I have to (politely) disagree with [Diane Pecknold's]
conclusion.

Woody Guthrie was definitely a country singer, in
that he made popular the ballads and traditions of
the people living in the country-side. Today,
perhaps, we differentiate between country music and
the folk music of the country, but I believe the
differentiation is a more recent distortion of
cultural perception , created as a result of the
increased commercialization (country) and the
countervailing tendency for a strange sort of elitism
in country (folk) music. I find this to be ironic,
given the populism expressed within the "country music"
and "folk" songs themselves.

Although rock music and other forms of music also suffer
from intense commercialization, we don't generally carry
that same sort of differentiation into rock music. There's
a wide gulf, to be sure, between Shania Twain and Woody
Guthrie. That gulf represents the changes since Woody
first started preserving and singing country music.

Many elements of Appalachian culture survived the move into
the gateway cities of Cincinnati, Columbus and Chicago. Did
the Okies and the "Hillbillies" really embrace post-war
consumerism? My experience is that, here in the Midwest, most
of the Appalachian diaspora had little opportunity to do so
until the 1970s. Employment discrimination against
"Hillbillies" exists even today. It was a very serious matter
in the years before that.

I think that perhaps the discussion is confusing the audience
that has since adopted Woody Guthrie's work for the audience
for whom Woody Guthrie originally worked. That, too, is a
situation that developed in the 1970s--or perhaps the late
1960s. Woody was certainly adopted by a small group of East
Coast aficionados, and then embraced by a larger community of
young counter-cultural rebels, but he sang the songs and
preserved the experiences of a rural America.

I think the fact that the Appalachian people constitute a
minority that can "pass" into the mainstream by changing speech
patterns and residence tends to conceal the fact that they were,
and are "country". Perhaps the issues become much more visible in
a discussion of other minority musical cultures.

That same sort of assumption (that a later audience defines an
earlier work, or that the identity of the people preserving an art
form defines the art form) would certainly be a mistake if we
applied the same logic to the blues, wouldn't it? Should we describe
the blues by a later audience of privileged East Coast white yuppies,
when the original audience was entirely different? Does the fact
that a very small, dedicated archivists and preservationists
recorded and distributed the blues artists somehow make the blues
part of an "art world"?

I would disagree. Whether preserved by archivists or commercial
interests, the underlying music remains. Whether adopted by a new
audience or maintained by the original audience, the underlying music
remains. The apparent change lies in our viewpoint and metacognition,
not in the original art.

Michael Wood,
Cincinnati

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