“I’ve Got My Haunts”: Jam Communities, Individual Repertoires, and the Folk Process in Michigan

Music jams in Michigan present challenges to participating musicians to discover and learn musical repertoires. While such forms of “participatory” music are socially welcoming, full engagement and participation require folksingers and instrumentalists to search out songs and tunes in face-to-face and digital encounters. As they do so, musicians enact folk processes in which they negotiate with archival and digital institutions in order to forge their own vernacular musical voices. As a social endeavor, many find these processes empowering, enabling them to contribute to group archives, forge strong social identities, and re-evaluate older or abandoned musical resources.