Final Thoughts

There is something unique and confessional about folk music—perhaps a function of its lack of audio production. Stories can be shared with ease because the only threshold to performing them is having a guitar. Technically trained voices are not needed, rhythm sections superfluous. All a good folk song calls on is someone willing to share his or her story, with the requisite honesty to not sugarcoat. Here—despite composing some of the most soothing, children lullaby melodies—love songs are not the happily-ever-afters of young-reader fairy-tales, but rather are tinged with regret and thirst and the unsatisfied. Work songs do not extol pleasant bosses and  do not speak of the culmination of lifelong dreams, but rather seek respite in death. Singers need only to tell the truth. The old joke holds if you play a folk song backwards your wife comes back, your boss hires you back, your car starts back up; folk music, forward, seeks simply to tell it as it is.

And yet, despite the honesty and confessional nature of the songs, they, notably, are meant to be sung by anyone. This, perhaps, speaks to the universality of their themes. But more than that, it reveals something about the art form that songs are meant to be shared (the vast number of covers and reworkings we sang in this class speaks to this point). Each tune has its own message, but its performance carries a greater one: our own unique trials can be overcome in unison—no burden is truly solitary.

In a way, this message dictated my own experience in the class. I told stories in voices that required gymnastics to pretend were not mine. They were harsh. They were honest. But they also were not easy to share—where my stories lost focus, and ultimately did not succeed was where I assumed a character, other than me, to tell them with distance. Where I succeeded, the act of camp-circling up and sharing the stories on an equal plane allowed me to tell without fear of judgment, to let off my issues and see them as anything but solitary.

The voices of “I Ride an Old Paint” and “Sweet Home Chicago” are so clearly different. Yet as performances by groups they are made level, and hint at similar truths. This to me was the chief takeaway of “Songs and Stories.” Montana and Louisiana, young and old, prisoner and free—these are all abstractions. The stories we tell may fluctuate by circumstance, but no story is specifically an unnaproachably ours, or mine. They are not ours or mine, nor should they be kept that way. The power in an experience is that it is shared.