13 minute read
By Sophie Severs
What the FOLK Is Up?
by Sophie Severs
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Folk music is for old, White men with banjos and harmonicas, right?
Wrong — Folk music is for the girls. But let me back up a little bit.
For as long as its existence, folk music has been inextricably interwoven into the fabric of social change. By definition, it is the unfiltered voice of the people, an inherent catalyst for revolution, carrying messages straight to the ears of those who need to hear it most.
Predictably, those championed as world-changing folk songwriters are usually men. The work of female folk artists and folk artists of color has long been overshadowed by the work of their White, male counterparts who receive almost all of the credit for spearheading the genre. When taking a closer look, it is clear that women continue to be the true pioneers of the scene. Female folk artists sang about much more than lost lovers and heartbreak. They were a force to be reckoned with, lending their voices to matters that necessitated a powerful soundtrack. Their music did not shy away from pointing fingers at injustice and reaffirming the strength of their identities.
As an Asian woman and an avid lover of folk, I have often felt that these two identities are mutually exclusive. When I attend a folk festival, I am the single drop of color in a sea of Whiteness. The supposed “genre of the people” evidently does not represent the actual people. According to the United States Census, 50.8% of the American population is female-identifying, with women of color making up
Does folk music still have a noticeable impact on society? What work is being done to give women credit as active contributors and legitimate players in the folk industry?
Has women’s representation in the contemporary folk scene deviated from folk of the past?
What does modern-day folk music have to improve on?
And thus, I ask: What the FOLK is up?
To help answer these questions, I heard from three amazing women active in today’s folk scene.
Alana Amore is senior guitar principle at Berklee College of Music and founder of online music-instruction platform Bipop. Bipop is tailored toward women of color and the non-binary community, providing students an affordable and safe learning environment that reflects how they personally identify.
Cristina Vane is a Nashville-based musician who wants to set one thing straight: her womanhood does not define her art. Born in Italy to a Sicilian-American father and Guatemalan mother, Vane spent her childhood living in different parts of Europe and was fluent in four languages before coming to America for college. She channels both a contemporary delta blues and a crisp traditional folk sound to explore and connect to her American roots.
Raye Zaragoza is a Los Angeles-based musician who never knew she could be the “It Girl” until she wrote a song about it. Zaragoza traces her ancestry
20.3% of the population. Yet the face of folk music
continues to be White men.
to Japan, Taiwan, Mexico and the Indigenous Akimel O’odham people, additionally identifying as a New Yorker through and through. Though she loves her multicultural identity, it has often left her facing feelings of imposter syndrome—which she addresses through her music.
Sophie: What’s so special about folk music?
Amore: It tends to be a genre of music that lends itself more to storytelling, but also to commentary. [...] It isn’t a genre that people think is very smart. It’s loose and it can be funny, but you can make it the way that you do. It’s open-ended enough, that’s what makes it different.
Vane: [It’s] really just a mirror; it shows the good, bad and the ugly. There’s hard, real stuff: minstrel shows, the racism, domestic violence references, a lot of murder ballads.
They are a reflection of, for better or for worse — obviously, for worse — real life. [...] It is a hard reality that [the mainstream isn’t] trying to cover. [Folk is] very empowering to the speaker. It puts you in this position where you’re explaining your world; you’re putting somebody briefly into your culture.
Zaragoza: You can perform a show with one person and one instrument — that’s not really common amongst other genres. Folk songs are poetry. [...] I try to write every song so that someone could just read it, and it would be a really beautiful poem. It’s a very pure form of storytelling.
S: How has folk music helped you reconcile parts of your identity?
A: I don’t have a traditional “pop radio” voice. It took me a really long time to find voices that
Through my music, I was able to create my own identity that was a collage of all of my cultures and all of the places I’ve been, who I am and all the music I love. I got to kind of
present myself to the world in a new way. For me, that was really healing. [...] It sounds so cheesy, but I am my song. [...] My music was just a way of healing and being able to become the person that I always wanted to become. I always felt like the person I was supposed to be wasn’t enough or I wasn’t good enough to be her—which is not true. I’m enough as I am.
S: How are women and women of color in folk treated?
A: [At Berklee] I’ve never been in a class with another female guitarist, or a non-binary guitarist. Then, every single semester within April or May, I’ve watched a professor realize that I’m pretty good, and
reflected mine or made me feel comfortable in mine. A lot of my influences and the people who sort of helped me discover who I am are also activists.
V: If I’m conflicted about where I’m from and what I’m doing, it’s gonna come out in my music. My first full length album was about this journey I did around the States for the first time. That was really interesting because my father was born and raised in the United States, but I was born and raised in Europe. I didn’t really identify with the United States [...] until I hopped in my car and went on tour and saw all these different places and people. [My music] has been a parallel journey of my identity with myself and in my own life.
Z: I really wanted to identify with every single part of my identity, but I also felt like I wasn’t enough of any of it to claim it. The way that I look, no one actually thought I was Asian growing up. I don’t speak Spanish. I didn’t grow up on the homelands of our Indigenous ancestors. I just felt like such a fraud. I just feel like this, “American girl who no one says looks American.” I don’t feel enough of anything else, so who am I?
then they always have to cover up their natural reaction that wasn’t supposed to be seen.
V: I did feel limited in some ways by the mentality that I had absorbed around me, which was that women don’t play guitar, or at least they don’t solo. It’s totally not true and very ignorant of so many women that have been and currently are smashing it on the guitar. [...] It took me like 27 or 28 years to just start not caring about being bad, and I saw these guys around me just...do it.
If you’re gonna make such a big deal about me being a woman, I’ll take it. [...] I would just like it if things were normal, and everyone treated everybody normally and they didn’t assume that I don’t know what I’m talking about. [...] There’s always gonna be some asshole somewhere, but there seems to be a lot more when you’re a girl with a guitar.
Z: There was like a cookie cutter definition of what folk music was that wasn’t inclusive. [...] There have been instances where I’ve been described in publications or by people announcing me, being qualified by my race. It’s like “Raye Zaragoza, a Native American artist or a Latinix artist, an Asian American artist.” I have such a diverse upbringing that they all come up. I’m not comfortable with that because I just want to be an artist, like everyone else. [...] I’ve always kind of felt like this novelty or special niche artist that was only speaking to something specific [...] like a one-trick pony.
S: How do you prioritize yourself and your mental health while also wanting to speak out on these real issues?
A: I choose to spend my time and efforts in communities that reflect how I identify and communities that I want to promote — that being people of color and women of color and women and non-binary people. [...] I deal with it by making space and taking up space.
[...] That’s that weird dichotomy, where if we keep making it about male or female-dominated stuff, that stays the focus — but we also have to, because there really is an imbalance.
Z: Holding that burden of being the person to constantly educate is really exhausting. It’s good to have allies who can help carry that
weight. [...] There’s a part of me that loves really being outspoken about how I’m so proud to be a woman and I’m proud to be a member of multiple marginalized communities. It’s an opportunity for me to speak up, be proud and show up for all of those who have felt like they were passed on because of their gender or race. S: Representation in the genre — what’s going on there? V: [Folk is] distilled down into this very singular, one-dimensional: “Here are the same 10 people that you always hear about, and they’re largely this kind of person.” I don’t think that’s reflective of reality. When I look around me in my circle of musicians, it is not really dominated badly, and especially in the real folk — real folk being traditional, old time, bluegrass, the Americana and string — world, there are a lot of prominent people of color with marginalized identities. [...] You don’t get the sense of that as an outside consumer. You have to be pretty into [the genre] and really start to look at who [...] all these people doing all these awesome things are. Once you’re in it, oh man, there’s men, women of every color, every dimension. It’s really beautiful.
V: It’s so hard because you want to acknowledge the real difference in the experience of being a woman in music but don’t really want to focus on it. It’s not what my music is about. It’s not what my whole life is about. I’m just a person when I’m playing guitar in my head. I don’t think about my boobs or my legs.
Z: I talk a lot about feeling like a sideshow and feeling like you’re not welcome in the mainstream because of the way you look. The music industry — really, not only the music industry, but American society and a lot of the entertainment industry — unfortunately lacks a lot of diversity. The first solution was, “Okay, as long as we have one, then we’re good.” That is tokenism. Every time I have interviews or I’m talking to someone new, my team tries to get questions in advance so we can spark conversations or tell the person in advance that their questions are tokenizing. They’re asking [me] to speak on behalf of an entire race or an entire group of people that I don’t speak for.
S: What do you want to see in the future of folk music, or music as a whole?
A: It’s important that at least one Black, queer woman in rock becomes more than a vocalist and is someone who is regarded as a lyricist, as a musician. We don’t have any female Guitar Gods. [...] If nothing else, I just hope that that conversation creates a space for people who look like me to take over the world.
V: What I would like to see is the same transparency that I think was lacking whenever record labels decided to come up with genres and race records. That same manipulation of what in real life doesn’t feel like that.
Z: I hope the gatekeepers will let more folks of color through the gates, but what I want to see is more folks of color as the gatekeepers themselves. [...] Those are the places that we want to see the diversity, not only just in the artists but also in the executive level. [....] I want to see some BIPOC gatekeepers, and they could open all the gates.
A lot of people still have that idea of folk music as being really old timey. We’re creating new sounds within the folk
A: If you find an artist that you like, support that artist. That isn’t necessarily just buying their merch and going to their shows, but telling your friends about it. If you have the aux in
the car, play that. [...] Create that space for yourself because someone else is looking for that. [...] For the people who are hesitant because that representation isn’t there, they can’t find other artists that look like them, that reflect their culture and their heritage.
Z: One thing you can do, White folks, is be really intentional about finding artists of color. Really go digging and find some artists of color that you can listen to. Get to love their
music and then share their music, no matter the color of their skin or whoever they are. [...] And listen, just listen. Flood your feed with artists of color and start to see the other perspectives.
The folk industry is not perfect — in fact, it is far from it.
The aim of this piece has not been to prove that women in folk music are totally okay and that the genre of folk is well on its way to becoming more inclusive. If anything, this piece has shown that there is unfortunately much left to be addressed in the folk genre when it comes to equity and representation.
Amore, Vane and Zaragoza are all brilliant women who are producing wonderful content — but it is not their job to diversify the folk industry. It is ours.
We as listeners must work to recognize and properly credit women as crucial players in the folk scene. It
umbrella. There’s a lot of artists who are really pushing the envelope of what folk means, and I hope that I’m one of those artists. We’re trying to create a new definition of folk.
S: What can listeners do?
is no longer the time to sit comfortably in our music. In taking the initiative to diversify our listening, we are making it easier for people who have never felt represented in media to discover artists that look and sound like them.
This piece is equally as much of a celebration of these women and their work as it is a signal of what we must improve on. Women of color have always carried folk music, and they continue to do so to this day. I leave you with a quote from Raye Zaragoza:
And that, my friends, is what the folk is up.
