mostly just reblogs lol

me:

You start to wonder why in every fiction that reaches us, EVEN IN FICTION WRITTEN HERE, jungles and deserts are considered "exotic" and "hostile" and are never home to any main characters, why they're always "exotic", never "home". You start hearing people who wish they had snow in Christmas (which is in summer) and you realize that's nonsense but it takes a bit of thinking to properly articulate WHY is that nonsense. You see city planning bringing plant species from the north which don't grow here, people trying to imitate northern climates where it just doesn't work, and you think that's silly, until you start learning about how these are just the tail of actual plans of transforming colonized enviroments. You hear comments about how people in hot places are such and such and you of course realize that's discrimination and racism, but you also start to connect the dots about how the discrimination goes against the very place they live in.

what sort of folk music do you like to sing?

I don't often see American's mentioning folk music, I had thought that folk music traditions mostly became Country and Blues in the US. Do you feel linked to a local folk tradition?

thanks,

-A Folk Music enjoyer in Scotland

Not prying at all! I love talking about folk music!

A lot of my family comes from Scotland and Ireland, and my dad and grandmother both loved and carried those folk music traditions and passed them down to me (along with a family tartan and a love of Robert Burns), so traditional Scotch and Irish folk music are among my favorites. That said, I also love a lot of traditional and modern American and Canadian folk music. Yes, country and blues are both American folk traditions, and the term "American Folk Music" overlaps heavily with them, so there's not necessarily clear distinctions, but i think most country or blues enjoyers would file most of what I listen to as "folk music" independently of other genres. In terms of regional differences, if Country is the folk music of the western US, and Blues is the folk music of the southern US, then what most Americans would refer to as folk would be the folk music of Appalachia, Bluegrass.

That said, these genres have intermingled and cross-pollinated a lot, and many of my favorite songs and artists draw on multiple traditions. Think like, John Prine, House of the Rising Sun, James Taylor, Devil Went Down to Georgia, Nanci Griffith, John Denver, City of New Orleans, David Wilcox, or Paul Simon (who also drew a lot on a variety of African folk traditions and worked with African folk artists in his later works).