The Folk Musician as Tradition-Bearer

The folk musician described by much earlier scholarship played a paradoxical role. “The folk” comprised all individuals in a society, and folk song issued from the mouths and souls of all. This egalitarian distribution of folk music ipso facto made it impossible to single out specific individuals as exceptional performers. Folk music was defined by ubiquitous musicality, never by the creative impetus of individual personalities. George Herzog merely echoed the assumption of most scholars when he portrayed folk music through the prerequisite of widespread participation.

Folk song is an art in which the average member of the group participates more generally than is the case with the cultivated music or literature of the city. Nearly everyone in a folk group knows songs and sings them, or at least listens to them and knows a good deal about them. On the many occasions at which singing is by a group, the less outstanding singers have ample opportunities for participating (Herzog 1949-50:1034).

Folk music was to be the art of everyman.

When concepts of folk music became more complex, accumulating qualities of place, transmission, or social structure, these qualities perpetuated the voicelessness of folk music and the paradox of individual participation. With the sharpening of the urban-rural dichotomy, it became necessary to perceive rural society as a setting in which all people could and did participate in folk music. Rural society thus became even more idealized, urban society more resistant to true folk music. Accordingly, musical specialists were absent in the rural setting but proliferated as the result of urban influences (ibid.).

From this perspective the origins of folk music should also lie in a nonspecialized society. A number of theoretical variants arose from the assumption of universal participation in the origin of folk music. These variants ranged from the association of folk music with play to the claim that people working together spontaneously generated song as a means of easing their labors (Barry 1961:59-61). The ballad theories of Francis Gummere argued polemically for the origins of ballad in the communality of “dancing throngs,” with their natural transformation of movement into dramatic situations and rhythmic patterns (Gummere 1907:71-85 and 1961:20-29). It is hardly surprising that theories of group origin should produce a fair amount of literature steeped in ideology and bias. Most often, this literature, like its precursors, remains at the level of the abstract, obtaining largely in idealized “preindustrial” societies (e.g., Lomax 1968:170). Occasionally, it promulgates misconceptions that blind researchers to the complexity of certain musical cultures, causing them to argue for the special value of musical communality. The impulse to idealize has been especially persistent in studies of African music, and only very recently has more localized ethnography revealed considerable musical specialization in many, if not most, African societies (e.g., Merriam 1982:321-56).

The tendency of folk music research devoid of individual musicians is to homogenize time and tradition, to reduce them along with the role of folk musicians to an innocuous sameness. The older a tradition, the fewer the individual influences. Should a tradition have primordial wellsprings, the absence of composition at the point of inception would further justify the absence of recognizable musicians over time. And so transmission exists sui generis. It does not require individual efforts to provide it with energy. Transmission, then, acquires a preeminent position. The human role in the maintenance of this position is one of passing music on to subsequent generations, ideally without introducing any change, even if it means suppressing individuality. The folk musician should be merely a tradition-bearer. The tradition-bearer generally has specific attributes that define his or her nonrole. First, the folk musician exhibits unflagging respect for tradition, which is by its nature inviolable. What the folk musician receives, the folk musician transmits. Second, the folk musician is dispassionate, maintaining a certain emotional distance from the text of a song or the performance style of instrumental music. This might even result in flexibilty of intonation or rhythm (Herzog 1949-50:1041). Finally, the folk musician keeps tradition alive by performing, not by an objective knowledge of its bounds or the function it fulfills throughout a given society. This lack of objective knowledge serves also to purify tradition, for it implies that the folk musician does not have an active awareness of external traditions or the possibilities for change.

Ironically, albeit appropriately, the concept of folk musician as tradition-bearer appears first in studies that take special note of musicians who are not simply indistinguishable threads in the fabric of folk music. These musicians, instead, stand out because they are unusual. They catch the eye of the field-worker and attract subsequent visits by other scholars. They make the job of collecting easier because they know more songs and more variants than others in a community. They are the individuals to whose door one is first directed when entering a community. They are the key informants around whom regional anthologies are built, the Emma Dusenburys and Almeda Riddles (cf. Belden 1973, Randolph 1980, and Abrahams 1970). A background of voiceless tradition-bearers may still exist, but there emerges from this background a particular type of folk musician whose activities illumine the rest of the community in new ways, casting up new details and putting other exceptional individuals in a more distinct chiaroscuro. If dispassionate, voiceless tradition-bearing does not disappear, another form of tradition joins it, this one accompanied by folk musicians conscious of the unique contributions they stand to make.

The Folk Musician and Performance

Several related reasons account for the greater attention individual folk musicians have received in recent years. As fieldwork becomes more intensive, the variation within culture becomes more striking, appearing normative in its distribution. In general, recent folk music research has concentrated on smaller groups and communities and concerned itself less with fleshing out preconceived notions of national repertories or monolithic corpora. The focus of much research has shifted from the general to the specific, from predetermined pattern to thick description in which pattern results from a multiplicity of diverse details (Geertz 1973:3-30). For an expressive behavior that, like music, is temporal in nature, detail is inevitably a function of performance. Recognizing this function produces a fundamentally different view of folk music. It forces a reformulation of concern for prototypes, taking instead the plethora of variants as commonplace. The tradition of folk music is therefore not simply a question of whether a song exists in a particular region, or how close the versions of that song are to the song’s appearance in a given anthology. Instead, tradition embraces all versions of a song, which in turn becomes the sum of all its performances.

To concentrate on performance it is necessary to recognize fully the role of the folk musician. Each performance is the expressive act of an individual or a group of individuals, and that expressive act reflects the interrelation of the performer and the tradition. The performance poses many questions about that interrelation, questions that only the musician is fully capable of answering. How does the folk musician learn a particular song? From whom? What personal stories relate to the musician’s concept of the song? Was this performance an appropriate context for the song? What is the range of appropriate contexts? Does this version replicate others, or are there innovative elements? Would it be appropriate to add to or alter the piece? To compose a new song in its stead? The answers to such questions contribute to a more complete understanding of tradition, not simply a justification of tradition. They place the folk musician at the center of tradition and insist that only through the analysis of performance can a broad understanding of tradition be reached.

The performative aspects of tradition, while drawing attention to the folk musician, reveal ways whereby expressive behavior that previously seemed exceptional may have normative forces tempering it. By studying many performances of upstate New York singer Dorrance Weir, Henry Glassie observed that the composition of new verses for “Take That Night Train to Selma” was guided by audience response. If a verse met with audience approval, always signified by laughter, it stayed in the song; if approval was not forthcoming during performance, verses quickly exited (Glassie 1970:29-30). Performance was also essential to the satiric song tradition in the Canadian Maritimes and the American Northeast (Ives 1964). The use of folk song to exert power or mark interaction with neighbors might at first glance appear to require more invention and particularity than any tradition could tolerate. Instead, it was a tradition that many song-makers practiced, some more effectively than others. Those who excelled in the tradition, such as Larry Gorman, did so because they were masters of ad hoc creativity and could adapt the tradition through performance to the need for satire (ibid.: 180-81). The key to understanding the tradition, therefore, was seeing what sort of pastiche individual performances yielded.

The folk musician uses performance to express an understanding of the relation between stability and change. Some performances may incorporate more techniques that bring about change; others ensure stability. The musician’s role, therefore, is not one of simply bearing tradition via repetition or, in contrast, willfully innovating. It can, and usually does, combine both, the ultimate balance depending on the audience, which is also an indispensable component of performance. Like individual folk musicians, audiences manipulate the balance of stability and change. During the performance, the audience’s response may draw attention to the violation of traditional expectations or it may encourage creativity. The skillful performer, too, knows from the composition of his audience what stylistic and social boundaries can or cannot be crossed. Each performance, therefore, becomes a metaphor for the folk musician’s relation to tradition and its social and musical bases.

Creativity vs. Representation: The Individual’s Role in Traditional Change

Many discussions of folk music assume that tradition eschews creativity. Correlatively, many histories of Western art music depart not at all from the nineteenth-century notion that change is essential if music is to develop with vigor and to respond to the social conditions of its day. Such contrasting assumptions about music would have the reader believe that creativity and tradition are mutually exclusive. These assumptions define music so narrowly as to reinforce the contrasting levels prescribing folk and art music in highly stratified societies. But assumptions they are. And as assumptions they require rather restricted views of how change occurs and who stimulates the processes of creativity. They rest on idealized models of tradition that belie the reality of the present and insist on relegating folk music to the past.

In their most basic form these assumptions place creativity at odds with representation—which I use here to mean a performance in which the musician intends to adhere to the piece as it was learned. In this polemical position, creativity and representation appear in a number of other conflicts, including the conflict between individualist and communalist views of society. The rudimentary argument posed by this conflict is that individual acts introduce change, whereas communal society stems change. A wide range of evidence, nevertheless, refutes this argument. Communal settings may, in fact, be quite tolerant of individual expression, and individuals may, in contrast, take great pains to conform. Genres that depend on individuality are sometimes bound to those that require concerted effort. Research by John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw (1986) suggests that improvisation by individual musicians was an institutionalized practice of eighteenth-century orchestral performance. In other words, it was expected that ensemble players would use a communal setting to demonstrate individuality. This widespread practice, moreover, provides a radical contrast to the model of orderliness and decorum that cultural historians have preferred to see in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment or the Classic Era in music history. Observing such different cultural phenomena as African society and jazz in the United States, Alan P. Merriam consistently argued that the “deviance” of certain musicians was normative in society (1982:330). Extreme individuality was thus the essential link to functional community social and aesthetic systems (Merriam 1979:19).

Creativity assumes many forms in folk music. Some musicians may exercise creative options in an intentional way, consciously attempting to introduce change, or at least variation, into traditional styles. For other folk musicians, creativity may be largely unintentional, even though the eventual result is widespread innovation and change. The reasons for unintentional creativity vary. Knowledge of the tradition may be incomplete, forcing the musician to draw from another stock of convenient techniques during performance. The musician may play in contrasting performance settings, some of which require relatively unfamiliar repertory; folk musicians performing widely in pluralistic regions may face such situations frequently. In these cases, the impulse toward change may not originate in the musician, but the attitudes of both musician and audience may demonstrate considerable tolerance for certain types of change that occur unintentionally. During the past century many areas of the Midwest have witnessed the growing use of instruments to accompany previously soloistic ethnic vocal repertories. Inevitably tied to this transformation has been the use of harmonization, usually the basic patterns found in much European art music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Harmonization not only imposes a new vocabulary on a traditional folk melody; it also forces a restructuring of the melody’s syntax. In certain non-Western repertories, the encroachment of harmony has produced a preference for modal structures that lend themselves more easily to the vertical structures of harmonization. Often, these non-Western modes are those that resemble the Western major and minor modes most closely (Nettl 1985:37-40).

For many musicians, adherence to this new syntax is of considerably less importance than using chords in repetitive, standardized patterns regardless of form or harmonic implications in the melody. The performance of “Barbara Allen” (example 6) illustrates one possible manifestation of the unintentional creativity resulting from juxtaposing harmonization—in this case the chordal accompaniment at a reed organ—on a traditional melody. This common version of Child 84 uses a pentatonic scale, lacking fourth and seventh degrees that would make it modally major (cf. Seeger 1966:120-67). In this performance Charles Bannen expands the possible harmonization of one verse to encompass two verses. Accordingly, two types of change result. First, the melody acquires the leading tone (F sharp) of a G-Major scale, thereby directing the harmonic drive toward the tonic and replicating the third degree of the dominant triad in Bannen’s harmonic pattern. Second, those places where melodic and harmonic syntax conflict result in the singing of certain pitches out of tune (marked here with arrows). At the beginning of the second verse, when Bannen sings B while playing a subdominant chord with its root on C—lacking in the pentatonic scale, but only a half step from B—he sings it sharp, in effect introducing a type of “blues note,” which occurs at other similar points of syntactic juxtaposition (e.g., “against” in the second verse).

In the ethnically diverse areas of Wisconsin and northern Michigan that border Lake Superior, instrumental performance of many previously vocal repertories may well have become normative during the twentieth century (Leary 1984). Instrumental arrangements are common in such institutionalized genres as ethnic recordings and public dances, and the use of instruments with the concomitant introduction of harmonization is frequent in the home music-making of all ethnic groups in the area. Contemporary folk music tradition, thus, virtually demands that musical instruments serve as a conduit for unintentional creativity, that is, change. By examining a broad cross-section of the region’s ethnic repertory, it is possible to identify various stages of unintentional creativity.

In an incipient stage (example 7), the Finnish-American accordion player applies harmonic patterns in a purely tactile manner. The syntax of the harmonization would work fairly well, were it not in the wrong mode, B-flat Major (the relative major, also using two flats) rather than g minor. Although the resulting harmonies may not sound “correct” to the outsider, they conform to the kinesthetic criterion that has made widespread introduction of harmony through instrumental music possible (for the significance of kinesthetic patterns in a Chinese instrumental tradition, see Yung 1984).

Barbara Allen

EXAMPLE 6 (cf. Bohlman 1980:178-80)

Such elements of unintentional creativity are again evident in extracts from the Finnish-American dance “Iitin Tiltu” (example 8). The modal conflict posed by juxtaposed harmonic patterns has now evolved into the presence of mixed modes, including the combination of major and minor chords on the tonic (I and i) and subdominant (IV and iv). More complex use of harmonic structures—for example, the frequent occurrence of chords in first inversion (e.g., I⁶)—reflects the expansion of the innovative component of the Finnish-American musical vocabulary. Finally, the quantity and degree of melodic variation has increased in pace with harmonic complexity, thus signaling a complete transition to a stage in which creativity has become requisite and representation of prototypical versions extremely rare.

The inherent creativity of many folk music traditions represents a vast array of individual attitudes toward the balance of innovation and representation. Some musicians may use the possibilities of creativity as a means of expanding individual poetic license. In contrast, others may take a reactionary stance, recognizing in the processes of creativity a musical territory that violates tradition. Some may use creativity to concentrate audience response on the folk musician, while others successfully diffuse the importance of the individual by consciously sidestepping creativity. At the very least, creativity clearly delineates the various limits a tradition may have, and it does so by drawing attention to the folk musician’s position vis-à-vis those limits.

The different types of creativity and the individual attitudes they represent form a continuum, with one end demanding faithful representation of the repertory and the other end permitting conscious innovation. Eleanor Long (1973) has proposed four typical responses of ballad singers to musical creativity that are suggestive of my somewhat expanded pattern for this continuum. At one extreme is regulated creativity, a process Long calls “perseverating,” which characterizes a “ballad singer who insists upon faithful reproduction of his text” (ibid.:232). Even though accurate representation is the primary motivation for perseverating, it is nevertheless an active process, one that presumes that knowing how to effect faithful reproduction predicates conscious awareness of how and where departure from tradition takes place. At the other pole of the continuum is ubiquitous creativity, a process whereby willful departure from traditional constraints is the rule rather than the exception. Long sees this process, which she labels “confabulating,” as a sort of loss of faithfulness, both to the tradition and to any version of it that the individual folk musician produces in a given performance (ibid. :232-33). I am less willing than Long to see wanton abandon as motivation for this extreme, for that would entail a failure to consider audience and cultural expectations, in other words, a complete departure from tradition itself. Even the most extreme creativity, I would suggest, is possible only with some tempering influences from tradition, some foundation that can serve as a reference for variation and change.

Muurarin Valssi (Mason’s Waltz)

EXAMPLE 7 (cf. Leary 1986a:side 4, cut 1, and Leary 1986b:27)

Iitin Tiltu

EXAMPLE 8 (cf. Leary 1986a:side 4, cut 3, and Leary 1986b:29)

Individual choices play a greater or lesser role on the continuum, depending on to which extreme the folk musician is closer. Not far from the more conservative extreme is a process that might be labeled discriminatory creativity. In this process the musician may perform in a faithful manner but make certain choices that limit repertory or aspects of performance. Ozark singer Almeda Riddle, for example, exhibited discriminatory creativity by choosing to sing only folk songs that were complete and those with “classic” value. This process of discrimination resulted from personal decisions and the incorporation of external values: complete songs usually were songs with a narrative that made sense, and classic songs usually included corpora that collectors and scholars had canonized, such as the Child ballads (Abrahams 1970:156-57).

Awareness of external influences and values plays a somewhat greater role in the category that I call, drawing on Long, rationalized creativity (1973:233). This process relates to the folk musician’s ability to adapt traditional material to external values and contexts. The musician functions as a mediator, using a supposedly neutral store of texts and musical materials under new circumstances. Rationalized creativity is similar to what James Porter calls “a feature of style that transcends the harder sanctions on meaning and relevance when the local context is exchanged for the exoteric” (1985:327). Musicians exhibiting this quality, like Scottish ballad singers Jeannie Robertson and Belle Stewart, whose creative prowess Porter has studied with singular thoroughness, possess a “knowledge and power ... to move all who listen, whether native to the tradition or not” (ibid.; see also Porter 1976 and 1986).

Extensive contact outside the folk musician’s own community may engender a still more creative process, one in which new material is adapted to traditional formulae. Integrative creativity, then, combines old and new materials in specific ways, so that repertories and styles are in effect altered, but in ways consistent with the expectations of diverse audiences (Long 1973:233-34). Integrative creativity lies relatively close to the extreme of ubiquitous creativity, but differs because the integrative musician is clearly a specialist: he stands out against the traditional background because of a special willingness to identify and tap appropriate new material. It is this process that distinguished Maine songmaker Joe Scott, whose role as a folk musician has been chronicled by Edward D. Ives (1978). Scott actually combined two traditions—the Anglo-American ballad and the nineteenth-century popular sentimental song—as a technique of composing new songs that appealed to broad audiences on several levels. Ives summarizes Scott’s integrative creativity:

Given his chosen field of expression, he was a master not only in the sense that he could work extremely well within the tradition, but also in the sense that he went beyond it, showing considerable originality in his inventive use of models, his combining of popular and folk traditions (especially in his use of the language of sentimental song in balladry), and his leisurely and elaborate style of development. Had the tradition continued in “expected” fashion, we might well have been able to show how Joe altered its direction by virtue of his work becoming part of it and furnishing new models (Ives 1978:412; the parentheses are Ives’s).

This continuum is meant to suggest the tremendous range of relationships between individual creativity and a society’s expectation of adherence to tradition. Rather than being mutually exclusive, creativity and representation of tradition are mutually dependent; they define each other by their balance and interaction. Creativity depends on tradition to give it direction; tradition becomes flaccid and moribund without creativity to animate it. Maintaining this balance is the folk musician. Indeed, the ability and care with which the musician sustains the balance becomes also the measure of the musician’s skill and specialized role in society.

Specialization and the Folk Musician

Folk music is totally without vitality unless performed. It cannot survive only as an artifact. The folk musician must be more than a curator. Nor can passive audiences make a tradition. The folk musician invests time in the maintenance of the tradition—to learn, to practice, to perform. Folk music may be inseparable from daily labors, but it more frequently accents or punctuates those labors. And so too in the life of a community, folk music signals a departure from the usual, a moment that articulates the aesthetic and social values under-girding community. Performance of folk music is therefore a specialized practice. As such, it takes place in the hands of specialists, whom the community has designated not because of a passive willingness to bear the tradition forth but because of a particular skill or designated social role that provides the creative energy required to keep the tradition vital.

The determinants of specialization in folk music differ greatly from society to society. In some cultures the musician gains prestige; in others he may lose prestige. Some communities reward folk musicians with a small payment in recompense for the rendering of specific services; others designate professionals and provide them with full-time support. In those societies where many members participate, there may be only a few roles—for example, playing the largest instrument—that distinguish the specialists; when participation is relatively sparse, it may be a specialty simply to perform publicly at all. Value and aesthetic judgments, too, appear universally as markers of specialization (cf. Seeger 1977:324-25). Insisting that a musician is, by definition, a specialist, Merriam observed “that in all societies individuals exist whose skill at making music is recognized in some way as being superior to that of other individuals so that they are called upon, or simply take their ‘rightful’ place, in musical situations” (1964:124).

To understand how a folk musician becomes a specialist or exercises a differentiated musical role, it behooves us to observe different types of musical specialization. In this section I sketch several of the ways in which specialist status obtains in the folk music of different cultures. These categories are not meant as discrete or exclusive, and in practice musicians may draw upon several categories to achieve specialist status; a musician recognized as a social deviant, for example, may also perform on a musical instrument and receive regular payment for doing so. The categories therefore suggest the complex processes determining the specialization of a folk musician. These processes result from a society’s conceptualization of the folk musician’s role and the individual’s achievement of that role. Even in the most extreme forms of that role, society and individual reach a consensus with regard to the acceptable limits of musical behavior. Thus, the role of the folk musician may in some cases be conspicuous, while in others barely evident. In all cases, however, some form of specialization marks that role.

Wide distribution of specialization. Earlier models of folk music in isolated rural areas often implied an ideal of all people participating in all music. Such folk music would therefore lack specialization. Models of this sort were further predicated on such notions as “primitive society” in which lack of artistic differentiation presumably resulted from an essentially human egalitarianism. Closer ethnographic observation, however, uncovered some basic conflicts, even in the most idealized renderings of these models. Not everyone sang the same music; not all music was known to everyone. Musical life was specialized in some ways. Repertories paralleled the differentiation of culture according to sex or age. Women more commonly sang lullabies; specific musical roles accompanied rites of passage. Just as division of labor existed on some scale, so too were musical roles distributed according to certain patterns. One can speak of musical specialization in such societies as widely distributed. Specialization exists, but for the most part it characterizes subgroups rather than individuals. These subgroups may originate from other social activities, but their organization may also be musical, as in the case of drumming ensembles in West Africa. This category covers a broad range of possibilities, many of which are distinguished by fairly widespread participation in musical activities. Participation, in this sense, extends to the processes that bring about musical specialization, enhancing its relation to other social activities.

The specialization of skills. Various factors, most of them embedded in a society’s conceptualization of music, identify certain skills as specialties. Some specialties are relatively abstract, labeled, perhaps, as talents, whereas others may take the form of material phenomena. A folk musician may be born with a skill or may acquire it after years of directed effort. It is this difference that Merriam describes with the terms ascribed and acquired musical roles (1964:130-33). Ascribed skills may predominate in some cultures, acquired in others; but both draw attention to individual musicians and ensure the perpetuation of specialization.

One skill basic to oral transmission is memory. The genres of folk music differ considerably with regard to the demands placed on sheer memory. Many genres are largely repetitive, whereas others require a seemingly vast store of memorized details and techniques. Genres requiring skill in memorization tend not to be as widely distributed as those that are highly repetitive. Accordingly, epic singers in the Balkans command remarkable memories and are recognized by society for this skill, both by means of attaching some reputation to the singers and by making it possible for the most skillful to make epic-singing a profession. The performance of musical instruments also requires measurable skills that frequently receive some reward from society. Instrumental skill is apparently one of the most basic denominators of musical specialization in some societies. Among the Basongye of Zaire the five major classifications of musician relate directly to instrumental skills or lack thereof (Merriam 1982:329). In contemporary Anglo-American folk music, fiddling contests have increasingly come to rank musicians according to their instrumental skills, bringing, of course, commensurate rewards as further designation of this form of specialization.

Skills may be relatively normative or highly exceptional; in most folk music, skill has both normative and exceptional qualities. Memory may generally be a skill in oral transmission, although certain types of memory may be more highly valued. Among the Venda in southern Africa, participation in music requiring quite diverse skills is normative (Blacking 1957:45-46). Acquisition of at least rudimentary instrumental skills is desirable in many parts of the United States. Skill, like other aspects of folk music specialization, requires recognition from both society and the musician. Each makes diverse choices about those skills that have special meaning, but such choices are inevitably a part of identifying the panoply of musical roles in culture.

The specialization of elevated or important social functions. Few societies lack ways of quickly identifying those musicians who perform important social functions. The folklorist frequently witnesses this process of social identification when engaging in fieldwork. Upon asking in a community about musicians, it becomes quickly evident whom the community regards as “good,” and not infrequently informants identify specifically the social function that qualifies these musicians as “good.” One may play well at dances; another may sing all the “old” songs; still another may perform “new” songs at a nearby radio station. These musicians are a community’s designated specialists. Their specialty is not necessarily an aesthetic or technical quality, but a recognition of those social functions that a community wishes to maintain; their performances thus symbolize and reinforce the patterns of social organization that the community values the most (Szwed 1970:150-51).

It is not uncommon for communities to institutionalize musical specialists according to social function. Religious institutions, for example, delegate specialists to organize a wide range of musical activities that often spill over into secular life. In some cases, musicians actually function as a priesthood, binding religious activity to musical expression. There are other cases in which musicians are identified by extramusical traits, which then assume the characteristic of a specialty vis-à-vis musical institutions. Some observers believe that the blind are often channeled toward musical specialization, citing such cases as the goze of Japan who may actually have been recruited on the basis of blindness (Harich-Schneider 1959:56 and Merriam 1964:132). The Bauls, a Bengali religious sect with distinctive musical practices, fulfill different social functions, depending on whether their audiences are Bauls or other Bengalis, for whom the Bauls and their music represent the leveling of religious and caste restrictions (Capwell 1986:10). The Bauls themselves absorb this social stance into their own culture, while outsiders, through the influence of Rabindranath Tagore and others, have transmuted specifically Baul themes into Bengali art and culture (ibid. :20-32). In Bengali society, then, the music of the Bauls, though no longer just Bengali per se, becomes the explicit symbol of an abstract social context that is both idealized and disdained.

Deviance. When individual musicians function in ways that the bulk of a society would never sanction for itself, the specialization of these musicians manifests deviance. Deviance, in this usage, does not imply extrasocietal behavior. Deviants are, instead, necessary to society, for they specialize in forms of cultural expression that could become dysfunctional were they to become commonplace. Merriam found that Basongye society was unanimous in its condemnation of the behavior of deviant musical specialists, who engaged in many, if not most, of those activities the Basongye deemed unacceptable. Just as unanimous was the assertion that the social order would disintegrate without these musical specialists.

Non-musicians react with genuine seriousness to the possible loss of musicians, saying that “life in a village without musicians is not to be considered.” Non-musicians and musicians alike speak of leaving Lupupa Ngye were no musicians present, and such a reaction is extremely strong, for the people are closely tied to the village by powerful and multifaceted bonds of kinship, economics, and emotion. The importance of the musician to the other members of society, then, is extremely high (Merriam 1979:3).

The extent of deviance depends on both social and individual attitudes toward musical behavior. Thus, if specialized deviance is widespread in a culture, it may mean that music has a low status but that social norms still accord great importance to music by delegating specialists as musicians. In many Islamic societies, disfavor and proscription greet music-making. Music does not, however, disappear from these societies, which continue to demonstrate their need for music by tolerating various forms of specialized deviance. Outsiders, especially minorities, have often assumed a disproportionately high percentage of musical activities. Certain types of musician have deflected criticism by diversifying within the bounds of their specialty, thus making it difficult to identify them as “just a musician” in any single genre of performance (Shiloah 1974:52). The performance of certain genres traditionally took place in settings that bore a deviant stigma—for example, coffeehouses—thus separating music from the disapproval of more orthodox Islamic society.

It is important to remember that deviance is a cultural category. The successful deviant musician carefully observes the limits placed on his specialty by society; to step beyond these limits would, in effect, terminate his livelihood. Existence of deviance also allows society to maintain musical activities that it cannot condone but that are nevertheless indispensable. The interaction between society and specialized musical deviance therefore forms a complementary relationship. One depends on the other, with the end result that musicians function in an intricate web of specialization.

Communication. The specialization of the folk musician usually proffers mobility, both literal and figurative. This mobility brings the musician into contact with new forms of aesthetic expression, a wide range of social settings, and, rather often, groups other than the immediate one of which the musician is a member. The development of instrumental specialists in European secular music, with its roots first apparent in the Middle Ages, was paralleled by many different communicative roles, ranging from the wandering minstrel to the civic musician representing his city at festivals and public events in other cities (Schwab 1982:15). This broadening of contacts and influences affects the musician’s attitudes, activities, and repertories, all of which gain a necessary flexibility augmenting other aspects of specialization. That change results is inevitable, for the folk musician in different situations is confronted with choices. That the musician communicates these choices and the concomitant change to audiences is also inevitable.

In some societies special recognition accrues to certain folk music specialists because of the communicative function. The narrative technique favored by many broadside composers is that of recounting and elaborating a type of news. It is not just the manner of producing songs that distinguishes many broadside composers and performers; so also do dress, instrument, and position in the urban marketplace for professionals like the German Bänkelsänger or Bulgarian panairdzijski pevec (Roth and Roth 1985:343-44). The more expansive world-view of many broadside composers becomes the explicit motivation for musical specialization.

The modes of expression in which this communicative function is evident may be aesthetic or social in nature. Extreme forms of social creativity can accord the musician outsider status, which both signals the fact that the musician is not a member of the community and enhances the ability with which the musician responds to change because of the license outsider status affords. In various Middle Eastern contexts outsider status is cultivated by community and musician alike to circumvent the possibility of negative responses to music-making (cf. Lortat-Jacob 1984 and Schuyler 1984). Claiming that the music one experiences is not really the community’s in effect disavows local responsibility.

Musicians whose communicative function centers on aesthetic aspects often narrow, rather than expand, cultural distance. Dan Gruetzmacher, a German-American concertina player from rural northern Wisconsin, exemplifies the folk musician who has specialized in mastering the musical dialects of ethnic old-time genres. This specialty allows Gruetzmacher and his orchestra to perform for most of the large ethnic groups represented in the Upper Midwest, even though he claims as his preferred style the “Dutchman” music associated with German-American communities. If his audience is Slovenian-American, he communicates a Slovenian style; if it is Polish-American, he slips easily into a Polish melos. This communicative flexibility means that Gruetzmacher can play in many more ethnic settings than he could if he were content only with “Dutchman” style. In turn, his musical specialization has gained him considerable fame, with the result that his economic base too has broadened (Bohlman 1985 and Martin et al.: 1986).

Professionalism. Professionalism results when music becomes virtually a full-time activity for the folk musician. Music provides a way of making a living. Although various degrees and forms of specialization bring about an exchange of goods and services to reward music-making, there are still specialists in many societies who use music as the primary means of livelihood. Until recently, many folk music scholars regarded professionalism with reprobation: folk music was, by definition, nonprofessional. Professionalism was seen as an urban phenomenon, and it produced a distinction between concert-giver and concertgoer that was not possible among rural groups, whose performers and audiences usually melded into one (Herzog 1949-50:1034). But rural cultures, too, had professional folk musicians, and in many cases they performed within traditions of great age (Roth and Roth 1985:343 and Lord 1960). Moreover, different types of professionalism might well coexist in rural and urban areas of the same culture (Roth and Roth 1985:344).

Professionalism is not only a phenomenon of folk music in urbanized or modernized contexts. Merriam has proposed that professionalism, rather than measuring financial recompense, might better serve as a concept to estimate the willingness of a community to designate certain individuals as musicians and support music through various forms of material and cultural approbation.

The “true” specialist is a social specialist; he must be acknowledged as a musician by the members of the society of which he is a part. This kind of recognition is the ultimate criterion; without it, professionalism would be impossible. Although the individual may regard himself as professional, he is not truly so unless other members of the society scknowledge his claim and accord him the role and status he seeks for himself (Merriam 1964:125).

Professionalism, therefore, exhibits various gradations. It is not a question of being a professional or not being one. Some musicians subsist entirely on the money earned from performance; in some societies the system of reward is sufficiently limited as to prevent any individual musician from living entirely on the basis of musical activities. Professionalism is often a component of other categories of specialization. Instrumental musicians, for example, may receive a specific payment on the basis of their skill. Deviant status may permit a musician to engage in other behaviors that accumulate wealth; in Basongye society, for example, deviant musicians even have greater license to procure goods dishonestly. Despite the claims that professionalism removes the performer from the sanctions of the audience, quite the opposite usually occurs. Even an extreme form of specialization like professionalism requires that the performer understand intimately and observe carefully the existing social norms and the tolerance for change. To do otherwise would effectively terminate professional status.

Most folk musicians are innovative and creative on some level. They may accept or reject change; they may rigidly observe tradition or wantonly violate it. But innovation and creativity do not exist without restrictions. If the folk musician breaches these restrictions, community approbation ceases, and, in some cases society censures. Creativity can be encouraged and yet limited, with the restrictions—the cultural boundaries—symbolizing a metaphorical realm within which creativity can transpire. Accordingly, these boundaries heighten the awareness of both the community and the folk musician of the potential function of creativity in the expression of tradition and the tendency toward change. Creativity, too, serves to juxtapose stability and change and to determine the aesthetic forms both will take. The folk musician’s creativity is yet another factor undergirding the dialectic of tradition.