Revolution Rock

Pete Seeger Week Part Three

To my mind, there are three important periods in the 20th century history of American folk music: 1932-1942 in Washington D.C., 1955-1965 in New York City, and 1974-1984 in London, U.K. In the first period, academics and folklorists began to collect and record the songs and stories of long overlooked Americans and spurred on the careers of the likes of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Leadbelly. The second period encompasses the folk revival of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, leading to the careers of Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, and many others. In the last, British rockers shed the excesses of post-Beatles pop music to return to more a accessible, grassroots/Do-It-Yourself approach to music and politics. So, yeah, I'm making the argument here that The Clash -- four punks from Ladbroke Grove -- were essentially an American folk act.

Consider:

Oh what will you give me?
Say the sad bells of Rhymney.
Is there hope for the future?
Cry the brown bells of Merthyr.
Who made the mine owner?
Say the black bells of Rhondda.
And who robbed the miner?
Cry the grim bells of Blaina.
-- From "The Bells of Rhymney," words from "Gwalia Deserta" by Idris Davies, music by Pete Seeger


You owe me a move
Say the bells of St. Groove
Come on and show me
Say the bells of Old Bowie
When I am fitter
Say the bells of Gary Glitter
No one but you and I
Say the bells of Prince Far-I
-- From "Clash City Rockers" by Strummer/Jones


Certainly, the punk era had it's share of protest songs in the form of "God Save the Queen" or "Straight to Hell," just as Seeger's "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" or Phil Och's "I Ain't Marching Any More" give a taste of punk's anger. And American folk tunes turn up on all manner of punk records: Nirvana did Leadbelly's "In the Pines," Billy Bragg does "Which Side Are You On?" and an entire record of previously unrecorded Guthrie songs, and my city's own Violent Femmes produced a seminal punk record on mainly acoustic instruments. Greil Marcus once called Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and Elvis Costello's King of America -- two records steeped in the folk tradition -- two of the "quietest punk records ever made."

Both Pete Seeger and The Clash's Joe Strummer sought aspects of the universal in the music of other cultures, merging their own folk traditions with those of Africa and Jamaica, Germany and Spain, Chile and Guatamala. They both were interested in developing newer artists and at the same time looking back upon the routes that wind back through time. (A friend of mine was lucky enough to meet Joe Strummer in Chicago in the late '80s. Strummer signed his T-shirt with the message: "Keep listening to the roots sh!t.")

Strummer's Earthquake Weather, his widely panned (and yet exceedingly excellent) first solo record from 1989, strikes me as a street-level exploration of American folk music, similar in its nature to King of America and Nebraska, and Graceland to boot. A listener can pretty well map Strummer as he moves through Louisiana ("King of the Bayou") and southern Florida ("Island Hopping") to the industrial Midwest ("Passport to Detroit") and the idealized American plains ("Sleepwalk"). In "Leopardskin Limosines": "People gonna wanna Xerox you, baby, it's a good thing you ain't a Chickasaw or your soul would take an overnight train to Pittsburgh, calling Baltimore." And "Highway One Zero Street" is not only the place where "Elvis buys his Pabst," it's also there that "they hung Fatty Arbuckle's balls" and where your little sister sits, "kicking drugs on a Bedouin rug in the hall." So I'm going to guess Los Angeles.

In some ways, Strummer is a truer succsessor to Peter Seeger than any American folk musician I'm aware of, in that where Seeger can collect a song like "Wimoweh" or "Guantanamera" and make it known to the public, but Strummer (in later work with the Clash, on Earthquake Weather, and the records with the Mescaleros) took the next step of stitching some of these traditions together, fusing a Global-a-Go-Go that befits a legacy of folk, punk, and what's oddly called world music. By yesterday's taxonomy, that makes Joe Strummer a Bob Dylan to Pete Seeger's Woody Guthriedom.

More on "Wimoweh" tomorrow, as Pete Seeger Week continues.