Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music

American historians and American studies scholars have been notoriously shy about constructing thematically oriented overviews of American music. Where is the book that will try to tell the story of how migration and urbanization shaped twentiethcentury American music? Or one that will examine “crossover” (folk to popular, sacred to secular) as a central concept of the music? Benjamin Filene and Bryan K. Garman seem aware of this timidity in the scholarship and have developed useful analytical frameworks for approaching large sections of the American musical landscape. The unacknowledged model for both Filene and Garman is, I think, Greil Marcus's important book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975). Methodologically, Marcus is much more inductive, subjective, and allusive than either Filene or Garman. But Marcus's major structural move, to juxtapose one set of “ancestors” (for him Robert Johnson and, improbably enough, a hokum singer named Harmonica Frank) against a pool of “inheritors” (The Band, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley), provides Filene and Garman with a starting point. What Marcus did—and what Filene and Garman attempt to do in more strictly academic fashion—was to try to create a cultural family tree, one in which kinship is determined by performance stance, thematic concern, tropological investment, and so on. “And so on” in this case also includes gender identity: all three authors construct lineages remarkably free of women, and it is only Gar man who makes analytical hay out of this singlegender orientation.