In Austin, seeking the next big thing in folk

Moving music, messages of strength mark forums

By Joe Gross, Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 12, 2006

It wasn't long after the 18th annual International Folk Alliance conference began at the Austin Hilton hotel Friday morning that an eternal question was asked: What is folk music?

That ongoing head-scratcher was the title of one of the first panels at the conference, which draws thousands of musicians, record labels, promoters, instrument makers, agents, CD manufacturers and distributors. It continues through Tuesday morning.

Although nobody on the panel pretended there was a definitive answer, Austin musician Mark Rubin, known for a long stint with the against-the-grain folk band the Bad Livers, dove right into the fray.

"I don't like the term 'folk,' " Rubin said. "I like the term 'vernacular.' It's the artistic expression of an unexamined cultural heritage, music the people learned to play because not to play it was to be left out of the fun."

"Fun" was a key component of the weekend, along with networking and hunting for the next big thing in traditional and progressive acoustic sounds.

"If you're in my position," said Ken Irwin, co-founder of folk label Rounder Records, "you come here to check out new artists. You never know when you'll hear someone playing in the hall and think, 'What was that?' "

You could find plenty of folks playing in the halls, as well as in the hotel rooms, which hosted both official showcases and dozens of unofficial "guerrilla" showcases.

At one Friday show, Pittsburgh musician Kevin Mitchell had a surprising reaction to Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez's twanged-up, country-blues version of one of Taylor's earliest hits, "Wild Thing."

"In a way, I thought nobody wrote this," Mitchell said. "I just thought it was out there — a classic, like 'Happy Birthday.' "

One of the most powerful of Friday's performances came from Madrigaia, an a cappella group of seven French-Canadian women from Winnipeg, Manitoba. A percussionist augmented the singer's pounding poles, tapping sticks and stomping feet. Singing songs from around the globe, sung in as many languages, their intricate harmonies were gorgeous, and their tightly timed, syncopated movements were unique and clever. They were the kind of discovery that people come to this conference to make: the act you've never heard of that delivers the most dynamic show you've seen in ages.

Saturday's keynote address was another highlight. Each of the three speakers — Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, author and Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman, and Arlo Guthrie — was greeted with a standing ovation by about 300 in attendance. They delivered a unified message: in times like these, a single performer, with the right song and message can make a difference.

Soft-spoken, yet purpose-filled Yarrow led off the address in seemingly rote fashion, recounting the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s. But when he tied the '60s remembrances to today's situation of a war in Iraq that he said has "no rational basis," he made a case for the patriotism of dissent and talked of how proud he was to get hate mail after he apologized to the people of Vietnam at a concert in Hanoi. He termed his unscripted talk "an invocation to storm the administration building" and said music "has the power to make us all one country again."

Friedman moved from his well-rehearsed campaign stump rhetoric to read a touching chapter from new book "Texas Hold 'Em" about the passing of his parents and then put the book down to announce that "MLK is not a street, JFK is not an airport, RFK is not a stadium. These were real people who dreamed a little bigger, dreamed a little kinder."

Finally, an animated Guthrie, who is not considered just a member of the first family of song at this folk music conference, but of the first family of America, winged it on biblical parables to come to the wildly received conclusion that it's much harder to make a difference when peace and love is all around. "There's never been a time like this one, in a world that sucks, when you could do so little and make it mean so much," he said in a hipster cadence.

Thinking back to the idealism of his youth, when his audiences were made up of folks just like him, the son of Woody Guthrie said, "This might be the world we've been asking for all along."

Additional material from Lynn Margolis.