Abstract
This paper draws upon more than eight years of observation and participant observation to examine the place of talk in the performance work of folk musicians. The research for this paper has been conducted in Canada, the United States, and Norway (in order of priority). Firmly grounded in the “life as theater” traditions of Goffman and related social theorists, this essay attends to on-stage talk and its place in the overall performance strategies of contemporary folk musicians. While some artists quite deliberately eschew the practice of on-stage talk and may in fact be critical of others for the practice, others may rather directly attend to on stage banter as an aspect of performance and as a strategy to attend to the concert-going experience of audience members.
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Grills, S. (2015). Talk, Rhetoric and Frames. In: Bude, H., Dellwing, M., Grills, S. (eds) Kleine Geheimnisse. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-00487-3_9
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