WHITEHALL — Musician Ben Traverse returned to the White Lake Community Library Monday, hosting a new class on the history of American folk music and its evolution through our country’s history.
Last summer, Ben was a guest of the library, inviting residents to learn about the history of sea shanties and enjoy a sing-along concert, an educational program they’ve toured to different libraries around Michigan. This past Tuesday featured a similar structure, with various facets of American folk music history, structure and features introduced, paired with an accompanying piece to demonstrate.
Ben is originally from Manistee and described themselves as a history buff first and a musician second.
“I played guitar, but history was where my passion was at,” they said.
When introduced to the history of American folk music through an after-school program, though, Ben was inspired. Traverse City’s SEEDS program partnered with Earthwork Music Collective and Blackbird Arts to create an educational music program honoring Michigan-based ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and for Ben, “This is the two things that I do at the same time. This is cultural history and its music. I just got super deep into it from that.”
Ben is based in Grand Rapids, but travels around the state educating and performing.
As Ben introduced it, traditional folk music was made by and for the working class. As such, folk music was characterized by its central focus on the struggles of the working class - be it the onset of the Industrial Revolution or the dispersal of news that would otherwise not be easily accessible. With every bullet point in their lecture, Ben brought out a guitar or banjo and enthralled the crowd with a rendition of a folk song, ranging from classics to deep cuts of America’s 250-year-old songbook. Afterwards, they would point out the particular qualities of the song’s structure or verse delivery distinct to folk music.
As the title of the class - Old Time in the Current Times - suggests, Ben followed the evolution of American folk music from its earliest origins as centuries-old British Isles tunes to the recording sessions of the early 1900s, which dispersed the genre throughout the country and founded the bedrock of the 1960s pop-folk revival and modern-day country music.
No discussion of American folk music would be complete without the acknowledgment of the influence of African-Americans, particularly the introduction of the African instrument known today as a banjo. Ben navigated the tricky history of minstrelsy and race records, highlighting the innovations of Black American musicians such as Elizabeth Cotton and James A Bland.
To finish out the “Current Times,” Ben played their own original song “Birch Grove,” based on a hike at the Loda Lake Wildflower Sanctuary in Newaygo County. Earlier in the program, Ben described, “Another really core trait of traditional music that separates it from classical music is the collective input on its composition,” and this original song is a perfect example of the ever-evolving aspect of folk music, as a tune from the 1850s to which Ben overlaid lyrics describing the hike. Said Ben of this creation, “There’s a lot of really great things that can come from engaging with this historical material and creating new stuff on the groundworks of that.”
Ben is as much a researcher as a musician and has gathered a wealth of resources on their website for those interested in learning more about folk music. They also encouraged the audience to be on the lookout for classes and scholarships awarding musicians interested in learning about and playing “old time” music.
“I feel like it's a good time to be a traditional folk musician," Ben said. "There are camps and there are festivals and there are jams and there are events happening all over the state.”
When discussing the state of traditional folk music in our modern day, Ben praised the work of everyday musicians and hobbyists creating music for the pure enjoyment of the craft.
“I mean, as long as there are people making music, traditional music’s in a good spot, because traditional music is just the music the average person is doing," they said.
