Listen Up: Welcome to the New Folk Revival

Alela Diane Menig—the Portland-by-way-of-California singer-songwriter who released one my favorite albums of this year, To Be Still—recently got a haircut. But before that, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Karen Dalton, the weary-voiced singer who rose to prominence in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s.

Her wavy auburn hair was long and parted in the middle, framing her round face and dark, kind eyes. And like Dalton, there’s something about Menig that seems a little far-away and not entirely of her own time. Her music—so deeply rooted in traditional folk sounds that it’s easy to forget she pens most of her own songs—only reinforced the comparisons. And so the resemblance seemed like nothing more than a loving homage.

Except, it wasn’t.

“Early on, I remember people always comparing me to Karen Dalton. And I had never heard Karen Dalton when I recorded Pirate’s Gospel,” Menig admitted, mentioning her debut album, when I interviewed her last year. “And so then after a year or so of folks saying that to me I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should check her out.’”

Menig is one of a few young artists who’ve recently taken up the rather musty mantle of folk music—some, she’d surely be the first to admit, more deliberately than others. And I don’t mean folk music as it’s now most commonly known—beardy guys in sweaters, guitars in hand, murmuring nonsense about their latest breakup at coffeehouse open mic nights. I mean the music that had laid largely undisturbed since the great British and American folk revivals that first sparked in the 1950s, when performers like Woody Guthrie, Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy popularized the found works of archivists like Alan Lomax and Harry Smith and the centuries-old collection of traditional songs known as the Child Ballads.

Some, too, wrote their own material, using traditional structures to voice contemporary concerns like labor conflicts and social unrest. But the revival’s most distinctive artifacts were the continued interpretation of all those seemingly-ancient songs about knights and ladies, daggers and fawns, heath and thyme and sage. The language was obscurely delightful, the stories precise and the best deliveries of the songs never anything less than urgent, plaintive, entranced. (Blame it on my own way-way-back family roots in Scotland and Wales, but I think it might even stir up something a little bit primal in me—when I hear an old folk song for the first time, it never really feels like the first time.)

The revival rolled right into the ‘60s and ’70s, too, with some artists growing more and more experimental, skipping right up to Pentangle and Strawbs in less than a generation. For nearly 30 years, folk tended to its small slice of the popular-music pie, as R&B and rock ’n’ roll rose to ascendancy right along side it—and, eventually, eclipsed it. Few of its stars made it big (or, at least, few made it as big as Bob Dylan, whose traditional roots have since become ever more obscured), but many held on in some fashion through the late ‘70s, ’80s and beyond, and some are still active today (Linda and Richard Thompson chief among them). Others, like Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan, broke into the general consciousness well after their creative peak, and we mourned for all the time we’d lost.

Over the last several decades, though, the popularity and influence of the major players of the 1950s folk revival has seemed to become increasingly atomized, pushed further and further out of whatever rivulet of the mainstream it once occupied. In terms of original music created in some semblance of the traditional folk style, there’s plenty—thank you, beardy guys—but when it came to keeping the old songs themselves alive, at least to my understanding, there wasn’t much of a chain of command. More recent entries into the canon were safe in the hands of rootsier-leaning Americana artists— take Uncle Tupelo’s version of The Carter Family’s “No Depression,” which remains an alt-country hallmark (and gave a name to one of Paste‘s favorite magazines) or Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 Seeger Sessions.

But what of all the bonny lasses, daggers and fawns? Perhaps, after the decade-and-a-half that brought us disco, punk, new wave and grunge, those old folk songs sung in that old folk style just seemed fussy and staid. Even the experimental moments were suddenly rendered kind of unshocking, despite the uproar they’d once caused in sectors of the British traditional music community—some had once balked at the idea of folk music being performed in any style other than a capella, but surely that’s better than them not being performed at all.

And so it’s good to see, as we have lately, more and more of these traditional folk songs seeping their way into this strange beast known as independent music. Around the turn of the century, Hal Wilner staged a series of Harry Smith tribute concerts that were later compiled into a massive boxed set, featuring everyone from Beck to Nick Cave (who’s done a fine job carrying on the sanguine eeriness of traditional folk in his own songs, if only in spirit). In 1999, Wesley Stace—performing as John Wesley Harding, a name snagged from Dylan—released Trad Arr Jones, a nice tribute to British revivalist Nic Jones that swung between faithful acoustic finger-picked tunes and janglier interpretations of songs like “Billy, Don’t You Weep For Me” and “Canadee-i-o.”

Then there’s Alasdair Roberts, the young Scottish singer/songwriter who’s been offering perhaps the most faithful modern interpretation of traditional English folk for most of his career, releasing four albums on Drag City, the Chicago label home to the decidedly un-folky Pavement (but also the more sympathetic Smog and Bonnie “Prince” Billy—plus The Black Swan, the 2006 album by Pentangle founder Bert Jansch). Give a listen to The Crook of My Arm and try not to peer skeptically at its 2001 release date.

There are others, I know, that are falling victim to my own black-hole of ignorance. But I’m not sure you can argue that the number of young artists cropping up with traditional folk tributes within the past year, specifically, is somehow just de rigueur.

Back in 2005, Decemberists lead singer Colin Meloy recorded a tour-only EP of six traditional songs arranged by British revivalist Shirley Collins, his first really public expression of a fascination with the folk music tradition that would more fully manifest in The Hazards of Love, his band’s most recent album, which I’ve written a lot about already. Shouldn’t be surprising, then, that he found Alela Diane’s To Be Still to be “spiffing.” She, by the way, just put out an EP with Alina Hardin that includes the traditional “Matty Groves,” possibly the greatest song of all time to feature a semi-nude fight scene.

Also this year, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold recorded four shivering, reverb-swathed songs as White Antelope (which you can hear on MySpace or download here), two of which are traditional pieces (“False Knight on the Road” and “Silver Dagger"), another a relatively modern reworking of a traditional form (“Wild Mountain Thyme”). He’s played “Katie Cruel,” an old Karen Dalton staple, at a few live shows, too—and of course, it’s impossible not to hear the old folk influence in nearly every bar of his band’s original music.

Same with Elvis Perkins, whose Doomsday EP (which just came out last week) features a screeling, spooky take on a song that has many names and many variations but is here called “Gypsy Davy.” If you’ve heard Meloy’s version of “Charlie” from his Shirley Collins collection (or any other version of the song), you might recognize the line “How old are you, my pretty little miss? How old are you, my honey?” which is actually near-impossible to Google just because there are so many variations within the whole folk idiom. This stuff’s pretty big on lechery. “Pretty Young Thing,” what?

What’s significant about all these artists working traditional folk songs into their repertoire, even if obliquely, is perhaps less that they’re playing the songs at all and more who the songs are being played to. Fifty years ago, when the last great traditional revival began, these songs were played almost exclusively in folk music clubs—just like there were jazz clubs, blues clubs, white clubs and black clubs. But in the same decades that traditional folk music mostly faded from view, what came up behind it was less and less concerned with genre, with purity, with point of origin.

These modern artists all play to and in a world on shuffle, and their fans are seemingly less balkanized than ever before. It’s possible now, somehow, for Meloy and his band to fuse folk with stoner metal and for it to make sense, and for someone who loves Fleet Foxes to be just as enthralled with Pecknold’s cover of “Silver Dagger” as with The Hood Internet’s mashup of “Ragged Wood” and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”—I know I am, at least. There’s still a place for someone to straightforwardly carry on that traditional folk tradition of simple acoustic instrumentation (if any) and those plain, lovely voices singing those old, old songs. But if these new folks are going to be shouldering this mantel, they’re doing well by dusting it off, stitching up some of its worn-out bits and making it their own. Let’s hope they carry it on for a while yet.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s assistant editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.

Listen to Karen Dalton performing “Katie Cruel”:

Watch Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold performing “Katie Cruel”:

Listen to Fairport Convention performing “Matty Groves”:

Listen to Alela Diane & Alina Hardin performing “Matty Groves”:

Listen to Shirley Collins performing “Barbara Allen”:

Listen to Colin Meloy perform “Barbara Allen”: