It’s Celtic tales and Viking battle songs. It’s banjo strumming tunes and deep hums and hallelujahs, stories sung around a fire or on the side of a street. It’s a search to find meaning in life. It protests wars, it pleads for love. It’s a pub swelling with euphoric emotion and quick guitar picking to a feverish crowd.
It’s all a bit difficult to wrap your mind around, really.
Folk music has evolved over the years as culture, various revivals and current events shape musical trends, cultivating a sound and an image that keeps people listening. And they are listening to more than just music – listeners are interested in what musicians have to say. In response to the deep themes running through recent folk music, a discussion of religion and spirituality has folk artists asking, what are we really all about?
From its origins in medieval Europe, folk music has trickled through lower class and African-American culture, the church and its gospel music and hymns, and protest eras and underground movements to end up where it is today. That journey has defined folk in many ways, as artists draw from these roots and the life around them and apply it to their music. As a result, folk is something familiar – a celebration of history and life in all its complexity.
Today, a variety of artists are categorized in the folk music genre, many of them sharing that homespun, acoustic sound we usually associate with folk. The American folk scene has continued to enmesh itself in Britain’s, influencing that sound and the folk scene in both cultures. We have nu-folk, indie-folk, folk-rock and a variety of other categories that allow the genre to encompass a host of musical sounds.
And just as folk’s musical definition has become loosely defined, so has its message.
Folk musicians of late have bared their soul, sharing personal beliefs and emotions through decidedly spiritual lyrics. Recently, however, musicians are careful to make a distinction between spirituality and religion.
British-folk band Mumford & Sons, for example, claims its music is spiritual but wants listeners to recognize the difference between that and God or religion.
Marcus Mumford, the band’s songwriter, touched on the subject in an interview with The Guardian, a U.K. publication. Mumford described the lyrics for the band’s debut album, Sigh No More, as “a deliberately spiritual thing but deliberately not a religious thing.” (Read the lyrics to the album single, “Sigh No More,” or “Awake My Soul,” and you’ll understand why it’s even a question.)
It’s a discussion that keeps coming up as artists like Fleet Foxes and Laura Marling also make it clear they do not want their music to be associated with religion.
The confusion lies in the meaning of the words. Some artists seem to think the two words are synonymous and want to steer entirely clear of both. Others want listeners to determine the lyrical meaning on their own, and still others say, “Yeah, we are normal human beings singing about the human condition and trying to find meaning in it, but don’t confuse that with God or anything of the sort.”
So what is the difference? Spirituality today can mean everything from intense positive emotion to a desire for inner peace. It can mean seeing beauty in everything or imply a search for a higher power.
The word “religion” carries more baggage. It means rules, regulations, church and a higher authority – which could be a chief reason why many musicians don’t want to be associated with that label.
Sweden-born musicians Johanna and Klara Söderberg of the woodsy band First Aid Kit address the subject in a song titled “Hard Believer,” which lashes out at Christianity and religion.
“Well I see you’ve got your Bible your delusion imagery,” Söderberg sings to bold acoustic strumming. “Well I don’t need your eternity or your meaning to feel free/ I just live because I love to and that’s enough you see/ So don’t come preach about morality that’s just human sense to me.”
That seems to be the consensus among folk artists today: they are just living – and making music – because they love it.
Musicians want to connect with their listeners. They realize that many of us don’t know what we believe, and they want to make sure we know they’re in the same boat. Call it postmodernism, call it spirituality, call it whatever you want.
It all goes back to what folk is all about. It’s existentialist theme makes it a genre that blankets a multitude of ideas, experiences and beliefs, reminding us humans are different, and yet very much the same.
