My father, Charles Seeger, was a musicologist; when he was 90, he put out a collection of papers he had read at various scholarly gatherings. The last paper he read was titled ‘The Folkness of the Nonfolk and Nonfolkness of the Folk.’ The last sentence was, ‘Musically speaking, the people of the United States are divided into two classes: a majority that does not know it is folk and a minority that thinks it isn’t.’ What lovely lines, because we’re all folk.
