Folk Music's New Genre Benders

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There's something in the water in Vermont, or maybe something missing. Known for its independent politics, the state is also a haven for freewheeling 'free folk' musicians who ignore genres, push instruments to the limit, fuse odd new sounds with familiar strains, and otherwise stretch the limitations of the folk 'thing.' What the British music magazine The Wire calls 'New Weird America' is an eclectic assortment of musicians. Regardless of what you call it, there's a movement afoot that's not likely to be contained.

In Wire (Aug. 2003) David Keenan reports on the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival held last May in Brattleboro, Vermont. (True to the looseness that defines the scene, the event's second evening actually took place across the border in a tavern in Amherst, Massachusetts.) The festival brought together drone guitarists from Texas, the heavily rhythmic Boston band Sunburned Hand of the Man, the ethereal, meditative Amherst-based Son of Earth, a 'one-man acid folk project' known as Six Organs of Admittance, the Vermont legends Dredd Foole, and others.

The result was some high-energy music that defies labeling. Pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh Murray's bloodied fingers testified to one musician's excitement to be playing with others who think outside the lines. 'I am the music,' Murray says, with a gospel singer's conviction: 'I don't even have a choice, I cannot stop.' Sunburned Hand's John Moloney is equally visceral, asserting that his main goal is to get everyone moving. 'Pretentious assholes, arm folders, negative hipcats, they're everywhere and we're out to get them.'

Is this folk music? Maybe so. When it comes down to it, folk is any music sung and played because people want to play it. Folk music is heart and soul, not brain and pocketbook, whether performed solo by a Senegalese kora player, or a group wielding digital samplers, toy pianos, and electric sitars.

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