It is not too unusual to find in the field of folk music that the same word means quite different things to different people. “Authenticity” is one such word.
I think you will agree with me, that there are some appalling commercializations of folk music which one hears today on the juke boxes. However, I have often been just as repelled by some of the sterile imitations of folk music which I used to hear from effete, well-trained, middle class musicians. Don’t you agree that it is quite possible, in fact it has often happened, that the letter is imitated while the spirit is allowed to escape?
When I sing, in America, some of the beautiful songs I learned in Britain I try to keep the spirit, the strength, and the truth of the songs. But it would not be authentic of me to try and sing them in a British accent. It would not be “authentically me” if you want to come down to it. I am an American. And for me to sing one of these songs in Britain with my unmistakably American accent might sound as silly to an English audience as it does to an American audience when a London singer tries to sing in Brooklynese.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the first duty of any artist is to produce good art. The only artists exempt from this first commandment are those engaged in the very specialized field of creating historical reproductions. They, of course, must try to be as authentic as possible in restoring, say an 18th-century drawing room for a museum. Here we can only hope that the original was good art.
SOURCE Spin 2, no. 9 (early 1964): 2.
In the field of folk music the authentic original is best captured on an authentic field recording. Since this is the case I think it would not only be futile but completely wrong of a singer such as myself to reproduce exact imitations. Rather, it is my duty to be authentically myself and to make as good music as I possibly can, and to transmit the truth and strength of other nations’ songs as well as I am humanly able.
And as for “good music”, that can be interpreted in an almost infinite variety of ways. My personal definition, for example, of a “good” vocal tone is the resonant rasp of a real country singer which has no vibrato to speak of and often strains the upper registers. And with no such things as pear-shaped tones placed in the proper cavities.