Fighting the forces of disco

At just 33 years old, Eli Smith is a relative young buck in the world of folk music. This weekend he brings his old-time band, the Down Hill Strugglers, to the Great Lakes Folk Festival. City Pulse caught up with the artist by phone from his New York home.

How long have you been playing old-time music?

I’ve been playing, personally, I’ve been interested in American folk music, rural music, old-time music, since I was in high school, which was about 15 or 17 years ago, so I’ve been playing for a while. But this particular band (the Down Hill Strugglers), we’ve been together about four years.

What drew you in to this type of music?

I always kind of liked music from when I was a kid, but I could never really get into the music that was around me. It wasn’t for me. In New York — New York is kind of a rock and rap town. And that’s what everybody in school and people that I knew listened to. And everything I heard on the radio and TV and everywhere was a very narrow range of music. But then I started to hear some old blues — kind of randomly, from a family friend or here and there — and then some old string band music. And I heard the New Lost City Ramblers, which was the great string band from New York from the 1950s that was founded by John Cohen, who we’ll be playing with at the Great Lakes Folk Festival. So I found out about John’s band, and from his band I began to discover some of their sources, the musicians they had learned from or the recordings that they had learned from, and I started to get into that.

So I started to hear this whole other vein of American music that I had not been told about in school, that I hadn’t heard on the radio — it was completely fresh. And it was what I’d been looking for — for all of those years I had liked music but hadn’t heard music that I liked. So I went mad for the music.

I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York, where there’s a history of folk music, but from decades previous. I was growing up there in the 1990s, and there wasn’t much going on in terms of folk music at that point. There was nothing going on. But I knew that there had been something that had gone on in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and I was interested in that and wanted to find out more about that.

What is it like to play this old style of music in New York, one of the world’s most modern cities?

New York has had a history with American folk music for many years, going back to the 1930s when Leadbelly moved to New York, and Woody Guthrie came to New York in 1940. Pete Seeger dropped out of Harvard and came back to New York in 1939 to start leading a more unconventional life. Other people too, Margo Mayo had the American Square Dance Group here in New York in the ‘30s and ‘40s — it was very popular but people don’t remember her now. So there’s a whole history in New York. It’s not new. I didn’t invent it. It’s a relatively long history.

But the U.S. has become very homogenized; everywhere you go is quite homogenized. It’s hard to break out of that homogeneity — the highway culture, endless strip malls, the big-box stores and everything — so I don’t think it’s unusual to be attracted to a less homogenous and more humanized music, anywhere you might be. But New York is the cultural capital of the United States, so its not surprising that you would find anything here. There’s no contradiction for me in playing string band music in New York. If anything, it’s a way to assert yourself against the forces of homogeneity that are rampant all over the United States and all over the first world.

We’re trying not to be dragged down by the forces of disco — very standardized and plastic stuff. That’s such a powerful force, it’s hard to get away from, but we try.

This is your first trip to the Great Lakes Folk Festival. What are you looking forward to?

It seems like it’s going to be a really great festival. Most folk festivals in the United States are not real folk festivals. They say they’re folk festivals, but in reality they’re singer/songwriter or rock festivals. But it seems like the Great Lakes Folk Festival is a real folk festival with a nice spectrum of traditional music. And it’s curated by people that really care and are knowledgeable. I can’t wait to go. I’ve never been before, so I’m looking forward to it. It’s a real folk festival.

I produce the Brooklyn Folk Festival as well as the Washington Square Park Folk Festival, and I try to make our festivals here real folk festivals — just like you have going at the Great Lakes Folk Festival — because there are so many festivals that are dominated by singer/songwriter or Americana rock acts and don’t have that much representation of recognized forms of American folk music, like old-time music or blues or Mexican music or African music or whatever it might be. It’s nice to see this other festival out there. We’re doing something similar here in Brooklyn.

Have you noticed a resurgence of interest in old-time music among younger people?

I think there’s a real interest from people our age, but especially younger — like five, 10 years younger or more. I’m on the old side in terms of our folk music scene here in New York. I had to wait around several years before I could meet some younger people coming up that I could play music with. The guys in my band are six or eight years younger than I am.

I think there is a wide interest, and growing interest, among younger people in older music. Because it has very unique qualities, and it’s kind of humanistic. I think there’s a push towards humanism, however you want to define that, because there are so many forces in the world that are anti-human, that are mechanized or bureaucratized in some way that’s not accessible and doesn’t feel good. So people are looking for something that feels more natural, more approachable. And more human.

An old ethnomusicologist friend of mine, who passed on several years ago — she had lived through the Great Depression and World War II and the Vietnam War era — she once made the observation that in times of war and economic recession and political turmoil, malaise, that people get interested in folk music. People who are alienated are looking for something that they perceive as real. Old-time music — this raw, unadulterated music — they perceive as real. As they should, because it has a reality to it that’s important. People who are alienated try to find something like that.