On Sunday night, we went to see Jackson Browne, 75, in concert in San Francisco. He was playing a tribute concert for some folk artist along with the entire contents of the local folk-rock retirement home. We got to see Joan Baez, 83, and Bob Weir, 76, as well. It was a lovely show and they all had a deep, affectionate connection with the honoree, Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Some of them couldn't carry a tune any more, but they were all still good guitarists.
They talked about their love for truckers, cowboys and steel mill workers. They played folk songs about the plight of the working poor. They also spouted standard, progressive, political bromides. I thought about Trump voters and how they were the modern truckers, cowboys and steel mill workers. This crew of coffee house troubadours couldn't have been philosophically farther from today's working poor if they tried.
I wondered how and when the split occurred. I wondered if Browne, Baez and Weir even knew that there was a split.
Then it hit me that they were never the voice of the working poor. Jackson Browne sold out arenas, but Weir and the Grateful Dead played to burned-out hippies and I'm not sure Baez ever got far from the coffee house folk circuit. The working poor were listening to AC/DC and Hank Williams Jr.
My working hypothesis is that the folk-rock crew don't take anyone else's opinions seriously. They're an insular group, living in a progressive bubble. I would bet that many of them subscribe to Marx's idea of "false consciousness" where the working poor are content with striving for a middle class life only because they don't understand they're oppressed.
It's the problem with the Elites in general. If you're at the top of your game, and these artists certainly were that, why pay attention to Bubba and Delores who live in a trailer park in Kentucky? They romanticized Bubba and Delores in their songs, but never understood how they saw the world or why their world view might be valid. If they saw a Trump flag flying over the double wide, they'd lose their minds.
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| We sing the songs of the working poor even though we despise them. |
Correct. Singers who claim to be "representing" some group of people, almost never have the slightest clue what the lives of the people they claim to be singing about are actually like. I grew up on a small dairy farm in the 70s, and it was always painfully obvious that the "Country" and "Folk" singers were predominantly a bunch of urban posers who had probably never had to heave a forkful of manure in their lives. Most of my career since then has been working with mining companies, and the singers' fanciful tales about life in the mines and metal industries are stuck back pre-WWII at best. I haven't had a lot of direct relationship with truckers, but I have no reason to think that the singers ever knew anything real about their lives, either.
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