The query about the Virginia Roots Music exhibit and municipal brass
bands illustrates a common misunderstanding about the vague term
"roots."  We used to use the term "folk" and everybody knew that the
term meant music in the oral tradition (which would exclude the brass
bands, their music being all written and orchestrated in the Western
European classical tradition), but then Pter, Paul and Mary (etc.) stole
the term "folk" to apply to a branch of commercial popular music which
may have been folk-derived, but was primarily college-educated
singer-songwriters who had learned to strum a guitar or banjo.  "Roots"
is very inexact, and may sometimes include both folk and folk-derived
non-folk music.  "Vernacular" is exact but ugly-sounding.

Anyway, the Virginia Roots Music exhibit focuses on "non-learned"
vernacular music, primarily in the oral or folk tradition---string-band
music, gospel, blues, early bluegrass, worksongs, ballads, etc.  The
exclusion of the municipal bands from the exhibit should not be taken as
a slight, or as some indication of its lack of historical interest.
 Indeed, though I am myself a folklorist by training, I am also the
director of a local historical society that has done exhibits on the
Charlottesville Municipal Band as well as on many other aspects of our
community's musical heritage, folk and non-folk.

I hope I haven't just muddied the waters further.

D.

--
Douglas Day, M.A., Ph.D.
Executive Director
Albemarle County Historical Society
The McIntire Building
200 Second Street, NE
Charlottesville, Va. 22902-5245
434.296.1492
fax 434.296-4576
<avenue.org/achs>

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