GEOG433:
Geographic of
Music
Folk, Gospel
and Punk
Housekeeping Items
 We’re
a little ahead of ourselves, but that’s
all right as we may need time at the end for
the project presentations.
 If you haven’t, please read Chapters 3, 16
and 19 in Lynskey.
 Do I have everyone’s project outline?
 Rochelle is presenting on the 4th after
Reading Week, Linda and Melissa on the 6th,
Doug on the 11th, Kate (any topic yet?),
Tomson and Steve on the 13th, Sam on the
18th, and Kim (any topic yet?), Sarah, and
Dan on the 20th. Will check with Johnathan.
Housekeeping Items
Geography is looking for volunteers next week
(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) to talk to
Grade 10s about their experience taking
Geography courses between 11 and noon in
Building 355, Room 211 (the Activity Lounge).
Anyone interested?
 Will have your mid-terms back on Tuesday after
reading week.
 There is a second workshop available to students in
preparation for VIU CREATE. The next one focuses
on giving Oral Presentations and is free. It is this
Friday in building 305, room 444, from 10:00a.m. to
12:00p.m.
 The deadline for submitting a proposal for a poster
or research presentation for CREATE! is Thursday,
March 6th. Go to CREATE.

Folk Music
 American
folk music had its roots in bluegrass,
English folk music, and white church hymns. Its
staple instruments were guitars, banjos
(originally from Africa) and, less commonly
mandolins, dulcimers, and later harmonicas.
 As a vehicle for protest, it has a long and
storied history, beginning with Joe Hill, a
Swedish immigrant, who wrote topical songs
for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
an anarcho-syndicalist organization, which
was at the forefront of the labour movement
in the early twentieth century.
Folk Music
 Hill
was eventually
executed for a murder it
is thought he did not
commit. Fifteen years
after his death in 1915,
Alfred Hayes wrote the
lyrics “I Dreamed I Saw
Joe Hill.” Earl Robsinson
wrote the music in 1936,
and the song was later
immortalized by Joan
Baez.
Folk Music

Guthrie’s boyhood
home in Oklahoma in
1979
Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) was
the prototypical singer who wrote
songs as a vehicle for political
causes, as well as to describe the
lives of poor working people,
especially during the Depression.
As Wikipedia notes, “Such
songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil
Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, John
Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Andy
Irvine, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg,
Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, Bob
Childers and Tom Paxton have
acknowledged Guthrie as a
A contemporary of
Guthrie was Leadbelly.
major influence.”
Folk Music
Guthrie’s most famous song was “This Land is Your
Land,” though he wrote dozens of others. Like
many other well-known American folk singers of
day, he had an affiliation (though not necessarily
a membership in) the Communist Party.
 Around 1939, Woody hooked up with Pete Seeger
and the Almanac Singers in Greenwich Village,
but work became scarce especially after the war
when anti-communist sentiment and
McCarthyism flared up. During the war, Guthrie’s
autobiography, Bound for Glory, was first
published.
 In the ‘50s, Guthrie developed Huntingdon’s
disease but, despite his inability to play music, his
influence on folk music and its gradual revival was
strong.

Folk Music

Pete Seeger, who only
died last month at age 95,
is best known for adapting
a Christian hymn, already
modified by a Black labour
activist, into what became
known globally as “We
Shall Overcome.” It was
first auditioned in 1947. It
has played an important
role in popular movements
around the world, but no
more so than in the civil
rights movement of 1950s
and ‘60s.
The song continued to
evolve in the hands of
other activists, Frank
Hamilton and Guy
Carawan.
Folk Music
I
won’t reprise what’s in Chapter 3 of Lynskey,
but basically progressive folksingers had a rotten
time of it in the U.S. during the late ‘40s and ‘50s.
Only with the rise of the civil rights movement in
the mid-’50s to mid-’60s did politicized singers
recover their influence.
 There were also apolitical folk groups, such as
the New Christy Minstrels, and soon a
burgeoning folk scene – a topic that Rochelle
will be looking at -- developed in Greenwich
Village in the early ‘60s. This scene has been
chronicled in the film, “Inside Llewyn Davis.” [I’ll
show a clip from a documentary.]
Folk Music
When Bob Dylan “plugged in” at
the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he
scandalized folk purists, but the
Byrds and others had already
been taking his and Pete
Seeger’s acoustic songs and
giving them a rock treatment.
 One could argue that this was a
necessary shift – that the “folk”
were no longer listening to folk
music and that, to stay relevant,
such music had to find new ways
of reaching an audience.

See also the
chapter on Dylan –
Chapter 4.
Folk Music
Without Dylan, the folk movement faltered, and the
Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Jefferson Airplane –
all playing a variant of folk rock – took centre stage.
 Dylan wrote a number of very memorable protest
songs – especially during his acoustic phase –
“Blowing in the Wind,” “It’s Hard Rain,” “The
Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Masters of
War,” and many others. But then he rebelled
against that, not wishing to be pigeon-holed as a
‘protest singer.’
 But others carried on in the same tradition – for
instance, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, though with a
declining influence.

Gospel Music
 There’s
no reading specifically on gospel
though it has been alluded to in a number of
the readings. It influenced rock n’ roll, soul, and
especially the protest folk music of the ‘50s and
‘60s.
 Major artists included the Fisk Jubilee Singers,
the Dixie Hummingbirds, Mahalia Jackson, and
many others. Black gospel has its own
traditions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1XMxy8
pTGo.
 There are also various forms of mainstream
white, bluegrass, and Celtic gospel.
Punk and Post-Punk



While Canada has had a vibrant punk scene,
punk’s origins mainly lie in the ping-ponging
effects of American and British artists on one
another – starting with the Stooges, Ramones,
and New York Dolls in the U.S., and the
emergence of the Sex Pistols and Clash in
Great Britain.
Numerous imitators evolved from these, but in
Britain bands like The Clash incorporated
more reggae and dub influences than he U.S.
In the U.S., there was also bands like the Dead
Kennedys who – like the Clash – were very
political, but in a much more sardonic way
(see Chapter 19).
Punk and Post-Punk
Fronted by lead singer, Jello Biafra, Dead Kennedys’
two best known songs were “California Űber Alles” –
imagining California under Jerry Brown as a fascist state
(“happy hour is now enforced by law”) and “Holiday in
Cambodia” (suggesting Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge as a suitable holiday destination for the
bourgeoisie).
 You could argue that late ‘70s and early ‘80s punk had
a lot in common with folk. It very much had a DIY
attitude. When members of the Clash first saw the Sex
Pistols, they said “it’s great – they couldn’t even really
play their instruments”! And it has spread around the
world – Pussy Riot is described as a Russian “punk”
band.
 I will show excerpts of a video on the vibrant punk
scene in Vancouver.
