Folk Music: Sing Love, Not Protest

FOLK MUSIC Sing Love, Not Protest I have nothing to sing you that you’ve never heard;

I’ve got nothing to teach you that you’ve never learned.

The lines are from Look to the Rain, and their author, 16-year-old Singer Janis Ian, says that they define “exactly where it’s at. When I walk onstage, man, all I can give them is me.” It is all that most of today’s young singers in the folk groove can give. Traditional folk singers—including the modern figure of Bob Dylan—have usually been purveyors of a musical heritage, chroniclers of their time, protesters against injustice. But today’s troubadours are turning away from protest. Their gaze is shifting from the world around them to the realms within. “They are taking stock of what they are,” says one folk buff, “purging themselves until they feel sensitive and pure.”

The result is that race, war and politics are becoming peripheral themes. What counts more is the intensely personal vision that deals with a romantic quest for love and “self-realization.” Janis Ian launched her precocious career with Society’s Child, a bitter plaint about a white girl pressured into breaking up with her Negro boy friend, but has since concentrated more on what she calls “mood songs.” Arlo Guthrie, 20, expresses antiwar sentiment in Alice’s Restaurant (TIME, Jan. 12), but he wryly folds it into the overall theme of his own picaresque adventures with bureaucratic authority. The trend is summed up by Tim Hardin, 26, a sometime performer and gifted songwriter (If I Were a Carpenter, The Lady Came from Baltimore) who lives and composes at a mountain hideaway in Colorado: “I’m too involved with my personal life to write about the world.”

No Urging. If any message emerges from the music, it is “Wake up and be,” a refrain of Richie Havens’ No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed. But in another song, Havens himself says:

Don’t listen to me

When I talk about the love that

I understand,

‘Cause I’d say things that took me All my life to be.

The fact is, there often is no message. Havens, 27, a Brooklyn-born Negro who performs with compelling fervor, exemplifies the tendency of today’s singers to avoid urging anything on the listener, but to try to embody an emotional state that makes its point indirectly. California’s Tim Buckley, 21, says that he prefers to sing for audiences who “just want to feel someone’s pain and happiness.” And like most of his colleagues, he is confident that, as he intones in the Larry Beckett lyric for The Magician:

When I sing I can bring Everything on the wing Flying down from dizzy air To the ground, because I care.

Heroes in Seaweed. But can they bring it down? With some exceptions, the musical element in the performances of these troubadours is strangely disappointing. Words are what interests them, as is obvious from their undistinguished melodies. At best, the lyrics attain a gentle, sometimes mystical eloquence. Leonard Cohen, 33, an established Canadian poet and novelist (The Spice-Box of Earth, Beautiful Losers) who recently began performing his songs, tells of Suzanne, who “leads you to the river” and shows you

There are heroes in the seaweed, There are children in the morning; They are leaning out for love.

Hardin sings of waking from a dream of freedom and seeing “the room, a parental plan for a childhood tomb.”

Too often, however, the new folk singers try to commune without communicating, and the result is cosmic banality such as Havens’ Inside of Him:

I have learned-that the birds fly, And the fish swim . . . And man walks inside of him. Blurring things over with an effulgence of religiosity, they sometimes become self-indulgent; they presume an assent from listeners that they do not earn, an understanding that they cannot specify. When this happens, they may confirm the convinced, but probably will not persuade many who are not yet initiated into the love generation.

It has been said of the late Woody Guthrie, one of the great folk singers of an earlier generation and the father of Arlo Guthrie, that he was the root, that younger singers after him were the branches; and that the flowers were yet to come. In a sense, today’s new singers are the flowers.