Earnest Bovine wrote:Dave Mudgett wrote:
1. Artistic intent
2. Audience self-identity and perception
3. Artistic ineptitude may be more important. An "artist" (in the broad, commercial sense of the term) is often ridiculed as inauthentic if he is capable of playing more than one specialized kind of music.
Yeah, I think you're correct in some situations - my experience is that absolutists frequently perceive things this way. And yes, I'm using the term "artist" in that very loose, commercial sense.
But not everybody is so rigid. And purism is not how any of these styles of music - country, blues, rock, folk, or whatever - came into being. Styles are, have always been, and I suspect will always be born as a result of mixing of various musical approaches. To me, to innovate, one must command more than one approach. Ultimately, any musician who performs for a living has to find and hold an audience, and being rigid and inept does not help except in very special circumstances. My experience is that most working musicians - the ones I know, anyway - have to know a bunch of different styles to survive on the circuit.
The other thing is that the entire notion of 'authenticity' is arguable. The vast majority of the people who grew up, e.g., chopping cotton or tobacco and grew up in a sharecropper's shack, or spent 20-40 years on the "Cadillac assembly line" or in the pit at US Steel and drinking their lunch at Joe's bar across from the plant, are either very old or dead. If you wanna talk about 'authenticity' of, let's say, a 'true blues' or 'true country' performer singing about the classic stuff in the tunes, then there's hardly anybody active left who is speaking from actual experience. It's getting to the point where there will be very few blue-collar Americans left, since most blue-collar work has been and is continuing to be outsourced to other countries. But how may country cover bands do you hear playing "Workin' Man Blues"? Almost all of them, pretty much anywhere I go.
I think only the purest of the pure are truly worried about this type of 'authenticity'.
