I sometimes wonder what Fair Folk might sound like if Danica spent some time in a small town in Mississippi, sitting down with people who work at an IHOP or Walmart and simply listening to them. Their stories, their music, their spirituality, their family traditions, their food, their relationship to place. That is folk, too. That is contemporary American folk culture, and in some cases a kind of modern peasant culture.
It might be a more difficult kind of folk to engage with because it isn’t necessarily beautiful, exotic, historically distant or aesthetically curated. But these people have traditions. They have music. They have stories and beliefs and ways of understanding family, place and community. To genuinely inhabit that world for even a short time would mean stepping outside the highly educated, affluent and culturally elite circles that seem to surround so much of Danica’s work. And I think that would be fascinating.
This is ultimately what I find difficult about Fair Folk. There seems to be an enormous distance between the ordinary people whose traditions are being celebrated and the privileged cultural world from which the work itself emerges.
There is a particular kind of wealth that doesn’t announce itself through flashy consumption. It can look like rustic clothing, traditional crafts, beautiful surroundings and an intentionally simple life, while still providing extensive travel, leisure and access to a remarkably elite cultural world. The simplicity is elective.
I don’t begrudge her that privilege. But I do wish there were more awareness of the class divide between studying “the folk” and actually spending time with contemporary folk whose lives are shaped by economic hardship.
Sometimes I wonder whether Fair Folk is more comfortable with the idea of the folk than with the complicated, unglamorous, very real people who are actually living folk lives today.
