Molly Beer has taught literature and writing at the Universidad Técnica de Ambato, Ecuador, and the University of New Mexico. She wrote Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals, with David King Dunaway, a Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Singing Out is culled from more than 150 interviews and the story it tells spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of the folk revival movement. In the original article below Beer looks at the experience of writing a book with another author.
“Apathetic,” he scoffs.
“Naïve and romantic,” I counter defensively.
“These songs are so self-absorbed!”
“Those songs were so self-righteous!”
This is Pete Seeger-biographer David Dunaway and I debating the evolution of American folk music from our distinct generational perspectives, and we aren’t, technically, arguing. Beyond the pot-shots, we are engaging in academic discourse born out of the ever-shifting debate over purity, authenticity, and activism in folk music.
David presents the case that young people today are tuned-out technophiles singing only in the “key of me.” I rebut that the old peace-and-love folkies have gone soft, waxing nostalgic while Dylan croons from high-end speakers in their safe, shiny Volvos. We’re speaking indirectly of banjo-picking coalminers in Appalachia and guitar-toting folkstars in Greenwich Village, and we’re comparing it all to 2010: Why is no one playing anti-war songs about Iraq on the autoharp? Why is no one playing the autoharp? David and I have vying theories.
History written from a single, mysteriously objective, even omniscient vantage point is history, all but obsolete. Even personal history with its explicit, personified point-of-view can suffer from a shortage of counterpoints (David, for example, would write a very different story here). This is the argument for writing a history in many voices, for oral history, and for the braiding of accounts and interpretations into a multi-faceted, contradiction-ridden narrative.
In Singing Out, David and I took this multi-voice theory one step further: we co-wrote the book—a man and a woman, a child of the folk boom and a child of, well, Madonna and Nirvana, I suppose.
Out of these dichotomies we crafted a narrative voice—a “glue” as we called it—for all the shards of stories and rants and explications that David has been collecting since before I was born and which I spliced and arranged into one, albeit schizophrenic narrative.
“There is no budding Pete Seeger on the horizon,” David remarks, pensively stroking his goatee. “Young people just aren’t writing protest music. I mean Ani DiFranco is in her 40s!”
“True, but the guitarist in Rage Against the Machine has a political-science degree from Harvard,” I counter, Wikipedia