Behind the Veil

A meditation on the power of music

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of my 2005 book, Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music. Footage from last weekend’s terrorist attack at the Supernova Festival (among many other videos) left me, like so many others, in a state of despair. For many years I worked as a world music journalist, and I performed at numerous festivals as a world music DJ. Festivals bring people together to celebrate the power of music, of community. The hundreds of artists I interviewed and performed with were all there for the same reason: to unite everyone. I recognize that such sentiments fall flat in the face of so much devastation. But we have to continually remind ourselves of what we’re fighting for.

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Global Beat Fusion focuses on folk traditions worldwide. America is rich in regional music, from Creole zydeco and cajun to blues and bluegrass, chicken scratch and conjunto to polka and klezmer. The constant influx of immigrants bringing a host of international influence has created unique blends of instrumentation and rhythmic nuances.

Beyond what America is generally known for (rock, hip-hop, jazz, and pop), minor subtleties have sparked innumerable creative variations. The term “folk” receives a negative connotation of old white men strumming beat-up six-strings and singing monosyllabic renderings of ’60s protest songs; Woody Guthrie as folk par excellence (and Bob Dylan as the genre’s most exciting proponent) stick in the American mind.

That is only one strain of regional music. Much more exists. While this book is not directly involved with the sonic tradition of this land, it remains a book about music in America, as America has long been a country of everyone else.

The defining factors of folk are instrumentation and storytelling. Outside devotional and ritual music, folk musicians serve as “living newspapers” (as journalist Elijah Wald said of Mexico’s narcocorrido artists), spanning social and political topics, as well as waxing poetic on sexual, spiritual, and personal issues.

When we talk about the regional music of Mali, for example, images of acoustic guitars and the kamélé n’goni come to mind; Jamaican reggae is bass and synthesizer heavy; Australians bore the digeridoo (literally, as they were hollowed by termites); and what would a Mariachi outfit be without their viheula and guitarron?

American folk music is so vast specifically because, in popular history, there has always been a multicultural audience, regardless of who maintained political power. This country is a melding (or melting) of peoples, and the music foreigners brought along is no different—and most of us are historically foreigners.

The two major folk forms known today in America—the ubiquitous, aforementioned acoustic folk, and gospel with her many strains—were actually imported simultaneously, from differing regions. As folk expert Kip Lornell writes,

Early immigrants also brought with them different concepts about music making. White settlers brought ballads telling stories about unrequited love or war along with the Scottish borders that were usually performed by a solitary singer, while transplanted Africans contributed a highly developed concept of call and response that reinforced a sense of community among people torn from their land.

Lornell goes on to cite an example of this seemingly random merging of cultures via a hit song by the Rolling Stones. Guitarist Keith Richards was fascinated by the deep blues of John Lee Hooker and was taught this riff by a young Ry Cooder (the American guitarist who would bring Cuban son to the world with Buena Vista Social Club).

So that famous riff in 1969’s ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ came to millions of fans across the world from a Detroit-based, Mississippi Delta-born black musician by way of a young white southern Californian who taught it to a British rock star!