Overlapping the “old songs” is a second layer of music, items people remember having picked up personally: recent folk music. Folksingers’ memoirs, such as the one by the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, always detail how they absorbed songs from specifi c family or community members. In any setting, a beloved uncle stopping over on his way home from a war might introduce a new song that could stick in the mind for a lifetime. Today, advertising jingles and ring-tones quickly become folklorized as part of permanent consciousness. With the current overlap between popular songs and commercial extensions, repertoires have fused and the whole system operates as folk song might have in earlier times. Music-sharing Web sites strongly reinforce this trend by encouraging improvisatory uploading. Yet even though today’s Internet music communities can be creative and tightly knit, they are isolated from the pressures of everyday settings, where singers and players mix and mingle on a daily basis within a small physical and acoustic space, whether it is an isolated village or a dense cityscape. In those settings of hardy up-close music-making, a sense of continuity and change might look different to the locals than to the outside visitor. People have their own internal music clocks, depending on their strategies and agendas.
Folk Music, Colonialism and Rustic Sense of Music
