Gene Blustein – Folk and pop in Amercan Culture

Conclusion. 

"There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the Future; the Establishment and the Movement," Emerson once wrote. "At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs underder the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs. The dialectic between the past and the future was evident during the generational conflict of the 1960s, when a sometimes strange coalition of young people committed to everything from civil rights to unlimited and instant gratification stripped away an accumulation of hypocrisy about certain basic American values. 

Similarly, today's debates over multiculturalism (or pluralism), affirmative action, the revision of literary and historical canons (which some claim to constitute an attack against western civilization), and anomalously the literary philosophy called deconstruction) also pit certain scholars against a rear-guard movement that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge some fundamental realities of the American experience. 

As I have argued, our culture is already pluralist and multicultural, the result of a syncretic process that dates from the beginning of our national existence and that has colored black, essential elements of our society. Herder's ideas are central to this understanding in two ways. First, Herder's assertion that the folk determine the national characteristics of each society could actually lead to the conclusion that the United States was not a coherent and national mature culture, but, as folklorists have often maintained, a callow and derivative one. Folklorists have constantly argued that our folklore legacy was only what was bought here from more mature societies thus the United States is not authentically a nation at all. Dorson's conception of fakelore arises logically from such a view. The authentic folk, he has asserted is simply fakelore, fraudulent because it is associated with individuals whose folk credentials have been irreparably damaged by contact with popular levels of culture.

For Dorson and others conservatism is both a methodology and an ideology that turns us to the past rather than the future. Conservatism implies slow change that retains traditional materials over long periods of time. Despite the extensive and manifold influence of such people as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Jean Richie, folklorists have simply not been able to place these people 

in any of these artists in any coherent framework. While academic critics may have grudgingly admired their work, its alleged contamination by pop traditions has put them into a kind of limbo.

They have obviously done something with folk material, but what they have done is difficult to evaluate within  the obsolete definitions of folklore still in vogue.

In this innovative study, Gene Bluestein proposes that we revise our ideas about the meaning of folklore in the United States, beginning with our defini-tion of what is "folk" and what is not. To this end, he advances the notion of "poplore" as more accurately reflective of the popular and commercial roots and dynamic, syncretic traditions of American democratic culture. In making his case, Bluestein closely examines the folk ideology of Johann Gottfried Herder, whose theories of nationalism strongly influenced American scholars from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to Con-stance Rourke and Alan Lomax. At the same time, he challenges the idea "fakelore" popularized by Richard M. Dorson and his followers, a conclusion that assumes unchanging standards of what is genuinely or purely "folk. 

To illuminate the significance of "poplore" in contemporary culture Bluestein shows how Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, and other artists have creatively adapted traditional folk materials in their work. 

The book also includes interviews with legendary banjo picker and singer Buell Kazee and founder of Folkways Records, Moe Asch. "Poplore' . . . is wonderful. A very sensible new word; Bluestein's analysis makes sense. Two centuries ago the word 'folklore' made sense, describing the traditional culture of the peasant class, 

In these industrial-technology ridden times, it's better to use a new word than try to make an old one fit."Pete Seeger"

The book's thesis and presentation are strong. Its important argument augments the push of the New Historicists and corrects a lot of nonsense about the purity of the folk.

Gene Bluestein is a folk performer and professor emeritus of English and American studies, California State University at Fresno. His books include The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.