Between sniffles, she forces down tiny sips of herbal tea. "I would be pounding coffee except I'm sick," she apologizes, feigning a British accent on a Wednesday afternoon. "I'll tell you, herbal tea just doesn't do it, babe, it just doesn't."
Cooped up in her Avenue D apartment on New York's Lower East Side, slumming in wool socks and long underwear, DiFranco is lying flat on her bedroom's hardwood floor feeling tired of what seems an endless tour -- one that essentially started three years ago out of her 1969 Volkswagen bug. DiFranco's life has been one long schlep. Following in the dusty footsteps of Woody Guthrie, she defies modern conventions like electric guitars and amps. In 1991 she gave up the normal folk route (and her apartment's lease) for the underground-living and touring out of her bug for a year. Claiming it's the purest way to get heard, she sees the life of a true folk singer as one bound to the road. "I can't think of another way of doing it that would still have life in it," she asserts. You can believe her when she sings, "I've got highways for stretch marks." DiFranco 23, remains a modern-day folk pioneer.
Just as Bob Dylan went back to his folk roots on his latest two albums, many younger folks like DiFranco are discovering their own roots. In the process, they're changing the meaning of folk, flirting with traditional and non-traditional instruments while keeping the attitude of punk. They're taking the music back to basics and breaking with what they call the "folk ghetto." You won't find them perched on MTV's Unplugged" -- or even on an NPR folk music program....
DiFranco, who wears a topknot and a nose ring, puts out records on her own Righteous Babe Records label, and plucks out a sound that blends West African rhythms, bare knuckle folk, and a voice that trips over octaves like a schizo Joan Baez. As sort of feminist in-joke, DiFranco picks her guitar using extra-thick press-on nails wrapped in electrical tape. And her lyrics aren't just blowin' in the wind. She wrote "Names Dates And Times" about the problem of encountering too many white people at festivals where folkies preach the gospel of multiculturalism. "I know so many white people/I mean, where do I start," she sings. "The trouble with white people is/you just can't tell them apart."
"It's amazing," DiFranco says, "you go to a folk festival and there's so many white people out in the field that it's hard to keep track of them all. I mean, I like folk music because it tends to span generations, but it does tend to be a white thing, and that's kind of a drag. It's a drag that the world is so segregated."
DiFranco's wariness of both mainstream folk and DIY directness pits her outside any particular scene. "I'm never quite sure if I'm a freak at the folk festival or some chick with an acoustic guitar at a rock club..."
The return-to-roots revival was inevitable after punk broke into the mainstream and every one-time indie band signed to a major label. Folk's appeal to musicians who got lost in the shuffle is, according to DiFranco "that it happens on a sub-coporate level. Folk music has traditionally been -- and still is -- the kind of music that happens in clubs or meeting halls; it's not mainstream."
...Evoking Woody Guthrie, the ever-romantic DiFranco believes true folkies will always remain outside of mainstream culture to correctly observe their surroundings. "The life of a folk singer -- you stay in a, lot of people's houses, pet a lot of people's cats, and you're gone the next day. You get to look at a lot of vignettes of people's lives, snippets of what their lives are like. You sort of enter into their realm for a few hours the then you're gone. It's sort of like the world as a movie and never quite being a part of it."
- Jason Cherkis