Authenticity and Authentication: Mike Seeger, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Old-Time Music Revival

While interviewing a preacher as I conducted research on religious folklife in Virginia's Blue Ridge some thirty years ago, I was told the story of an evangelist who had held an emotional, week-long revival service in a local church. Under the evangelist's preaching a number of people had fallen under conviction for their sins, confessed at the altar, and felt that the Lord had lifted their burdens and saved them. Some time later, it came to light that the evangelist had not been living for the Lord even as he had been preaching revivals. In disgrace, he retired from his ministry. But then a question arose: were the conversions that had taken place real? That is, was it possible to be truly converted in response to the preaching of a false prophet?

No one charged Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers with being false prophets when, from the late 1950s through the 1960s, they introduced Depression-era, old-time string band music to the folk music revival—but many of the entertainment critics who wrote about their performances and recordings raised the issue of authenticity.² Basing their concerts and recordings of old-time southern string band music on 78 rpm recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, the Ramblers usually were considered faithful interpreters of tradition, but not authentic tradition bearers themselves. They were regarded as actors or models, revivalists but not the 'real thing.'³ The authentic thing, in the minds of many folklorists of Mike Seeger's generation, was the Ramblers' source musicians—those 'old originals' who presumably had internalized their family and community musical traditions and expressed this cultural inheritance as inevitably and inescapably as their given names.⁴ The two books under discussion in this essay, Ray Allen's Gone to the Country (2010) and Bill Malone's biography of Mike Seeger, Music from the True Vine (2011), revisit this question of authenticity, one that was critically important to the folk revival generation—and to folklore studies.

Historically, authenticity has had at least two meanings. They are related, but not the same. In one, the authentic is the original, not the copy. Sometimes the copy carries a negative value: false, rather than true. One speaks of the authentic painting as opposed to the forgery; the authentic currency as opposed to the counterfeit; the real, as opposed to the imitation tricked out to look like the real thing. At other times the copy does not carry such negative value: the historically informed performance of a piece of music, for example, is said to be true to the original composer's or score's intent. Or the copy proclaims itself as such, as when in a furniture store one may come upon 'authentic reproductions' of period pieces.

The A-word's second historical meaning relates to people, not things. It means being true to oneself. An authentic utterance, gesture, or action comes from a person's deep and natural well of truth, what Emerson called the "aboriginal self," uncorrupted by artifice ([1841] 1944, 38). As such, it is powerful, exacting from an observer immediate recognition and assent. In American thought, this notion is synonymous with Emersonian self-reliance. Expanded, it is the idea of living an authentic life—Thoreau's central quest. In modern European thought, it is often related to existentialist philosophy.

For Mike Seeger, the Ramblers, and the folk revival generation—roughly, those who came of age between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War—both meanings of authenticity were very much in play. The same could be said of the folklorists of that generation. One needs only to think of scholarly quests for the genuine ('folklore' as opposed to 'fakelore') as an application of...