“To me folk music is about storytelling, and opera is about storytelling, so there’s no contradiction at all.”

Books sit in haphazard piles on the floor of Adobe Bookstore, providing a cozy scene for five performers who don vintage hats and pluck the humming strings of an upright bass, a violin, and a ukulele. With their casual dress and folksy serenades, the band resembles any number of old-timey or Americana bands performing in coffee shops across the country. But these musicians, led by singer/songwriter Annie Bacon, have a unique approach to the intersection of song and storytelling. They perform a “folk opera,” a series of songs written by Bacon that all connect and narrate one dramatic story, much as an opera or a musical would.

Bacon’s Folk Opera resembles ordinary life coming into itself as music. The narrative follows the interactions of women who have found themselves in a bleakly mundane town. Yet towards the end of Folk Opera, the protagonist Elizabeth realizes: “This stop was to pass the time, now its time has stopped me.” On this particular night, the audience watching Folk Opera seems to agree; they sit transfixed at the end of the performance. What may have just been a “stop” in a line of events for their evening has held them all in a state of awe. They’ve witnessed a relaxed, seemingly amateur gathering of singers suddenly blossom into a complex fabric of interpersonal and musical articulation.

The folk opera, a form that is gaining momentum amongst indie-folk musicians, is laden with contradictions and, as a subgenre, still seems slightly nebulous. Perched in a space between the rustic leaves of folk culture and the proper limbs of the operatic tradition, folk operas exist under the radar in many cases. They do not appear on the TV screen nor do they boast glossy MTV ads. Folk operas are the grassroots version of musicals, the bluegrass cousins of moody rock operas like Pink Floyd’s The Wall. At any given time, the folk operas I have seen resembled plays, ditties, improv routines, fully-fledged operas, ballads, circuses, and theatrical spectacles.

Taken separately, folk and opera seem to lie on opposite ends of the musical spectrum. But if Bacon’s piece, with Folk Opera as a temporary title, is any indicator, the folk opera can meld divergent musical traditions and narratives into a potent formula of fluid storytelling, rooted artistry and emotional charge. With musicians such as Colin Meloy from The Decemberists and singer/songwriter Anaïs Mitchell also creating captivating versions, the folk opera can proudly claim to have enticed artists well within the reach of music trend arbiters like Pitchfork or Pandora.

Though still under the national radar herself, Annie Bacon has made small splashes in the California music scene. Based in San Francisco, Bacon writes and performs her own indie rock music along with what she calls her O-SHEN, a rotating mélange of musicians who accompany her. A year ago she came across the ukulele at a friend’s house and became smitten with the petite instrument. At the time, she was preparing for a longer trip to the United Arab Emirates and South Africa, and she wanted to take advantage of the chance for creativity the trip could provide.

“A week or two before I left I just all the sudden decided I was going to write a folk opera–I have no idea why, it just popped into my head,” Bacon remembers. Not that she had a very sturdy concept of what that meant. “I had no idea what a folk opera was,” she admits. “There’s no easy defined form of it.”

Armed with her guitar, the new ukulele and the persistent feeling that an important musical piece was in the works, Bacon set off for her six-week trip. And as if by magic, the folk opera appeared. She stayed up late on the trip to journal about characters, cut and paste snippets of her past and her imagination and combine them into a narrative about two travelers who get stuck in a small town in New England. Even with all the extra work, she insists that some of the opera’s success was beyond her control. “It was more like finding it rather than making it,” she says about the creation of Folk Opera. “I would wake up from deep sleeps with songs on my lips, and the characters whispered their stories in my ear as I experimented with sounds and lyrics.” Her subconscious seemed to direct her storytelling.

By the time she got back to the States, Bacon had almost completed her nascent piece and felt ready to put her experiment to the test. She booked a show at SoCha Café on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District and completed Folk Opera’s last song minutes before dashing off to perform it for the first time. Since performing at SoCha Café, Bacon has performed Folk Opera on stages around San Francisco, in her own home (know as “The Tower”), and at the FAR West Regional Folk Alliance in Irvine, CA.

Folk Opera tells of Elizabeth, a caretaker in her twenties in charge of Aunt Sara, an ornery old bird afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Their car breaks down, and in one short afternoon their fates become enveloped in the entrenched personalities and histories of a small town. Tragedy ensues, but not before love can enter the scene, strangers have a chance to win each other over, small town antics abound, and Rita the waitress serves her coffee. And while death sits at the doorstep of this short tale, the fact that Bacon composed the entire opera on her ukulele lends a lighthearted tone to the whole affair.

“I tend towards really intense, so the last half of the opera is really sad,” admits Bacon. “But it’s on the ukulele, so it just kind of balances it a little bit so you don’t end up diving into this pit of despair…you’re not bulldozed away.”

Folk Opera, though entirely written and directed by Bacon, soars with the talent and energy of all of its performers. Elizabeth Greenblatt mesmerizes with her pure and pitch-perfect vocals as she sings the part of Elizabeth, and she and Bacon combine to offer harmonies that rise and seem to stay suspended above the audience long after their lips have closed. Joel Dean, who sings the part of “Old Man” Benjamin Defaunt, surprises viewers with a voice so rich and refined it appears to be generated from a much larger and older man.

Though we sometimes lose her vocals, Savannah Jo Lack imbues her fiddle playing with compelling emotion. Holding the whole piece together on upright bass, Joe Lewis provides more than just a regular beat. “He’s so solid,” affirms Bacon. “He worked with the charts for maybe two rehearsals and had the whole thing memorized. And he didn’t just show up and say OK, I’ll just play whatever you want me to play, he was really interested in the songs rhythmically.”

The folk opera “is ultimately is an extended version of what every folk song is,” muses Bacon. “The idea was definitely to take the whole idea of folk music and just make it bigger, longer.” Watching the show is falling deep into the world of a song and getting to hang out there, see what happens, follow the characters along for a ride. Many folk songs target the lives and tribulations of everyday people, and the folk opera relishes in the extended time it is given to do so. Musical themes are looped, lyrics enter again, feelings and subtexts are allowed to stew and resonate. The slow build of an extended piece provides more chance for a cathartic potency. “The last show the drummer who was going on after us came up to me and he was just weeping and crying,” remembers Bacon. “I didn’t expect that.”

Bacon is not the only musician who has used this subgenre to beguile audience members. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to catch the staging of a different folk opera, also by a talented and young female singer/songwriter. Anaïs Mitchell, who is on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records label, created her folk opera Hadestown after becoming engrossed in the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. While Mitchell was the one to dream up and write the opera, she worked with composer Michael Chorney and director Ben T. Matchstick of Vermont-based Bread & Puppet Theater to bring the piece into musical fruition. Hadestown premiered in Vermont in 2006 and later toured around the country.

Already a prolific and talented songwriter, Mitchell decided turn her penchant for writing tunes into a means for creating one longer work. Hadestown not only retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also recalls the culture and dress of 1930’s America with its prohibition-era setting. In the Greek myth, the lyre-playing Orpheus is heartbroken at the death of his true love, Eurydice, and so he decides to voyage to the underworld in hopes of finding her. He charms everyone so much with his melodies that even Hades agrees to strike a deal with him. Eurydice has a chance for survival, but only on one condition: Orpheus must never turn back to look upon his loved one until they are out of the underworld.

As Megan James writes in her story for the Addison Independent, Mitchell found the inspiration to write Hadestown after she composed two lines inspired by the Orpheus myth: “Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/ With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?” Like Bacon, who was visited in her sleep by whispers of lyrics and characters, Mitchell found the incipient threads of her opera as if by magic. “The truth is the first few songs came out of nowhere,” Mitchell insists. “I was like, what are you? And they were like, we’re a folk opera!”

Hadestown was much longer than Bacon’s Folk Opera and it was also staged. Though the relationship between movement, costumes, special effects and rhythm were not always cohesive, watching Hadestown was truly exciting. The songs became an integral part of the drama, and the story rarely broke for musical interludes but rather sustained them without pause. The score combined bluegrass, jazz, rock, and folk into an energetic explosion of harmony, discord, and darkness. Hadestown traveled to hell and dragged the audience along with it. Floating up from the darkness, Mitchell captivated viewers as Eurydice with her silky voice and luminescence. After seeing Hadestown I did not simply feel as though I had been privy to something very unique; I felt I had stumbled on a whole new genre.

An official definition of a folk opera has not yet made its way into the current pop culture dialogue. Many artists have composed rock operas­– The Who’s Tommy a prime example– and there are also Hip Hoperas by R.Kelly and Beyoncé and Mos Def, who star in Carmen: A Hip Hopera. Artists are eager to appropriate the term “opera” into their works, as if the genre can accommodate whoever is brave enough to endeavor its grandeur.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Music, Opera is “a drama set to music to be sung with instrumental accompaniment by singers usually dressed in costume.” The form is said to have originated in Florence towards the end of the 16^th Century and borrowed from madrigals and church music. There is something all-encompassing about opera, and Wagner viewed the form as “an amalgam of all the arts” (“Opera” 2). Throughout the ages opera has been considered as a component of high culture and an essential to the elite.

Folk seems to spring from the opposite side of the musical spectrum. In contrast with opera, which originated in Italy during a specific era, folk has existed since the beginning of music. The definition of folk music is riddled with controversy, subjective to whichever leader of thought decided to appropriate it during a particular era. In her article for Grove Music Online, Carole Pegg notes: “‘Folk music’ as a cultural construct, used for a variety of political agendas including nationalism, communism, fascism and colonialism, is the subject of ongoing research and debate.”

Folk music often describes traditional music of a particular ethnic or regional group. Without even trying, Bacon captures the irony embedded in the controversy surrounding the definition of folk music by simply referring to it as “simplistic and repetitive melodies and rich harmonies that tell stories of folks” on her website. Even though ethnomusicologists and historians may still be arguing over the true definition of folk music, the one thing everyone agrees on is that it comes from “the people,” rather than the elite.

History has shown a connection between highbrow opera and the grassroots context of folk even though they seem like disparate forms.  During the verismo movement of opera, composers attempted to reveal the harsh conditions and suffering of their protagonists. Often inspired by French realistic novels of the late 19th century, these operas wanted to tell the story of the workingman rather than the nobility. La Boheme is perhaps the most famous to emerge, and it later provided the inspiration for the Broadway musical Rent.

Similarly, in the 1930’s Berlin’s Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht adapted The Beggar’s Opera into their ThreePenny Opera, which tells the tale of beggars in London and features the tune “Mack the Knife.” ThreePenny Opera incorporated not only the perspectives of the lower classes but also the music popular at the time; dance bands and cabarets provided much of the musical inspiration. Because of the dialogue between songs, ThreePenny could be considered a musical more than a proper opera. “But there’s something about it that is more raw, more random and gritty than most Broadway-style shows,” says Mitchell. Weill and Brecht’s work proved wildly popular in Europe and beyond, and Mitchell cites ThreePenny Opera as one of her main sources for Hadestown.

Folk and opera are not as historically polemical as they first appeared, especially in the United States. In fact, the first critically acclaimed American opera of any sort is deeply rooted in folk. Around the same time as The ThreePenny Opera, Americans saw a revival of folk music and heritage. George Gershwin caught on to the folk fervor and composed Porgy and Bess, which revolves around the lives and music of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina and is based off of DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy. Gershwin not only incorporated the spirituals hymns of the black culture in Charleston, he went as far as to label his opera “An American Folk Opera,” a subtitle that has for some reason been dropped by popular culture over the decades.

Gershwin’s attempt to deliver music straight from the people did not succeed entirely, even if the opera was a massive success. Though he took his inspiration from spirituals and African American folk music, Gershwin composed his own “folk” songs. As Professor Ray Allen notes in an article on the folkness inherent in Porgy and Bess for the Journal of American Folklore, critics accused Gershwin of interpreting and exoticizing African American culture for the benefit of the white audience. Despite these shortcomings, Gershwin’s composition can be seen as a notable bridge between classical and folk traditions. Gershwin believed that folk music was “the strongest source of musical fecundity.” Notes Allen, in 1933 Gershwin even gushed: “The best music being written today is the music which comes from folk-sources.” When seen in the context of Gershwin’s work, the idea of folk opera depended on the appropriation of music that had naturally emerged from regular people struggling to survive.

Bacon and Mitchell’s operas capitalize on a similar eagerness for the music that emerges from “folk sources.” Both folk operas employ string instruments that are accessible to common people, such as guitars, banjos, ukuleles, and fiddles. In Hadestown, some characters bang on trashcans, pots and pans, and rattle chains in order to infuse the drama with a rhythm reminiscent of ordinary sounds. All of this is a ploy to capture what it means to exist in the realm of the regular and mundane, and also to find light in the rawness of everyday survival.

Yet even as Bacon’s Folk Opera tells a particular story about particular people, her works is an attempt to transcend the limits of individual experience. She describes herself as a loyal proponent of empathy and art as an “empathic bridge.” “It’s important for me to create a space for people to connect to their own humanity and to feel things,” explains Bacon. “Just feel, doesn’t matter what they feel, just so long as they feel. And I feel like when that happens, and especially when it happens in sort of a communal setting, it makes people care about each other a little more.”

Mitchell takes the idea of myth–a story passed down that explains something about human nature– and grounds it using the culture and music of a particular era. Yet somehow, through watching Hadestown, audience members are launched back into the realm of the universal. It’s potent artistry, and not everyone can pull it off. But she seems to have both the gumption and brains to do so. “Myths are crazy rabbit holes, plumbless in their depth, with echoes of every human story,” hints Mitchell. Even though much of the costume and music of the folk opera is reminiscent of the 1920’s, Mitchell argues: “Hadestown is really meant to exist as an archetypal story, outside of time.”

Bacon and Mitchell use folk opera, then, to both highlight and escape the confines of stories rooted in particular people. Some aspects of their folk operas seem to actually go against the accepted definition of folk. “You know we tried to hold a lot of different things together at the same time with Hadestown,” admits Mitchell. “The Greek thing, the Depression thing, plus there’s this post-apocalyptic futuristic thing…but I think sometimes mixing metaphors you stumble upon something unexpectedly consistent.” For a genre that merges so many divergent traditions, a folk opera can offer a remarkably fluid experience.

Neither Mitchell nor Bacon seem to be hung up on the possible contradictions inherent in their folk operas. “To me folk music is about storytelling, and opera is about storytelling, so there’s no contradiction at all,” urges Mitchell. What’s clear is that Mitchell and Bacon have helped a whole new subgenre gain momentum, and in the end the exact idiosyncrasies of the definitions of folk and opera could be eclipsed by the real impact of their works.

***

Sources:

Allen, Ray. “An American Folk Opera? Triangulating Folkness, Blackness, and Americaness In Gershwin and Heyward’s Porgy and Bess.” Journal of American Folklore. 117: 243-261. 2004.

“Opera.” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd Edition rev.. Ed Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. 3 Dec 2009. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/opr/t237/e7485

Pegg, Carole. “Folk Music.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 3 Dec. 2009.
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/09933

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