Word: folke
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Genesis and many a folk tale notwithstanding, most anthropologists have pictured primitive man as a little fellow somewhere between an ape and a monkey in size. But last week evidence was offered to prove Genesis correct. A Java geologist had dug up bones of prehistoric men bigger than the largest known apes...
Flamenco v. Classical. When a Spaniard speaks of flamenco music, he means a kind of inspired strumming and wailing, rich in Moorish overtones, which bears about the same relation to the comparatively sedate folk music of Spain that New Orleans jive does to the prim fiddling of U.S. hillbillies. Few performers are equally good at both flamenco and "classical" music...
This isn't news, but there are several things that should be said about Aaron Copland's lecture, "Jazz and Folk-Song Influences" on modern American music which he gave several weeks ago. In dealing with the development of jazz, Mr. Copland made one assertion which rubbed our fur the wrong way--a statement which seems so basic and misleading as to call for a rebuttal...
...than 40-odd years ago when ragtime and jazz were born in New Orleans. In those days, Americans--and Europeans--listened to symphony orchestras and military bands, and they danced only to string orchestras. Only the musicians and a small element of the Negro population knew this new American folk idiom. Today, the popularity of Duke Ellington among the name bands, the crowded bistros of New York's 52nd Street and Greenwich Village, and the prodigious increase in the issue of jazz recordings attest that people, far from becoming bored with the earliest and purest forms of folk music...
Copper-Bellied Corpse. The American folk who emerge from this lore are robust, daredevil, imaginative, fond of broad humor, tender love, great deeds, crude, rude, sometimes full of noble sentiment, sometimes intolerant. They glorify outlaws (Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid), poke fun at woodsmen (Mike Fink, Davy Crockett), sanctify Johnny Appleseed. The U.S. gift for tall talk is flaunted in Sven, the Hundred Proof Irish man, and speeches by General Buncombe ("Sir, we want elbow room - the continent, the whole continent - and nothing but the continent"). The U.S. talent for epithet is flaunted...