by Kip Lornell
Various. Corridos y Tragedias de la Frontera, 1928–37. [Tragic Corridos of the Frontier]. Folklyric 7019/20. A two-CD set of classic border ballads that comes with a 168-page book!
Various. Cuban Counterpoint: The History of the Son Montuno. Rounder CD 1078. A compilation of popular and folk-based style of music that has also been imported to the United States.
Various. Music of New Mexico: Hispanic Traditions. Smithsonian/Folkways 40409. A well-rounded and nicely annotated contemporary anthology that includes a wide array of secular as well as sacred music.
Various. The Roots of the Narco-Corrido. Arhoolie CD 7053. This exemplary reissue of material from (mostly) the 1920s and 1930s underscores that the confluence of drugs, violence, and the Mexican-American border is not a twenty-first-century issue.
Various. The Roots of Tejano and Conjunto Music. Arhoolie CD 341. An anthology of representative recordings over the period between 1946 and 1969 from the vaults of Ideal Records, the first significant Tejano-owned and -operated record company.
Various. Taquachito Nights: Conjunto Music From South Texas. Smithsonian Folkways 40477. Live and lively performances by mostly local groups such as Amadeo Flores, Freddy Gonzalez and Los Super Unidos, Conjunto Aztlan, and others captured on digital tape during the Conjunto Festival of the Narcisco Martinez Cultural Arts Center in San Beninto, Texas.
Various. Tejano Roots: The Women (1946–1970). Arhoolie CD 343. Another anthology of tejano music during a period its modern forms began to emerge with the older styles.
SUGGESTED READING
Ray Allen and Lois Wilcken. Island Sounds in the Global City: Carribean Popular Music and Identity in New York. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. The topics addressed by these essays include calypso and steel pan ensembles as well as Dominican “Merenege” in particular and Puerto Rican music in general.
Paul Austerlitz. Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997. The author looks not only at merengue and its importance in the Dominican Republic but also at its impact on the musical culture of New York City.
Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez. Lydia Mendoza: Norteno, Tejano Legacies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. This is a bilingual edition: the first is the English translation, then the original Spanish. The author discusses Mendoza’s career and includes an extended essay on the significance of her career as well as her place in tejana music and chicana studies.
Ruth Glasser. My Music is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and their New York Communities, 1917–1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. A historical study that looks at a wide range of Puerto Rican musics in New York City.
Jose Limon. Dancing with the Devil. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. A series of thoughtful essays about the history, folklife, and expressive culture of Mexican Americans living along the borderlands.
Anthony Macias. Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Macias focuses on the pre-rock era and Los Angeles in this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary book.
Peter Manuel (with Kenneth Bilby and Michael Largey). Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995. Manuel and his colleagues survey a great variety of twentieth-century musical styles in the Caribbean (including Cuban and Puerto Rican) and, secondarily, address their importance in the United States.
Manuel Pena. The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. A fine book that takes both a musical and historical view of this accordion-based music.
Americo Peredes. A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976. This is a classic study devoted to this long-standing tradition of ballad singing.
David Reyes and Tom Waldman. Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ’n’ Roll from Southern California, rev. edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. A fascinating look at the intersection of rock, pop, and Latino culture from the late 1950s to the present.
John Robb. Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self-Portrait of a People. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. An important summary of Robb’s many years of collecting and studying this music.
Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. Tejano Proud: Tex-Mex Music in the Twentieth Century. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2002. This history professor has written a brief, chronological survey of Musica Tejana that uses the recording industry as its primary underpinning.
Chris Strachwitz (with James Nicolopus). Lydia Mendoza: A Family Biography. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1993. The life story of this pioneering Tejano music star is told through her own words.
SUGGESTED VIEWING
Various. The Buena Vista Social Club. Lion’s Gate. The eclectic and interesting American guitarist Ry Cooder gathered together some of the best Cuban and Cuban-American pop and folk-based musicians for a reunion of sorts in this documentary film that gained national theaterical acclaim during the summer of 1999.
Various. Chulas Fronteras. Flower Films. The lives and music of both Flaco Jimenez and Lydia Mendoza are highlighted on this documentary about music along the Rio Grande Valley.
Various. Del Mero Corazon (Straight from their Heart): Love Songs of the Southwest. Flower Films. Norteno music and culture is the focus of this documentary.
Various. La Junta De Los Rios. Documentary Arts of Dallas. A documentary film about the history, music, and culture of the border region around Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico, and Presido, Texas.
Various. Songs of the Homeland. Galan Productions. A survey of music and musicians in the United States who maintain strong ties with their Mexican roots.
Various. Tex-Mex: The Music of the Texas-Mexico Borderlands. Shanachie. A tour of the cantinas, clubs, festivals, and even prisons where Flaco Jimenez, Lydia Mendoza, and others perform.
Chapter 10
THE FOLK REVIVALS
• Red Roots
• The Mass Media and Popular Culture
• Field Research
• The 1960s Folk Revival
• A British Invasion
• The Blues Boom
• Back to the Mountains
• New Entrepreneurs and Frontiers
• Final Thoughts
A folk revival refers to the interest of singers and musicians from outside of a regional, racial, or ethnic group in perpetuating its traditional music. These singers and musicians are often young and just beginning their explorations of grassroots music. Their attention, however, can also stimulate a renewed commercial and popular interest, such as the attention focused on Woody Guthrie and his musical era by Billy Bragg, Wilco, and many others, including Bruce Springsteen. There have been successive waves of folk revivals in virtually each generation as at least some members discover and reinterpret the past. These twenty- to thirty-year cycles vary in size, intensity, and focus. During strong revivals—in the late 1950s through the middle 1960s, for example—our population of acoustic guitar pickers and banjo players with ties to traditional music increases. Since the early 1960s pioneering southern string bands, Appalachian folk songs, and blues have been the object of this curiosity on the part of the general public.
In some instances such attention has served to renew interest in this music within its hearth area. Such renewal (along with the decades-long success of the annual Galax, Virginia, fiddlers’ convention) has helped to strengthen the local appreciation of old-time and early bluegrass music in Carroll and Grayson counties. Likewise the interest of some younger polka adherents in the upper Midwest has helped (in some small ways) to renew the “ethnic” bands found throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota, and adjoining states. Such renewals or revivals also tend to spark more scholarly interest in these traditions.
Blues men Bukka White and Houston Stack-house leaving the stage of the 1970 Festival of Ameri
can Folklife in Washington, D.C. Bill Pierce photo, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
Music revivals in the United States are not limited to folk music, of course. Rockabilly, for instance, has been resurrected on more than one occasion—most recently in the middle 1980s when groups such as the Stray Cats traded upon the tough boy, cool, outsider’s image associated with the rockabilly pioneers such as Billy C. Riley (whose accompanying group was called the Little Green Men!) and Jerry Lee Lewis. In the late 1990s and early 2000s rhythm and blues (R&B; cum big band jazz) made a strong comeback in large measure because of the “swing revival,” which could be more accurately characterized as a renaissance of interest in R&B. Groups such as Big Voodoo Daddy, which provided a portion of the musical interlude during half-time at the 1999 Super Bowl, look back to Louis Prima, Roy Brown, and, especially, Louis Jordan for their musical inspiration. (For more information on R&B, please refer to chapter 11.) A few other contemporary artists, such as the Old 97s, Sun Volt, or Wilco (both with and without Billy Bragg), have amassed a substantial following by marketing the roots aspect of their music and through their reinterpretations of the various genres of American folk music.
Joan Baez at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Ralph Rinzler photo, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
In the early twenty-first century, however, the term folk revival generally has a more concrete meaning for many people born shortly before or during the baby boom. For them the folk revival began slowly in the late 1950s and peaked with the 1964 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan first appeared in public with an electric guitar. This specific revival evokes a certain nostalgia for aging baby boomers: simpler times before the Vietnam War fully exploded, their own misspent youth, civil rights struggles, sing-alongs at hootenannies, and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Much of this chapter focuses on the folk revival that held forth from the late 1950s through the middle 1960s, certainly the largest and most widespread of these revivals of the twentieth century.
The musicians associated with this folk revival essentially belong to two related, but separate, groups. Let’s look at them to help reinforce the earlier distinctions between folk music and folk-based music. In one group are rural, southern folk musicians such as Reverend Gary Davis (gospel), Mississippi John Hurt (blues), and Bill Monroe (bluegrass). Their music was bred in the bones. These influential musicians grew up within the musical culture, not to mention the racial and regional communities, that spawned gospel, blues, and bluegrass.
The other group of musicians consists of those who rework, revise, draw inspiration from, or interpret folk music. Eric Von Schmidt, for instance, generally performs blues. He was born and raised in Westport, Connecticut, and studied art on a Fulbright scholarship in Florence, Italy, in the early 1950s. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Von Schmidt played blues around New England, particularly in the greater Boston area. Despite his love and respect for Sleepy John Estes and Lead Belly, Eric Von Schmidt grew up within the white middle class, far from the direct ties to African American culture and music. Moreover, the vast majority of his patrons and fans were white and many were northerners. Von Schmidt later consciously chose to step outside of his own background and identify with the very expressive language of black American blues. Traditional music also inspired Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Tom Rush, who began their careers by singing their own interpretations of folk songs but who have evolved into highly respected singers/songwriters. Such musicians play folk music or folk-based music, rather than being folk musicians themselves, which is an important distinction.
RED ROOTS
Many of the musicians who cut their teeth during this folk revival were inspired not only by traditional music but also by an older generation of traditional or folk-based musicians. The early 1960s folk revival was simply another retrospective—one of the periodic, popular excursions into our unique American roots. This was not the first twentieth-century reevaluation that resulted in commercial viability. During the late teens, Henry Ford tried to revitalize American folk dance (and reinforce traditional American values) in the Midwest with the assistance of his self-described “old-time bands” that featured hammered dulcimers.
Traditional music cast in a more politicized form crept into the American consciousness beginning in the middle 1930s, spurred on by the Depression and left-wing activists who viewed it as the “voice of the people.” The veterans of this movement—Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, for example—largely served as role models for the early 1960s folk revival.
Not all of the folk-based music from this period was overtly political. Another group viewed folk music as a bucolic escape from the pressures of the modern world and a return to traditional American values. Some, such as Richard Chase, spent much of their energy collecting folk tales and songs, performing only occasionally. Others, like Richard Dyer-Bennett and John Jacob Niles, used it as an apolitical springboard to further both their interest in the music and themselves. Trained as an opera singer, Niles parlayed his Kentucky heritage into a new career. He also displayed a modest ability to play his own unique homemade instrument that he called a dulcimer, but which is only distantly related to the standard plucked Appalachian dulcimer. Niles brought his singular interpretations of this music, an uneasy mix of formal Old World sensibilities with southern American folk, to audiences across the country and made some commercially successful recordings for Victor as well as his own label.
Meanwhile Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers, Moses Asch, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, Alan Lomax, and Lead Belly established themselves as integral parts of the politicized folk song movement. Dr. Charles Seeger, an eminent academic musicologist and patriarch of the famed musical family, served as a de facto cultural commissar of this movement. The “folk camps” (Pineville, Kentucky), craft schools (Penland, North Carolina) and experimental colleges (Black Mountain College, North Carolina) began in the 1930s to explore the possibilities music holds as an agent for social change and to reexamine America’s identity.
Union organizing and workers’ rights were also major issues, as was the role of the Communist Party in helping to reshape the United States. The Communist newspaper, the People’s World, once described this music as “the songs of people, of farmers, of workers, of laborers, and they come from the directed contact with their work, whatever it is” (Denisoff 1971, 59).
Early in 2000 that exploration and reexamination of cultural roots and music continue in other similar ways. Now camps that specialize in teaching folk music and folk dance dot the American landscape. Their intent is generally less political than musical but their emphasis remains with the American vernacular and passing along the traditions. In the late 1980s Henry Sapoznik started a highly successful “KlezKamp,” among other projects. This annual event, held on the East Coast (in or near New York City), attracts several hundred people interested in Jewish culture, klezmer music, and traditional dance.
The 1930s and 1940s marked a period when protest songs decried social and economic conditions of many Americans. The capitalist system was carefully scrutinized and criticized by singers, many of whom belonged to or sympathized with the American Communist Party. Struggles for the recognition of unions, especially in the Appalachian coal fields, were one central theme. Several of the New York City–based activists, notably Seeger and Lomax, helped to bring recognition for the battles fought by their Kentucky brothers and sisters. During the late 1930s Aunt Molly Jackson, Sarah Ogan, and Jim Garland often sang at Union rallies held in the Northeast to raise money for Kentucky union members. They sang the decidedly pro-union “Which Side Are You On?” which opens like an old British broadside:
Come all of you good workers
Good news to you I’ll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.
&nbs
p; * * *
MUSICAL EXAMPLE
Woody Guthrie contributed many great songs to our contemporary musical culture: “Vigilante Man,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “This Land is Our Land,” and many others. “Do Re Me” is a fine example of the socialist protest songs that he began performing in the late 1930s. A committed popularist and socialist, Guthrie lived through the Depression and felt a great deal of animosity toward the capitalist system that seemed to offer much but deliver little. Guthrie lost a long battle to Huntington’s chorea (a slowly debilitating neurological disease) in 1967 that began affecting him some fifteen years before.
Title “Do Re Me”
Performer Woody Guthrie
Instruments guitar and vocals
Length 2:28
Musical Characteristics
1. It is performed in a major tonality.
2. The simple finger-picked guitar accompaniment to his laconic vocal forms a homophonic texture.
3. The song is structured in an ab form.
4. The melody is relatively conjunctive and uncomplicated.
5. Guthrie’s nasal relaxed vocal falls into the middle register.
Lots of folks back east they say,
Leavin’ home every day,
Beatin’ a hot old dusty way to the California line.
’Cross the desert sands they roll
Gettin’ out of that old dust bowl.
Think they’re a comin’ to a sugar bowl,
But here’s what they find:
Oh, the police at the port of entry say,
“You’re number 14,000 for today!” Oh!
Chorus:
If you ain’t got that do, re, me, folks
If you ain’t got that do, re, me,
Why you’d better go back to beautiful Texas,