Physical Folk

Folk is often about movemnent: physical work, rhythm. Sea shanties, harvest, battles. Folk is about touch and smell and taste. It's what you can hold with your hands. In other words it is essentially vital, sensory. Take the kiss of a dead lover in Bonnie Light Horseman: " And I'd kiss the white lips, that lie cold in the clay".

Folk songs are not often about wealth, but delight in other things. In Spencer the Rover we have lines like: "With bread and cold water he laid down to rest, and it tasted far sweeter than the gold he had wasted, sweeter than honey and gave more content".  Folk music is also rarely esoteric. Songs tend to have a definite subject. Real problems, real people, real places.

Steve Tilston sets the physical reality that folk music takes as it's subject against the manufactured reality of the free market economy:

And behind their hedge
They don't plant wheat,
They don't cut corn,
They don't pick tea,
They don't dig coal,
They don't forge steel,
They just push numbers all about,
They push too far we bail them out,
Keep their fingers firm on fortune's wheel.

The bankers don't do anything. The market has no physical reality, it is only a collection of numbers that go up and down. The people who push the numbers do not make anything like steel or bread. They only make more money for themselves, and get bailed out if they fail. They deal in inconsistencies, in thin air. They are the new magicians, the new priests. For these City men are the only people left in this rational society who can make everyone believe in something they cannot see and touch. Money is the new god.

Folk music sees real value in physical experience: the birds, the bees, the bonking and the beer. The flora and fauna, the value of friends and community. It reminds us of what is really important. Money is not real. The market is not real. And in the end it can bring no comfort. As Jon Fletcher puts it: "I never met a wealthy man who didn't want for more".

As the Native American Cree say: "Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money".