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| | Granta: 'American Folk' by Greil Marcus |
 | | In most of the vast amount of commentary that greeted the reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1997, the music was taken as a canon, and the performers as exemplars of the folk. |
 | | This is the classic Sixties account of what folk music is, how it works, how it is seized by the dominant discourse of the time and turned into a soulless commodity—the classic account of who the folk are, of how even when everything they have is taken from them, their essential goodness remains. |
 | | On the Anthology, the spiritual ‘Present Days’, the same group’s recording from the same year, has a deep, mature bass, a reedy lead by a man you can see as the town pharmacist, then a farmer or a preacher taking the most expansive moments of the tune, their wives filling out the music. |
| www.granta.com /article-excerpt?article_id=1453 (4396 words) |
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