Folk Music Strikes Chord With a New Generation

Elaine Weissman has seen the Southern California folk scene wax and wane. Right now, she said happily, it’s on the rise.

“The scene locally is getting 1,000% better,” said Weissman, 61, director of the California Traditional Music Society Folk Music Center in Encino Park. “It’s really blooming from San Francisco to San Diego.”

Weissman points to such signs of vigor as the growing interest in contra dances, a traditional American form of country dancing, and the health of folk organizations, such as Orange County’s Living Traditions.

The latest issue of FolkWorks--a Sherman Oaks-based publication about the Greater Los Angeles folk community--bears Weissman out.

Its front page quotes a jibe by drummer Warren Casey of the local Scottish drum and pipe band the Wicked Tinkers, “Don’t you know that folk music is illegal in Los Angeles?”

But the paper’s calendar of events shows Los Angeles to be a hotbed of folk activity. It lists local concerts featuring every kind of traditional music from Armenian to zydeco, as well as gatherings for people who love the rhythms and intricacies of African, Irish, Scandinavian and a dozen other traditional forms of dance.

Weissman, who lives in Tarzana with husband and fellow folkie Clark Weissman, has been part of the local folk scene almost as long as there has been one.

At Fairfax High School, she recalled, “I joined a bunch of guitar-playing hippies who used to sit on the lawn.”

She remembers the days when Bess Lomax and husband Butch Hawes, once members of the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, strummed and sang at hootenannies that Will Geer and his family held in Topanga Canyon. And Weissman was there when Richard and Mimi Farina and every other rising star in folk music appeared at the now legendary Ash Grove on Melrose Avenue.

Like so many folkies, Weissman championed causes, as well as a musical style.

“I protested at the Renaissance Fair--the whole bit,” she said. The cause on that occasion was the decision to divert and effectively destroy California’s Stanislaus River.

For 20 years, the Weissmans have been the force behind the Summer Solstice Folk Music Dance & Storytelling Festival, which she describes as “the largest participatory folk festival in the United States.” They also founded the California Traditional Music Society, or CTMS.

Two years ago, Weissman persuaded the city of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department to give the nonprofit CTMS the use of a then run-down building in Encino Park.

Formerly used as a photography center, the building was refurbished by the city and is now home to the Folk Music Center. The Cultural Affairs Department provides an operating budget of $15,000 a year, and the center raises additional money. At the center, Weissman is able to advance her latest cause--preserving traditional music and creating new audiences for it.

“Our mission and purpose,” she explained, “is keeping the music alive for future generations. That’s what we do.”

On Monday nights, the center offers classes in banjo, fiddle, Scottish fiddle and guitar. It has “old timey jam sessions” under the trees on the first Sunday of the month. It sponsors concerts such as the Sept. 22 appearance of April Verch, a Canadian fiddle champion and step dancer. And the center serves as an office for both the summer solstice festival and the music society, whose related projects include sending traditional musicians into area schools.

Weissman said folk music organizations all over the country are reporting a surge of interest in traditional music and dance, especially among the young.

“Riverdance did it for all of us,” she said, alluding to the popular program of traditional Irish music and dance that toured internationally in recent years. Weissman also believes the recent films “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Songcatcher” have piqued interest in folk because of their compelling soundtracks.

Margo Blevin, director of the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va., reports that she too has seen heightened interest in traditional music and other arts in recent years. Her institution, which runs folk arts camps and workshops, is in the heart of Appalachia, where folk music has always been popular.

“The joke here,” she said, “is if you meet somebody from Randolph County [West Virginia], you say, ‘Hi, what instrument do you play?’ ”

Blevin also gives credit to Riverdance for the explosion of Celtic music and dance. Every once in a while, a movie or other popular entertainment comes along that causes people to decide to master the dulcimer or learn more about traditional arts, Blevin said.

“There was an enormous outpouring of interest in blues when ‘Crossroads’ came out,” Blevin said, referring to the 1986 film about blues pioneer Robert Johnson. “Kids started to come out in droves to play roots music, kids who before were only interested in rock.”

She said her center has recently seen a significant increase in the number of children, teens and 20-somethings signing up for institute programs and attending concerts.

“I’m seeing a different population--a younger population,” she said. “From the ‘70s on, we were a graying population, as people who had been involved in folk music in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s remained involved but few young people joined them.”

She also thinks new technology has been a boon for the time-honored arts.

“Kids are fairly computer savvy,” she said, “and you can get on the Internet and find all kinds of music you’d never find in a record store.”

Like Weissman’s programs, Blevin’s emphasize making music, not passively consuming it.

“We have a ‘Fiddle From Scratch’ workshop, where you can borrow a fiddle and learn how to play it in a week,” Blevin said.

In programs like Weissman’s, Blevin said, “people are going there to learn how to participate. They’re not just sitting in a chair, drinking a beer.”

Like Blevin, Weissman believes folk music is eternal. What changes is how fashionable it is.

“We’ve always been here,” Weissman said. “We just don’t make it to the front page of the newspaper. We don’t get airplay on the radio.”

As Weissman’s Folk Center colleague Tammy Javorsek said, “There aren’t folk music awards on TV.”

FolkWorks publisher Leda Shapiro thinks the folk renaissance reflects a widespread desire for a respite from high-stress modern life: “I think people are looking for something simple, a simpler way to live, and this is part of it.”