American folk music, as the general music education community knows it today, UPHOLDS systemic racism – most notably, White people on top and Black people underneath them. What I think most music educators in America consider to be folk music today is a WHITENED idea of racial identity. What has been acceptable in the American music education classroom as folk music (think “This Land is Your Land”) is filled with music by White musicians but not representative of our students.
“American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. … Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some “other,” either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African-influenced, but with most exhibiting both.
Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed “race records” and “hillbilly music.” American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened.” – (Roy, 2002)
Let’s talk more! What are your thoughts?
Update:
“White critics in folk music and elsewhere have often taken it upon themselves to define “authenticity” in a way which includes white performers with black influences, but excludes black performers with white ones.” – (Berlatsky, TrackRecord, 2017)
- Why are White people allowed to define “authenticity” in America, but not anyone else?
- Who is excluded when music educators attempt to define “folk music”?
- Why does music that has originally been shared and passed down in another country not included in the notion of “American folk music” if it is continued to be shared in America?
ALICE TSUI 徐晓兰 
Hello, I am curious about your reference to the song “This Land is Your Land”, as being part of a music genre that “upholds systemic racism” and is a “whitened idea of racial identity”. I did some research on the writer Woody Guthrie and his reason for writing that song. Please see below for an article from The Kennedy Center.org.
“Folk singer Woody Guthrie was sick of THAT song. The year was 1939, and everywhere he wandered, “God Bless America” was playing on the radio. It was driving Guthrie nutty. Guthrie felt that Irving Berlin’s song was too sappy, too blindly patriotic, and too cut off from the hard-knock life many Americans were facing as the Great Depression dragged into its 10th year. Guthrie knew firsthand how tough life could be for poor folks. Since his teens, he had hopped trains and hitchhiked back and forth across the country. He shared the road with former farmers, laid-off factory workers, and migrants chasing hopes of work. Along the way, he chronicled their adventures, dreams, and sorrows in song.
In February 1940, Guthrie decided to fight music with music. In reaction to “God Bless America,” he worked up a simple song that tried to capture his love of the American landscape. At the same time, he wanted to point out that a lot of Americans weren’t feeling blessed at all.”
I also researched his life and upbringing and he had a tough upbringing. Please see below for a piece of his bio from woodyguthrie.org.
“By the time he arrived in California in 1937, Woody had experienced intense scorn, hatred, and even physical antagonism from resident Californians, who opposed the massive migration of the so-called “Okie” outsiders.” … “Woody strongly identified with his audience and adapted to an “outsider” status, along with them. This role would become an essential element of his political and social positioning, gradually working its way into his songwriting; “I Ain’t Got No Home”, “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad”, “Talking Dust Bowl Blues”, “Tom Joad” and “Hard Travelin’”; all reflect his desire to give voice to those who had been disenfranchised.”
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about these articles and how they might change your perspective on his song This Land is Your Land. Thank you!