Discovering Folk Music Review

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(More customer reviews)Stephanie Ledgin is primarily a photojournalist with roots in folk music. She managed the New Jersey Folk Festival for 10 years and helped found the International Folk Alliance. This is her second book, the first being Discovering Bluegrass. While I've not read that book, I did enjoy reading this volume.
Ledgin's goal is to introduce what baby boomers experienced in the 1960s and 70s by discovering the breadth of "folk music" being performed by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton, Mississippi John Hurt, Libba Cotton and others, to the iPod generation, many of who never owned a disc record or attended a "folk festival". For those of us who did attend festivals, as well as political rallies and marches BW (Before Woodstock), this is all rote knowledge. We lived it. With book Ledgin is reaching for the PC-ready audience providing brief bios of legendary performers as well as some of the "new generation" of folk music performers and lots and lots of website references to seek further info. After a chapter whose title asks "What is Folk Music?", she moves quickly to the "Folk Boom" of the 1950s. Utilizing excerpts from interviews she has recorded over the years with artists ranging from David Bromberg and Tom Paxton to the Abrams Brothers, she shows the breadth of what is often too narrowly defined as "folk". Is Aaron Copland a folk composer? (He borrows from traditional American music.). Are both Stephen Foster and Ani DiFranco folk song composers? It all blends together. And, as you will see in the "resource section" that fills the last third of the book, nearly every artist, movie, or even "folk camp" has a website you can visit to learn more. As expected, there is a "selected listing" of recordings that Ledgin recommends. Its brief but a good place to start. There is an index in the back to help you find your way back to a certain spot.
Some of Ledgin's photos of folk performers are bound into the middle of the volume.
This is not really a reference book, but more of an easy to read series of essay which will introduce new listeners to this genre of music (now often being blended into the title "americana"). Because new artists come and go - and website URLs change - the book may outlive its currency in a few years. But, for now, I can certainly recommend it to anyone who has just discovered their first folk festival or chanced across the satellite radio channel "the Village" on XM radio and wants to know more.
Steve Ramm
"Anything Phonographic"


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