The Commercial Folk Era
Some years ago, after performing at the Improv in Hollywood, Len Chandler wrote me a note that said,

They sure have! In the 1970s, folk music (in the popular sense of the term) retained a certain hold-over proclivity toward a stereotypical character. It retained the flavour of the hillbilly fifties and at the same time maintained a kind of reflective adaptation to the hippie sixties. I had the opportunity to work on some of my songs with Joe Frazier (Chad Mitchell Trio) well into 1980s. I was stuck in that folk music box (and I still am). And even during that post-folk-period, an era of great groups and singers such as, The Brothers Four, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Kingston Trio, The Limelighters, Bud and Travis, Gordon Lightfoot, The Sandpipers. Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, The Smothers Brothers...and so many more...the times might have been changing but they never were really over. The folk sound lay latent below the layers of now other more contemporary sounds. The more organic hootenany sound lay dormant, just waiting for a revival of sorts. That came to some degree with the reuniting of Peter, Paul and Mary and an occasional folksy-sounding record that somehow got past the controlling realm of the A&R establishment.

Everybody's Leaving Town
To some degree this residual organic sound wasn't just the extension of a generational phenomenon bringing back the good old days. Additionally it was an integration with an emerging social era, fad, trend, phenomenon. The 70s and even 80s saw the arrival of a mobile neo-bucolic inclination that was sweeping people from the cities out into the suburbs and ultimately into rural settings. Your so far away, wrote Carole King, doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

The evidence of this migration was observed in the increase of populations and appeal for places like Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Northern California. It was composed of a wide cross section of demographic but certainly the archetype was found in those of the persuasion of Oliver Wendel Douglas,......trying to flee the pollution and rat race of the cities. The popular music of the time reflected the same. In the 1960s Petula Clark sang the Tony Hatch hit...Downtown; When you're alone and life is getting you down you can always go DOWNTOWN! However, by the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the lyrics describing cities went from sugar towns to the stark realities of what was going on In the Ghetto. Places like the Santa Monica freeway in David Frizzell's, You're the Reason God made Oklahoma, make country girl cry.

Country Roads.... Get Me Out of the City
Perhaps, from a musicology point of view we'd been long primed for a new sound that associated itself with this western version of the Great Leap Forward. Perhaps you could call it, Northern Urban Country Music....without the twang, sang by the likes of Eddie Arnold, Jim Reeves, The Bakersfield Sound, and the existential cognitive ramblings of Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell. These were the cross-over artists. These were singers, whose dress was more de rigueur with white collar office workers than with the audience that required their singers to be clad in Porter Wagoner suits weighted with rhinestone bling. They sang songs in a genre representative coincident with the general trend in the urbanization of the country. But a new migration was afoot since Arnold sang his international cross over hit...Make The World Go. By the beginning of the 1970s people were making their worlds go away or at least trying to....perhaps even perceptually, by moving, migrating into a landscape of ramblers ensconced in an acre or two of land, with a corral for the horse and a spot to park the Renault Dofin. Even at 28 cents a gallon we were frugal back then since it was a long drive into the city from Green Acres.

The undisputed balladeer songsman for these neo-agrarians...the "back to the landers" was ironically a product of the folk world. A former member of the (Chad) Mitchell Trio after Chad had left. He even westernized his Germanic sounding surname to reflect a place he loved and the geographic region that was on the receiving end of this incipient migrational trend. It was the new move west .....the push to Rocky Mountain high. These homesteaders came in BMWs and VW microbuses. Leaking through the windows loud and clear from a radio or the eight track tape player.......John Denver delivered the mantra of the movement, .....Thank God I'm A Country Boy! But indeed...was John Denver really "country"? Some CW stations refused to play him...arguing from the lyrical posit presented in a Barbara Mandrell song, Denver wasn't even country when country wasn't cool. That was the parochial (little boxes on the hillsides) mindset of the time. No matter, This seemed to be one time when the people spoke out and in '75 Back Home Again took the Country Music Association's, Song of the Year: Hey it's good to be back home again. Sometimes this old farm feels like a long-lost friend. Yes 'n' hey, it's good to be back home again.

When Chandler wrote me that note back then, thinking about what would happen next in the music business was a linear affair. John Denver as a singer was a one-man American version of the British Invasion. By 1975 Denver, (singing songs about the land, and feather beds)...was the largest selling recording artists in the U.S. Sure...the times they are a changin' but they were changing in a very predictable and controlled fashion. They were changing to the next wave of whatever or whomever might (or be allowed to) saunter down the musical trail next. In those days the superstar, like the superpower, was in.

But the listening audience was trapped by a technology that could only deliver so much, and was dictated to by economic forces driving that market for profit. And although the delivery box was neat and tidy, it was getting warn. Even the clean sound of FM radio stations were struggling in the pocket book. In 1972 Gospel Rock singer Larry Norman succinctly purveyed the market's general sense of what radio programming had become in his award winning album Only Visiting This Planet .... I don't dig the radio, I hate what the charts pick, Rock 'n roll may not be dead but its getting sick, and all over the world disc jockeys sound the same, And every town I play is like the one from where I came.....what a mess this world is in I wonder who began it? Don't ask me I'm only visiting this planet. (From Readers Digest).

Then a year later in October of 1973, the times did drastically change and the mess the planet was in as to its dependence on fossil fuel hit the population like an Old Testament judgment from God. Enter the phenomenon of the gas line, where there was nothing one could to do except turn on the radio and wait in line......thinking of other places one might rather be right now. In 1973 Johnny Russell's hit provided some perceptual solace... There's no place that I'd rather be than right here with my Rednecks, white socks and Blue Ribbon Beer.......or perhaps somewhere high in the Rockies.

Who will be the next musical messiah? There was no other way to think in this pre-digital music world. If folk was dead, then rock was alive, and if rock was dead then disco was in.... etc. Although the electromagnetic homogenizer of the day, radio, and its elite enclave of program directors, branched out into some standard genres....Country, Rock, Jazz, Middle of the Road, (MOR), no one in 1970 or 1980 could imagine how those sounds would ultimately be put through the digital prism and split into a million new points of light. And certainly no one would think that a (the) technology might become the prophet crying in the wilderness.....providing access to any and all of those points of light out there...... ubiquitously.

I recall my publisher, Robert 'Bob' Mercer, (Right Hemisphere, Fantasy Records, Credence Clearwater Revival, noguru.com) had written a very seminal work early on in the trades dealing with the up and coming shift from cassettes to a revolutionary new digital music delivery media..... called compact discs. In the wake of...vinyl, eight tracks, and cassettes.... it sounded like science fiction but those on the inside of this industry knew what digital could mean, both good and perhaps bad. Even my day job in the 1980s was steeped in the world of this new application to technology...engineering a weird new telephone system called cellular phones. Certainly no one, especially the CEOs of small independent record labels of that day, would think to see the ultimate dégringolade of major record executives! Let alone, the emergence of a musical world so diverse that the notion of market share would be completely redefined.....turned upside down by the speed of download software. But no one thought any walls could come down back then, ...hmmmmmm....then one night in Berlin, November 1989......and the ticky tack on the hillsides, started to crumble. And we all sang.

Anything Goes As Long As The FCC Approves It.
I was in the radio business during the era, as well as in markets, that assured, legal station identifications at the top of each hour, and no vacant studios at 3 A.M..... if you could operate 24 hours. We spun records, did news, and prepared for the end of the world by practicing CONELRAD and EBS (now EAS) tests. And for everything we did we answered to the all hearing ear of the local Federal Communications Commission field inspector. When the FCC approved FM radio in the 1940s it was for an improvement in fidelity and conversely to invigorate the radio market by providing new technology to enhance the sound of broadcasting. By the late 60s and 70s radio stations realized FM was where it had to be at, to compete against TV...and especially for the broadcast of music......so the transition began to take place...AM went talk....FM went music. By the late 1980s, radio station owners were crying for expanded markets and the D word .

Some might suggest that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the ensuant Deregulation of radio saved the medium from its demise. Tell that to a radio ad salesman while he's beating the streets for clients and watching kids go by with I-Pods in their ears. It was the FCC that giveth and taketh away band allocations in every radio market in the country. The deregulation of wireless radio was, in part, an attempt to provide diversity of programming in each market, just like the advent of FM radio was conceived to invigorate the radio market. On a side note.....is the advent of high definition television nothing more than a re-run of those old Mickey Mouse ideas? Even Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, is saying it like it is, "....the computer will soon supplant the television as children's screen of choice. "In the years ahead, broadband on the computer will be the primary source of entertainment for kids," he said. "It's just as important to them as the TV set now." Yeah but wait a minute Bob! Come on baby! Even high def? You mean kids want content?

But ironically, all the advent of FM radio and ultimately deregulation has provided in the form of content and programming was more radio stations, more than likely, playing the same canned programming. FM or not, for every wireless radio market that maintains (legally) X numbers of stations to provide diverse programming, there is a virtual, digital internet cloud hovering over that market..... providing it with X to the 6 billionth times more diversity. In the wireless world of the internet, the formats are as varied and diverse as the listening audience. How can the purest of FM signals compete against that? Play more Pete Seeger?

Today, like Ella Fitzgerald sang, Anything Goes, and there is plenty of anything out there. But the twist today is there is also as a digital media infrastructure to deliver it. In a way it's similar to what happened to Detroit, when the Japanese found a high-tech solution for making good, cheap cars. Today, however, even the Sony's of the world are running scared as they witness the out-of-control bifurcation of their own market niche. It's the indies that are doing the dividing and conquering this time and even the most potent of Meiji proprietary controls can't combat the fierce musical melange coming out of the laptops of millions of garage bands, all playing their own unique sound, and recording it on technology that surpasses what Armstrong, Collins and Lovell had to get them to the moon. But wait......now its come full circle.....even the indies are feeling the impact of cut and paste ethics. Music is free baby! Don't rip me off! Napst me! (But you don't need to be in the music business to hear that perspective........ Teacher, can we cut and paste stuff off the internet?

Geographer-Musician?
I am a geographer who plays and writes music. Additionally I have an interest in the use of technology not only in music but also in the delivery of curricular content. The virtual world has certainly changed my sense of teaching space as well as how I manage my musical oral tradition. My music, my style of music, and even what I write about, is ensconced in the "folk genre" whatever that is, or however you define it. For me it has been interesting to observe just how that music has emerged over the years in its own right, but likewise what the Broadside folksinger was talking about in 1978 in the context of how change has changed in its own right. It's not a linear world any longer. Within the last ten years, given the digital media technology, the old linear thinkers in the industry continue to scratch their heads trying to redefine the major record labels in this era of elaborate bricolage. Ironically, even the independent anarchist is subject to being ripped off, as indie labels now find their own hard work being downloaded and ripped for nothing. Just like in geopolitics there are no super powers anymore....but there is a new mindset in the market. Radio, in contrast to what those late night advertisements might suggest, IS NOT FREE. It costs the listener time....time to listen to those advertisements. There is a music market out there with I-Pods in their ears. That demographic has no interest in paying for something that in the context of the post modern virtual ethos should be free....not even in the amount of time it takes to spin a thirty second spot for a half price sale on Dooney & Bourke handbags. And the question remains....how does an artist make money (at least enough to eat) by giving all his art away? (Folksingers are supposed to be poor and down and out.....I think teachers are also....so no problem there for me!)

In January 2004 I received a letter from my friend, Pete Seeger. In it he articulated something of the future. For those wondering where its going...in the music industry or otherwise, here I think are some insightful as well as optimistic thoughts.

I think the next ten years will be the most exciting any of us have ever known, as our country (and the world) wakes up to the danger we are all in. I now think the world will be saved by millions of small organizations. We'll disagree on so many things it'll be hilarious. But we'll agree: better to talk than shoot, and bombs etc. always kill innocent people. And when words fail, we'll use arts, sports, food, to communicate.

What is Pete suggesting here? Maybe, we're entering into a world full of possibilities? Where the hillsides have the potential of not being covered in "little boxes made from ticky tack". Where the ingenuity of our individuality will be given the chance to prevail and break through walls even beyond the virtual world. Isn't it time we quit wadding in the big muddy? And what about this Wittgenstein slip...when words fail? Well, Jean-Paul Sartre used plays to communicate his philosophy, Julia Child, the chef, used buliabase.......Tom T. Hall called his method, Journalism with a tune.

And so...when words fail....just.... sing?

Okay so I will shut up and sing....Here then is a selection of some of my songs (perhaps for your listening enjoyment) that by default speak of space, both materially and perceptually. They emerge from my "garage" littered with boxes filled with old books, snow shoes, LPs and 45s, kids clothes, toys, and the general stuff of life.....experiences.....they have been recorded on vinyl (my first by United Artist country singer Judy Lynn) cassette and cd......all looked at through the eyes of a geographer, sung with a northern twang......in a genre called folk......whatever that is.

Thank you for listening.

Dr. M Marian Mustoe
Eastern Oregon University

Thank you to the following musicians that have assisted me in the production of songs:

Dale Kesey, Eugene Oregon, Violin (Formerly with The Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters)
Mark Lowe, Odessa Texas, Standup Bass (The Award Winning group: Texas Mud)
Tim Mustoe La Grande, Oregon, Percussion, Synth, Lead Guitar
Steve Palousek, Awesome Works.....Holland, Texas, Dobro and Lead
Mike Snider, La Grande Oregon... Banjo Summit Ridge and Houseblend

Special Thanks to:
Photographer Kit Kittle on Buzzards of Steel
My long time friend Robert Mercer, Right Hemisphere Productions, Noguru Entertainment, Van Nuys CA
Ness Michaels and my friends at Sunshine Records Winnipeg, Manitoba

Thank you to Penny Moore (Home For A Bunny Star) for her Web Editing Expertise!


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