This Washington Post article on ipod dj-ing started me thinking about the future of folk. No, not whether the genre will survive, but about how we will listen, how we will share new music. Instead of house concerts, ipod Folk nights?
Do you have an ipod? I don't. But I do listen to new music online, through AOL Radio, iTunes radio, 3hive, artists' web sites. Does your favorite singer/songwriter provide mp3s? Can you buy individual songs? Probably not. With the decline of CD sales, maybe singer/songwriters should think about that.
Do you listen to folk podcasts? Do you know what podcasts are? (more background) The first companies developing podcasting software are emerging. Podcast directories are springing up to capture lists of sites podcasting on different subjects. Here's a Folk directory Guess what! Podcasting isn't just for the young and fresh faced. Roger McGuinn podcasts folk songs
what happened to Chuck Mitchell, the guy who gave Joni her last name? He performs every now and then, but also moved on to other things, other lives.
Chuck Mitchell could hardly be called a careerist. A seminal figure on the '60s folk scene in Michigan, he and his ex-wife have traveled very different paths.Joni Mitchell became a huge star and influential singer-songwriter with hit records and major tours. Chuck Mitchell became an actor, fixed up old houses and continued performing, but he made only two self-released records.
"I'm singularly unfocused. She was intensely focused," laughs the 65-year-old singer-guitarist, who returns to his Michigan folk roots Saturday with a performance for the Flint Folk Music Society at the Greater Flint Arts Council.
Mitchell was a fixture on the Detroit-area folk scene in the 1960s, sharing stages with the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and his now-famous ex-wife, whom he married in 1966. They performed together and separately at Flint's Sippin Lizzard coffeehouse several times.
"There were lots of interesting clubs, so we worked them all. When Joni first came in on the train from Toronto - I picked her up in Windsor - one thing I enticed her with was that we could get these gigs for $25-$40 a night at places like the Sippin Lizzard, where she was a huge draw. So was I," Mitchell recalled from one of his two homes, a 19th century house on the Mississippi River in southeastern Iowa (he has another home in Wisconsin).