Wayfaring Strangers: Old-Time Culture and Indie-Rock Logic in the Post-Commercial Popular Marketplace

In this paper, I explore the recent embrace (and its meanings/implications) of Appalachian music, dance and other cultural signifiers by artists and audiences within the underground (“indie”) rock community. “Traditional” Appalachian culture has been extensively appropriated by artists in the popular sphere; much of the scholarship on this topic – for example, Garofalo’s (2003) and Allen’s (2011) work on the folk-revival and counterculture movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and Fox and Ching’s (2008) collection on the alt-country trend of the ‘90s – productively focuses on contentious issues inherent in the commercialization of “folk culture”: cultural colonialism, irony, (in)authenticity, and so on. But I argue that the current indie-rock/old-time phenomenon resists such an analytical approach, due to fundamental differences in practice (its artists and audiences appear to favor (perceived) accuracy and faithfulness to tradition over borrowing/blending), dissemination (indie has an essentially antagonistic relationship to the popular-music marketplace, and has, itself, been a source for appropriation), timing (that very marketplace has been radically altered in the Internet era), and more. Through musical, social and discursive analysis, I will demonstrate how contemporary indie-rooted artists (such as Black Twig Pickers and Frank Fairfield) and events (such as the frequent square dances now taking place in punk venues) are better understood as uses of (mediated) slices of old-time culture for their oppositional characteristics – indicative of a larger struggle by artists and fans to maintain “indieness” in response to the seeming inevitability of an all-access online marketplace