![]() ![]() But in that tradition, where authorship is beyond the point, it’s definitely a folk song.”įor all its grandiose lyrical statements and geographical touchstones, according to White, “Seven Nation Army” is about a rather banal subject: the trappings of his burgeoning fame. To be honest with you, I have no idea what ‘Seven Nation Army’ is about. As it turned out, Americans in the cities loved that music, too. “ American Epic is about the time when popular music shifted from being made for and marketed to reasonably affluent people in the city to recording poor communities in rural America in the hopes of selling their own music back to them. Posed with the question of “Seven Nation Army”’s place in that linage, he laughs. An avid turn-of-the-century American music historian, MacMahon spent much of the past decade tracking down the stories behind pre-Dust Bowl folk songs. 6 in a poll of Detroit’s 100 Greatest Songs.īernard MacMahon, who worked with White on his four-part PBS documentary series American Epic, initially had trouble wrapping his mind around “Seven Nation Army”’s categorization in the old-school folk tradition. And many times this will happen in sports arenas of course, particularly soccer,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2016 on the occasion of “Seven Nation Army” being ranked No. “Modern folk music around the world happens when groups of people gather together in larger numbers, not in small homes and villages like it used to in the past. ![]() “People have always said if you can create one song like that in your lifetime-that people really think of beyond its living author-then you’ve really accomplished a folk song.” Conveniently, White himself has also weighed in on the subject, referring to “Seven Nation Army”’s popularity as “one of the things I am most proud of being a part of.”Ī former seminary student, White has argued that the sports arena is an extension the church gathering, where many of the songs we consider folk canon first took shape. Place agrees that “Seven Nation Army” is one of the better recent examples of that style of broad folk. The only vessel for such things nowadays is the sports anthem. It’s logical then that so-called “topical” folk would stay regionally minded, leaving a gap for the “old school” broadly applicable type that traverses international borders orally, reaching beyond socio-economic and geographical restriction. They’re topical songs, and every so often one catches on and lives.” “Songwriters are now basically using the traditions they grew up with in their local communities to create their own music. “Folk songs come out of every community,” he says. “For me, the definition is a lot broader than that.” To accommodate our modern times, Place argues the term has to be both broadened and localized. Jock Jams)-is the last remaining musical monoculture.Īs the head archivist at Smithson Folkways, Jeff Place has spent the past 30 years considering, branding and deciding what is and isn’t canonical “folk.” “Most people consider the definition of folk music to be the record-store definition: a singer-songwriter, acoustic guitar, plays in a coffee house,” he told me on a recent afternoon. This argument poses two counter-intuitive narratives: first, that the traditional understanding of a folk song has become anachronistic to the point of stereotype, and second, that the sports anthem-a genre most associated with the daft, soulless and unabashedly commercial aspects of songwriting (i.e. As the go-to sports anthem internationally, it’s very likely that “Seven Nation Army” may not only be the best-known musical phrase in popular music, but also the last Great American Folk Song. “After the one from ‘Satisfaction.’”Īt first blush that statement might appear audacious: how could what amounted to little more than an indie-rock anthem possibly be mentioned in the same breath as the Big Bang of teenage culture and, possibly, of modern rock ‘n roll itself? But upon closer inspection, it’s not audacious enough. “It might be the second-best-known guitar phrase in popular music,” Wilkinson noted. Wilkinson was referring to the popular seven-note passage from The White Stripes’ 2003 song, “Seven Nation Army,” which serves as both its verse and chorus. In his recent New Yorker profile on Jack White, writer Alec Wilkinson noted a rather awkward conjecture about the bon vivant, rock star, label owner and analogue enthusiast: “More people know a fragment of White’s music than know his name.”
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