I’ve been doing a lot of research into the historical roots of what we now call “folk music.” I think people used to just call it “music” though. Folk music now is like this weird distinction you make to indicate that the music actually came from a living breathing person, and not a machine that can correct notes for human singers, and which can probably write songs all on its own without any help from anybody.

But that’s not where folk music comes from, I don’t think. I don’t think folk music comes really from one person. It comes from a “folk” or a “people” or a tribe of people. It’s ownership is shared by those who participate in it: singing, dancing, or even passively listening. It’s ownership is therefore a community affair: the tunes are passed from person to person, and the ancestral archetypal emotional content takes as vessels whoever happens to be around and is ready for it.

That’s what I think folk music is or may be. I sat a while at work today, listening to the low whir of the air conditioner. I began humming along with it, trying to immerse myself in the shape and nature of the tone it created. That, I think, is where folk music comes from. People listening to their environment and feeding back their interpretations of those noises into it. The hoofbeats almost inherent in cowboy tunes, the huffpuff of railroad songs. I began to wonder, humming, if as a singer, as a poet, as a vessel, if it’s possible to harmonize yourself and the “note” you’re creating as a person to the spirit of the moment itself, of the entire world, the zeitgeist. Can you hit upon and fall into that one tone that leads you home. I think you can. It’s what the sages meant by living in the Tao. Or so it seems to my Western ears.

Blogging, I’ve come to realize is a sort of performance writing. An odd online singing of news and tips and quips and opinions and whatever else slung at passersby: internet users seeking other types of traffic, other types of content. What do I have that they want to hear? Will they want to stop a while and listen to my songs?

The future of folk music, to me, then stands somewhere in between the traditional role of the wandering sage musician hobo evangelist gypsy tramp found all over the world in all time periods, and that weird unnamed hungering mass of people out there: those web searchers who still can’t find what they’re looking for, and the people who don’t even know where to begin looking. Folk musicians maybe (under which I lump all folklorists, paranormalists, conspiracologists and other types of new age poets and archivists) are the future’s version of the human search agent. The people who are available to ask honest questions to, when all you can reach are automated phone trees which can’t seem to direct your call to the person (probably imaginary anyway) who can get you your money back. The Dead Moment Collectors. The people who remember that things once upon a time used to be different and who, more importantly, know what those differences mean, and who maybe if you open your heart to can lead you back into spaces which are supposed not to exist anymore.