No.

No

My stepdad got a nice obit in there. Way outshone by the other guy who died the same month though. Damn, he was impressive! That's the extent of my Sing Out! knowledge.

John Prine and Guy Clark are folkies? O RLY?

I used to go see John Prine when I was in high school and had to flash a fake ID to get into the bar. Good times. "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes...Jesus Christ died for nuthin', I suppose..." I love John Prine. Wish he'd write a novel. I'll bet it would be good.

Guy Clark's "Stuff That Works" is one of my favorite songs. I think it's on "Dublin Blues". And "Cold Dog Soup" is a good record.

You should check out Robbie Fulks. He has a rep as a writer of "novelty" songs, and he does do that, but his trad stuff is really good, and his guitar playing is outstanding. Plus, he does a cover of the Cher song, "Believe". And he hits that note in the chorus without using a vocoder, too!

I saw Greg Brown in Portland, Oregon in 1997(?) in a tiny little venue. I think Elliot Smith should count as a folkie. Off to google Robbie Fulks...

Robbie Fulks!

He's alt-country more than anything. But he's an awesome guitarist, great in concert, and an excellent songwriter. Yeah, he's popular for some of his novelty songs -- but he's written some that should be classics.

"... Any other closeted folkie folks out there also?"
posted by: Lipstick Thespian at: 21:57

If you like that Jonathan Edwards track Jeep is using, you'd go gaga over Jimmie Spheeris, if you could find any of his stuff. Some amazing music, really. Sadly, because of Sony's failure to understand the long tail, now out of print, again.

I'm not in the closet in any way, LT. I play folk songs for money :-)

Anyway, I'd like to thank you for introducing me to this song. When her voice cracks after the breakdown verse, the heavens open.

Have you listened to much Townes Van Zandt?

These are good recommendations! (eekacat, I have to say, though, that Richard Thompson has been profiled in Sing Out! and his album releases are always reviewed there.)

I am really on the fence about the whole Sing Out! world and the folk revival in general and even the terms "folk" and "folkie," which have lost most of any meaning they once had. Just about all the artists mentioned in this thread, for instance, are not folk musicians - they're contemporary singer-songwriters working in the roots/acoustic vernacular. "Folk" once implied that it was somehow the traditional music of a common class people (i.e., not professionals), and that songs and tunes had unknown authorship. These days scholars call that stuff "traditional" music, just because the word "folk" has become so uselessly non-specific. Most of what people refer to as the "folk" genre isn't folk at all, by that definition.

But people tend to cluster together this type of folk-influenced or folk-inspired music and extend that definition of "folk" over it. And don't get me started on "freak folk," which, despite extensive listening, I have yet to find a single musical marker to tell me why it's not more of the same of exactly what's been called "folk" for forty or fifty years. It's very helpful to be able to cluster artists into named genres, if only for the purposes of making recommendations to others and publishing magazines and promoting shows and using the "if you like X, you'll like Y" principle. It's hard to get away from referencing a genre. But the more music I listen to, the more I find it helpful to talk about not in terms of genre but in terms of influences. Once you get down to genres as specific as "swingabilly-swamp rock" or "Alpine New Wave," what you're doing is pretty much describing a smallish musical movement or a specific set of bands.

Anyway, I tend to call the stuff in the Sing Out! world that I don't like "folk". I realize this isn't fair. I generally detest earnest and pretty songs that don't try very hard to say something new or are enchanted with their own cleverness of lyric or structure. The stuff I do like, I immediately slap another name on: alt.country, roots, rockabilliy, old-time, mountain gospel, traditional gospel, British Isles folk, and the best catch-all. 'singer-songwriter.'

The folk revival that Sing Out! represents has been an enormous force in the development of music in the last fifty years, it can't be denied. I wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but at times the whiffs of purism you get in outlets like that really bothers me.

I was gonna jump in here and spout off on genre labels and how the term "folk" has become virtually meaningless, but I see that Miko has already handled that - and in a much more elegant, less ham-fisted way than I would have done. So I'll just say "what she said" and go sit in the corner again.

John Prine, Guy Clark

These are country singers, not folkies.Hell, both have done work that could be called rock and roll. Listen to Prine's Sweet Revenge.

Sure jon, you know I agree with you that they sound like real country music -- but they might not. The tag "country" is just as badly deprecated as "folk." I mean, I'm a huge country fan, but I don't touch what comes outta Nashville today with a ten-foot pole. I don't think John Prine and Guy Clark really want to share the same genre label as Keith Urban and Lee Ann Rimes, you know? Another example of how useless genres are as a way of describing an artist's sound and aims.