Below is a piece on Christopher Guest’s film, A Mighty Wind. The PR company pulled the quote “The film’s genius … American folk of the 1960s gets the Spinal Tap treatment” from the piece and put it on the posters. In the piece, ‘the film’ refers to Spinal Tap, not A Mighty Wind, the apostrophe is possessive rather than short for ‘the film is’, and the second half of the quote is pulled from the sub’s summary, not from anything I wrote. Thus the quote attributed to me contains thirteen words, three of which were written by me, but didn’t refer to A Mighty Wind and have had their meaning altered by grammar. Perhaps they could have said … “despite A Mighty Wind’s obvious love of its subject and lofty realist ambitions, it often lapses into predictable comedy tropes”.

Four years ago, the soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ Depression-era odyssey O Brother, Where Art Thou? crystallised a growing musical trend. The huge Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music boxed set had already made the scratchy source material available again, but T Bone Burnett, the producer, together with some top singers and pickers, helped reintroduce American folk music to the people. Bluegrass legends such as Ralph Stanley played to bigger audiences than ever, stripped-down singers such as Gillian Welch found a mass market and the phrase “weird old-time Americana” began to appear on the influences list of cool young bands. Now, the soundtrack to Cold Mountain -on which Burnett coaxes authentic performances out of the White Stripes’s Jack White and lifts the lid on weird old-time Americana’s best-kept secret, the massed chanting of the Sacred Harp Singers -looks set to consolidate the revival. However, American folk music isn’t all stirring, heart- rending beauty. It, too, has had its share of rubbish pedalled by insincere opportunists and deluded fools. Which is where A Mighty Wind comes in.

The film, released here on January 16, is the best comedy documentary about the early-1960s American folk scene ever made. Christopher Guest, its director, made his name, with Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as one of a trio of British heavy-metal musicians in Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary Spinal Tap. Without Tap, we wouldn’t have Alan Partridge, Marion and Geoff, The Office or the chart-topping rockers the Darkness, who have recreated appalling 1980s hair-metal in the nonexistent band’s image. The film’s genius lay in choosing an easily recognisable subject as a platform for far more interesting ideas: the struggle to communicate, the gulf between dreams and reality. Guest built on this aesthetic with 2000’s Best in Show, an extemporisation on trainers and competitors in a dog show. But is the sun-dappled yesteryear of early-1960s Amer-ican folk music portrayed in A Mighty Wind a useful vehicle? As one post to the Internet Movie Database, attributed to Drunken Critic, put it: “I personally liked Best in Show better, maybe because it was about something I would be more interested in in real life, ie dogs.”

For contemporary British audiences, understanding what A Mighty Wind means when it invokes “folk” music encounters the usual semantic problems suffered by two nations divided by a common language. The British folk scene of the early 1960s was less compromised and almost offensively fecund. Yes, we too had Hootenanny television shows, usually hosted by Julie Felix, and the Young Tradition or the Ian Campbell Folk Group can sound as twee today as their American counterparts, but British folk music eventually retreated from prime time to its prelapsarian isolation. Here, the word folk still applies to interpretations of traditional tunes, spiced with occasional new compositions.

In America, many of the gen-eration of musicians who cut their teeth on traditional tunes moved through the mid-1960s singer-songwriter scene, which made artists such as Joan Baez stars, into the acid-rock movement. There, even the Byrds, a psychedelic rock band, are sometimes categorised as a folk group, and it’s taken weird old-time Americana to redefine American folk’s authentic fringes.

A Mighty Wind, however, takes its lead from the wilderness years between the birth of the teenager and the moment Bob Dylan went electric. It follows the events leading up to a present-day reunion concert staged by three groups of former clients of a recently deceased folk-music promoter. There is no suggestion of the serious early-1960s folk scene regulars -Dylan, Doc Boggs or Fred Neil -who share the protagonists’ time frame. A Mighty Wind offers a carefully constructed composite of three American folk acts at their most banal, scrubbed clean, injected with showbiz and watered down by pop sensibilities.

Bottom of the bill are the New Main Street Singers, an all-singing, all strumming neuf-tet, in which a dementedly evangelical Parker Posey is sorely underused. They are clearly based on the New Christy Minstrels, anodyne entertainers of whom you need know nothing.

A Mighty Wind, the New Main Street Singers’ signature song, superbly deflates the celebratory vibes of rousing classics such as This Land Is Your Land with po faced allusions to flatulence.

Second on the bill are the Folksmen, reuniting the actors behind Spinal Tap as three performers in the vein of the Weavers or the Kingston Trio. The latter famously put on dinner jackets to make a sugary version of the sinister standard Tom Dooley a million-seller. They are key to understanding the historical background of A Mighty Wind.

Commercial opportunists who learnt the Appalachian ballad from an anonymous performer while awaiting their audition for a San Francisco nightclub called the Purple Onion in 1958, they sold the music of the people to the masses in straw hats and striped shirts. In his history of the era, Turn Turn Turn, Richie Unterberger offers the backhanded compliment: “It took the Kingston Trio to truly make folk music a fad.”

The stars of A Mighty Wind’s reunion show are the vocal duo Mitch and Mickey.

Eugene Levy, the film’s co-writer, invests the damaged Mitch with a litany of tics and thousand-yard stares, and Catherine O’Hara is quietly convincing as his zither-playing partner.Mitch and Mickey echo the pop-folk of forgotten acts such as Ian and Sylvia or Jim and Jean, and their more earnest moments even suggest the doomed Dylan acolytes Richard and Mimi Farina. The duo represent the acceptable face of early-1960s US folk, and, while you would have trouble tracking down Jim and Jean’s lone album, the proto-psychedelic Changes, as the only copy I have ever seen belongs to me, the Farinas’ Complete Vanguard Recordings is still available in a three-CD set.

In a masterclass at the National Film Theatre last November, Guest spoke patiently about his own genius for improvisation, but despite A Mighty Wind’s obvious love of its subject and lofty realist ambitions, it often lapses into predictable comedy tropes. Admittedly, the artists it celebrates haven’t aged well. But even at its most absurd, like the music of Ian and Sylvia, Jim and Jean or the Farinas, the film is sincere and somehow innocent -rare qualities in today’s inherently self-aware climate.

All the same, it would be a tragedy if it was so successful that it sparked a folk-pop re-vival. Some things are best left forgotten.