Hubert Parry: "in true folk-songs there is no sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity"
Folk is associated with naturalism - the idea that there is no artifice involved, no element of show.
Performance, stripped of performativity or exhibitionism. The singer as the ego-less vessel or conduit for the people's consciousness.
Green Gartside on Anne Briggs: "The beautiful melodies Anne sang unaccompanied were profoundly affecting, her unornamented voice a precursor to the anti-professionalism of DIY."
Folk would be the Quaker option, the nonconformist in the religious and Puritan sense - everybody equal in this society of friends, the liturgy barebones and stripped of ceremony.
(Whereas opera, or heavy metal (at least in the 70s) is obviously Catholic. Pomp rock.
And the Puritans of despised and feared the theatre.
The diagram below relates to anti-theatricality - and the idea that some sorts of performance can actually be "real", bring reality on to the stage
(More on the Diagram below)
Peter Sellers’s spoof on Lenny Donagan - Benny Goonagain:
This diagram depicts the discursive space of pop music
- how fans (and critics, who are really just fans with an extra degree of articulation) see the music…
- how artists explain what they do, to themselves and to others
(But could there be a fourth side, making it a square? See if you are as clever as some of my students)
Some artists are firmly established on one side or other of this triangle, but the most interesting careers either involve an artist located somewhere between one axis and another, or between all of them - or, even more interesting, when the artist goes on a trajectory within this triangular space, starting in one place and moving to another, or veering all over the place, doubling back, and contradicting / erasing the previous location. Careers like John Lennon's, or David Bowie's, do that.
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