American Folk Music As Tactical Media
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‘Svec in this powerfully revisionist book shows how the HENRY ADAM SVEC folk revival’s communications milieus, metaphors, and, in a brilliant reading of Bob Dylan, its songs, had already discovered that “the folk and the machine are often one and the same”. From Lomax‘s computer-generated Global American Jukebox and Dylan’s Telecaster to today’s music apps and YouTube, from the Hootenanny to the Peoples’ Mic, the folk process, then as now, Svec argues, reclaims our humanity, reinventing media technologies to become both instruments Media as Tactical Music American Folk of resistance and fields for imagining new societies, new Folk Music selves, and new futures.‘ – Robert Cantwell, author of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival ‘Svec’s analysis of the American folk revival begins from the premise that acoustic guitars, banjos, and voices have as Tactical much to teach us about technological communication and ends, beautifully, with an uncovering of “the folk” within our contemporary media environments. What takes center stage, however, is the Hootenanny, both as it informs the author’s own folk-archaeological laboratory of imaginary media and as it continues to instantiate political community – at a Media time when the need for protest, dissent, and collectivity is particularly acute.‘ – Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara HENRY ADAM SVEC is Assistant Professor of Communica- tion Studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. ISBN 978-94-629-8494-3 HENRY ADAM SVEC Amsterdam AUP.nl University 9 789462 984943 Press AUP_recursions.reeks_SVEC_rug11.7mm_v03.indd 1 09-11-17 14:04 American Folk Music as Tactical Media The book series Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques provides a platform for cuttingedge research in the field of media culture studies with a particular focus on the cultural impact of media technology and the materialities of communication. The series aims to be an internationally significant and exciting opening into emerging ideas in media theory ranging from media materialism and hardware-oriented studies to ecology, the post- human, the study of cultural techniques, and recent contributions to media archaeology. The series revolves around key themes: – The material underpinning of media theory – New advances in media archaeology and media philosophy – Studies in cultural techniques These themes resonate with some of the most interesting debates in international media studies, where non-representational thought, the technicity of knowledge formations and new materialities expressed through biological and technological developments are changing the vocabularies of cultural theory. The series is also interested in the mediatic conditions of such theoretical ideas and developing them as media theory. Editorial Board – Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton) – Anna Tuschling (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) – Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia) American Folk Music as Tactical Media by Henry Adam Svec Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: Julian Higuerey Núñez Cover design: Suzan Beijer Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 494 3 e-isbn 978 90 4853 585 9 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462984943 nur 670 © H.A. Svec / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Permission to quote several Bob Dylan and Guthrie and Seeger compositions is gratefully acknowledged. For the complete credits, see the extenstion of the copyright page on p. 175. Table of Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 11 1. Alan Lomax’s Deep Rivers of Digitality 29 2. Pete Seeger’s Time-Biased Tactics 53 3. Bob Dylan’s Noisy Faces 71 4. A Folk Approach to Imaginary Media 97 5. Another Authentic Folk Is Possible 107 6. American Folk Music as Strategic Media 127 Epilogue 143 Notes 147 Lyrical Credits 175 References 177 Index 195 Acknowledgments Like the songs of the so-called folk, scholarship is an inherently collabo- rative production, and I am indebted to numerous teachers, colleagues, scholars, and scenes. I began this work as a doctoral student in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and I would first like to thank my disserta- tion advisor, Nick Dyer-Witheford, for path-changing introductions to the Marxist tradition and digital culture, and for his unflagging support of this project. The wide range of approaches to media practiced in FIMS at large has also deeply marked my thinking. I am especially indebted to Alison Hearn, for a rigorous introduction to media and cultural studies and for ongoing mentorship; Bernd Frohmann, for helping me and others into German media theory with spirit and generosity; and Keir Keightley, for countless productive chats in the early stages. I was also indelibly af- fected by courses taught by Tim Blackmore, Jonathan Burston, Norma Coates, Carol Farber, Michael Gardiner (in the Sociology Department), Anabel Quan-Haase, Sharon Sliwinski, and Warren Steele. I acknowledge the support of the Ontario Graduate Scholarships that I received over the course of my studies. At the University of Western Ontario, I also benefited from close proximity to a strong group of fellow graduate students. In no particular order, Elise Thorburn, Owen Livermore, Kamilla Petrick, Jeff Preston, Lee McGuigan, Kyle Asquith, Derek Noon, Leslie Meier, Michael Daubs, Brian Brown, Trent Cruz, David Jackson, Christopher Cwynar, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, Liam Cole Young, and Tiara Sukhan – each heard or read at least small bits of my arguments as they developed. My palimpsest-like sense of what ‘media studies’ is owes quite a lot to this vibrant community, wherein informal group study of various volumes of Das Kapital, close readings of Innis’s work on the fur trade in Canada, much Guitar Hero play, ‘bad’ film screenings, and intense sessions of the epic board game Diplomacy at the Dean’s house all coexisted and cohered into a single world of sensemaking. A few times over the course of writing this book, I have had the oppor- tunity to work as an artist in residence. Twice I attended residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, where progress was made during very different stages (first, at the dissertation proposal stage, then at the book proposal stage). I thank Althea Thauberger, Michael Taussig, Imre Szeman, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, and everyone else for inspiration and energy 8 AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC AS TACTICAL MEDIA in Alberta. I also thank Matt Sarty and the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon, where I was an artist in residence in the spring of 2013. I continued work on the project at two other academic institutions. At the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where I was the Media Artist in Residence and an instructor from 2014-2015, I owe thanks to Lauren Cruikshank, Robert Gray, Mark Anthony Jarman, Erin Morton, Ross Leckie, Mike Nason, and Scott Preston (and, on the North Side, Nick Cobham and Eben Arnold). Revisions were also made in Jackson, Mississippi, where I am now Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Millsaps College. In particular, I thank my colleagues in the English Department – Curtis Coats, Ralph Eubanks, Laura Franey, Eric Griffin, Anne MacMaster, and Michael Pickard – for their support. I also thank all the librarians and archivists – especially Don Fleming at the Association for Cultural Equity and Todd Harvey at the Library of Congress. And I am grateful for the organisational efforts of folks at Struts Gallery, Gallery Connexion, Third Space, and VibraFusionLab, which made my research on ‘imaginary media’ possible. Parts of this research have been presented at meetings of the Canadian Communication Association, the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, the Canadian Cultural Studies Association, and the Pop Culture Association of Canada. I am appreciative to all co-panelists and attendees for their questions and for their own scholarship. Parts of this book have also been published elsewhere: chapter 2 is a revised and extended version of ‘Folk Media: Alan Lomax’s Deep Digitality’, which was published in the Canadian Journal of Communication; chapter 3 is an extended version of ‘Pete Seeger’s Mediatized Folk’, which was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies; and bits of chapters 5 and 7 were published as ‘iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media’ in the journal Fibreculture. I thank the editors for permission to republish the work here in altered and extended form, and I thank the reviewers at those venues. Of course, you would not be reading this book at all if not for everyone at Amsterdam University Press. First, resounding thanks must go to the editorial board at Recursions – Jussi Parikka, Anna Tuschling, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young – for seeing promise in my proposal and first draft, and for their regenerative criticism. It is a thrill to be part of this series. I would also like to thank commissioning editor Maryse Elliott for her time and attention to detail. The anonymous reviewers have made this work much stronger than it would have been otherwise. Hearty thanks go to Mitchell Akiyama, Marc Finch, and Michael J. Kramer, too, for closely reading and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9 commenting on the manuscript in the home stretch. (Any mistakes or omissions, of course, are my own.) I thank Eleanor King for persuading me, at a decisive moment, to stick with this project. I thank WL Altman, Adrian McKerracher, Penny Smart, Misha Bower, Andrew Penner, Bridget Moser, Evan Brodie, Sam Shelstad, D’Arcy Wilson, Jenny Mitchell, and Erin Brandenberg, for various forms of encouragement.