I’m sitting on the grass in the shade of two beautiful oak trees listening to Reggie Harris spin his magic of story and song.

The audience of 50 or 60 is mesmerized. This is grassroots music. This is where folk music came from – people gathering on porches and in yards sharing music. As things have opened up I have been to several concerts and two large folk festivals. It has been a celebration with performers and audiences grateful and so happy to be sharing the live musical experience again. At these events I have noticed, as I did before the pandemic shut things down, that most of the audience members have gray hair just as I do. We epitomize the “aging audience” problem.

This is a problem that I have been hearing about for at least two decades and I am sure people have been concerned about it far longer than that. People are worried that the absence of young people signifies a dying genre of music. This is a problem that permeates the arts. In music, promoters and venues for folk, jazz, symphonies, opera and beyond all talk about this issue. It is noticeable at art shows, plays, and book readings as well.

As I became more deeply involved in this world, founding and running an arts organization, putting on concerts and art shows and becoming a folk radio DJ, I have discussed the aging audience problem in meetings, workshops and at a bar or two. These sessions had a similar trajectory. First, a discussion about the age of the attendees at various events, then an expression of concern that our audience would age out and there would be no one left to support our events and finally brainstorming about how to attract younger folks to venues, usually ending in despair about all the failed efforts in this vein in the past.

All this led to a couple of observations. First, over the two decades I have been discussing this issue the audience never got younger but they never got smaller either. In fact, in many cases the audiences seemed to be growing. The second was that as I attended industry conferences such as Folk Alliance International and its regional counterparts, I noticed that the performers were on average much younger than I. Here where the public was not included, the participants fell in to two general categories: industry (DJ’s, concert/festival presenters, music promoters, music companies, etc) and performers. The industry folks often looked like those aging audience members while the performers skewed a generation or two younger.

This led me to two conclusions. First, given the age of the new performers folk music is going to keep coming. Second, that the aging audience concern is overblown. Let’s explore that second assertion a bit.

Experts tell us that the music we identify with and that means the most to us is the music we listen to in our teens and early twenties when we are establishing our adult identities. It is a time of exploring, developing social and romantic relationships and embarking on jobs and careers. I suggest that my case is typical. When young I listened to the popular music of the day for white kids which was largely pop and rock and roll. It was the music that accompanied me when I was driving around, going to parties and dating. It was a mix of songs from Pat Boone (sorry) to Del Shannon to The Rolling Stones. I still love to hear Roy Orbison sing his slightly sappy love songs. At the same time the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights movement exposed me to Pete Seeger, Sam Cooke, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and of course Dylan, Baez and company. And these people made me aware of Woody and Leadbelly and people of that era.

After college I was working a lot and music was largely background. As I got past the family, work, house stage, I came back to music and now had time to explore. I found folk music had much more substance than pop, rock, country, etc. I discovered the world of jazz which was and is mesmerizing. And once I had a bit more time and a bit more money, I started to attend folk and jazz concerts, festivals and clubs. I joined that aging audience. So, I would posit that it isn’t that audiences are aging out of there genres but people are aging IN to them. Yes, I still love Orbison and Chuck Berry and all those, but I have come to appreciate more the depth and richness of both the music and the content of folk music in particular, and I am grateful for all those young performers who are continually reinventing the form. I expect that as people reach a certain age and sophistication they, too, will to age in.

 

 

Ron Cooke is the author of a book of short stories and poems entitled Obituaries and Other Lies (available at Amazon); writes a well-received blog (ASSV4U.com/blog); and hosts a weekly radio show called Music They Don’t Want You to Hear on KTAL-LP in Las Cruces, NM.  He is also a founding director of A Still Small Voice 4U, a not for profit supporting arts, culture and community that presents folk concerts, sponsors artists, festivals and community groups. Ron is an avid cyclist, racer, blogger, sculptor and ne’er-do-well.