Die Gründe der Hipness des Banjospielers

Die Singer-Songwriterin Claire Holley über den Boom von Roots, Old Time, Acoustic, Folk und ähnlicher Musik (in einem Interview mit Image):

Image: The last ten years have seen a surge of interest in roots, folk, and traditional music, with instruments like the banjo and mandolin and subjects like heaven and hell coming into vogue—and not always in the genres or age groups or regions where you’d expect. Is it something in the air? Some kind of national hunger?

Claire Holley: I don’t know if I’m in a position to answer that question because I don’t go to a lot of folk music festivals. Just yesterday, though, I saw a friend who goes to MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, every year. Based on what she was saying about attendance (grown roughly from one thousand to one hundred thousand in the last decade) it would seem that you are right. I think it has become vogue and hip to listen to an old timer strum a banjo.

I attribute a lot of this to the popularity of records that T-Bone Burnett is behind, like Gillian Welch’s Revival or the Oh, Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack or the new Allison Krauss/Robert Plant collaboration Raising Sand. Burnett seems to have an uncanny sense of how to make something work musically—and perhaps he knows what will work commercially, as well.

Or maybe we were just ready for it, hungering for that authenticity.

Maybe we have become too removed from the essence or the source of where songwriting and playing music came from: hills, porches, cotton fields, mines, baby cribs, churches. Mostly, we hear slick productions of songs on radio and television and film that have been recorded in expensive studios. It reminds me of the way that we never see animals slaughtered any more on a farm, we just see a variety of meats covered in plastic at the grocery store.