I Bow to the Power of Folk Music

Last night, a Butler friend of mine, Emily, and I met up to go to FreshFest, which was supposed to be a huge array of performers and musicians showcasing their stuff, trying to get people excited to join their club at the club fair tomorrow. It worked well for about an hour, and it actually ended with the improve group I had wanted to see last night, but the tickets had been sold out – but it ended a t 9 p.m. when it was supposed to end at around midnight. Emily and I left and stood outside Pleasance, trying to decide what to do next. We consulted her handy Fresher’s Week orientation schedule, and there was folk music starting at 9 p.m. on 48a Pleasance. We found the correct door, marked “48a” in chalk on the side of the door. It was essentially what you would expect a university music festival to be: located somewhere really hard to find, but very amusing in its hard-to-findness.

For two hours, I sat on a wooden floor and listened as fiddlers, flutists, and guitarists strummed and made music. A lot of us were cramped together in a warm room with yellow-gold light. People struck up tunes, and other players would join in and try and follow along. If they didn’t know the tune, they would play notes to complement and harmonize.

There was something in that music. Any music, live, that you hear, you can feel pulsing within you. The beat seems to match the rhythm of your heart, and so something greater has come into being. There is a saying that when words fail, music speaks, and to me, last night, it spoke to something deeper and more ancient and more sophisticated than words. It invoked ancestral memories which I didn’t even know I had. I have only a few threads of ancestry coming from Scotland, but I was like I was remembering something, like the very blood in my veins was remembering what it was like to listen to this music, to be part of a folk music tradition that was enriched by people adding to songs and changing them and making them their own. To think of people sitting around a fire in their pittance-poor homes but clinging to and loving their traditions. It was like a glimpse into my own history, my past, my forebears.

I am now and forever will be a fan of folk music.