“Vernacular Music” is that form of human musical culture that is in one way or another available and open to all and sundry, more or less all of the time—not as passive consumers, but as active participants, even if the chosen mode of participation is not as musical performers, but as engaged audience members, supporting, encouraging, helping to drive music making activity onward and upward, through dancing, clapping, exclamatory vocal articulations, etc.
“Vernacular music making” is thus by definition small-scale community-oriented, in such a way that not only characterizes how it is enacted, but also establishes the sensibility or aesthetic that shapes its sound, and serves to bind its enactments together.
Along these same lines, “Vernacular Music culture” can be said to manifest a decisive bias towards immediacy. What is granted primary importance is that which takes place in the immediate moment, arising organically as a consequence of the extemporaneous interactions between the musicians, their audience, and the musical sounds around which their shared experience revolves.
The upshot of all this is a thus form of human musical culture oriented by definition towards immediate community relations.
In this sense, then, it might be further asserted that a manner of “immediate community” is pro-actively created by means of this shared musical experience (and this is so whether the participants were all familiar to one another prior to their shared musical experience, or on the other hand, happen to have been absolute strangers).
In sum, “Vernacular Music” should be seen as that foundational basis of all human music culture, that form of music making which throughout human history has functioned as the ground level of human music culture as a whole—the foundation upon which all other forms of music making culture have been based (whether this operated consciously or unconsciously for those involved).
Hence, within the realm of human music culture, “Vernacular Music” performs a role, I believe, very much analogous to the role that certain sectors of the physical or ecological world—such as oceanic coral reefs, or tropical rain forests—perform in not just helping maintain, but in operating as the foundational basis upon which significant portions of the physical realm overall depend.
And in this same way, one would have to likewise acknowledge that, just as damage done to such foundational-level sectors of the overall ecological realm threatens the future existence of this realm, damage done to “Vernacular Music” culture—this “foundational level” of human music culture—can only lead to a catastrophic state of affairs vis-a-vis human music culture overall.
This, I would argue, is precisely what has been taking place in the last few decades.