If you know who wrote it, it’s not a folk song,” says folk singer Michael Cooney, a longtime practitioner of the genre and a former Tucsonan.
“My whole thing is that, through the oral process, when a person learns a song from someone else, they add their own things to it,” Cooney says on the phone from his home in Friendship, Maine, where two weekends ago there was still snow on the ground in the shady spots.
“And as people learn a song, maybe they forget bits and change other bits, accidentally or on purpose. They’ll play it for other people, who might change it themselves, and so on. And ultimately, through this passing on of the tradition, the song evolves and it becomes a pretty interesting piece of folk art.”
Cooney would further argue that folk songs aren’t static artifacts in a museum, but living things, constantly in transition. Among prominent examples of folk songs that have evolved over the decades are compositions widely known as “The Banana Boat Song,” “Tom Dooley,” “La Bamba” and “Wimoweh.”
And, Cooney hastens to add, “Most of the songs I sing are not folk songs according to this definition, because somebody has written them, and I like to give them credit. But it’s just a question of distinguishing real folk songs from the music that a singer-songwriter has created.”
Cooney also likes another definition of folk music: “I’ve often heard this attributed to other people, but I think it was Big Bill Broonzy, who said in a Studs Terkel radio interview, ‘I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing ’em.’ “
Cooney will return to Tucson for three appearances at this weekend’s 29th annual Tucson Folk Festival.
All of his appearances are scheduled for Sunday. He’ll play a 30-minute set at noon on the Plaza Stage. At 1 p.m., he’ll conduct a workshop titled “What’s a Folk Song” in the Moore Courtyard at the Tucson Museum of Art.
And at 3 p.m., Cooney will join a panel discussion titled “Tucson Folksingers 1955-1962” at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library, 101 N. Stone Ave. Cooney joined the Folksingers, an ad-hoc group-cum-movement, as a Tucson teenager. The discussion will be moderated by Ted Warmbrand—a prominent musician, folk singer, promoter and activist.
Presented by the Tucson Kitchen Musicians Association, and always free, the Tucson Folk Festival this year will feature 20 hours of live music on Saturday, May 3, and Sunday, May 4. More than 120 artists from Tucson and across the country will play on five downtown stages.
In addition, the festival offers instrumental, singing and songwriting workshops; a children’s show; a young artists’ showcase; a songwriting competition; a ballad tree; a tribute to the late Pete Seeger; and lots of food and craft vendors spilling out from El Presidio Park.
This year’s headliners are the Sonoran Dogs, led by local flat-picking legend Peter McLaughlin, who will close the Saturday festivities with a 9 p.m. set; and Run Boy Run, a second-generation bluegrass band based in Phoenix and Tucson that will bring the festival to a close with an 8 p.m. performance Sunday.
Among the special guests at the festival are singer-songwriter Hans Mayer, who will perform an all-ages set at 5:30 p.m. Saturday and a children’s show at 3 p.m. Sunday, and the duo Ryanhood, which will precede Run Boy Run on Sunday with a 7 p.m. set. For a complete schedule of performances, see tkma.org.
Cooney will help recall some of Tucson’s folk-music traditions as the Sunday panel discussion focuses on the Folksingers. A documentary about the group also is in the works.
“I joined them when I was high school, when I got excited about folk music and heard about this folk songs club. Not a lot of my school friends were as interested,” Cooney says. “I guess we thought of (the Tucson Folksingers) as this group of middle-aged people who weren’t that cool.
“Clyde Appleton, who was the leader of the group, and who is still around, was my eighth-grade music teacher, and I had no interest whatsoever in music then. He told me later that he thought I would never have a career in music,” says Cooney, who went on to spend more than 40 years as a working musician.
“Tucson Folksingers had an impact the way everything has an impact—little ripples which interact with other ripples ad infinitum. Everything I carry from then is filtered though the gauze of my own perceptions and misperceptions of then, and now. I remember the good feeling of swapping songs, and hearing Clyde lead a great song I’d never heard before.”
Cooney was born in 1943 in California, but his parents moved to Tucson when he was about 6 months old, and he was raised in the Old Pueblo, where he played as a teenager in various ensembles with his friends. Since leaving Tucson in the early 1960s, he has toured the country, from the San Diego and San Francisco areas to Denver and the Midwest, and up and down the East Coast. He has played with such like-minded musicians as Bobby Kimmel, Travis Edmonson and Jerry Garcia, among many others.
During his years as an itinerant musician, his modes of transportation often included hitchhiking or jumping freight trains.
He plays 6- and 12-string guitars, banjo, concertina, harmonica, penny whistle and jaws harp. He performs “real folk songs, old popular and novelty songs and found songs of wit and wisdom,” sort of running the gamut of folk music, according to its various definitions.
Cooney has been mostly retired from performing for the past decade, but plays the occasional benefit in Maine. However, simply playing a show entails considerable preparation. “Now I am so rusty, I have to practice for several weekends in advance to get back in shape for one gig,” he says.
And he rarely leaves Maine, so the trip to Tucson this weekend is a big deal. “I hate to fly. I mean, I hate to go the hardware store. I am traveled out.”
This article appears in May 1-7, 2014.
I am a huge admirer of Michael Cooney’s talent, but I have to disagree with him about folk music. Just because “you know who wrote it” does not automatically disqualify it from being a folk song. There is indeed a folk process, but it has impacted even songs actually written by people we know of. He uses “Wimoweh” as an example: written b y Solomon Linda, adapted by Pete Seeger, further adjusted by the Tokens, it is absolutely a folk song. The narrow definition Mr. Cooney ascribes to is both dangerous and frankly an insult to the folk process. So many of us learned folk songs around a campfire that we later learned were written by Stephen Foster, for example. Does that make them any less folk songs. There are thousands upon thousands of kids who learned “Puff the Magic Dragon” when their parents sang it to them at bathtime or bedtime” the folk process at work. When they later heard PP&M do it, did it automatically lose its “folkness”? I fully admit that I have a pretty broad definition of folk music, in part because I have an inherent distrust of “genres” (mostly artificial constructs designed to reinforce individual musical tastes/prejudices), and in part because I think that almost all music has its roots in the folk tradition. I know that people often smile when they hear Big Bill Broonzy’s statement (sometimes attributed to Louis Armstrong) that “All music is folk music, because I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song,” and then refuse to take it too seriously. But the crux of my personal definition of folk music lies in that statement, however oversimplimfied it might be. I am NOT one of those hardcore purists who believe that only old, traditional (authors unknown) songs played on traditional instruments is folk music. The google dictionary defines folk music as “music that originates in traditional popular culture or that is written in such a style. Folk music is typically of unknown authorship and is transmitted orally from generation to generation.” That is silly, self-contradictory, and unhealthily limiting. “Transmitted orally” implies that more modern transmissions (i.e. recordings) are invalid, and its insistence on “typically of unknown authorship” directly contradicts the earlier claim of “written in such a style”, as the authorship of songs in that category is generally known. Indeed, all songs at some point were created by someone. The “folk process” is far more intricate and complex than that simple definition indicates. The National Endowment for the Arts provides the following definition of “folk and traditional arts — rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community. Community members may share a common ethnic heritage, cultural mores, language, religion, occupation, or geographic region. These vital and constantly reinvigorated artistic traditions are shaped by values and standards of excellence that are passed from generation to generation, most often within family and community, through demonstration, conversation, and practice.” This is a pretty good place to start. Read it carefully. Despite what some folks assert, it paints with a pretty broad brush. Blues and Rap music would fit easily into this definition. It fails, however, to take into account the rich vein of protest music that has been around for at least two centuries and has often been considered– even by the purists– to be part of folk music. Is Woody Guthrie’s music folk music? Of course it is. For the most part, like Joe Hill, he took old traditional tunes and put new words to them: something that has been going on for many hundreds of years. Because we can name who did it, does that make it any less folk? When Franz Schubert or Ralph Vaughan-Williams took old German or English folk songs and turned them into classical pieces, did they lose their folk identity? I would argue not. In fact, almost any music can be considered folk if one is willing to take the time to examine and discuss its roots and influences. And we MUST differentiate between defining folk music and articulating our individual tastes in music. There are some artists I do not like to listen to, but that does not make them any less folk. I have a weakness for harmony and for shorter instrumental introductions (unless the piece is an instrumental), but that doesn’t mean that I believe folk music to be limited to the songs I like. If it makes someone more comfortable to break music down into categories like “traditional folk”, “urban folk”, “contemporary folk”, “topical (or protest) folk”, “folk rock”, “folk punk”, etc. so be it. But it’s mostly all folk to me.