He spoke with J.D. Lasica about the Folk Den, a Web site devoted to continuing the folk tradition of storytelling, which he says is in danger of being obliterated by commercial interests. The interview was conducted for the book Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation.

Why don't we start with your talking about how you came to be attracted by the folk song tradition.

I was 15 when I got turned onto folk music. I was already turned onto rock 'n' roll. I was attending a high school assembly and this music teacher was friends with Bob Gibson, a folk singer in Chicago, and she brought him in do a 45-minute concert, and I loved what he was doing: banjo picking and singing beautiful melodies and telling stories. I'd never paid attention to folk music before. I guess I'd heard the Weavers, but I didn't differentiate that from just regular pop music. So when I heard this, I got really excited about it. The music teacher told me, you know, a school just opened up in Chicago called the Old Town School of Folk Music, why don't you go over and check it out? I did and studied there for several years until they basically said to me, we can't teach you any more. At that point I got a professional job and I've been on the road ever since.

How is the folk song generation in some danger of not being passed down to a new generation?

When I was initially thinking about it, it wasn't getting played on the radio, people weren't doing it in clubs anymore. Folk music is a broad term, incorporating everything from the Beatles to ballads. Bluegrass is a commercialization of the banjo picking styles from the Appalachias. Blues, too. Even aspects of rock 'n' roll, where they wrote melodies that they put African rhythms to.

There is a traditional side and a commercial side and then there's contemporary folk music, where there was a lot more money in being a singer-songwriter like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell than there was in going around and doing traditional songs that were public domain. So the record companies and artists were focusing on the new material and neglecting the traditional material, and that was what I became concerned about.

About 10 years ago I was listening to a some old recording and just loving it and thinking, you know, I don't hear this stuff anymore. So I wrote a letter to the head of a Sony label, a fellow I knew by the name of Ralph Winzler. Well, I didn't know it at the time but he had terminal cancer, so I thought I'd do something about it myself, and I decided to take up the preservation project.

I taught myself how to do Web pages and html and everything, and I thought it would be good to use the medium to preserve folk music. You're one on one with the computer, not in front of a group of people, so in that sense it's kind of like the old way of transmitting folk songs and preserving them, which was the oral tradition. Somebody would sit there on the front porch and somebody else would learn how to do it.

It's worked out very well. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from all kinds of people, writeups in places like Time magazine. The University of North Carolina has given me web space to do it. So it's been really fun.

So one of your motivations for Folk Den was to preserve the folk music tradition because the music labels weren't about to.

Right. I wanted to help make sure that the folk tradition continues — the tradition of telling stories and the singing of songs. In this electronic era, that's in danger of being overwhelmed by the commercial mass media and the corporate lawyers. I wanted to set up a space to preserve the folk songs that have chronicled our global heritage for centuries.

I suspect most people don't know much about the folk music tradition. How much of it is an American vs. European tradition?

Well, it's not American-born. A lot of the songs I do on my web site, the Folk Den, are from Ireland, England, Wales, Australia. I focus mostly on English-speaking songs. I'm not multilingual so wouldn't do justice to a lot of the other songs in Spanish or other languages.

The tradition was an oral one, teaching your kids how to sing and they would pass it along.

That's right. It goes back to the Middle Ages when they would use folk music as a news medium. The troubadours would go from town to town and relay the news of deaths and convey it by music.

Tell me about the 'Treasures from the Folk Den' project. How did you enlist people like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Pete Seeger?

About six years after I started doing the Folk Den on the Internet, I got a call from Appleseed Recordings. They said they loved what I was doing on the Internet, but they reminded me that not everyone was online, and why didn't we do a traditional CD and while we're at it get Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Odetta and Richie Havens and get them all to sing on it. And I thought that was a great idea.

So it started out with Pete Seeger not being comfortable going into New York City to record in a recording studio anymore. It's a tough thing to do, he's in his early 80s now. And I said, you know, I can bring portable equipment to your house and we can just do it in your living room. That's how it started to be an Alan Lomax-like field recording of music.

So you didn't just show up at Joan Baez's house or on Judy Collins' doorstep.

Actually, it was all pre-arranged. Joan I got on the fly. She was touring and I went to her concert — I think she was playing at the House of Blues here in Orlando — and I sat in with her and did a song and asked if she'd be willing to record it with her, and she said yeah. I went over to her road manager's house the next day and we set up in his garage and recorded it.

What kind or response did you get after it came out?

It was great. It got great reviews and sold pretty well for an independent project. And it was nominated for a Grammy.

Did it also spur a bit of awareness about the folk music tradition and its current dilemma?

Yeah. With after all this stuff going on, especially with the Internet, folk music is now alive and well. I'll be continuing with the Folk Den project on the Internet, but folk music is pretty healthy now. It's come a long way in just the last few years.

If you look at "O Brother Where Art Thou" and a movie called "Songcatcher," folk music has been brought to public awareness once again. It's got respectability again.

And the Internet has played a role as well?

Yes. There are quite a few folk web sites now. If you go to Google and type in folk music you'll find thousands of sites that have folk music lyrics and words. Not necessarily melodies, but there's plenty of interest in it on the Internet.

Why have the big record labels shunned folk music?

They're just focusing on such a narrow part of the musical spectrum that they're really not interested in folk music. For years, the music business has been turning away from the traditional kind of music and even steering commercial radio away from it to where it was narrowcasting just rap and bubblegum music. There was no money in folk music so the labels weren't bothering with it.

If a recording artist says to his or her A&R person, I want to do a folk recording, they would try to talk him out of it. That's not gonna sell, forget it.

Because there's not a mass audience for it.

It's alive and well. It's not in danger of getting lost in the shuffle anymore. But it's still not massively popular, like hip-hop is.

How many songs have you made available on the Folk Den?

Over a hundred. The original ones were streaming and the later ones are MP3s available for download. I only do MP3 now. I never liked streaming media, even with a fast connection.

How many visitors does the Folk Den get? And why are you sharing instead of just selling songs on CD like so many other artists?

I don't keep track. I do it as a public service, and I'm not concerned about getting lots of hits.

What are some of your favorites?

It's hard to say because I love them all. I'll go back to the very beginning when I started out. There was Old Paint, which I heard Bob Gibson do back at that high school assembly, so I've got good memories of it. Some of the early songs on the Folk Den are really memorable, like John Riley, To Morrow, Springfield Mountain. These are from Bob Gibson's early albums, so he had a strong impact on me.

Gibson was a traditional folk singer, then?

He was like Pete Seeger. He played the banjo and the 12-string guitar. He died about five or six years ago.

If you could change one thing about our music culture today, what would it be?

I'd broaden the scope of appreciation to beyond dance music, to classical and jazz and reggae and world. These things are not getting mass exposure because of financial considerations.

Are you using any of the new technologies like satellite radio or Internet radio?

I've got both XM Radio and Sirius, and I love them. We've driven across country several times in our RV with them, and it's just a tremendous source of music and information. I've used Musicmatch, too. You can find 98 percent of the stuff that's no longer available over commercial radio.

Have you used the file sharing networks?

I have, just to check out my own stuff. It's funny. On Kazaa I'll find titles from the Folk Den on there. It's free on my site but they're giving it away anyway.

What's your opinion about the whole file-sharing phenomenon?

As an artist, I think it's just like being played on the radio. It's good publicity. I went to the Senate and testified on that. The only money I ever got out of the record deal was the advance, which was pretty small when you boil it down, and the money I made secondarily, through playing concerts. The record labels have very creative accounting. At Aristra Records, I sold half a million copies of "Back to Rio" and never got a penny in royalties.

It sounds like sour grapes, but it's a fact of life. The labels say, well, we need to do that because not all the albums sell and we have to subsidize the others. But nobody has ever audited the record companies and come away empty-handed.

Do you still own the rights to all the songs you perform?

I do some songs owned by other people, like Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan, and some songs by Pete Seeger. Everything else is public domain or something I've written.

The reason I ask is that I've read about other artists who've recorded well-known hits and then, after they left the band, the record label would forbid him from performing a song he made famous.

Right, I've heard those stories as well. I have a fairly healthy relationship with Sony Music, and they've sent me royalties. The early stuff, it was a really lousy contract. They're laughable. They were due to pay me like .0003 cents per album sold.

Do you think the music needs to change to accommodate file sharing?

I would say so. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pretty cool. They're trying to figure out a way to do all this legally, like maybe you pay a percentage to some fund to make it legal. Because it's not gonna go away.

This guy Cory Doctorow, he points out that every time a new technology gets in the way of copyright, they try to break the technology. They have to drag the copyright people kicking and screaming to the money tree, because they always make more money. It happened with piano rolls, it happened with radio, it happened with VHS videotape. The studios make more money off video than they do in the theaters. With the Internet, they haven't figured it out yet, but they're going to make money there, too. The blanket license might be one approach.

And I admire the fact that you attach a Creative Commons license to all the songs on Folk Den.

Right. Creative Commons is cool, too. I found out about them through the University of North Carolina.

You like sharing these songs as long as nobody makes a profit off them?

I do. Basically the whole reason I'm putting these songs on the Internet is so people can hear them and learn the tradition, and what better way to share them?

How old are you now?

I'll be 62 next july.

You sound 40! Do you have any plans to turn over the Folk Den to someone else?

No, I'll do it as long as I can. Some of my artistic heroes were still working in their 90s when they died. So I want to keep doing this.

Thanks, Roger, I wish you well.

Nice talking with you. Good luck with the book.

— interview conducted March 30, 2004