Folk music isn’t the guy in the coffee house with his guitar and self-important lyrics. It’s the lullaby a mother sings to her child.

Folk music isn’t a bunch of guys on a stage playing at the local fair. It’s the Christmas carols a family sings after an all-too-large feast.

Folk music isn’t the ponderous mp3s you download from iTunes. It’s the drinking song a bunch of drunks break out with when the bartender announces last call.

Folk music is the music people make for their own enjoyment. Folk music isn’t passive listening, it’s participatory, interactive, a communal creative effort. It’s about enjoyment. It’s about music for music’s sake.

Folk music shoudn’t be professionalized. When you take it away from the people and give it to an elite few, it stops being folk music.

I’m offended by what happened to folk music. At some point it stopped being folk and started becoming elitistist, pseudo populist propaganda.

Certainly, I’m not bemoaning the existence of protest songs in the folk music genre. The protest song is a very valid component of the body of music that makes up folk. But in many circles, no other form of folk music, besides protest, is considered valid or relevant.

This flies in the face of what folk music really is. Folk music, to quote wikipedia.org, is music by and of the common people. Are the common people communists? The vast majority are not. So why then is a Marxist with a guitar sitting in a coffee shop railing against the World Trade Organization most people’s vision of folk music? What the hell happened?

I don’t know. Maybe it was Vietnam. Maybe it was the Great Depression or the rise of the industrial age. Today, most people who heard a sea shanty wouldn’t even consider it folk music, nor a work chant, drinking song or reel. In fact, players of these other kinds of folk music are now calling their music ‘traditional’ in order to distance themselves from the self-important tripe that pawns itself off as folk.

To paraphrase my pal and band mate, Jerry Wheeler, fat men with beards need to take back folk music. It was Jerry’s proclamation that made me think of angryfolk.com.

Folk music has become something that the folk can’t identify with anymore. What the hell is that? That pisses me off, and it should piss you off too.

My band mates and I, being the Poxy Boggards, have been performing folk music for nearly 15 years, and we’ve met with some moderate success. I think that’s because we’re doing the folk music the folk want to hear. Most of it’s pretty bawdy, with subject matter that’s pretty damned irrelevant.

So we know there’s still a place for folk music in modern life. In the same world where Milli Vanilli wins a Grammy and Jessica Simpson’s shaking it from the top of the record charts, people still respond to a bunch of fat guys with beards playing instruments they’ve never heard of.

Now with a digital studio, the internet and some spare time, I think we can make headway in Jerry’s dream of taking back folk music.

It started with Inside Home Recording. One day I noticed that iTunes had a podcast directory. I was getting ready for a road trip, so I naturally searched for “Home Recording.” And there was IHR. I downloaded all of their episodes (more than 30 now) and listened to them on my road trip and for many days after that. They started out publishing a little irregularly, but now they’re hitting about every other week.

Then I discovered the Project Studio Network which is produced every week. On one of the later episodes of PSN, they had an interview with Leo Laporte. For those unaware, Laporte was a broadcaster, a virtual character on MSNBC’s “The Site,” and co-host on TechTV’s “The Screensavers.” (this is just a smattering of his credits)

Most recently, he took over the computer call-in show on KFI radio (a marked improvement over the previous host)

Tangent: Leo’s predecessor still works in the LA radio market doing the same thing. I won’t name him, but I’ll say this: it’s amazing how many of his listeners called in with problems that just “happen” to be solved by certain products, every show. I mean, seriously, if you are uninitiated enough to have to call a radio computer show, why the hell do you need to install two operating systems on your computer? If some guy wants to install Windows XP and Linux on his computer, wouldn’t you sort of classify him as a “power user” of sorts? And if he knows enough about computers to install Linux, I find it hard to believe he can’t figure out how to have two OS’s live on his hard drive. And it strikes me as odd that there are enough of these guys out there to justify a call on EVERY FRIGGIN’ SHOW. A-hem

Back to Leo. While he was being interviewed on the Project Studio Network, he mentioned his empire of podcasts, all of which can be found at twit.tv. “Twit” stands for “This Week in Tech.” Most of his shows are weekly, so there’s new content nearly every day of the week.

Of course, the first podcasts I listened to were by recording engineers or professional broadcasters. That being said, I fell in love with a new media by hearing the cream of the crop.

I even considered doing my own podcast.

Then I listened to the rest of the crop. Holy cripes. I heard someone say how wonderful podcasting is, because now anyone with a PC can make their own talk show. [sarcasm]Boy, is that a blessing![/sarcasm]

I’ve heard podcasts by people who literally can’t talk — where every other word is “uh.” They press “record” and have no idea what they’re going to say. Why did you press record? How about jotting down a few notes, Mr. Murrow?

As I listened to these amateur podcasts, I was dissuaded from the idea of producing my own podcast. I definitely don’t want to be that lame – seriously. Then I realized: I can’t be that lame. I’ll recognize my lameness and just delete the file.

So now, doing a podcast is on my list of things to do. It’ll have opinion pieces (because I’m pretty opinionated), arguments, interviews with all my band mates – maybe even have someone jump in the studio to perform a song they’ve just finished (or are working on).

If it turns out to be worth a crap, maybe you’ll hear it.