Folk+World+Country Music Thread

[Lisnaholic]

...because these wide-ranging musical genres should have a home base on SCD, imo. Here's a place where anyone can put the Folk/World/Country songs they come across and enjoy. Here's a couple from me:

^ From Conil's album "Strange Part Of The Country", released in 2007, this track is folky, but as a whole the album is more a combination of Nick Drake meets blues while putting a toe into rock music.

Artist: Manbo Weena
Song: Oguo
Country: Haiti
I just put the basic info for this track as I couldn't find out much about them/her online. Great song, though, and an inspiration in its way - that such music can rise up out of a country that has been so badly treated throughout its history.

Anyone else with any Recommendations From Around The World ?

[Lexi Darling]

Only tangentially related but I just gotta vent: the radio here won't stop playing that country cover of Fast Car. That's one of my mom's favorite songs ever, and she played it all the time when I was growing up. So the fact that it's a huge hit 35 years later is so dang surreal to me. But they play it on top 40 radio so often that it's making me like the song less.

[Lisnaholic]

I didn't know that there was a country music cover of Fast Car, Mrs. Waffles, but by extraordinary coincidence, the article below ( discussing Fast Car) appeared on today's CNN webpage. Thanks to you I was able to say, "Aha, Right!" as if I knew all about it. The article explains that Fast Car is creating waves in the ocean that is country music. If you can't endure to read the article yourself, perhaps you should at least send it to your mom :-

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/29/entertainment/luke-combs-jason-aldean-country-crossroads-cec/index.html

Country music can get pretty irritating, to be sure, but then some songs "reach the part that other songs don't reach". Even my cold cynical soul has been moved by this one, for example:-

[Lexi Darling]

I didn't know that there was a country music cover of Fast Car, Mrs. Waffles, but by extraordinary coincidence, the article below ( discussing Fast Car) appeared on today's CNN webpage. Thanks to you I was able to say, "Aha, Right!" as if I knew all about it. The article explains that Fast Car is creating waves in the ocean that is country music. If you can't endure to read the article yourself, perhaps you should at least send it to your mom :-

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/29/entertainment/luke-combs-jason-aldean-country-crossroads-cec/index.html

Country music can get pretty irritating, to be sure, but then some songs "reach the part that other songs don't reach". Even my cold cynical soul has been moved by this one, for example:-

Thank you for the link! I definitely did think about the implications of a straight white dude making a huge mainstream country hit out of a song written by a queer black woman (I didn't actually previously know about Chapman's connection to lesbian identity). Good food for thought.

I'm honestly pretty illiterate when it comes to most country. I can enjoy some country songs I know just on the merits of being good pop songs, but I don't really understand it on anything more than a surface level. It's not a culture I identify with lyrically or aesthetically; in all the country songs I like, it's always the least "country-ish" elements that I latch onto.

[tristan_geoff]

ambient americana

[Lisnaholic]

^ Thanks for the contribution, tristan  Great title, and a genre label I haven't heard of before. With the music, though, the first two tracks were enough for me, I'm afraid: too much ambient and not enough americana.

The Paris, Texas album might be considered ambient americana, perhaps: a mainly instrumental album with tracks that never really leave the mood of this opener:

[Lexi Darling]

ambient americana

This is such interesting stuff! Reminds me a lot of The KLF's Chill Out with the ambient sampling and such. I love works that kind of deconstruct classic sounds and recontextualize them, thanks for posting this!

[Lisnaholic]

I'm honestly pretty illiterate when it comes to most country. I can enjoy some country songs I know just on the merits of being good pop songs, but I don't really understand it on anything more than a surface level. It's not a culture I identify with lyrically or aesthetically; in all the country songs I like, it's always the least "country-ish" elements that I latch onto.

Yeah, as a genre, I don't like it much, and the culture you mention is always gonna remain alien to me.

This song, on the other hand, "calls to my ancestral roots" (if you'll excuse the pretention) :-

"She swore by grass, she swore by corn
Her true lover had never been born"

I feel like I want to go into the woods tonight and perform some arcane Druid ritual with Pol Mac Adaim and whoever the girl in the song is.

[Lisnaholic]

Here's a song that's hitting the headlines outside of music-orientated media because it was used during the GOP candidates debate the other day:-

In a YouTube video shared on Friday, the singer addressed his song having been played at this week's 2024 Republican presidential primary debate, saying that he found it "funny" because the song "is written about the people on that stage."

Folk-Country-Rock-Rap: all genres that have given voice to the plight of the common man. A couple of my personal favourites have been Woody Guthrie, and also Ewan McColl:-

 

[grindy]

This year's Le Cri De Caire by the group by the same name is a beautiful mix of arabic music, jazz and minimal classical. Highly recommend the whole album.

[Lisnaholic]

Good to see you here, grindy! That's a great, moody track. Thanks.

The combination of traditional Indian sounds and electronica has been around for a long time now, but here's a recent good song from MIDIval Punditz, helped out on this occasion by a female vocalist:-

[Lisnaholic]

My favourite track from Argentinian singer, Mona Maca Mu:-

What's it about? These are the opening lines:
Every time I think I'm waking up,
I feel like I've stopped walking
And an alarm sounds in you
And an alarm sounds in me"

[tristan_geoff]

[Lisnaholic]

Two guesses at a lost music:

Afro-Mexicans are a larger-than-you-might-imagine ethnic group, They don't get a lot of attention, and people can only guess at what their music first sounded like. Here are some dancers today who freely admit that they are retro-inventing a style, based on what they've gleaned from the internet:-

...and here is a 1996 theatrical re-imagining of how Afro-Mexican music might have been, in the unlikely event that it was sung by a choir trained in the European tradition. This is a short song from the soundtrack to La Antorcha Encendida, a Mexican historical drama, and its intention is to evoke a party among slaves during Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain, so round about 1790.
 

[grindy]

Not sure how to classify this but probably okay to post here.