This is not a tirade against any economic system but an acknowledgement of how it impacted the "folk revival".

It was "savvy businessmen" like Ralph Peer who shaped what we know about roots music in the USA. They were capitalists and honoring their creed they monetized anything they could. That is how the system works. They saw a market, created a narrative by which to commodify it and presented it to an audience that was happy to receive it. The whole "folk scare" came about when folks began to realize what was going on. Fresh faced, trained singers took old rough songs and polished them up for middle class audiences. Some folks still listen to that music and it is quite good by pop standards. Others, however, searched for the sources of songs like Tom Dula, and that opened a whole new realm of music that has not only persisted but has grown in audience at albeit a much slower rate than most entrepreneurs might tolerate.
Tangential music to the old songs opened up the world of fiddle and banjo tunes we all know as folks explored the music that made up the community. Once there were many styles of fiddle. For a long time old time fiddle all began to sound the same as folks learned from revival recordings of some individuals who became quite popular. Again, the range of fiddle styles is diversifying as influences have grown over the years that the revival has persisted and is no longer a revival but a movement, a subgenre of "Americana" another marketing term.

What’s most intriguing to me is the point that the revival was so heavily curated. Like any kind of revival, the adherents tend to latch on to certain aspects of the thing they admire and then build a world around them. The resulting product is not really a faithful reproduction of the past or a true continuation of the traditions but more of an interpretation.

It’s been long enough since the folk revival that the event itself has now become part of history. I think it’s often wrongly assumed that the musicians of that era were doing the same thing as the musicians they idolized and that they represented an unbroken link to the older playing styles.

I don’t think that being a savvy businessman is inherently evil, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to curate a genre to present it to an audience. I’ve been making the argument elsewhere that this is exactly what happened with the establishment of the Old Time genre. Rather than attempting to paint a rosy picture of folk music or Old Time where everyone was a pure source of Everyman artistry that reaches back to the dawn of time, I prefer to acknowledge it as a product of an era.

Edit: I meant to add that in my view, if we acknowledge that Old Time wasn’t really a true snapshot of “down-home” culture from the mountains but rather a nostalgic interpretation of it engineered by record companie, it makes the definition of the genre clearer and distinguishes a commercial category of music from the overall tradition of American fiddle playing. 

The argument is made periodically that Old Time is or was the traditional music played in the Appalachian mountains by the people that lived there. Proponents of that theory say that the recordings were simply snapshots of what players were doing at a given time and that it’s not the recordings that identify the music but rather the style of playing. The argument is also made that a player can only understand the music and play it properly if a birth certificate shows that birth occurred in the right zip code. Anyone not born and raised in Appalachia is viewed as an outsider and a threat to the purity of the culture regardless of understanding of the music or playing ability. When the origins of the music in Europe and the influence of African interpretation are brought up, it’s typically dismissed as an attempt to somehow co-opt the history through academia. The interpretation of Old Time as a purely Appalachian tradition also establishes one region as the source and guardian of the music while ignoring (at least in argument) any contributions that were made from other regions.

The fact that the Appalachian mountains go south from Maine to Alabama, at least, tells you that what passes for old time in the revival is a small sampling of the existent music in that geographical region. There is a wide range of musical styles historically found in that expanse. Collectors like the late Garry Harrison, who worked outside that region amassed a wealth of great songs and tunes from Illinois. A lot of the music collected in Kentucky did not really come from the most mountainous regions of that state. There are collections of New York old time music and Indiana old time. Pennsylvania had tons of fiddlers located throughout the state and today many are still playing tunes collected by the late Dr. Samuel Bayard, whom I had the great pleasure meeting over a half century ago. I had the honor to be asked to take his place as a judge after he retired from his professorship and Penn State for the state fiddle championship. I later played bluegrass with several bands through those extensive mountains in PA. Fiddlers would come out of the woodwork back then. They could pick up the Grand Ole Opry on their AM radios as well as the Wheeling Jamboree. I met old timers back then had played on small radio stations in towns around the region.
Old time music flourished in the primarily agrarian days. Chicken Nisely ran the Laurel Run Lodge, the last building on the paved part of the road that ran to Blaine. He touted himself as a Curly Fox man, and boy howdy he could sound just like him. I met a fellow playing mandolin in A cross tuning. Said he learned from playing along with his dad back home in Galax, VA.
Old time music is a live and different today. A lot more book learning in the fiddling and repertories that are far more extensive. Harold Carney was the first fiddler I spent a lot of time with and we routinely played 245 tunes. Once in a while he could conjure another one from his memory. Most fiddlers probably didn't have that many.
That's enough of memory lane for a while.

quote:

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Originally posted by RobBob

The fact that the Appalachian mountains go south from Maine to Alabama, at least, tells you that what passes for old time in the revival is a small sampling of the existent music in that geographical region. There is a wide range of musical styles historically found in that expanse. Collectors like the late Garry Harrison, who worked outside that region amassed a wealth of great songs and tunes from Illinois. A lot of the music collected in Kentucky did not really come from the most mountainous regions of that state. There are collections of New York old time music and Indiana old time. Pennsylvania had tons of fiddlers located throughout the state and today many are still playing tunes collected by the late Dr. Samuel Bayard, whom I had the great pleasure meeting over a half century ago. I had the honor to be asked to take his place as a judge after he retired from his professorship and Penn State for the state fiddle championship. I later played bluegrass with several bands through those extensive mountains in PA. Fiddlers would come out of the woodwork back then. They could pick up the Grand Ole Opry on their AM radios as well as the Wheeling Jamboree. I met old timers back then had played on small radio stations in towns around the region.
Old time music flourished in the primarily agrarian days. Chicken Nisely ran the Laurel Run Lodge, the last building on the paved part of the road that ran to Blaine. He touted himself as a Curly Fox man, and boy howdy he could sound just like him. I met a fellow playing mandolin in A cross tuning. Said he learned from playing along with his dad back home in Galax, VA.
Old time music is a live and different today. A lot more book learning in the fiddling and repertories that are far more extensive. Harold Carney was the first fiddler I spent a lot of time with and we routinely played 245 tunes. Once in a while he could conjure another one from his memory. Most fiddlers probably didn't have that many.
That's enough of memory lane for a while.

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I think we're in agreement for the most part. The fiddle music that was/is popular in various regions throughout the country is a much broader array of music than what's in the scope of the revival movement. I have been arguing for a more exclusive definition of Old Time that aligns more with the selection of music that was promoted by the recording industry, partly because so many of those recordings became canon for fiddlers who play what they describe as Old Time now, but also partly because the product that was sold was NOT aimed at the people who played the music at home but rather toward people who were completely unfamiliar with the music. The popularity of the old recordings occurred, not because everyone in town wanted to buy a record made by their local fiddlers, but because city folk were a little tired of all the seismic changes going on in music and in the world in general and gravitated toward a sense of nostalgia, even if it was somewhat artificial. The people actually living in the mountains didn't really need the records, as they were still playing the music themselves.

I like to distinguish American fiddle music from Old Time. To me, American fiddle music covers the wider geographical range and the historical traditions that co-mingled or remained in isolation in many areas throughout the country. Old Time made use of a decent amount of the repertoire, but it presented it in a different way to the public.

My great-great-grandfather was a farmer in his youth before becoming an orchestral violinist. Once he was injured and couldn't play properly, he pivoted to  violin making, repair, and sales. Even though he did a lot of business with touring violinists and local orchestra players, he would open his shop up to players at the end of the business day periodically and have a jam. Although he couldn't play orchestral repertoire, he would still do his best to play fiddle tunes, music I suspect he learned in his youth in rural PA and OH. I think you could genuinely call the jams at his shop back porch music. But I doubt that anyone called it Old Time, a term that was more popular with the people who were buying records in bigger cities. For those playing the music at home, it was just "fiddle music" or "dance music."

To be fair, though - when people use the term "Appalachia(n)" in relation to culture, they mean, often vaguely, some mountainous, or at least, hilly, region of what they understand - again, often vaguely - to be the "Southern" US; they're not thinking of Maine (let alone New Brunswick, which encompasses the north-eastern end of the Appalachians). That said, it's my impression that when people talk about American Old Time, they tend to mean that "Appalachian"-y, "Southern"-y stuff, as if all the other stuff didn't exist, its Oldness and Timeyness notwithstanding.