-By Warner Todd Huston
I was recently reading an article about the folk music scene as it developed in the 30s and 40s and it hit me that these people were yet another example of how leftists take a culture and corrupt it to push their political schemes instead of merely presenting their philosophies and legitimately winning converts.
The article on the folk music scene noted that the nationalized folk scene started in the early 30s with people like Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, and later Pete Seger and ultimately Bob Dylan–the latter of whom turned his back on the genera after undermining its legitimacy with his protest against it.
Folk music, as the nation came to know it, was not an organic creation, but essentially a leftist propaganda program built on the music of the common folks of the Appalachians, a generation before. But instead of crying about politics, the backwoodsie originators of the sound were singing about life, love, and family, they weren’t singing about the workers, capitalism, or the proletariat–subjects that most people equate “folk music” with today.
The fact is, these leftists dreaming their dreamy Soviet-inspired dreams in the 30s and 40s invented folk music as we think of it as a propaganda effort to push leftism, not a celebration of truly American folk music as created by the hillpeople.
In fact, folk music initially celebrated both Stalin and Hitler until Hitler turned on Russia and invaded that frozen land. Once Hitler became the anti-Stalin, folkies turned against Nazism in support of their more favored dictator, Stalin.
Then, as the Cold War began, the lefties began to angle their music toward undermining the US as much as possible.
So, what does this all mean? Only that “folk music” as we know it today, the protest song of “We Shall Overcome” ideals, your Joan Baez singing about left-wing murderer Joe Hill at Woodstock, all this is a fabrication called “American art” by leftists and based on the cultural theft of a previously generation’s truly American musical art form.
Leftists cannot simply put their ideas out there and see if they stand or fall on the strengths of their argument, they have to steal a nation’s soul, corrupt it with their political ideology, and then repackage it, blatantly claiming that they have revealed a true national art form in the doing. Liberals cannot create beauty. They can only steal it and present it as their own.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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