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Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967), known almost universally as "Woody", was a folk singer and raconteur who wrote some of America's best-loved songs. He is best known for "This Land is Your Land" ([http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/music/audio/mp3/this_land.mp3 MP3 clip]). Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, the year his namesake Woodrow Wilson was elected President. At age 19 he left home for Texas, where he met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. He left Texas (and his family) with the Dust Bowl, following the Okies to California. The poverty he saw on these early trips affected him greatly, and many of his songs are concerned with the inequities faced by America's working men and women. A lifelong socialist and trade unionist, he also contributed a regular article, "Woody Sez," to the Daily Worker and People's World newspaper. In 1935 or 1937 he achieved fame in California as a radio performer of both traditional folk music and his protest songs. In 1939 or 1940, Guthrie moved to New York City and was embraced by its leftist and folk music community. He also made perhaps his first real recordings: several hours of conversation and songs, recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress, as well as an album, Dust Bowl Ballads, for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey. He began writing his autobiography, Bound for Glory, which was completed and published in 1943. In 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song, "This Land is Your Land", which was inspired in part by his experiences during a cross-country trip, and in part by his distaste for the Irving Berlin anthem "God Bless America", which he considered unrealistic and complacent (he was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio). In the original version of "This Land is Your Land" Guthrie protested class inequality with the verse, :In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple; :By the relief office, I'd seen my people. :As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, :Is this land made for you and me. and protested the institution of private ownership of land with the verse, :As I went walking, I saw a sign there; :And on the sign there, It said, 'NO TRESPASSING.' :But on the other side, It didn't say nothing. :That side was made for you and me. In another version, the sign reads "Private Property." These verses were left out of subsequent recordings (even by Guthrie himself), turning what was a protest song into one more along the lines of the then current style of patriotic songs. The melody Guthrie used for "This Land is Your Land" is the melody for the old gospel song, "When the World's on Fire". This song is probably best known as recorded by the country/bluegrass legends, The Carter Family around 1930. In May 1941, he was commissioned by the Department of the Interior and its Bonneville Power Administration to write songs about the Columbia River and the building of the federal dams; the best known of these are "Roll On, Columbia" and "Grand Coulee Dam." Around the same time, he met Pete Seeger and joined the legendary Almanac Singers, with whom he toured the country and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village. Guthrie originally wrote and sang anti-war songs with the Almanac Singers, but eventually he and they, along with the Communist milieu with which they were associated, joined the anti-fascist cause -- Guthrie famously wrote the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar. He joined the Merchant Marine, where he served with fellow folk singer Cisco Houston, and then the Army. In 1944, Woody met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land is Your Land," along with hundreds of others over the next few years. He began courting Marjorie Mazia in 1942 and married her in 1945 while on furlough from the Army. They moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, and together had four children, including Cathy, who died at age four in a house fire, sending him into serious depression, and Arlo, who became a famous singer-songwriter in his own right. It was during this period that he wrote and recorded Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')", written when Arlo was about nine years old. Meanwhile, he was still writing topical songs, as well. The 1948 crash of a plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California, to be deported back to Mexico inspired the poem "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)". The poem was set to music a decade later by Martin Hoffman, and the song has since been covered by performers such as Pete Seeger, The Byrds, Dolly Parton, and Woody's son Arlo Guthrie. "Pastures of Plenty", written around the same time, also sympathized with the struggle of immigrant farm workers. By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was worsening and his behavior becoming extremely erratic. He left his family, traveling with Ramblin' Jack Elliott to California, where he married for a third time and had another child, before eventually returning to New York. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia), before he was finally discovered to be suffering from the degenerative nervous disorder Huntington's chorea, which had killed his mother. He was hospitalized at Creedmore Mental Institution in Queens, NY until his death on October 3, 1967. By that time his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them in part through Bob Dylan, who visited Guthrie in the last years of his life and described him as "my last hero." Bob Dylan later went on to write Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, a five page poem as a tribute to his hero, Guthrie. In 1964, Phil Ochs's debut album included the song "Bound for Glory", a tribute to Guthrie and a criticism of revisionism and ignorance among modern audiences who preferred to forget some of Guthrie's more controversial (especially socialist) lyrics. In 1995, Woody's daughter Nora approached the British singer Billy Bragg about recording lyrics her father had composed in the later years of his life. After researching the lyrics at the Woody Guthrie Archive in New York City, Bragg worked with the band Wilco to record 40 tracks, a number of which were released on the albums Mermaid Avenue in 1998, and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in 2000. These albums derived their names from a lesser known song "Mermaid's Avenue." She also approached Janis Ian about writing a song using the lyrics of one of Guthrie's unfinished songs, "I Hear You Sing Again". Ian wrote music in his style for the song, changing some of his lyrics and incorporated some of her own. The song was released on her 2004 album Billie's Bones. Some of Woody's songs have also been recorded by the Working Class punk band Dropkick Murphy's 2004

Quotation

:"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don't give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." :"Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow."

External links


- [http://www.woodyguthrie.org/ The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives]
- [http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/3448/guthrie.html The Songs of Woody Guthrie]
- [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wwghtml/wwgtimeline.html Timeline of Guthrie's life]
- [http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/music/audio/mp3/this_land.mp3 Ballads: This Land is Your Land mp3] - University of Virginia Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, Woody ja:ウッディ・ガスリー

1912

1912 (MCMXII) was a leap year starting on Monday.

Events

January-March


- January 1 - Establishment of Republic of China.
- January 5 - Prague Party Conference
- January 6 - New Mexico is admitted as the 47th U.S. state.
- January 17 - British polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and a team of four begin the second expedition to reach the South Pole.
- January 23 - The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague.
- February 8 - Mexican Revolution - Military rebellion against the rule of Francisco Madero begins in Mexico City. Battles last for 10 days
- February 12 - Republic of China adopts the Gregorian calendar
- February 14 - Arizona is admitted as the 48th U.S. state.
- February 14 - In Groton, Connecticut, the first diesel-powered submarine is commissioned.
- February 18 - Francisco Madero is forced to resign - battle ends. All members of Madero's government are arrested.
- February 19 - Prizes are included in Cracker Jack candy boxes for the first time
- February 22 - Francisco Madero and Pino Suarez are shot, allegedly when they "tried to escape"
- March 1 - Albert Berry makes the first parachute jump from a moving airplane.
- March 1 - Georg Ritter von Trapp, head of the famous Austrian singing family memorialized in the musical The Sound of Music marries Agathe
- March 5 - Italian forces are the first to use airships for a military purpose by using them for reconnaissance west of Tripoli behind Turkish lines.
- March 7 - Roald Amundsen announces discovery of the South Pole
- March 7 - French aviator Henri Seimet makes the first non-stop flight from Paris to London in three hours
- March 12 - The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts) are founded.
- March 16 - Lawrence Oates, ill member of Scott's South Pole expedition leaves the tent saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time"
- March 27 - Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo gives 3,000 cherry blossom trees to be planted in Washington, D.C. to symbolize the friendship between the two countries.
- March 30 - France establishes a protectorate over Morocco.

April-September


- April 15 - Sinking of the RMS Titanic.
- April 17 - Solar eclipse in Europe.
- April 19 - United States Senate inquiry into the Titanic sinking begins.
- May 2 - British Board of Trade inquiry into the sinking of Titanic begins.
- May 3 - The first victims of the RMS Titanic are buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
- May 5 - The 1912 Summer Olympics open in Stockholm, Sweden.
- May 13 - In the United Kingdom, the Royal Flying Corps (forerunner of the Royal Air Force) is established.
- June 4 - Fire in Constantinople - 1120 buildings destroyed
- June 5 - US Marines land on Cuba
- June 6-June 8 - Eruption of Novarupta in Alaska, second largest volcanic eruption in historic time.
- June 8 - Carl Laemmle incorporated Universal Pictures.
- July 12 - Greek island of Icana declares independence (Greece annexes it in November)
- July 19 - A meteorite with an estimated mass of 190 kg exploded over the town of Holbrook in Navajo County, Arizona causing approximately 16,000 pieces of debris to rain down on the town.
- July 30 - the Meiji Emperor of Japan, dies. He is succeeded by his son Yoshihito, the Taisho Emperor. In Japanese History, the event marks the end of the Meiji period and the beginning of the Taisho Era.
- August 12 - Sultan Abd al-Hafiz of Morocco abdicates.
- August 25 - Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party is founded.
- September 25 - Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism founded in New York,_New York.

October-November


- October 8 - First Balkan War begins: Montenegro declares war against Turkey.
- October 14 - While campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, former president Theodore Roosevelt is shot by saloonkeeper William Schrank. With a fresh flesh wound and the bullet still in him, Roosevelt still delivers his scheduled speech.
- October 16 - Bulgarian pilots Radul Minkov and Prodan Toprakchiev perform the first bombing with an airplane in history at the railway station of Karaagac near Edirne against Turkey.
- November 5 - U.S. presidential election, 1912: Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson wins a landslide victory over Republican incumbent William Howard Taft. Taft's base was undercut by Progressive Party candidate (and former Republican) Theodore Roosevelt, who finished second, ahead of Taft.
- November 7 - The Deutsche Opernhaus (now Deutsche Oper Berlin) opened in the Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg with a production of Beethoven's Fidelio.
- November 11 - Chios declares its independence from the Ottoman Empire.
- November 24 - Mine explosion in Hokkaido, Japan - 245 dead
- November 27 - Spain declares a protectorate over the north shore of Morocco.
- November 28 - Albania declares its independence from the Ottoman Empire.

December


- December 3 - First Balkan War ends temporarily - Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia (the Balkan League) sign an armistice with Turkey, ending the two-month long war.

Unknown dates


- Sea Scouting begins under the aegis of the Boy Scouts of America.
- Kazimierz Funk identifies vitamins.
- The first blues song, "The Memphis Blues," is published.
- Alfred Wegener proposes the theory of continental drift.
- Mount Katmai in Alaska explodes.
- Piltdown Man presented in Britain.
- British treasure hunters try to drain Lake Guatavita to find gold – they find nothing.
- African National Congress

Births

January-February


- January 1 - Kim Philby, British spy (d. 1988)
- January 3 - Armand Lohikoski, Finnish director (d. 2005)
- January 6 - Jacques Ellul, French philosopher (d. 1994)
- January 7 - Charles Addams, American cartoonist (d. 1988)
- January 8 - José Ferrer, Puerto Rican actor (d. 1992)
- January 19 - Leonid Kantorovich, Russian economist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
- January 21 - Konrad Emil Bloch, German-born biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2000)
- January 28 - Jackson Pollock, American painter (d. 1956)
- January 30 - Barbara W. Tuchman, American historian (d. 1989)
- February 4 - Erich Leinsdorf, Austrian conductor (d. 1993)
- February 6 - Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's mistress (d. 1945)
- February 11 - Roy Fuller, English poet and novelist (d. 1991)
- February 19 - Stan Kenton, American musician (d. 1979)
- February 20 - Pierre Boulle, French author (d. 1994)
- February 27 - Lawrence Durrell, British writer (d. 1990)

March-April


- March 5 - David Astor, British newspaper publisher (d. 2001)
- March 8 - Preston Smith, Governor of Texas (d. 2003)
- March 12 - Irving Layton, Canadian poet
- March 14 - Les Brown, American band leader (d. 2001)
- March 15 - Lightnin' Hopkins, American musician (d. 1982)
- March 16 - Pat Nixon, First Lady of the United States (d. 1993)
- March 17 - Bayard Rustin, American civil rights activist (d. 1987)
- March 18 - Lucien Laurin, Canadian horse trainer (d. 2000)
- March 22 - Karl Malden, American actor
- March 23 - Betty Astell, British actress (d. 2005)
- March 23 - Wernher von Braun, German-born physicist and engineer (d. 1977)
- March 27 - James Callaghan, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 2005)
- April 8 - Sonja Henie, Norwegian figure skater (d. 1969)
- April 12 - Walt Gorney, American actor (d. 2004)
- April 15 - Kim Il Sung, President of North Korea (d. 1994)
- April 19 - Glenn T. Seaborg, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1999)
- April 22 - Kathleen Ferrier, British contralto (d. 1953)
- April 26 - A. E. van Vogt, Canadian-born writer (d. 2000)
- April 28 - Odette Sansom, French World War II heroine (d. 1995)

May-July


- May 3 - Virgil Fox, American organist (d. 1980)
- May 9 - Pedro Armendáriz, Mexican actor (d. 1963)
- May 9 - Per Imerslund, "The aryan idol" (d. 1943)
- May 11 - Foster Brooks, American actor and comedian (d. 2001)
- May 12 - Archibald Cox, Watergate special prosecutor (d. 2001)
- May 14 - Ben Hogan, American golfer (d. 1997)
- May 16 - Studs Terkel, American writer and broadcaster
- May 18 - Perry Como, American singer (d. 2001)
- May 18 - Walter Sisulu, South African anti-apartheid activist (d. 2003)
- May 21 - Monty Stratton, baseball player (d. 1982)
- May 22 - Herbert C. Brown, English-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
- May 23 - Jean Françaix, French composer (d. 1997)
- May 23 - John Payne, American actor (d. 1989)
- May 25 - Princess Dukhye of Korea (d. 1989)
- May 27 - Sam Snead, American golfer (d. 2002)
- May 28 - Patrick White, Australian writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1990)
- May 30 - Julius Axelrod, American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 2004)
- May 31 - Alfred Deller, English countertenor (d. 1979)
- June 6 - Maria Montez, Dominican actress (d. 1951)
- June 23 - Alan Turing, British mathematician (d. 1954)
- June 25 - William T. Cahill, American politician (d. 1996)
- June 26 - Jay Silverheels, American actor (d. 1980)
- June 27 - Chen Kenmin, Japanese chef (d. 1990)
- June 30 - Ludwig Bölkow, German aeronautical engineer (d. 2003)
- July 1 - David R. Brower, American environmentalist (d. 2000)
- July 14 - Woody Guthrie, American folk musician (d. 1969)
- July 17 - Art Linkletter, American television host
- July 31 - Milton Friedman, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
- July 31 - Irv Kupcinet, American newspaper columnist (d. 2003)

August-November


- August 9 - Anne Brown, American soprano
- August 10 - Jorge Amado de Faria, Brazilian author (d. 2001)
- August 11 - Thanom Kittikachorn, Prime Minister of Thailand (d. 2004)
- August 11 - Norman Levinson, American mathematician (d. 1975)
- August 13 - Salvador Luria, Italian-born biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1991)
- August 15 - Julia Child, American chef (d. 2004)
- August 16 - Ted Drake, English footballer (d. 1995)
- August 16 - Wendy Hiller, English actress (d. 2003)
- August 23 - Gene Kelly, American actor (d. 1996)
- August 25 - Erich Honecker, East German leader (d. 1994)
- August 30 - Edward Mills Purcell, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1997)
- August 30 - Nancy Wake, New Zealand World War II heroine
- September 5 - John Cage, American composer (d. 1992)
- September 11 - David Packard, American electrical engineer (d. 1996)
- September 19 - Kurt Sanderling, German conductor
- September 21 - Chuck Jones, American animator (d. 2002)
- September 22 - Martha Scott, American actress (d. 2003)
- September 24 - Don Porter, American actor (d. 1997)
- September 29 - Michelangelo Antonioni, Italian film director
- October 5 - Karl Hass, Nazi war criminal (d. 2004)
- October 5 - Kristina Söderbaum, German actress (d. 2001)
- October 17 - Pope John Paul I (d. 1978)
- October 21 - Georg Solti, Hungarian conductor (d. 1997)
- October 22 - Johan Hendrik Weidner, Belgian World War II resistance fighter (d. 1994)
- October 25 - Minnie Pearl, American commedienne (d. 1996)
- October 27 - Conlon Nancarrow, American composer (d. 1997)
- November 4 - Vadim Salmanov, Russian composer (d. 1978)
- November 10 - Birdie Tebbetts, baseball player and manager (d. 1999)
- November 11 - Larry LaPrise American songwriter (d. 1996)
- November 14 - Barbara Hutton, American socialite (d. 1979)
- November 14 - T. Y. Lin, Chinese-born civil engineer (d. 2003)
- November 19 - George Emil Palade, Romanian cell biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- November 21 - Eleanor Powell, American actress and dancer (d. 1982)
- November 26 - Eugene Ionesco, Romanian-born playwright (d. 1994)

December


- December 11 - Carlo Ponti, Italian film producer
- December 12 - Henry Armstrong, American boxer (d. 1988)
- December 25 - Natalino Otto, Italian singer (d. 1969)
- December 27 - Conroy Maddox, British painter (d. 2005)

Deaths


- January 28 - Gustave de Molinari, Belgian economist (b. 1819)
- February 16 - Nikolai of Japan, Eastern Orthodox monk and saint (b. 1836)
- February 25 - Guillaume IV, Grand Duke of Luxembourg (b. 1852)
- March 1 - George Grossmith, English actor and comic writer (b. 1847)
- March 29 - Robert Falcon Scott, British Antarctic explorer (froze to death) (b. 1868)
- March 30 - Karl May, German author (b. 1842)
- April 15 - Victims of the sinking of the RMS Titanic:
  - Edward J. Smith, ship's captain (b. 1850)
  - John Jacob Astor IV, American businessman (b. 1864)
  - Archibald Butt, American presidential aide (b. 1865)
  - Benjamin Guggenheim, American businessman (b. 1865)
  - William Thomas Stead, English journalist (b. 1849)
  - Isidor Straus, German-American owner of Macy's (b. 1845)
  - Thomas Andrews, Jr., Titanic shipbuilder (b.1873)
- May 14 - August Strindberg, Swedish playwright and painter (b. 1849)
- May 14 - Frederick VIII, King of Denmark (b. 1843)
- May 25 - Austin Lane Crothers, American politician (b. 1860)
- May 30 - Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer (b. 1867)
- June 12 - Frédéric Passy, French economist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1822)
- July 1 - Harriet Quimby, American pilot (b. 1875)
- July 2 - Tom Richardson, English cricketer (b. 1870)
- July 30 - Meiji Emperor of Japan (b. 1852)
- August 7 - François-Alphonse Forel, Swiss hydrologist (b. 1841)
- August 8 - Ross Winn, American anarchist writer and publisher (b. 1871)
- October 6 - Auguste Marie Francois Beernaert, Belgian statesman, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1829)
- October 24 - Mykola Lysenko, Ukrainian composer (b. 1842)
- October 30 - James S. Sherman, Vice President of the United States (b. 1855)
- November 10 - Louis Cyr, Canadian strongman (b. 1863)
- November 28 - Walter Benona Sharp, American oil pioneer (b. 1870)
- December 23 - Otto Schoetensack, German anthropologist (b. 1850)

Nobel Prizes


- Physics - Nils Gustaf Dalén
- Chemistry - Victor Grignard, Paul Sabatier
- Medicine - Alexis Carrel
- Literature - Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann
- Peace - Elihu Root Category:1912 ko:1912년 ms:1912 ja:1912年 simple:1912 th:พ.ศ. 2455

October 3

:3rd October Organization is also the name of a Marxist terrorist group. October 3 is the 276th day of the year (277th in Leap years). There are 89 days remaining in the year.

Events


- 2333 BC - Establishment of the Kingdom of Korea (in the name of Joseon).
- 42 BC - First Battle of Philippi: Triumvirs Mark Antony and Octavian fight an indecisive battle with Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius.
- 1283 - Dafydd ap Gruffydd, prince of Gwynedd in Wales, becomes the first person executed by drawing and quartering.
- 1574 - Siege of Leiden lifted by the Watergeuzen; foundation of the first Dutch university
- 1712 - The Duke of Montrose issues a warrant for the arrest of Rob Roy MacGregor
- 1739 - The Treaty of Nissa is signed by the Ottoman Empire and Russia at the end of the Russian-Turkish War, 1736-1739.
- 1778 - British Captain James Cook anchors in Alaska.
- 1789 - George Washington proclaims the first Thanksgiving Day.
- 1863 - Thanksgiving Day declared as the last Thursday in November by President Abraham Lincoln.
- 1873 - Captain Jack and companions hanged for their part in the Modoc War
- 1918 - King Boris III of Bulgaria takes the throne
- 1929 - The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes is renamed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia, "Land of the South Slavs".
- 1932 - Iraq gains its independence.
- 1935 - Italy invades Ethiopia under General de Bono (replaced November 11 by Pietro Badoglio).
- 1942 - First successful launch of A4-rocket from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde, Germany: the first man-made object to reach space.
- 1951 - New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Dodgers 5-4, winning the National League pennant, with Bobby Thomson's "The Shot Heard 'Round the World".
- 1952 - United Kingdom successfully tests a nuclear weapon.
- 1960 - The Andy Griffith Show debuts.
- 1960 - Niger gains its independence from France
- 1962 - At Cape Canaveral the Mercury 8 blasts off with Astronaut Wally Schirra aboard for a nine-hour flight.
- 1964 - Underdog debuts on CBS.
- 1981 - The Hunger Strike by Irish Republican Army prisoners at the Maze jail in Belfast ends after seven months and 10 deaths.
- 1981 - The Communist Party of Namibia is founded at a conference in Angola.
- 1990 - Re-unification of Germany. East Germany ceases to exist.
- 1993 - Battle of Mogadishu: In an attempt to capture officials of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's organization in Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 US Army Rangers and about 2000 Somalis are killed.
- 1995 - O. J. Simpson found not guilty of murder.
- 2004 - The Montreal Expos play their last major league baseball game before the franchise is moved to Washington, D.C.
- 2004 - ABC dramedy/Soap opera, Desperate Housewives premiers.
- 2005 - Annular solar eclipse
- 2005 - President Bush announces his nomination of Harriet Miers to replace retiring Sandra Day O'Connor as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Births


- 1690 - Robert Barclay, Scottish writer
- 1716 - Giovanni Battista Beccaria, Italian physicist (d. 1781)
- 1720 - Johann Peter Uz, German poet (d. 1796)
- 1797 - Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany (d. 1870)
- 1804 - Allan Kardec, French founder of Spiritism (d. 1869)
- 1804 - Townsend Harris, first U.S. Consul to Japan
- 1806 - Oliver Cowdery, American religious leader (d. 1850)
- 1828 - Woldemar Bargiel, German composer (d. 1897)
- 1858 - Eleonora Duse, Italian actress (d. 1924)
- 1862 - Johnny Briggs, English cricketer (d. 1902)
- 1863 - Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov, Russian explorer (d. 1935)
- 1873 - Emily Post, American etiquette advisor (d. 1960)
- 1880 - Warner Oland, Swedish-born actor (d. 1938)
- 1885 - Sophie Treadwell, American playwright and journalist (d. 1970)
- 1889 - Carl von Ossietzky, German pacifist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1938)
- 1894 - Elmer Robinson, American politician (d. 1982)
- 1896 - Gerardo Diego, Spanish poet (d. 1987)
- 1897 - Louis Aragon, French writer (d. 1982)
- 1898 - Leo McCarey, American film director (d. 1969)
- 1899 - Gertrude Berg, American actress (d. 1966)
- 1900 - Thomas Wolfe, American author (d. 1938)
- 1904 - Charles J. Pedersen, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1989)
- 1916 - James Herriot, English veterinarian and author (d. 1995)
- 1919 - James M. Buchanan, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1923 - Edward Oliver LeBlanc, Dominican politician (d. 2004)
- 1925 - Gore Vidal, American author
- 1928 - Erik Bruhn, Danish dancer and choreographer (d. 1986)
- 1933 - Neale Fraser, Australian tennis player
- 1935 - Charles Duke, astronaut
- 1936 - Steve Reich, American composer
- 1938 - Eddie Cochran, American singer (d. 1960)
- 1941 - Chubby Checker, American musician
- 1946 - Biff Henderson, American television personality
- 1947 - John Perry Barlow, American musician
- 1949 - Lindsey Buckingham, American musician
- 1950 - Pamela Hensley, American actress
- 1951 - Keb' Mo', American singer
- 1951 - Dave Winfield, baseball player
- 1954 - Dennis Eckersley, baseball player
- 1954 - Al Sharpton, American minister and politician
- 1954 - Stevie Ray Vaughan, American guitarist (d. 1990)
- 1959 - Fred Couples, American golfer
- 1959 - Jack Wagner, American actor
- 1962 - Tommy Lee, American musician (Mötley Crüe)
- 1965 - Jan-Ove Waldner, Swedish table tennis player
- 1969 - Gwen Stefani, American singer (No Doubt)
- 1971 - Kevin Richardson, American singer (Backstreet Boys)
- 1973 - Neve Campbell, Canadian actress
- 1976 - Seann William Scott, American actor
- 1981 - Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Swedish footballer
- 1981 - Andreas Isaksson, Swedish footballer
- 1984 - Ashlee Simpson, American singer

Deaths


- 42 BC - Gaius Cassius Longinus
- 1226 - Saint Francis of Assisi (b. 1181)
- 1283 - David ap Gruffydd, Welsh prince of Gwynedd (executed)
- 1369 - Margarete Maultasch, Countess of Tyrol (b. 1318)
- 1568 - Elizabeth of Valois, queen of Philip II of Spain (b. 1545)
- 1596 - Florent Chrestien, French writer (b. 1541)
- 1611 - Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne, French military leader (b. 1554)
- 1629 - Giorgi Saakadze, Georgian military leader (b. 1570)
- 1649 - Giovanni Diodati, Swiss protestant clergyman (b. 1576)
- 1653 - Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, Dutch scholar (b. 1612)
- 1656 - Myles Standish, English-born soldier
- 1701 - Joseph Williamson, English politician (b. 1633)
- 1801 - Philippe Henri, marquis de Ségur, Marshal of France (b. 1724)
- 1873 - Captain Jack, Modoc tribal leader
- 1881 - Orson Pratt, American religious leader (b. 1811)
- 1890 - Joseph Hergenröther, German historian (b. 1824)
- 1929 - Jeanne Eagels, American actress (b. 1929)
- 1929 - Gustav Stresemann, Chancellor of Germany, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1878)
- 1931 - Carl Nielsen, Danish composer (b. 1865)
- 1936 - John Heisman, American football coach (b. 1869)
- 1953 - Arnold Bax, English composer (b. 1883)
- 1965 - Zachary Scott, American actor (b. 1914)
- 1967 - Woody Guthrie, American musician (b. 1912)
- 1967 - Malcolm Sargent, English conductor (b. 1895)
- 1987 - Jean Anouilh, French writer (b. 1910)
- 1987 - Kalervo Palsa, Finnish artist (b. 1947)
- 1988 - Franz Josef Strauß, Bavarian politician (b. 1915)
- 1990 - Stefano Casiraghi, husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco (b. 1960)
- 1990 - General Curtis LeMay, U.S. Air Force officer and Vice Presidential candidate (b. 1906)
- 1994 - Dub Taylor, American actor (b. 1907)
- 1998 - Roddy McDowall, English actor (b. 1928)
- 1999 - Akio Morita, Japanese businessman (b. 1921)
- 2000 - Benjamin Orr, American bassist and singer (The Cars) (b. 1947)
- 2002 - Bruce Paltrow, American television and film producer (b. 1943)
- 2003 - Florence Stanley, American actress (b. 1924)
- 2003 - William Steig, American cartoonist and children's author (b. 1907)
- 2004 - John Cerutti, baseball player and announcer (b. 1960)
- 2004 - Janet Leigh, American actress (b. 1927)
- 2005 - Ronnie Barker, English comic actor (b. 1929)

Holidays


- Germany - Day of German Unity
- South Korea - National Foundation Day (Gaecheonjeol 개천절)
- Rosh Hashanah, 5766 begins at sunset (2005)

External links


- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/3 BBC: On This Day] ---- October 2 - October 4 - September 3 - November 3 – more historical anniversaries ko:10월 3일 ms:3 Oktober ja:10月3日 simple:October 3 th:3 ตุลาคม

Folk singer

Folk music, in the original sense of the term, is music by and of the people. Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture. It normally was shared and performed by the entire community (not by a special class of expert performers), and was transmitted by word of mouth. During the 20th and 21st century, the term folk music took on a second meaning: it describes a particular kind of popular music which is culturally descended from or otherwise influenced by traditional folk music. Like other popular music, this kind of folk music is most often performed by experts and is transmitted in organized performances and commercially distributed recordings. However, popular music has filled some of the roles and purposes of the folk music it has replaced. Folk music is more or less synonymous with traditional music. Some would use either term with a more specific meaning, restricted to just popularized-folk/traditional music or just not-popularized; however, both terms are used interchangeably among the general population and are not strictly defined. See also: World music.

Defining folk music

World music "Folk music is usually seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now, past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived). Unfortunately, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no unanimity on what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) is." (Middleton 1990, p.127) Gene Shay, co-founder and host of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, defined folk music in an April 2003 interview by saying: "In the strictest sense, it's music that is rarely written for profit. It's music that has endured and been passed down by oral tradition. [...] And folk music is participatory—you don't have to be a great musician to be a folk singer. [...] And finally, it brings a sense of community. It's the people's music." The English term folk, which gained usage in the 18th century (during the Romantic period) to refer to peasants or non-literate peoples, is related to the German word Volk (meaning people or nation). The term is used to emphasize that folk music emerges spontaneously from communities of ordinary people. "As the complexity of social stratification and interaction became clearer and increased, various conditioning criteria, such as 'continuity', 'tradition', 'oral transmission', 'anonymity' and uncommercial origins, became more important than simple social categories themselves." Charles Seeger (1980) describes three contemporary defining criteria of folk music (Middleton 1990, p.127-8): # A "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal'; 'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'. Usually...folk music is associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and possibly also a popular, musical culture." Cecil Sharp (1972), A.L. Lloyd (). # "Cultural processes rather than abstract musical types...continuity and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular cultures'." Redfield (1947) and Dundes (1965). # Less prominent, "a rejection of rigid boundaries, preferring a conception, simply of varying practice within one field, that of 'music'." David Harker (1985) argues that "folk music" is, in Peter van der Merwe's words, "a meaningless term invented by 'bourgeois' commentators". Jazz musician Louis Armstrong and blues musician Big Bill Broonzy have both been attributed the remark "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."

Subjects of folk music

Apart from instrumental music that forms a part of folk music, especially dance music traditions, much folk music is vocal music, since the instrument that makes such music is usually handy. As such, most folk music has lyrics, and is about something. Narrative verse looms large in the folk music of many cultures. This encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry, much of which was meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure and often their in medias res plot developments. Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate the outcomes of battles and other tragedies or natural disasters. Sometimes, as in the triumphant Song of Deborah found in the Biblical Book of Judges, these songs celebrate victory. Laments for lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many folk traditions; these laments keep alive the cause for which the battle was fought. The narratives of folk songs often also remember folk heroes such as John Henry to Robin Hood. Some folk song narratives recall supernatural events or mysterious deaths. Hymns and other forms of religious music are often of traditional and unknown origin. Western musical notation was originally created to preserve the lines of Gregorian chant, which before its invention was taught as an oral tradition in monastic communities. Folk songs such as Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in a mnemonic form. In the Western world, Christmas carols and other traditional songs preserve religious lore in song form. Other sorts of folk songs are less exalted. Work songs are composed; they frequently feature call and response structures, and are designed to enable the labourers who sing them to coordinate their efforts in accordance with the rhythms of the songs. In the armed forces, a lively tradition of jody calls are sung while soldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made use of a large body of sea shanties. Love poetry, often of a tragic or regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. Nursery rhymes and nonsense verse also are frequent subjects of folk songs.

Variation in folk music

Music transmitted by word of mouth though a community will, in time, develop many variants, because this kind of transmission cannot produce word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy. Indeed, many traditional folk singers are quite creative and deliberately modify the material they learn. Because variants proliferate naturally, it is naïve to believe that there is such a thing as the "authentic" version of a ballad such as "Barbara Allen." Field researchers in folk song (see below) have encountered countless versions of this ballad throughout the English-speaking world, and these versions often differ greatly from each other. None can reliably claim to be the original, and it is quite possible that whatever the "original" was, it ceased to be sung centuries ago. Any version can lay an equal claim to authenticity, so long as it is truly from a traditional folksinging community and not the work of an outside editor. Cecil Sharp had an influential idea about the process of folk variation: he felt that the competing variants of a folk song would undergo a process akin to biological natural selection: only those new variants that were the most appealing to ordinary singers would be picked up by others and transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time we would expect each folksong to become esthetically ever more appealing — it would be collectively composed to perfection, as it were, by the community. On the other hand, there is also evidence to support the view that transmission of folk songs can be rather sloppy. Occasionally, collected folk song versions include material or verses incorporated from different songs that makes little sense in its context. A perfect process of natural selection would not have permitted these incoherent versions to survive.

The decline of folk traditions in modern societies

Folk music seems to reflect a universal impulse of humanity. No fieldwork expedition by cultural anthropologists has yet discovered a preindustrial people that did not have its own folk music. It seems safe to infer that folk music was a property of all people starting from the dawn of the species. However, the development of modern society--first literacy, then the conversion of culture into a salable commodity--created a new form of transmission of music that first influenced, then in some societies essentially eliminated the original folk tradition. The decline of folk music in a culture can be followed through three stages.

Stage I: Urban influence

One of the first folk traditions impacted by modern society was the folksong of rural England. Starting in Elizabethan times, urban poets wrote broadsheet ballads that (thanks to printing) could be sold widely. The ballads probably didn't need musical notation, since they would have been sung to tunes that everybody knew, the folk tradition being very much alive at the time. These ballads heavily influenced the folk tradition, but did not override it. In fact, the folk tradition showed great resilience. Through the process of folk transmission, the urban ballads were modified, keeping the more vivid content and ironing out the less "citified" material. The resulting body of folk lyrics is widely considered to be a very appealing blend. Thus, the printing press and widespread literacy did not suffice to destroy the English folk tradition, but in some ways enriched it. The English folk song legacy was probably affected by urban melodies as well as words. The clue here is that folk music in remote rural areas of the English-speaking world, such as Highland Scotland or the Appalachian mountains, abounds in tunes that employ the pentatonic scale, a scale widely used for folk music around the world. However, pentatonic music was rare among the rural English villagers who first volunteered their tunes to researchers in the late 19th century. A plausible explanation is that life in rural England was far more closely affected by the proximity to the urban centers. Music in the standard major and minor scales evidently penetrated to the nearby rural areas, where it was converted to folk idiom, but nevertheless succeeded in displacing the old pentatonic music.

Stage II: Replacement of folk music by popular music

The pattern of urban influence on folk music was intensified to outright destruction as soon as the capitalist economic system had developed to the point that music could be packaged and distributed for the purpose of earning a profit--in other words, when popular music was born. It was around Victorian times that ordinary people of the Western world were first offered music as a mass commodity, for example, in the phenomenon of Music Hall. The introduction of popular music was simultaneous with the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. This was a time of great change in lifestyle for the great body of the people, notably the migration of the old agrarian communities to the new industrial ones. It is likely that the resulting social disruption helped cut people's emotional bonds to their old folk music, and thereby helped the shift in taste toward popular music. As technology advanced, succeeding generations became enticed with popular music in ever more accessible and desirable forms. Gramophone records became LPs and then CDs; the Music Hall gave way to radio, followed by television. With the ever-increasing success of popular music, the musical life of many individuals eventually ceased to include any folk music at all. Moreover, since popular music for most people is passive music (that is, listened to, but not created or performed), the overwhelming success of popular music also entailed a sharp decline of music as an active, participatory activity.

Stage III: Loss of musical ability in the community

The terminal state of the loss of folk music can be seen in the United States and a few similar societies, where except in isolated areas and among hobbyists, traditional folk music no longer survives. In the absence of folk music, many individuals do not sing. It is possible that non-singers feel intimidated by widespread exposure in recordings and broadcasting to the singing of skilled experts. Another possibility is that they simply cannot sing, because they did not sing when they were small children, when learning of skills takes place most naturally. Certainly it is very common for contemporary Americans to claim that they cannot sing. There is anecdotal evidence that the loss of singing ability is continuing rapidly at the present time. As recently as the 1960s, audiences at American sporting events collectively sang the American national anthem before a game; the anthem is now generally assigned to a recording or to a soloist. Inability to sing is apparently unusual in a traditional society, where the habit of singing folk song since early childhood gives everyone the practice needed to able to sing at least reasonably well.

Regional variation

The loss of folk music is occurring at different rates in different regions of the world. Naturally, where industrialization and commercialization of culture are most advanced, so tends to be the loss of folk music. Yet in nations or regions where folk music is a badge of cultural or national identity, the loss of folk music can be slowed; this is held to be true, for instance in the case of Hungary, Ireland, Brittany, and Galicia, Greece and Crete all of which retain their traditional music to some degree.

Fieldwork and scholarship on folk music

Starting in the 19th century, interested people - academics and amateur scholars - started to take note of what was being lost, and there grew various efforts aimed at preserving the music of the people. One such effort was the collection by Francis James Child in the late 19th century of the texts of over three hundred ballads in the English and Scots traditions (called the Child Ballads). Contemporaneously came the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, and later and more significantly Cecil Sharp who worked in the early 20th century to preserve a great body of English rural folk song, music and dance, under the aegis of what became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Sharp also worked in America, recording the folk songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916-1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell. Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong interest in folk song collecting, and a number of outstanding composers carried out their own field work on folk song. These included Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, incorporated folk material into their classical compositions. In America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of musicologist Alan Lomax and others to capture as much American field material as possible. Often, fieldworkers in folk song hoped that their work would restore folk music to the people. For instance, Cecil Sharp campaigned, with some success, to have English folk songs (in his own heavily edited and expurgated versions) to be taught to schoolchildren. One theme that runs through the great period of scholarly folk song collection is the tendency of certain members of the "folk", who were supposed to be the object of study, to become scholars and advocates themselves. For example, Jean Ritchie was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old Appalachian folk songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence, was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic recordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs.

Folk revivals

As folk traditions decline, there is often a conscious effort to resuscitate them. Such efforts are often exerted by bridge figures such as Jean Ritchie, described above. Folk revivals also involve collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults. The folk revival of the 1950's in Britain and America had something of this character. In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Britain, where at a Working Men's Club in the remote Northumberland mining village of Tow Law he met two other seminal figures: A.L.'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who were performing folk music to the locals there. Lloyd was a colourful figure who had travelled the world and worked at such varied occupations as sheep-shearer in Australia and shanty-man on a whaling ship. MacColl, born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life. MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs from his mother. The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is credited with being the point at which the British roots revival began. The two colleagues went back to London where they formed the Ballads and Blues Club which eventually became renamed the Singers' Club and was the first, as well as the most enduring, of what became known as folk clubs. As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America. Another example is the Hungarian model, the tanchaz movement. This model involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs, resulting in a strong vocational foundation and a very high professional level. They also had the advantage that rich, living traditions of Hungarian folk music and folk culture still survived in rural areas, especially in Transylvania. The involvement of experts meant an effort to understand and revive folk traditions in their full complexity. Music, dance, and costumes remained together as they once had been in the rural communities: rather than merely reviving folk music, the movement revived broader folk traditions. Started in the 1970s, tanchaz soon became a massive movement creating an alternative leisure activity for youths apart from discos and music clubs—or one could say that it created a new kind of music club. The tanchaz movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities around the world. Today, almost every major city in the U.S. and Australia has its own Hungarian folk music and folk dance group; there are also groups in Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina and Western Europe. See also: blues, Harry Everett Smith.

The emergence of popular folk artists

During the twentieth century, a crucial change in the history of folk music began. Folk material came to be adopted by talented performers, performed by them in concerts, and disseminated by recordings and broadcasting. In other words, a new genre of popular music had arisen. This genre was linked by nostalgia and imitation to the original traditions of folk music as it was sung by ordinary people. However, as a popular genre it quickly evolved to be quite different from its original roots. Confusingly, popular (i.e., commercially-disseminated) music based on a folk tradition is called "folk music", no matter how different it may be from a folk music rooted in the community. As a result, some individuals in a modern society are unaware that folk music of the original variety ever existed. The rise of folk music as a popular genre began with performers whose own lives were rooted in the authentic folk tradition. Thus, for example, Woody Guthrie began by singing songs he remembered his mother singing to him as a child. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Guthrie both collected folk music and also composed his own songs, as did Pete Seeger, who was the son of a professional musicologist. Through dissemination on commercial recordings, this vein of music became popular in the United States during the 1950s, through singers like the Weavers (Seeger's group), Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio, who tried to reproduce and honor the work that had been collected in preceding decades. The commercial popularity of such performers probably peaked in the U.S. with the ABC Hootenanny [http://www.tvtome.com/Hootenanny/] television series in 1963, which was cancelled after the arrival of the Beatles, the "British invasion" and the rise of folk-rock. The itinerant folksinger lifestyle was exemplified by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, a disciple of Woody Guthrie who in turn influenced Bob Dylan. Sometimes these performers would locate scholarly work in libraries and revive the songs in their recordings, for example in Joan Baez's rendition of "Henry Martin," which adds a guitar accompaniment to a version collected and edited by Cecil Sharp. Publications like Sing Out! [http://singout.org/] magazine helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did folk-revival-oriented record companies. Many of this group of popular folk singers maintained an idealistic, leftist/progressive political orientation. This is perhaps not surprising. Folk music is easily identified with the ordinary working people who created it, and preserving treasured things against the claimed relentless encroachments of capitalism is likewise a goal of many politically progressive people. Thus, in the 1960s such singers as Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan followed in Guthrie's footsteps and to begin writing "protest music" and topical songs, particularly against the Vietnam War, and likewise expressed in song their support for the civil rights movement. Such songs were newly written, but took their instrumentation and stanza forms from folk tradition. In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem (although the members were all Irish born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village, it must be noted), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, The Pogues and a variety of other folk bands have done much over recent years to revitalise and repopularise Irish traditional music. These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a living tradition of Irish music, and they benefitted from collection efforts on the part of the likes of Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy, among others. In Hungary, the group Muzsikás and the singer Márta Sebestyén became known throughout the world due to their numerous American tours and their participation in the Hollywood movie The English Patient and Sebestyén's work with the Deep Forest band.

The blending of folk and popular genres

The experience of the last century suggests that as soon as a folk tradition comes to be marketed as popular music, its musical content will quickly be modified to become more like popular music. Such modified folk music often incorporates electric guitars, drum kit, or forms of rhythmic syncopation that are characteristic of popular music but were absent in the original. One example of this sort is contemporary country music, which descends ultimately from a rural American folk tradition, but has evolved to become vastly different from its original model. Rap music evolved from an African-American inner-city folk tradition, but is likewise very different nowadays from its folk original. A third example is contemporary bluegrass, which is a modified development of American old time music. As less traditional forms of folk music gain popularity, one often observes tension between so-called "purists" or "traditionalists" and the innovators. For example, traditionalists were indignant when Bob Dylan began to use an electric guitar. His electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was to prove to be an early focal point for this controversy. Sometimes, however, the exponents of amplified music were bands such as Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Mr. Fox and Steeleye Span who saw the electrification of traditional musical forms as a means to reach a far wider audience, and their efforts have been largely recognised for what they were by even some of the most die-hard of purists. Traditional folk music forms also merged with rock and roll to form the hybrid generally known as folk rock which evolved through performers such as The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mamas and the Papas, and many others. Since the 1970s a genre of "contemporary folk", fuelled by new singer-songwriters, has continued to make the coffee-house circuit and keep the tradition of acoustic non-classical music alive in the United States. Such artists include Steve Goodman, John Prine, Cheryl Wheeler, Bill Morrisey, Christine Lavin and Gundula Krause. Lavin in particular has become prominent as a leading promoter of this musical genre in recent years. Some, such as Lavin and Wheeler, inject a great deal of humor in their songs and performances, although much of their music is also deeply personal and sometimes satirical. In the 1980s a group of artists like Phranc and The Knitters propagated a form of folk music also called country punk or folk punk, which eventually evolved into Alt country. More recently the same spirit has been embraced and expanded on by performers such as Dave Alvin, Ani DiFranco, and Steve Earle. At the same time, a line of singers from Baez to Phil Ochs have continued to use traditional forms for original material. The appropriation of folk has even continued into hard rock and heavy metal, with bands such as Skyclad, Waylander and Finntroll melding distinctive elements of folk styles from a wide variety of traditions, including in many cases traditional instruments such as fiddles, tin whistles and bagpipes as an element of their sound. Unlike other folk-related genres, folk metal shies away from organized religion in favour of more ancient pagan inspired themes. A similar stylistic shift, without using the "folk music" name, has occurred with the phenomenon of Celtic music, which in many cases is based on an amalgamation of Irish traditional music, Scottish traditional music, and other traditional musics associated with lands in which Celtic languages are or were spoken (regardless of any significant research showing that the musics have any genuine genetic relationship; so Breton music and Galician music are often included in the genre). One of the more unusual offshoots of modern folk music is the genre now known as filk, a form of music defined primarily by who its audience is. Folk music is still extremely popular among some audiences today, with folk music clubs meeting to share traditional-style songs, and there are major folk music festivals in many countries, eg the Port Fairy Folk Festival is a major annual event in Australia attracting top international folk performers as well as many local artists. The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is always sold out within days, and is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or fifteen minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.

Pastiche and parody

Popular culture sometimes creates pastiches of folk music for its own ends. One famous example is the pseudo-ballad sung about brave Sir Robin in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Enthusiasts for folk music might properly consider this song to be pastiche and not parody, because the tune is pleasant and far from inept, and the topic being lampooned is not balladry but the medieval heroic tradition. The arch-shaped melodic form of this song (first and last lines low in pitch, middle lines high) is characteristic of traditional English folk music. A more recent similarly incisive send-up of folk music, this time American in origin, is the film A Mighty Wind by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy. Another instance of pastiche is the notoriously well-known theme song for the television show Gilligan's Island (music by