Label Specifics

This week, I've made some more technical changes to my data sheets and collection process which I'd like to highlight first. Under the Folk Artist Data Spreadsheet I added a column with links to each of the albums reviewed on the Folkways website. Under the Missing Albums Spreadsheet I have added a Yes/No column for keeping track of whether the album not found on Spotify is available on Ebay (in vinyl/digitized form). I also want to experiment and see if I can find any songs off the albums in question have been uploaded to YouTube, which would indicate that they have in fact been digitized. A presence on Ebay would suggest there is the potential for the album to be digitized, and that it is still in circulation on the music market. The Ebay search should be relatively easy to do, but I expect some trouble with the YouTube search. If it ends up being too tricky, or doesn't yield any results, I'll get rid of it, but for now I think its worth it to do some digging.

On to the real topic of this blog post. After compiling a list of the albums missing from the Spotify digital music collection I thought it would be informational and useful to do a little research some of the recurring labels which produced the albums on the list. From my earlier posts, I have developed a general concept of the Folkways approach and their history, and I'd now like to expand that with a few more labels that were producing folk music during the period I am studying. The two I will highlight today will be Riverside Records and Columbia Records.

According to the current holders of the Riverside label, the Concord Music Group, Riverside Records was launched in New York City in 1953 by jazz enthusiasts named Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews. Its original intent was to reissue classic jazz and blues recordings from the 1920s, however it wound up being one of the key labels of modern jazz. Some of its big name artists include: Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wes Montgomery, Sonny Rollins, Abbey Lincoln, Art Blakey, Mongo Santamaria, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Heath, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Byrd, and the Staple Singers. In 1964, a year following founder Bill Grauer's death, the company folded. In 1972 the Riverside catalog was acquired by Fantasy, Inc (http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/labels/Riverside/). The Concord Music Group does seem to be affiliated with Spotify, according to its website, but an interesting note is that the artists carried over and available from the original Riverside Records seems to be extremely limited. The two artists my search thus far with records under the label, Logan English and Jean Ritchie, are not listed under Riversides artists in the Concord Collection (http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/artists/artists.php?). They are also not listed under Fantasy, Inc.'s artists (http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/artists/label/Fantasy/). I'd be surprised if there weren't more folk artists under the Riverside label whose work has been lost (or has been made inaccessible) during the acquisition. This is exactly the albums I set out to find so to have evidence as to why the albums are missing is really exciting. It's a first indication of a real hole in the collection, a hole created due to the forces of the market.

Columbia Records is a label very different from Riverside Records. As one of the largest recording companies in the country, it is very focused on profits. It jumped into the folk genre in the 1960s when it signed three big folk artists at the time: Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and Simon & Garfunkel. These names aren't quite synonymous with the segment of folk I have been studying as they all are more associated with the folk-rock segment. Finding information about other artists signed by Columbia during this time is quite a challenge, but this timeline at least helps to highlight the most successful acts. The artists I have as releasing albums with Columbia out of my data collection so far are: Stephen Addiss and Bill Crofut, Andrew Rowan Summers, Malvina Reynolds, and Peter La Farge. As none of them are big name acts, it seems as though for the sake of profit maximization, and conservation of resources, Columbia, in fashion with other large companies, cut production and distribution of those albums which weren't successful enough. The likelihood of these albums floating around somewhere are probably higher than a small label, but again we can see the creation of a void in music collection. This time as a result of profit maximization as opposed to the business transfer we saw in the case of Riverside Records.

Update on Data Gathering

This week I'll be doing a quick post on some changes I've made to data gathering procedure, and updates to the Data & Notes page on the blog site.

Over the last couple of weeks, as I've been finding more and more artists whose complete discographies do not appear to be available in digital form, I've become dissatisfied with my original data collection procedure. Trying to include all the information about the missing albums on the one spreadsheet did not make my data easily readable or understandable. It felt like too much information to be trying to squeeze into a couple of cells on a spreadsheet. I therefore decided to move the information about missing albums over to a new spreadsheet, which I believe will make it easier to conduct analysis later on in the semester, plus its easier to read and comprehend. To be more specific, for every "No" in column G on the original datasheet (called "Folkways Data Spreadsheet") there are entry(s) in the new spreadsheet (called "Missing Albums Spreadsheet") depending on how many albums were missing per artist. The link to this new spreadsheet is on the Data & Notes page off the main page of the blog, and should be view-able to anyone with the link. In making this change I won't be losing any information which was something I was concerned about, and though it adds another step to the gathering process, in terms of output and data simplicity I think its worth it. The change has also been reflected in my Data Gathering Process page.

With the new expanded information, it will be easier to find patterns in the data. This could include windows of time where there are more albums not digitized, or labels which keep popping up over and over. Looking at the data I have now, it would probably be worth it to look into the list of recording labels I have currently compiled and find out whether they are still in business, where the ownership to this music lies, and some possible reasons why they haven't digitized this older content.  I'll try to do a post on that information in the next couple of weeks. Also on my itinerary with regards to the project is beginning a research paper on copyright specifically within the music industry. Once complete that paper will be posted in its own page on the blog.

Defining Folk

One problem I seem to be running into with this project is coming up with a conceptualization of Folk music, the specific genre I am studying. Last week I made a first stab at putting numbers on the market size, but based on comments from my adviser and my own uncertainty on what to consider folk or not when creating the maps, I decided to speak to the challenge of defining folk music in my post this week.

According to Merriam-Webster, folk music is defined as "the traditional music of the people in a country or region as well as a type of popular music that is based on traditional music and that does not use electric instruments" (Merriam-Webster). The first part of the definition very clearly speaks to international, country specific, music, as in Irish folk, Hungarian folk, Israeli folk, or any other nationality that you can think of. This part of the definition doesn't really apply to folk music within the US I think for the reason that our music industry is too larger and wide of breadth. Because of our extraordinarily diverse population, putting a a finger on what "traditional" music is for America, and even specific regional areas would prove to be a very challenging feat. I think the second part of the definition could help us out, specifically the part of exclusion of electric instruments. That's something concrete to go on, however figuring out what constitutes "based on traditional music" especially in an American context brings up the same problem as the first part of the definition. Maybe the challenge of American Folk music isn't so much the folk, but the underlying question of what is American tradition that stumps so many of us.

Perhaps folk music finds its definition in exemplary artists. The two names which dominate the American folk scene are Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. Their names are the first to appear when conducting a Google search, and have come up in my Folkways inventory far more than any other artist. What this calls into question is whether the genre is determined by a artist specific model created by artists like Guthrie and Seeger, or if the genre is determined by set commonalities between artists, like style, lyrical spin, or more specific traits like having no electric instruments. In terms of market size, the better situation for artists on Folkways who aren't Seeger or Guthrie, would be a folk genre that doesn't rely on specific name recognition, rather a taste for an essence that is folk.

There is a serious differentiation when it comes to artist who consider themselves to be a part of the genre. I came across the most striking example of this while reading Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society 1940 - 1970 which was written by Ronald D. Cohen. Cohen writes of a legendary folk artist Bascom Lamar Lunsford who started the Asheville Folk Festival. Excited artists Guy Carawan,Frank Hamilton, and Jack Elliot were disappointed to find that folk hero Lunsford "turned out to be just the opposite of the kind of person I'd expected. He sings like an old mountain reprobate, full of glee and friendliness. He turned out to be a reactionary aristocrat however. The first question he asked us was 'Are you Communists?'" (Cohen, 4-5). The reason I cite this example is because it calls into question the general assumption that folk is a liberal genre, obviously segments of folk have strong liberal tendencies, Pete Seeger and his conflict with McCarthy during the Red Scare is a strong example of this, but it seems as though that definition doesn't encompass the whole genre. Perhaps there is a faction like Lunsford who represent a more conservative take on the genre, and if there is, the market for the music is far less limited. Of course perception is everything so the fact that folk is perceived to be liberal might make any ideological differentiation inconsequential.

Folk is both cursed and blessed with an indefinite nature. On the one hand, overlap with other genres and diversification means that most people have probably heard and appreciated at least one folk song or a song that could arguably pass as folk. This includes music in such genres as rock, country, bluegrass, and jazz to name a few. The fact that the genre lacks a strong identity and rests largely on the shoulders of a few big name artist, however, makes branding folk music as its own entity extremely difficult and therefore developing a loyal following of fans, especially for smaller scale artists, nearly impossible. While Moses Asch solved the preservation problem, getting the music he saved to those who might value it is a much harder task. The cause of that difficulty, in my opinion, is a lack of definition within the genre.