Folk 101

Folk music is more than just a guy (or gal) with an acoustic guitar, strumming out a tale of love, woe, history or politics. The very best folk songs illustrate a deeper truth, and that's how they get to be part of our shared culture. Just about everybody learns a few verses of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," but his original version contains some populist (and, some would say, subversive) verbal barrages you probably never knew existed. An equally counterculture folksinger, Bob Dylan, takes the protest song into the modern era on his way to becoming the voice of his generation with "The Times They Are A-Changin'." And Gordon Lightfoot solemnly recounts the tale of an ill-fated freighter steaming through dangerous waters in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

In Next Steps, we visit Cuba, Canada…and cotton fields.

Where would folk music be without the "I love you, babe, don't want to hurt you, but I gotta go" song? Butterscotch-voiced Tom Paxton wrote and sings one of the best of its kind in "The Last Thing On My Mind." Canadian Bruce Cockburn gets political and goes ballistic — in a metaphorical way — against a Guatemalan regime that preys on innocents and children in "If I Had a Rocket Launcher." And Jose Martí, Cuba's national poet, is credited with the lyrics for the often-recorded "Guantanamera" (the literal translation of which, incidentally, is "woman of Guantánamo"), recorded here by Pete Seeger.

Freight trains, road kill, and the rarest motorcycle in history…all that and more, coming up in Deep Cuts.

Not all folk songs have words, and not all folk songs, strictly speaking, are folk songs. For instance the melody for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" was originally part of Bach's Cantata No. 147, but Leo Kottke has arranged it for solo acoustic guitar and dropped it squarely in the middle of the folk world. Ralph McTell's "Streets of London," a world-weary ode to the vagrants, homeless, and other forgotten souls in Britain's capital city, jump-started his career; the song was later transformed into a punk anthem by the Anti-Nowhere League. And Canadian folk-rockers Great Big Sea spun a Celtic-flavored sailing yarn of lovers separated — but not for very much longer — in "Boston and St. John's."

Many people, especially academics and musicologists, have debated just exactly what constitutes folk music; leave it to a science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, to come up with the most elegant answer: "It's when folks make music, silly!" Our Folk 101 Essentials will take you from "The City of New Orleans" to the "Streets of London" with stops along the way at "Boston and St. John's" and "Washington Square", and we've rounded up performers not only from the good old U.S. of A., but also from north of the border and from across the sea. Some of these tunes go back hundreds of years, some were written in the new millennium, but they all share the simple human impulse rooted in our DNA and the history of a hundred million campfires: everybody has a story to tell.