Wagner: Folk music continues to evolve

Though folk music often brings about images of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, the genre has adapted… Though folk music often brings about images of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, the genre has adapted to the changing musical climate by using  different instrumention to reflect the changing times.

There’s something about a person using his voice and an electric guitar that has always struck a chord with me — literally and figuratively. Sure, an acoustic guitar seems like the proper instrumentation of a respected singer-songwriter, but the raw power that someone can hold in his hands can create its own sonic splendor. No two artists do this better than two punk-rock troubadours separated by an ocean and 20 years, but united by a folk-music tradition that can sometimes be achingly sincere.

Billy Bragg first came to prominence in England with the 1983 release of Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy. Playing at 45 rpm in fewer than 20 minutes, it was really more of an EP. But Bragg’s songs communicated more than an album’s worth of romantic and left-wing political sentiment. The songs teeter on this line, making the personal public and the public personal.

One of Bragg’s compositions on that release, “A New England,” would later be a pop hit in England for songstress Kirsty MacColl. On Bragg’s version, he belts it out like it’s his last plea for attention while he plows through power chords beneath it. “I don’t want to change the world,” Bragg’s lyrics say. “I’m not looking for a new England / I’m just looking for another girl.”

Perhaps the album’s most famous song for Bragg is “To Have and To Have Not,” a song about living in a system people born into poverty have little chance of moving up. When Bragg sings the first lines of the chorus — “Just because you’re better than me / Doesn’t mean I’m lazy” — it has a jarring impact.

Besides these poignantly political songs, Bragg has also written some great ballads — for lack of a better term — that use his stripped-down approach to great ends. “The Saturday Boy” from Brewing Up With Billy Bragg is a great example of this. It is one of the most truly moving love songs that you’re likely to encounter. Bragg puts his lyrics over slow, meticulous chords: “In the end it took me a dictionary / To find out the meaning of unrequited / While she was giving herself for free / At a party to which I was never invited.”

The song’s inclusion of a trumpet solo also signals a shift for Bragg, who previously had only featured his voice and guitar. He would go on to play with a band supporting him — usually called the Blokes — for more than 10 albums in the next 20 years. During that time, “To Have and To Have Not” was covered by an American artist, Lars Frederiksen, playing in much of the same tradition as Bragg.

Frederiksen played with legendary punks, the UK Subs — short for United Kingdom Subversives — before joining Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman as a member of Rancid in 1993. By the early 2000s, though, Frederiksen wanted to pursue a more personal musical venture, and he found it in the Bastards, his own band that emphasized his personal voice and guitar work.

Fronting the Bastards, he co-wrote the songs with Armstrong but sang each of them with the same kind of personal sincerity that Bragg pioneered in punk 20 years before. Over two albums, 2001’s Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards and 2004’s Viking, Frederiksen moved between songs about his home, his love life and the lack of opportunity in America with an ease that underscores the connection between those themes. Nothing is isolated in the human condition, and the breadth of Frederiksen’s songs explores just that.

“Skunx,” a song from his first album is a punk-rock anthem in which Frederiksen sings about life in the eponymous street gang, beginning with fast downstrokes and his emotive voice before adding the power of his band. He adapts Bragg’s “To Have and To Have Not” with one of the verses replaced to make it his — something of a folk tradition. Where Bragg philosophized about keeping yourself together, Frederiksen says in his own lyrics, “I dropped out of high school in Campbell, California / I got a guitar, and I never looked back.”

Viking was controversial upon its release, as it was perceived by some as being degrading to women through its sometimes uncomfortably personal lyrics and a cover design that featured two buxom models. But within the context of the work, those choices are necessary.

“My Life to Live” details Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards’ sexual excesses with a perspective that’s uncomfortable on the first listen, but upon further listening lends credence to a surprisingly sentimental man. “The Viking” is the album’s final track, and it acts as one of the most achingly personal songs in the punk-rock idiom. “Well how do you do? My name is Lars,” the song begins while Frederiksen plays a simple set of chords. He continues this confessional nature, detailing the experiences he had as he “grew into a man.”

Both Bragg and Frederiksen perform in a tradition that has its roots in punk rock but finds its soul a little closer to what we might consider folk.