Rocking the boat: What makes a folk song a folk song?
January 30, 2025
Bill Taylor writes: Does Bob Dylan calling it “the greatest song ever written” count?
That’s what he said about Wichita Lineman, composed in 1968 by Jimmy Webb for Glen Campbell, who turned it into a Top 20 pop hit.
Be that as it may, for my money this, especially Webb’s own stripped-down version, is a quintessential contemporary folk song.
As Billy Joel put it: “A simple song about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts. You can see someone working in construction or working in a field, a migrant worker or a truck driver, and you may think you know what’s going on inside him, but you don’t.”
(Folk is where you find it: Image by Bill Taylor)
Webb was apparently inspired to write the song – which he set outside Wichita, Kansas – as he was driving on a blisteringly hot day across a remote and featureless part of Oklahoma. A long way from anywhere, he saw a telephone-line maintenance worker high up on a pole checking on the wire.
Webb presents him as lonely, far from home and isolated from his girlfriend or wife or maybe his whole family.
It’s a sentiment shared by Ralph McTell’s From Clare to Here:
or Missing You, written by Jimmy MacCarthy and sung by Christy Moore:
Wichita Lineman is also about a responsible man, dedicated to his job and putting off his own needs to do it properly. The dignity of labour.
I can see a link to something like The Work of the Weavers, as sung by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem:Written in the 1840s by David Shaw, a Forfar weaver, it’s regarded now as a classic folk song. But I’ve also seen it described as “a wonderful little trade propaganda song,” which Shaw used to perform at trade and political-reform meetings.
If it wasnae for the weavers, what would you do?
You wouldn'a hae the cloth that's made of wool
You wouldn'a hae a coat of the black or the blue
If it wasnae for the work o’ the weavers
Not too hard to transpose that into:
If it wasnae for the linemen, what would you do?
You wouldn’a hae the phone connection true
You couldn’a talk to me and neither me to you
If it wasnae for the work o’ the linemen.
So maybe folk is where you find it.
I’ve argued here in the past for Bruce Springsteen’s Racing in the Street as a good example of a modern folk songs :
The Springsteen video has been removed from that piece for reasons unknown, so here’s a live performance:
In a similar vein, Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning 1952 (my favourite version, with Nanci Griffith), transmutes the ton-up world of 1960s motorcycle tearaways into a folk epic:
And for further comparison (with real, four-legged horsepower), Turpin Hero, which The Traditional Tune Archive website says has its origins in an 18th century broadsheet ballad. Wonderfully sung here by Barry Skinner:
Springsteen is one of the hardest rockers of all time but take away everything but perhaps a couple of guitars and a piano… it’s not for nothing that The Ghost of Tom Joad netted him a Grammy in 1995 for best contemporary folk album.
I see parallels between The River, the title track of Springsteen’s 1980 double-album, and Ralph McTell’s Factory Girl. Different countries, different circumstances, different lives. But the ethos is the same:
Here’s Springsteen not only singing The River, but talking about it, too. Folk music? I’d say so. And so would he. Bob Dylan remains silent on the matter:
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Out on a limb here but I’ve never liked the song. That’s not the same as saying it’s not a folk song, of course . As I mentioned at the Facebook group, you deserve credit for through your well-argued piece without a single reference to the Big Bill Broonzy quite about folk music and horses
Posted by: Colin Randall | January 30, 2025 at 11:06 AM