It's really quite difficult, you know, to be a proper folkie in this day and age. My mother manages it somehow — but of course, she's in her forties. And it's really only to be expected, seeing as this is my mother we're discussing. If you knew her, you'd understand. But you just try being a folkie among today's youth. You mention your favourite song and they'll just give you a confused blink.

Who the hell's Bob Dylan?

Don't get me wrong: they do like 'old' music. Beatles and Stones fans are still fighting, just like I gather they were 40 years ago. But you mention a folkie from the same period, say Pentangle, the British folk revival group, and they get completely the wrong message.

Oh, are you a Wiccan? My sister's a Wiccan.

There are three decent reasons I can think of for this, none of which are particularly good ones. But there you go: who says today's youth need reasons? The first is that folk music is usually acoustic. I know the appeal of some three-hundred-year-old ballad sung by some old geezer who obviously doesn't know the meaning of the words 'staying in key' is somewhat limited. Trust me, I was the one who immediately regreted spending forty dollars on a set of authentic recordings of people singing the traditional ballads of the British Isles. But that's not what folk music is, necessarily. It can be upbeat and exciting and actually make good use of harmony, like Ian and Sylvia's traditional Canadian stuff. It can even be wild and electric, like Steeleye Span, who are so awesome. Boy, they would have been mind-blowing to see in concert.

Reason number two is perhaps the most obvious: this was the music our parents listened to! And believe me, I know that all too well. I grew up with 'Solidarity Forever' and the Wobblies' Little Red Songbook because my mother sung those songs in her grad school days; I listened to my tapes of Peter, Paul and Mary live in concert again and again, and when I was old enough to understand the double entendre in 'Eddystone Light' I was suitably excited. Yes, it was all passed down from my mother, but since when is that a bad thing? Plus, I don't see how any kid who wears a Rolling Stones t-shirt to school every day can possibly complain about the great folk musicians being too 'old'. Just look at Mick Jagger.

The other thing about folk is it's just too political for most kids. A lot of kids, first of all, don't get Woody Guthrie songs like 'Union Maid' and 'Pastures of Plenty'. They just don't know enough about what we bleeding-heart liberal folkies are like. Even Jacobite ballads are a bit too far out for them — perhaps even more so, I now realise, because there's actually history involved in those. Maybe it's just because I live in a conservative neighbourhood or something, but I was having a conversation with a classmate and a history teacher. I mentioned some little anecdote about our IWW songbook and its proud place of residence on the bookshelf:

Teacher: You have the IWW songbook?!

Me: Yeah, and the official CD. We listen to it in the car.

Other kid: What's the IWW?

Teacher: Industrial Workers of the World. A big union.

Me (to teacher): I'll make you a copy of the CD if you want.

Other kid: I don't see the point of unions, really.

Me: What?!!! How do you expect the workers to unite in the fight for reasonable pay? If they can't unionise, how are they supposed to be treated like human beings by the managers?

Teacher: You'll have to bring that CD in when you're in my US History class.

Other kid: My dad's a manager of a company and he says the unions only cause trouble.

At this point, I'm taken off on a long pro-union rant. 'The bosses don't like unions because they just want to be greedy and get as much benefit as they can while treating their workers horribly. And how would you feel if you were a worker who needed to support your family, but you weren't allowed to unionise and so couldn't do anything about it? The working man is downtrodden and constantly at a disadvantage, but the union can help him get together with his brother workers and make a stand!' The teacher and a few spectators are laughing now, and I start up with 'Solidarity Forever': When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, there will be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun... The teacher laughingly joins in, and the other kid shakes his head, exasperated.

But you get the picture. Folk is something our parents and teachers do; it's not for the likes of us hip, rebellious adolescents. (Incidentally, does anyone find that the word 'adolescent' conjures up a picture of a gawky boy with a lot of spots? I know that's what I think of.) Folk is the music of hippies and commies and, while not all folkies are hippies or commies (and not all hippies and commies are folkies) the idealistic dreams of change definitely went out with the Red Scare and the death of Woody Guthrie. And so far, retro jeans and cannabis haven't served to bring them back. For some inexplicable reason, it is no longer the 'Age of Aquarius', though AC/DC somehow manages to draw amazing crowds.

It's somewhat silly, too, when folk is all you have in your music collection. I have an iPod, and so I wander around school with it a lot. Kid in a Led Zepplin t-shirt comes up to me:

Kid: What are you listening to?

Me: Tom Lehrer.

Kid: Isn't that the guy that wrote the song about the guy who slept with his mother?

Me: Oedipus Rex? Yeah. 'There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex...' Oh. the song's changed. Now it's the Chieftains doing 'Rocky Road to Dublin'.

Kid: Chieftains? Don't they do, like, punk or something?

Me (trying not to lose patience): No, they play traditional Irish music. Actually, on this recording they're playing with the Rolling Stones.

Kid: What, rock? [Kid starts naming tunes or discussing rock trivia or something like that; since I really know very little about classic rock I'll try not to make a fool of myself by reenacting this bit.]

Me: No, traditional Irish music.

At this point, the kid usually walks off, and I'm left there, with the Chieftains and no one to share them with. Yeah, that sounds really lame, I know. But even just if everyone had a basic awareness of folk, that'd make life so much easier. Our orchestra teacher likes to give us 'fiddle music' to play as a change from Vivaldi or Schubert, but the thing is he knows very little about fiddle and so he directs it all wrong. I try to correct him, of course, but you find that when no one else in the group has ever heard a traditional Scottish reel, much less actually sat in a seisun for hours and played them, it makes it very difficult to do a credible performance.

Mind you, being a folkie ain't all bad. (For one thing, you learn that awful grammar. But that isn't really a good thing, is it? Anyway...) I play Academic League for my school, and so we were at the city finals when we got a question about famous American union leaders. I had no idea what the answer to the question was, but all I could think of were the words to a particular song: 'I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me...' So I urged the captain of my team to give Joe Hill as the answer, thinking it would be vaguely funny — and we got the question right! Three points to my school!¹

Yeah, so I think that if I go on any longer, I'm going to start repeating myself. Just, you know, bear in mind that if you're a kid who likes folk, better go out online and find someone to talk to about it, cause you're sure as hell not going to find anyone at school who'll talk folk. And if you're a parent who likes folk, go ahead and afflict your children with your passion. I'm proud that I'm the daughter of a folkie mother. Family roaring sessions of 'The Times They Are A-Changin' are actually quite moving. But just be careful: if you find that they're really lonely at school, you'd better be there for them!

PS: If all this folk lingo has completely befuddled you, perhaps Fraggle's excellent entry on The Wonderful World of Folk Music will give you somewhere to start resolving your confusion.