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment