Pete with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
Pete
Seeger and the Avant-Garde
In
the autumn of 1986, readers of The Nation
were treated to an intense debate on the state of “left culture” initiated by
Jesse Lemisch, a professor of history at SUNY Buffalo. His article, “I Dreamed
I Saw MTV Last Night,[i]“ attacked the music of
Pete Seeger and Si Kahn as well as most left documentary cinema, notably Seeing Red and Union Maids, charging each with the crime of inauthenticity.
Lemisch's language was inflammatory:
The whole guilt-trip
associated with the notion that blue overalls, and only blue overalls, are
where it's at is sexist, aesthetically retrograde and deeply out of touch with
the realities in America today. (ID 374)
Lemisch ridiculed the North
Carolinian Kahn's songs “of his ancestors' flight from the Cossacks...of the
concentration camps ...in the voice of a cracker” and took issue with Seeing Red's selection of 15 interviews
out of a group of 400 from which the filmmakers could have chosen.
Beyond
specifics, and ultimately more damning, folk music and radical film were alleged
to suffer inherently from “the
arrogance and condescension” of attempts at imposing a narrow aesthetic style
on the left in the name of a mythic (and obsolete) populism. The irony being
that such an approach no longer even remotely speaks to today's technologically-sophisticated
media-literate audience.
Even
progressive journalism was found guilty of this reverse elitism:
A direct-mail solicitation from a
brand-new left magazine boasts that it “isn't slick,” has “no lavish color
spreads” and is “printed entirely on newsprint.” (ID 375)
Except for “brand-new,” that
could easily be a description of The
Nation and Lemisch's critique seemed curiously placed on the front page of
a weekly whose sole direct representation of art, neo-Victorian poetry, is more
old-fashioned than anything in the repertoire of Pete Seeger.
The piece generated some 75 letters, mostly negative, in
reaction. Five of the six published took Lemisch to task, primarily for posing
an either/or question that failed to acknowledge the inherent legitimacy and
historic contributions of folk music and left documentaries. Unfortunately,
debates set entirely in the terms of one party are limited by that side's
categories and, in a follow-up essay in December, Lemisch took those responses
and submitted them to his test for authenticity: any production that does not
partake of the cues and vocabulary of contemporary media necessarily
self-selects irrelevancy. To defend such work was to be guilty of
collaboration.
Lemisch's insistence on authenticity is worth noting,
because it implies—indeed, requires—an authentic people, which, given his
charges, suggests just how deeply muddled his analysis is. As if to underscore
this, his follow-up piece (three times the length of his original article) now
added a second argument[ii]. The motive for left
culture's aesthetic self-censorship was to be discerned in its own never-ending
search for an historic (authentic) agent of change:
an ill-defined but predominantly rural
“folk” are the authentic and real Americans from whom change will come. (PLC 700)
By
the time this second article appeared, however, history itself had intervened.
Bruce Springsteen's 5-record set, Live/1975-85,
had become the first album in a decade to enter the charts at number one and
the most expensive “product” ever to top them. In addition to its first top-10
single, a cover of the 1970 hit “War,” Live
includes two separate anti-war monologues plus Woody Guthrie's “This Land is
Your Land,” complete with a pitch for Joe Klein's biography of Guthrie.
Springsteen's work is not folk music, at least not by Lemisch's definition, but
it is certainly unthinkable without that influence. From the Dylanesque lyrics
of his early records to the acoustic narrative monologues of Nebraska, Springsteen has always
presented rock as the logical extension (rather than a contradiction) of folk —
as, once we expand our definition of folk to include blues and country, it
decidedly is. Elvis' first sessions at Sun Records have as much in common with
Cisco Houston as they do the Bee Gees.
Springsteen
is just one example. During this same period, three members of the L.A. punk
band X formed their own folk group, whose conscious patterning after the
Weavers they acknowledged in their name, the Knitters. While the longest cuts
on their album Poor Little Critter in the
Road are the traditional “Walking Cane” and Leadbelly's “Rock Island Line,”
more significant are their folk re-arrangements of songs from previous X
albums. The sharpest retort to Jesse Lemisch might be an article on the folk
origins of punk.
Still,
to dismiss his position because it's empirically flawed fails to recognize it
as the symptom of a deeper, more serious issue: the uneasy relation between
contemporary mass culture, thoroughly commodified, market governed, chock full
of bourgeois and technical mystification, sexist, racist, you name it, and any
art forms that aspire to offer an alternative experience of life. For Lemisch's
argument is, in reality, a traditional complaint, although one aimed more often
at what seems to be the furthest end of the spectrum from Si Kahn and Pete
Seeger: those incomprehensible formalists of the avant-garde.
From
the French symbolists and impressionists of the 19th century, through surrealism,
dada, atonal music, abstract expressionism, happenings and performance art, to
the metafiction and new poetries of the past decade, aesthetic avant-gardes and
self-conscious “high art” culture have been the usual recipients of this sort
of elite-bashing. Here, for example, is Carol Duncan, writing in Socialist Review of “Cézanne, Cubism,
Mondrian, Kandinsky, Miro, [and] the Abstract Expressionists” as represented in
the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art:
art given the highest value is art that renounces
common experience and the language and visual modes that evoke that
experience.... In effect, the new art reminds “the average citizen” of his
inferiority to the privileged few.[iii]
Duncan's citizen closely
parallels Lemisch's caricature of anyone who feels out of place in overalls:
The rest of us, morally and politically
of a lesser sort, will get a little closer to the real thing if we sing the
songs of the folk and, sometimes, wear their clothes and dance their dances.
Left folk culture has involved a laying on of culture in which most of us are
trained in the culture of some of us. (PLC
700)
Such
symmetrical critiques tend to cancel one another out. “Why,” Lemisch asks, “at
a time when so much of avant-garde culture is crossing over toward a mass audience,
does the left...intentionally remain so isolated?” Duncan's solution, a
variation on the folk art model, is an exhibit by Vietnam Veterans.
Ironies
and contradictions abound in this region. Lemisch himself notes that the
Weavers were criticized in Sing Out!
for compromising their art in order to make hit records. Peter Guralnick, in
his savvy Sweet Soul Music, admits he
was drawn to soul by the purity of its status as an expression of black culture
and pride in the 1960s, compared to Motown or rhythm and blues, only to
discover once he began his research that his subjects not make such
distinctions, and that several also happened to be white.
Such
is the problem of boundaries within attempts at social definition. People's
culture was not always market culture. The dawn of mass culture, however, can
be traced to the herding of peasant populations into urban centers with the
rise of capital, a process still accelerating in this century. Even where rural
peoples have not yet been converted into proletariats, media has reached out to
envelop them, the influence of James Brown on African musicians returning to
the U.S. via Fela and King Sunny Adé. As
capital has organized the world, borders between cultures have become both
blurred and colonized. Just as rock and roll began as a peripheral, even
oppositional form, success internationally has also meant its transformation,
beginning even before the “British invasion” of 1964 — the origins of surf
guitar are Mexican.
Distinctions
exist for a reason. From Charles Baudelaire, Parisian dandy and inventor of the
prose poem, to Mussolini-worshipper Ezra Pound to Clement Greenberg, whose
first writings were offered as Trotskyist analysis, the concept of a “high”
culture was intended to preserve certain pre-capitalist genres
from the rapidly encroaching market organization of the aesthetic realm. The
dime novel, Norman Rockwell's Saturday
Evening Post covers and the newspaper doggerel of Edgar Guest threatened to
swamp their fields from below. This same expanding market culture did, in fact,
obliterate important folk traditions “from above,” such as friendship quilts
and acoustic rural blues.
It
is this ever-advancing, all-absorbent market culture—like the Blob from the old
Steve McQueen movie—within which we have all grown up, and with which we are
all too familiar and comfy, that Jesse Lemisch is ultimately defending. It is,
after all, a terrain where opposition is
possible. Bruce Springsteen is also ample evidence of that.
So
where do Si Kahn and Pete Seeger fit? As drawn by Lemisch, the boundary around
market culture excludes folk music and if, as he implies, only the market is
pertinent to the life of the masses, picking up a banjo would indeed be a
self-isolating gesture. But if these borders are permeable, or if folk music
and other oppositional genres actually fall within
the circle, then what is needed is a radically different conception of their
place, their role and their politics.
Here
the history of the avant-garde has a lot to offer. If “folk” is an ensemble of
practices centered around musical genres that, because they were originally
rural, preceded market culture, then a major, if not primary, political
function of folk music is, by its very opposition to commerciality and
commercial technique, to foreground those same institutional structures in
which it refuses to partake. Like the avant-garde with which it shares so many
of these features, folk has a politics implicit within its form.
Such
parallels are worth noting. In addition to their essential preservationism and
mutual distrust of bourgeois mass culture, the experience of historic time for
each is dramatically slowed compared with genres closer to the center of the
market. While this seems obvious enough with regards to folk music—Pete
Seeger's only major stylistic change in the past 40 years has been his setting
aside the 12-string guitar after a stroke in the early sixties— such a claim
may seem bizarre in the face of avant-gardism's constant insistence on “making
it new,” a commitment so deeply ingrained in our society that we call booklength
fictions novels. Yet how else are we
to account for the fact that the archetypal contemporary avant-gardist, the
composer John Cage, who first brought chance techniques to the arts in the
1940s, is the same age as Frank Sinatra? Or that poets still debate the work of
Gertrude Stein, a woman born in 1874, while The
Nation publishes verse that consciously
abstains from any innovations more recent than those of Wordsworth's?
Similarly,
folk's sense of transpersonal community and the anonymous composer is closely
aligned with the avant-garde's various assaults on romantic individualism,
ranging all the way from modern (and postmodern) literature and painting's
fragmentation of the subject to the role of improvisation in jazz, in which
performance is so contextually determined as to deny the possibility of
repetition, let alone authorial copyright.
Folk
music is an “avant-garde” with a difference, with all of the problematics this
implies. Whereas those movements that Peter Bürger calls the historic
avant-garde[iv] placed their trust in the
potentiality of art to transcend market culture and its inherent instrumentalization of aesthetics through a full
exploration of the formal capacities of various media—a program based on a
utopian belief in the powers of aesthetic literacy and social progress— folk
puts its commitment in the idea that people already were fully culturally
literate prior to the rise of
markets. It's a distinction not unlike that between writing and oral
literature. What differs here between folk music and the avant-garde is the
latter's conception of the cultural worker as a specialist, a role that brings
with it a new model of literacy.
This
is an argument that can be traced back to the middle ages, when Provencal troubadours
quarreled over a difficult poetry called trobar
clus intended primarily for other poets. Yet already in the 11th century
troubadours were specialists, writers and performers of the feudal court whose
stylized literary language differed markedly from the “common” tongue of their
contemporaries. Pete Seeger is also a specialist, whose output as a musician,
composer, historian and organizer over the past 50 years have made him an
overwhelming influence within folk music, comparable in impact on his field
perhaps only to Picasso, Charlie Parker or Ezra Pound in theirs, someone with
whose work decades of later artists have had to come to terms. Yet even the
most inexperienced folksinger, if they are to perform at all (let alone record
and tour), needs to master the social requirements of a profession.
As
an avant-garde, folk thus poses itself a doubly difficult problem: how to
create a specialization whose political function is to convey to audiences some
sense of what music was prior to the rise of the professionalizing market
culture of capitalism. At least the traditional avant-garde is able to embrace
its specialization, although it has done this in terms ranging all the way from
declaring itself to be “the revolution of the word,” to the most reactionary
defense of elitism imaginable. Folk, by comparison, has been consistent in its
sense of political orientation and commitment.
Given
that the ultimate dynamic of both tendencies lies in their attempts to separate
themselves out from an always advancing and never satiated, absorptive market
culture, promising as it does “success” in the form of incorporation and
homogenization, hubris and hyperbole in defense of their projects seems an
inevitable (albeit problematic) side-effect. The difference between having a
“crossover” hit and being co-opted is often one merely of perspective: “Little
Boxes,” Pete Seeger's one top-40 single since the Weavers, fell neatly into the
mainstream radio category of “novelty records,” more akin to Ray Stevens'
racist “Ahab the Arab” than to the folk-rock of the Byrds. It is easy for
someone like Lemisch to cite an instance of purism, such as Seeger's allergic
reaction to Bob Dylan's electrified “Maggie's Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk
Festival, and from this to infer a more generalized elitism.
This
is also a sticking point for aesthetic theorists such as Bürger, who argue
that, since history has made it quite evident that (at least in the absence of
a larger political revolution) the avant-garde will never be fully capable of
escaping the orbit and gravitational pull of the market, it therefore collapses
back into being just one more sideshow in the larger cultural circus, as
compromised as the rest. What that line of reasoning ignores is a fully
differentiated view of the market. This logic presumes that internal resistance
is essentially impotent, reducing Springsteen's politics to a matter of a good
career move, and failing even to recognize that folk and the avant-garde might
both be internal modes of resistance,
rather than simply delusional attempts to somehow escape the closed circle of
bourgeois culture.
Well,
what if? In spite of the fact that
the folk song movement was a Popular Front creation aimed at supplying a
product for a left market, Lemisch draws his boundaries so that folk falls
outside the circle, and thereby declares it irrelevant. Bürger draws his so
that the avant-garde falls inside, and on that basis alone declares it a
failure. Carol Duncan is distressed to find visual folk art outside the circle
she draws while politically ambiguous modernist painting has been placed by
museums virtually at the center.
From
such discrepancies, we can extract a few lessons. One is that participation in
“the circle” is not voluntary, or at least not meaningfully so. That decision
is made by the privileged construct of capitalism, the market. Even today,
there remain genres of people's music, primarily in rural areas of the third
world, that have yet to be reorganized into market forms performed by
professionals. Like acoustic delta blues before them, these musics appear to
have two choices when confronted with the still-advancing world economic (and
cultural) system: to disappear entirely or be incorporated and transformed by
the market. Some forms, such as the Balinese choral ritual of the ketjak, have been preserved through
conversion into a folk commodity, performed as a ceremony for tourists. Others,
like the South African township jive
that animates Paul Simon's Graceland,
were already unabashed transformations into market culture even before being
mined for display in American record collections.
A
corollary of this is that if participation is not voluntary, then neither is
withdrawal or exclusion. Neither the music of Pete Seeger nor the work of any
of the avant-gardists has ever been beyond the boundary of market culture. On
the contrary, their larger political importance has been that they have been
the only modes from within the circle to consciously direct our attention to
the existence of boundaries at all. It is not an accident that the arrival of
“camp,” pop art and the first serious examinations and inclusions of kitsch and
market design into “high” culture came precisely at the peak of abstract
expressionism in the '50s and early '60s, and in settings like New York—an
awareness of borders is the first step in a process of questioning, challenging
and transcending such limits.
But
what folk is not is an attack on the instrumentalization of culture. If
anything, folk's origin within the Popular Front was predicated on turning the
instrumentalizing element within capitalism on capital itself. And this has not
been a notable success. Although Lemisch doesn't cite it, the most damning
evidence against Pete Seeger's aesthetic integrity is to be found in the ways
that the pre-Weaver Almanac Singers' songs of war and international struggle
turned and twisted in the late thirties to parallel the tortured path of Stalinist
foreign policy. Yet it is the instrumentalist presumption, that the politics of
a folk song are to be found only in a
politically-correct content, and that all other aspects of the music must be
subservient to this level, that offends Lemisch and undermines far too much of
left cultural practice.
Here
the avant-garde's equation of market culture with instrumentalism per se has a
pointed value for folk and left culture. And yet this alone is not enough
either. Avant-gardes can be successful only to the degree that they are explicit in their politics, not simply
in their commentaries but in their products as well. It was a failure at that
level that enabled the Museum of Modern Art scene to capture the abstract
expressionists, many of whom had been cultural radicals, offering them as prime
exhibits for America's imperial destiny. This has been, and continues to be,
the dimension in which folk music has been an important achievement, if an
incomplete one. Left culture is explicit that its definition of success is not
a market definition. If the avant-garde needs to understand that any critique of
instrumentalism must be political and that all form is social, folk has still
to learn that any attack on capital must address instrumentalism per se, and
that its politics must be simultaneously a politics of form.
Ron Silliman
Socialist Review, March-April 1987
[i] The Nation, October 18, 1986, Front Cover, 374-376. Future
citations from this article are noted parenthetically in the text as ID.
[ii] "The Politics of
Left Culture," The Nation,
December 20, 1986, pp. 700-714. Future citations from this article are noted
parenthetically in the text as PLC.
[iii] "Who Rules the
Art World?" Socialist Review 70,
Vol. 13, No. 4, July-August 1983, p. 109.
[iv] Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by
Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Theory and History of
Literature, Vol.4; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Bürger's
theory, which has proven central to the recent postmodernism debate, is
constructed around a distinction between the avant-garde and modernism proper.
Only those attempts which fundamentally assault the institutionality of art (for
example, the status of the object which enables visual art works to be bought
and sold, and thereby submitted to the controls of a market) are deemed
avant-garde. Thus cubism, for example, is excluded from his definition. The
number of exceptions to Bürger's rule, however, suggests that his boundaries
are nearly as problematic as Lemisch's. My use of the term is much broader.
