Traversing the Twin Poles of Folk

Sunday News Published:
January 20, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Arthel "Doc" Watson was born in 1923 in Stoney Fork, N.C., where songs rise out of the halos of misty hills. Daniel Boone is said to have spent a good deal of time in the area. Some of Watson's ancestors might have known him; they had lived there since 1790.

Ani DiFranco was born in 1970 in Buffalo, N.Y., and was busking by the age of 9 with her guitar teacher. Her well-educated parents divorced when she was a teenager. She gravitated toward folk music, but also to rap and punk. No two artists grounded in folk could be more different, but this wide, accommodating genre has room for both. DiFranco will perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 23, at the Forum in Harrisburg. Watson, joined by his grandson, Richard, and David Holt, will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 25, at Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater.

Blind from infancy, young Watson borrowed a guitar and picked out tunes he heard his parents and neighbors singing in church or in their living rooms. The songs were timeless ballads, shape-note hymns, blues and gospel. While at school, he heard the music of Django Reinhardt and was amazed at the gypsy guitarist's speed.

By the early 1950s, Watson was playing electric guitar in a country dance band, adapting fiddle tunes to his Gibson Les Paul. In the process, he took flat-picking to a new level. Today, at 84, he is revered as one of the greatest living acoustic guitar players. Watson is old-school, singing the old-time folk, gospel and country of the American South - songs that don't seem to have a definite birth, songs peeled away from some ancient Scottish reel and transformed by the labors and lusts of a new land.

The views and attitudes of many of the folks who sang these songs would have been anathema to the likes of DiFranco, a post-hip-hop, post-feminist songwriter whose frailing guitar style and alternate tunings seem custom built for an urbanized, modernly militant, populist form of folk. Her guitar style combines a partially electrified (and usually quite loud) acoustic frailing method loosely related to flamenco styles. Traces of Dave Van Ronk and Leo Kottke seep through, but she often plays guitar like a drummer.

The notes come off her hands percussive, bright, direct and aggressive, though in recent years her music has become less confrontational and more graceful. Her songs deal in a frank manner with every concern of modern leftist politics: war, reproductive rights, gender and race. Watson, a product of the Depression, never expressed any overt political views. And while the socially minded folk movement of the 1950s and '60s turned his mediocre living into a lucrative career, Watson owes little to Bob Dylan or those who followed him.

Watson's mantle boasts a clutch of seven Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement honor from 1994. His tunes, and the others songs he knows, seem limitless in number and scope, the fruit of what Greil Marcus called the "old, weird America." If Watson and DiFranco share anything, it's firm roots: He's bound to the culture of a nation; she's anchored to that nation's indomitable, independent spirit.

Named one of the most influential artists of the past 25 years by CMJ magazine, DiFranco pressed her first 500-copy cassette of original music in 1990. That tape and everything she's released since (something like 17 studio albums, five compilations and a growing list of live bootlegs) have been produced through Righteous Babe Records, which she owns in whole. No major label has gotten one whiff of her business. It's purely her own music.

Watson's music comes from a time when commerce and music, at least folk music, didn't intersect. Folk music was something folks sang in praise of their god or for simple pleasure. Everybody did it. It was music purely of the people.