I’ve long thought that the only way for folk traditions to survive is through the understanding that each voice that touches the music within a tradition necessarily changes it and always has. If we want the old songs to continue, it requires carefully balancing the impulse for change and mutation with the tendency to preserve our calcified roots. Singers must weigh the understanding that growth and expansion are required when learning what has been, deeply, for all living things to continue and to survive time. Only dead things can’t change. Ask a flower or a butterfly…

Some say tradition is antithetical to invention, that the work be frozen at a single point of time long past. And, I disagree with that false dichotomy. Instead, I am interested in the ways that tradition thrives and evolves across cultures and genres, both in the United States and abroad. Here, we’ve been driven to assimilation and cultural compromise for the sake of the ease of mass production. Linguistically and socially, we’ve often abraded our cultural shapes into something unrecognizable to our forebears. But we still mix our artistic ingredients of the past, to varying degrees of success, with elements looking forward. Look at the recent success of musical acts featuring politically-charged expressions of identity: Kneecap, Kendrick LaMar, M.I.A., and P#$$y Riot are a few of the more shocking examples. Though the music feels contemporary, the themes remain: Folk in opposition to extant power structures, with themes of resilience and resistance threaded throughout.

I used to hear it described that in the US, we’re a “melting pot”, but that metaphor misses the fact that all the people involved can still taste the essential “ingredients” that shape and flavor our musical appreciations. From Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” to the tubas in Mariachi music, we hear the influence of all of them. In Appalachia alone, we find Scots-Irish, Indigenous, Jewish, and African ingredients in the music. And it feels “authentic” only because of the embrace of that cross-pollination, engendered by the people who brought and carried their influences to the music as an expression of lived experience. We hear it all, even when we don’t acknowledge it.

I promise we tradition-bearers aren’t solely relegated to the days of yore, or frozen static in the bygones… despite what ethnomusicologists would like us to believe. There’s no such thing as purity in anything old enough to be out of living memory, really. Even empires have always been influenced by their colonized peoples. We live, and love, and adapt what we’ve learned, each generation finding new ways to both keep up with the times, and remain true in essential nature. We want to create something sincere at every step, and we hope to still carry the kernels of our core forward while bringing them along to new ears that can be inspired by something both timeless and of the now.

I’ve belonged to a wide variety of overlapping and complementary song and dance communities for the last several decades, and am now both a traditional singer AND a writer of original compositions in traditional styles. The lifelong exposure to this combination serves me, not only in the breadth of exposure, but it also heightens my awareness of the gaps in my understanding of the music forms. Did I know that an Irish jig-step and a North African Bedouin pulse both contain 9/8 time signatures? Not when I first discovered either. And my access to both was entirely because there were openings for me as a living inheritor of those traditions, at the literal feet of my elders. My job then became to find my own entry points with their songs and stories and to embrace them wholly, while also listening to contemporary sources. The work became singing the songs that were given to me in the aural tradition AND then by exposure to popular culture and music. Movies, TV, old books, and grandma’s sheet music all influenced me. (Man, am I a sucker for Motown records!) I was shaped by all of that, and also by great singers in houses and halls, people I both saw and shared evenings with.

Each of these was shared with me because I was an interested and available young person, in both. Because of that eagerness, their musical treasures were handed to me to steward. I’ve spent a lifetime contextualizing the old and watching up-and-coming musicians fold seamlessly into the fabric of 21st century folk music. And I’ve seen those that can’t embrace both the past and the present wither in their hunger for relevance.

Because of this I learned that both directions in the folk song world are necessary for integration into the tradition. I’d return to the idea that a song within or brought into the tradition has to feel both universal in relevance and concept, and rooted as well in the specific to become tangible, real.

For several of those spaces in which tradition shone brightest, there were beacons of heritage holding change and modernity at bay by delving deeper into historical primacy. Many a ballad singer has scolded new recordings of old songs for using “non-traditional” rhythms, construction, instruments, or stylings. Likewise, many a songwriter has dismissed something as sounding overdone. Neither viewpoint is the whole story, though. 

Academics seem to tell us that the older something is, the more valuable or true it is, for that point in the cultural continuum. The collectors cling to “correct” tomes, forgetting they’re only one small moment in the stream of music that people have shared throughout history. But I think there’s room for both depth and breadth in folk music. Traditional singers, who seem to have no thought about how the stories still apply, or radio folks, who seek only the novel, could both benefit from finding the jewels in their other camps. The oldest instrument is the voice, after all. And the stories we sing are at the core of our shared understanding of each other. It’s living people who’ve always changed the words for comprehension’s sake. We must allow ourselves the possibility that the music might be fundamentally different with each passing moment.

I was brought as a babe in arms to folk music gatherings, where the very old and the very new were celebrated for what they were, but also very much separately from each other. The gifts of music and dance, as hoped for by the passers of the music in continuity, were kept separated from the “fresh, new” songs, but each were expressing the same longing, the same losses. Heartaches and hopes have always gone somewhere. 

The message is that we must choose sides. Even while stuck between the nascent brilliant poets who make their living popularizing contemporary trends, and the warmth of the ancient, many seek a sparkle of notoriety or fame. And therein lies a trap waiting for singers.

Steeped in the old ways of song and dance transmission by listening to living people I was also enveloped in the bustle of contemporary songwriting. It offered a ticket into an industry that saw tradition as tired, old, and therefore no longer relevant. But I found my path was a bridge crossing both: first by proximity, and then by choice. It became my task to continue learning and loving those traditions, but in a way that felt emotionally honest. So how to do this? I looked for where there was space to have both.

I look around and see young people in want of a tradition that relates to them. Grandma’s story of a forced marriage no longer applies, but political dissent is always pertinent. Those in power have always wanted to be the final arbiters of value or importance. They’ve always told us what stories we should want. And sometimes that formula doesn’t feel true or answer our human need to connect.

Media moguls and politicians seek to make music palatable, using a formula that hasn’t ruffled feathers very hard in the past. Once re-released to people, they’re often the stories that didn’t feed us enough on the way. We end up with telephone hold music at insurance companies while the elite take the teeth out of songs that answer our collective pain. We’re left holding the bag. And our points of entrance into tradition are sanitized of the raw emotional quality as shared across the millennia of human experience with our ancestors as expressed through folk music in all its expressions.

But folk music isn’t safe. It lasts because it still carries the weight of what needs to be shared and it includes the ugly and the hard parts of folks’ experiences too. In the Northwest Folklife festival in Seattle, 500K people gather each year, sharing a wide variety of human expression, for free. And it’s that variety that makes it still relevant  across time and cultural geography. The folk songs survive by acknowledging harsh human truths that plague people across every culture in history… As valuable as contributions from septuagenarians are, the only way to continue it, to make it available to the 20-somethings now, is to let it start with some rough edges.

Folk music needs that sharpness, that surprise, that relatability, or it fades into oblivion. So when there are songs that answer some unspoken desire for survival and reality, they carry the messages forward. It’s this that makes old songs still relevant, and makes new ones sound old and well-worn. They’ve been changed by time, and the many people who’ve sung them. As my friend Sadie says, they’re worn smooth by all those voices that change them, tiny bits at a time. So, how to keep a folk music tradition alive? We have to make space for it to live, include, and expand, and the song carriers have to have the space to find themselves in the carrying. Those are the songs I remember, and keep singing. This is how the tradition lives in me, ever changing: by changing the “or” to “and”.

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Amelia Hogan is a San Francisco-based singer of traditional and contemporary Celtic Folk music with three folk-chart-topping solo projects, and numerous collaborative works. With her haunting, honey-toned voice, she tells the stories of songs from the Irish, Scottish, British, and American song traditions. Her performances are both in the Irish music tradition of Sean-Nós, or “old style,” a highly lyrical a cappella tradition, and also with accompaniment.  She is the podcast host of “MixedMedia_Talks”, recently joined the Folkworks writing staff, and is also a painter and mixed media artist. Amelia fosters a deep love of community building in music education, and is committed to sharing how music can inspire spirituality and how spirituality moves people to make music. She can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and at www.ameliahogan.com, or in her San Francisco neighborhood with her husband and ghost-cat, sipping excellent tea.