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Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Folk music has often demonstrated a peculiar resistance to systematic classification, or stated more accurately, to classification systems. Despite the plethora of efforts to discern, describe, and ascribe order in folk music, classification has often been a culture specific or repertory specific endeavor. The systematic description of one repertory, no matter how much tolerance for variation it permits, rarely extends to other repertories. Even when classification systems are modified to account for some aspects of universality, it is usually the accuracy of the specific that suffers, while only a few more repertories yield themselves to the revised descriptive schemes. The history of classification therefore challenges many of the claims to the universality of folk music. At the same time, this history consistently validates and reexamines the boundaries that regional, local, or small group cultures fashion for folk music. Thus, the resistance of folk music to classification is not necessarily symptomatic of an absence of order or unsystematic musical behavior, rather, it may better serve to illumine those levels at which interrelated repertories and social structures prevail. When directed toward such goals, classification stands to establish and articulate the discursive boundaries of folk music.

Classification is a metaphor for our attempts to understand and describe folk music in an orderly fashion. As an abstraction of our concepts of folk music, classification ideally should provide the infrastructure for a systematic discourse about folk music. Two problems, appearing in two general approaches to classification, often prevent this ideal from being the case, thereby limiting also the effectiveness of the systematic discourse. Many inductive approaches begin by describing the specific and then base their theoretical models on that. Whether the specific is musical, cultural, or ideological in nature, its limits become the limitations of the theoretical model. Deductive approaches, in contrast, begin by prescribing a model and then determining which aspects from different repertories fit the model. Both of these approaches frequently result in a fixing and ossification of the canon, which leads to a seductiveness that may underlie classification. We observe this seductiveness when field workers return from a collecting trip ready to make claims for the persistence of this or that canon, even while a sturdy defense against encroachment from other, usually more modern or popular, repertories shows signs of weakening.

Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
  • Written by:Marvin Gaye & James Nyx Jr
  • Released: September 16, 1971
  • Recorded: March 1971

"Known as The Prince of Soul or The Prince of Motown, Marvin Gaye was originally a member of the doo-wop group The Moonglows. By the time of his shooting death in 1984, at the hands of his clergyman father, Gaye had become one of the most influential artists of the soul music era."

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