About This:

“Deep Community: Adventures in the Modern Folk Underground” by Scott Alarik… At a time when the mainstream music industry is in an historic decline, the small substream world of folk music is thriving like never before. Why? This book answers that question by looking across the vast, rich landscape that is folk music today in a colorful, authoritative and star-studded anthology by the man Dar Williams calls “the finest folk writer in the country.”

Scott is the principal folk writer for The Boston Globe and folk critic for the National Public Radio program Here and Now. Since 1969, Scott has been a professional folk singer and since 1986 a writer who has become one of the nation’s leading authorities the modern folk and roots music world.

There has never been a book quite like this, one that glimpses the vast landscape of modern folk music the same way its fans do. Typically, folk music books come in two basic types: anthropological or historical studies of specific genres, such as bluegrass, blues, Celtic; or biographies of particular stars, tracing eras in the musician’s history through their lives.

This anthology, primarily drawn from articles published over the past 15 years in the Boston Globe, views the folk world as it actually exists today: a music with a history, to be sure, but hardly a music of the past. It travels as its most ardent fans do, darting from Celtic bands to folk-pop songwriters, bluegrass divas to folk-rock pioneers, archly traditional fiddlers to cutting-edge radical troubadours.

But it would not tell the whole story of this proudly non-commercial - sometimes anti-commercial - substream music without also focusing on the people who keep its fires banked through good times and bad, revivals and droughts. There are vivid profiles of devoted behind-the-scenes professionals, more cultural activists than business people: concertmakers and independent record labels, coffeehouse volunteers and gifted high-tech professionals who use the latest information technology to allow folk performers to bypass the heedless superhighways of the commercial music industry, and build grassroots, fan-based careers that are designed not to dazzle, but to linger.

No modern music form has suffered more than folk from the fickle, careless, often bullying whims of an increasingly corporatized pop culture and media; and yet no form has prospered more by finding new, adventurous, and profoundly human ways to grow through the cracks of that cultural landscape. This book looks deep into those cracks, down the avenues where folk intersects with the fast, dangerous streets of the pop industry; and down the smaller, surer backroads where this real-life, human-sized music has always thrived, where it continues to plant the firm, deep roots of community - and to sing the songs of that community. -Scott Akarik

Featuring: Emmylou Harris, Ani DiFranco, Alison Krauss, Pete Seeger, Nickel Creek, Mary Black, Utah Phillips, Ellis Paul, Solas/Altan, Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, Patty Larkin, Joan Baez, Bill Morrissey, Greg Brown, Kate Rusby, John Gorka and more...