I couldn't be a musical purist if I wanted to be. My childhood was the Beatles, Elvis Presley and showtunes. The first single I bought was War's "Spill the Wine." My first radio request summer was 1974, calling in "Rikki, Don't Lose That Number," "Billy, Don't Be A Hero," "Midnight at the Oasis," "The Night Chicago Died," and "Rock the Boat" faster than Tulsa's KELI could hit them in regular rotation. "Rock the Boat" lay the groundwork, but it was Heatwave's "Boogie Nights" that sent me plunging headlong into disco. My first slowdance was "How Deep Is Your Love," and, after rediscovering guitar rock, the t-shirt I would not take off in 9th grade was Fleetwood Mac's *Rumours.* Springsteen struck me down on the road to Damascus in 1978, and I found a calling in rock, with Ian Hunter, Graham Parker, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello and the Clash schooling me in seminary. I was on my way to a Talking Heads show in 1983 when I first heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Kurtis Blow, and rap burst into my life as a force to be reckoned with. Still, it took Run-DMC, the "Sun City" single, Salt-N-Pepa and Eric B. & Rakim to make me a hip hop disciple.

I'm establishing that history because, while I've loved all kinds of music, I never bought one genre's claim of superiority over another . . . which isn't to say I wasn't prejudiced. Before going to the 11th Annual North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance Conference (February 24--27 in Albuquerque, New Mexico), I honestly thought of "folk music" as a genre devoted to narrowminded purism. At its worst, folk music might be trite and self-involved elevator music; in better cases it might be overwrought politically-correct dreck.

I had to attend exactly one session to see how wrong I was. I went to hear an oral history by Antonia Apodoca, an accordian player born in Rociada, New Mexico in 1923. It didn't take me long to realize that most people in the room new more about music than any roomful of people I've been with in my life. During the discussion, audience members could trace her accordian melodies to French folk songs and variants from Florida and Louisiana.

Apodoca's greatest surprises came with her "second" instrument, the guitar. She accompanied a few of her songs on an old acoustic, maintaining spry Nortena rhythms with guitar fills I'd never heard before--and some I had, lifted from Johnny Cash, Robert Johnson and, as was pointed out to me, Chet Atkins. When asked why she started playing music, she responded, "To buy chilies," and when she was asked why she started writing songs, she answered to the effect that she really liked chilies and wanted to buy more before expanding on the virtues of chili peppers as a cure-all. A friend leaned over, eyes alight, stating "That's a Bob Dylan answer!" One of the wonders of this conference was going to be the many mongrel shapes it took.

That idea of music's mongrel heritage carried over into the luncheon, which centered around three lifetime achievement awards--for the Carter Family, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Frank and Anne Warner. In a taped interview, June Carter Cash noted that, when she was growing up, there wasn't a song on country radio that didn't have 8 bars of a Carter Family tune in it. A.P. and Sara's daughter Janette, who accepted the award commented that, "I never thought of daddy as a writer so much as a collector." The source of our shared traditions is borrowed music reborrowed, and it flows on in endlessly intersecting patterns.

These patterns are inextricable from many of the most important moments in our history. In another video tribute, Sweet Honey in the Rock's Bernice Johnson Reagon told how church singing was used during the Civil Rights Movement to combat the intimidation tactics of the police. By the time the story of Frank and Anne Warner had been told, New York song collectors who loaded up their car with food and clothing and stayed in Appalachian shacks for days at a time to learn a few songs, I could articulate the reason our ragtag delegation of, generally, rockers fit into this event. The Warner's slogan was "People first/music second," and though a friend of mine skeptically joked, " . . . sometimes . . . ," that was exactly why we had come.

As a writer for the 16-year-old newsletter *Rock & Rap Confidential,* I was at the conference as part of the link between the leaders of a group of poor people from the most poverty-stricken section of Pennsylvania, Kensington North Philly, to this group of musicians. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union (led, in the main, by mothers of families homeless and/or dependent on welfare) has fought hard to raise awareness of poor people's issues for the better part of a decade. The group's best known leader, Cheri Honkala, has gone to jail upwards of 60 times, helping homeless people acquire shelter and helping her neighbors open community centers the city would not provide.

We brought three musicians with us, by no stretch a group of folkies: Tim Dowlin, a rapper from Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU); Ernie Perez, a singer multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles and Steve Earle, the biggest celebrity in our midst, a country rocker who has influenced most artists on the country and Americana charts even if the general public doesn't know his name. We were about the folk, and that's why they had to listen.

And listen they did. Our morning panel was hosted by RRC founder Dave Marsh, who gave a brief history of the folk movement, bringing up its reactionary, nationalist origins prior to the Popular Front of the 1930s, which changed everything--offering the leftist perspective that folk music was the voice of people who needed to be heard, singing about conditions that needed to be understood. He pointed out that during the times of folk's greatest power, the music aligned itself with working people, and, in the 50s and 60s with the Civil Rights Movement. While we often seek musicians to lead our movements, history has shown us that musicians have traditionally not been the leaders, but more appropriately stepped up to the plate with their talents when a movement was underway. He stated that groups like KWRU are the ones who will have to lead a people's movement, and the job of musicians who believe in their vision will be to help that movement grow.

The panel featured an impressive array of speakers, including the passionate Jim Musselman, who led with Woody Guthrie's statement that "you can't cut yourself away from the people." He told of how he used music as a Nader Raider in his former career and eventually left that consumer work to form his own independent label to place music in contact with activism.

Other activist musicians from the conference joined this panel, including Tish Hinojosa, who spoke of using music to raise awareness of various farmworkers issues, including bilingual education, and David Lestch, who takes his music into prisons. Dave Esila, of United Auto Workers, discussed the success of the two year old Detroit Labor Fest, which has used music to re-energize the labor movement as well as attract young people to the movement. He told a great story of Rancid coming backstage to ask Billy Bragg if he would teach them the words to "There is Power in a Union." Ernie Perez spoke of the success of LA's Rock-a-Mole (rhymes with guacamole), which brings together musicians, artists, at risk youth, families of prisoners and various other community groups to combine their power as a collective. And Steve Earle talked, at first, of his work fighting the death penalty.

Then Earle explained why he had to be with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union at the Folk Alliance conference. He recalled the day he met representatives of KWRU on his bus in Philly. Within moments, he was blown away by their vision and their accomplishments. They left him copies of the video of their story *Poverty Outlaw* and the books that partially document their story, *The Myth of the Welfare Queen* and the photo-essay *Urban Nomads.* Well before taking a look at all of that documentation, which he did, Earle knew that this group was for real and worthy of his time and commitment.

Finally, Cheri Honkala spoke, her voice rising with the urgent cadences of someone who knows she has only one shot at making a lasting impression and, at the same time, knows lives lie in the balance. Honkala told of the 50,000 children being cut off welfare in the Philadelphia area on March 1, and she testified to the importance of music in the various marches that KWRU has made, across the state, to Washington and to the U.N.. She talked about how music kept KWRU walking when the soles were gone from their shoes, and she told of how music helped bridge boundaries with the church communities they met in the deep South during last summer's Freedom Rides.

In the afternoon, Steve Earle repeated his endorsement of KWRU, playing five songs on an acoustic guitar and warning the crowd, "I'm here for KWRU, and I'm playing this music to get you in the door, so if you leave when I get done playing, you're an asshole." The crowd stayed, viewed a clip from the upcoming Skylight Pictures documentary on the 1998 Freedom Rides, *Outriders,* and virtually everyone in the packed room signed on to take part in next October's March of the Americas, a month long march of poor people's organizations from North America and Latin America, from Washington, D.C. to the U.N. to formally charge the United States government with gross violations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Two nurses from opposite corners of the room wrestled with breaking voices to tell how they had to turn away patients they knew they could help and sometimes broke the rules so they could treat others. Two young women (folk musicians) from Jackson, Mississippi, tearfully recounted the struggles of their family and wanted to know how they could get involved in this struggle.

Cheri replied, "You just started."

Another musician Chris Buhalis, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, came up after the workshop and said that he was writing songs in his head as people talked. And the next day at his showcase, he told his audience about the life-changing experience of meeting KWRU and asked anyone interested to hang around after his set if they wanted to talk more about the group. After listening to Buhalis's set, bringing home his album and listening to his music for the past week, I am not only astounded by the power of his music but eager to hear these new songs he mentioned.

Chris is representative of the many talented, beautiful people I met at the Folk Alliance conference, and I heard so much fine music--from Jim Roll (whose showcase I sadly missed, but bummed a tape off him), the Burns Sisters, Greg Trooper, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jimmy LaFave, Rebecca Riots and many, many others--that I am more convinced than ever that music is unique in its ability to deeply connect people; I left feeling spiritually linked to all of these folks. The guideline music offers got me through school in Oklahoma, brought me to Kansas City and delivered me to play my own small role in Albuquerque (which is really what this column's all about). Music's universal grace, diversity and power never ceases to amaze me. In and of itself, music may not build movements, but when it builds unity around a vision, there's no boundary it can't cross.

Danny Alexander
danny@thezone.org