Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (review)

Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. By Benjamin Filene. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. [ix, 325 p. ISBN 0-8078-2550-6 (cloth); 0-8078-4862-X (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

Benjamin Filene's strong addition to the series Cultural Studies of the United States from the University of North Carolina Press reveals just how wide a net students in American studies cast these days. A graduate of Yale University's American studies doctoral program, Filene writes that he "benefited greatly from the searching insights and friendly criticism of a group of peers at Yale that met to discuss how to incorporate music into cultural history" (p. x). One of his peers, Suzanne Smith, turned her dissertation into a well-received book about Motown, Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Perhaps more of them will follow in the footsteps of Filene and Smith.

It is significant that, with the exception of anthropologist John Szwed, who teaches two courses that are cross-listed with music, none of the scholars Filene turned to at Yale were members of its music department. This fact underscores the sad reality that Yale University is much like the rest of academia, where a direct dialogue between music and American studies is meager at best. Irrespective of the vagaries that often compartmentalize the academic world, Filene has written a first-class interdisciplinary study that speaks not only to musicologists but also to scholars in cultural history, southern studies, folklore, anthropology, and popular culture, who are at least occasionally represented in American studies departments or programs.

Although one finds little original research per se in Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, its essential and core strengths are twofold. First, the author offers original, well-reasoned, and interesting interpretations and analyses of familiar topics that range from early-twentieth-century ballad collecting to the impact of Bob Dylan on American cultural and musical history. Second, Filene's essays --the book is divided into five sections and each one stands on its own--are invigoratingly eclectic in their examination of the efforts of such diverse characters as Willie Dixon, Alan Lomax, and Cecil Sharp.

Filene does us all a great service by revisiting the whole notion of "folk" and suggesting that "roots" would be a more appropriate term for the music that most often falls under this rubric. He opines that "roots" refers to "musical genres that, whether themselves commercial or not, have been glorified as the 'pure' sources out of which the twentieth century's commercial popular music was created" (p. 4). The author argues that, as a retrospective term, it "shifts the focus of my study away from stylistic debates (which performers belonged to which musical traditions?) to questions of perceptions (who was thought of as exemplifying which traditions?)" (ibid.). He further suggests that the words "public memory" in the title of the book indicate that he is examining people's impressions of the past, which are often shaped by the culture brokers (folklorists and record company A & R men, for example) who serve as middlemen--very few of them have been female--in this complex process. At almost all points I find his arguments compelling, and even when I do not entirely agree with his assertions, they are well reasoned.

The book is clearly written, carefully notated, and mostly jargon-free. Except for a few minor lapses in assessments, such as characterizing Mike Bloomfield as a "Muddy Waters disciple" (p. 228), and some omissions--Filene fails to cite his own dissertation in the bibliography--I am hard-pressed to find serious faults with the author's analysis and his sources. Along with Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), Romancing the Folk is one of the most...