by Kip Lornell
Title “This Land is Our Land”
Performers The Harvesters
Instruments banjo, bass, guitar, four voices
Length 2:16
Musical Characteristics
1. It is performed in major tonality.
2. Loose harmony singing can be heard on the chorus.
3. The voices fit into middle registers.
4. A simple duple (2/4) meter is heard throughout.
5. It uses a verse/chorus form.
6. A pleasantly rich homophonic texture is established by the mixture of the voices and instruments.
7. The lead singers alternate throughout the song.
Chorus
This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to the New York island;
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters,
This land is made for you and me.
As I went walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway,
I saw below me that golden valley,
This land is made for you and me.
Chorus
I roamed and rambled, and I followed my footsteps,
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts,
And all around me, a voice was sounding,
This land was made for you and me.
Chorus
When the sun came shining, then I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving, and the dust clouds rolling,
This land was made for you and me.
Chorus
This selection is from Smithsonian Folkways 2406.
* * *
Indeed, the folk boom affected musical tastes across the United States. Folk clubs (most of them located in cities) presented music in small venues from Boston to Seattle. Smaller towns dominated by large college campuses—Ann Arbor and Madison, for example—supported folk music venues. Nonetheless, New York remained at the commercial and artistic vortex of this revival movement. In New York City Moe Asch also gave voice to newer and younger folk-based singers like singer/guitarist Dave Van Ronk, who resided at the center of the revival.
Dave Van Ronk, too, was attracted to American vernacular music, but early jazz emerged as his first love. He recalls:
What molded me musically, were the “moldy-fig” wars of the late 1940s . . . the traditionalists, who I call the Platonists, felt there was an original form that was pure. They felt the original form had degenerated, so here we have Preservation Hall [New Orleans’s famous jazz club] as Plato’s Cave. The modernists were aesthetic Darwinists and I think they were every bit as stupid. What is newer and more “developed” is not necessarily better. You can’t apply either yardstick to aesthetics . . . Being an adolescent at the time, I was an absolutist and I had to jump one way or the other. As soon as I was aware that this titanic tempest-in-a-teapot was going down . . . I stopped listening to my Dizzy Gillespie records for about seven years. I got over it. I’m happy that I have a huge collection of Gillespie and Parker! (Personal interview, January 21, 1991)
Sacco and Vanzetti cover. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
For about five or six years, Van Ronk stuck with traditional jazz. A high school dropout, he was determined to make his living through musical performance, so he moved to Manhattan and promptly lost forty pounds that first year away from home. Van Ronk not only played guitar but also usually took over the vocal chores because he didn’t mind and could sing loudly. By the middle 1950s, however, the “steam had just totally gone out of the traditional jazz revival” to the point that he’d often “play for Union scale and have to slip them back something under the table. You were lucky to get two gigs in a week, more often you’d get one gig in two weeks” (Personal interview, January 21, 1991).
Although Van Ronk loved this music, his future as a performer of traditional jazz seemed bleak. Van Ronk, along with others interested in old 78 rpm records from the 1920s and 1930s, used to haunt the Jazz Record Center on 47th Street where the blues and jazz records were often mixed together. This is where he got a taste for southern blues singers such as King Solomon Hill, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Furry Lewis. He gradually gained a greater taste and appreciation for folk music, especially blues, and decided to make a switch from jazz to folk. After all, he already had both the basic guitar technique and a powerful, gruff voice.
Van Ronk views this move as “technically retrogressive and partly lateral.” It was also a sound, and not surprising, aesthetic decision because of his ongoing interest in the grassroots of twentieth-century American music. Just as the Russians were becoming the first to get into the Space Age by launching Sputnik, Dave Van Ronk was making the more earthly transition to folk music. It was not that difficult because he moved into a compatible circle of neo-ethnics.
In New York City these folks tended to congregate in Washington Square. This gathering point not far from New York University at the edge of Greenwich Village became the weekly meeting and training grounds for folk music. People came to swap songs, look over banjos and guitars, talk about upcoming gigs, and see their friends. Barry Kornfeld, a thoughtful veteran of the scene, wrote in a 1959 issue of Caravan magazine (No. 18, August/September):
At 2 pm every Sunday, from the first balmy days of April to the last of the fair October weather, large numbers of instrumentalists and singers gather, from whose ranks there will emerge some fine professionals and some equally fine, or at least equally intense, amateurs who will follow in the footsteps of their predecessors. [We] presupposed the existence of Washington Square gatherings as we had presupposed the existence of grass, trees, and, of course, park departments.
The Washington Square scene really began in the middle 1940s, about the time that World War II drew to a close. Musicians such as George Magolin, who today is as obscure to most folk music lovers as the Seven Foot Dilly, would play his guitar in the afternoons. More famous folkies also made their way to Washington Square during the immediate postwar years. Fiddler Alan Block, Tom Paley (later of the New Lost City Ramblers), Harry Belafonte, progressive banjo wizard Roger Sprung, and Pete Seeger could be heard there on a good day. This assembly point was a true institution by the time that Dave Van Ronk himself became a regular there in the middle 1950s.
These Washington Square hootenannies were rather informal affairs, mostly for fun. Van Ronk often performed by himself but for a while he teamed with Roy Berkeley and they played as the Traveling Trotskyite Troubadours. Perhaps as an antidote to Bobby Darrin, Frank Sinatra, and other contemporary popular singers, it was also a multiethnic group eager for new musical experiences. Live music and musical interaction were the key. Van Ronk recalls:
The people that I was hanging around with were into all kinds of stuff; everything from bluegrass to African cabaret music. All across the boards. I was a sponge . . . picked up everything that I heard. Everything was going into the same meat-grinder. All of us were sort of like that. People specialized in old-time music would all of a sudden launch into a country blues. It was much more eclectic. (Personal interview, January 21, 1991)
It became more serious, too, as people decided to try to make a living by playing folk music. The Folk Singers Guild was one response to this new interest in traditional music. Though not an all-encompassing organization, the Folk Singers Guild nonetheless affected the New York City folk scene. The hundred or so members were mostly, but not all, musicians. Washington Square served as the primary venue for most Guild members; however, it also organized a few small concerts in local halls. Van Ronk recalls:
We used to go over to the Sullivan Street Playhouse . . . in the days before the “Fantasticks” moved in. It was on Sunday nights when they were “dark.” We would have three, four, or five people doing maybe twenty minutes or a half hour. That was really the only playing experience that most of us got. There wasn’t anything else; there were not clubs
. . . Gerdes [Folk City] didn’t start until about ’61. (Personal interview, January 21, 1991)
Paul Clayton, one of the most active New York folk singers in the late 1950s, refused to join the Folk Singers Guild. He used to attend meetings but would never join because he considered himself to be a professional, who made his living singing and recording. By 1960 Clayton had made at least a dozen albums and had served as Van Ronk’s principal mentor. Black guitarist Rev. Gary Davis became another of his heroes and he learned much from the older man’s highly influential finger-picking style. Van Ronk views Davis as a peer, albeit “older, more experienced . . . and more talented.” They worked many of the same clubs, and Van Ronk became most intimately acquainted with Reverend Davis shortly after these recordings were made. In 1961 Van Ronk was booking acts for one of the coffeehouses on McDougal and remembers:
I had Gary there every possible time I could. Unless it was an absolute full house, then I would be sitting in front of the stage watching those fingers. That’s the only way you can really learn. I’d ask him, “How do you do this?” He’d be only too happy to show me [and] then he’d cackle when I got it wrong, which was usually. It was that kind of thing that Gary and I had in common. (Personal interview, January 21, 1991)
McDougal Street was home to Van Ronk at the time of this recording. Izzy Young’s Folklore Center, which served as the informal headquarters for New York City’s folk singers, sat just a few doors down from Van Ronk’s apartment. This long, narrow store was crammed full of books, records, and posters announcing folk and jazz events. A friendly, rambling establishment, the Folklore Center became the crossroads and heartbeat for local folk singers as well as visitors. Young presented some of the first concerts by the New Lost City Ramblers and Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. He later served as the booker for Gerde’s Folk City when it was still called the Fifth Fret.
Some folk-based singers, including Van Ronk, all but lived at the Folklore Center. Folk singers, instrument makers, entrepreneurs, and budding academic folklorists could be found there. College programs in folklore were new, and several Washington Square/Folklore Center regulars were attracted to the scholarly life. But in the late 1950s Roger Abrahams, Ellen Steckert, and Kenny Goldstein, each of whom eventually earned a graduate degree in folklore and taught in universities, hung out there. Abrahams and Steckert went on to record for Folkways, while Goldstein eventually produced scores of folk music records for a variety of labels, most notably Prestige.
Goldstein, in fact, recorded and initially notated Van Ronk’s Folkways recordings. Intent on getting a recording out to the public to promote his career, Van Ronk bothered everyone he could think of in the business. He finally got both Electra and Lyrichord interested in recording him, but in 1959 he convinced Moe Asch that he was ready to record. Kenny Goldstein served as the A&R (artist and repertoire) man and the basic link between Van Ronk and Moe Asch.
The selections that Van Ronk recorded for Folkways and other smaller companies draw largely from African American music. They reflect a clear, longstanding interest in his heroes; among them are Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Jimmy Yancey, and Louis Armstrong. Van Ronk always admired keyboard players and approached the guitar pianistically, which is one reason why he never played with a slide or bottleneck. Within a few years after making these recordings, Van Ronk’s repertoire and approach to music had radically changed. He still loved the early recordings by Scrapper Blackwell, Blind Boy Fuller, and Snooks Eaglin, but his own persona began to emerge: “I was developing an approach and a style that was really quite different from that of my models. A few years down the line, I simply had no interest at all in [merely] emulating my models” (Personal interview, January 21, 1991).
The movement away from mere emulation to the performance of original material described by Van Ronk typifies the experiences of many people in the folk revival. Traditional music first caught the attention of Judy Collins and Bob Dylan, but after several years they moved on to perform more original material. First they began writing their own songs; albums and live performances mixed folk songs with self-penned verses. Slowly they moved into the popular mainstream by adding electric instruments and even lush string orchestrations.
This process was repeated many times, spawning the “singer/songwriter” movement that touched American popular music in the mid- to late 1960s. Once again we see the symbiotic interchange among corporate America, popular culture, and our own grassroots. Professional performers including Buffy Saint-Marie, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, and Joan Baez inarguably helped to ignite a minor musical revolution based on the earlier blues, gospel, and country artists they so admired; however, their careers also intertwined with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and they soon moved exclusively into folk-based music.
Another independent company, Vanguard Records, began as a classical label in the early 1950s, but quickly signed Eric Anderson, Buffy Saint-Marie, Joan Baez, and other folk-based artists when their commercial stock rose. These artists did so well that by mid-decade Vanguard’s roster expanded to include southern performers like Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Skip James. Nearly all of the blues sessions were produced by Samuel Charters, who obtained carte blanche to build Vanguard’s blues roster. Charters also explored the Chicago blues scene, producing an influential three-record set, The Chicago Blues Today! The Lawrence Welk Group presently owns the Vanguard catalogue and Sam Charters has repackaged much of his own material into a new CD—the only “Mid-Line” series designed to reach a new generation of listeners in the early 2000s. The label has also delved into its vaults to issue a series of compact discs (mostly thematic anthologies) devoted to performers who appeared at the Newport Folk Festivals.
* * *
MUSICAL EXAMPLE
A longtime resident of the northeast, Sandy Ives has for many years taught English and folklore at the University of Maine. In 1959 Ives included this song on a collection that he recorded for Moses Asch. Most of the songs were collected directly from older singers in Maine, often from men working at lumbering camps or fishermen, and they often sang about their life and work. This one he learned from Charles Sibley of Argyle, Maine, and its title refers to the small log buildings in which the lumbermen lived. Notice that it starts with the formulaic greeting so common in Native American ballads.
Title “The Shanty Boys”
Performer Edward “Sandy” Ives
Instruments guitar and vocals
Length 2:24
Musical Characteristics
1. The song is set in a major tonality.
2. Ives sings in the middle register with a very relaxed voice.
3. You hear a spare, homophonic texture.
4. Its musical form is strophic.
Come all ye good jolly fellows, come listen to my song.
It’s about the shanty boys and how they get along.
We’re all good jolly fellows as you will ever find.
To wear away the winter months a whaling down the pine.
The chopper and the sawyer, they lay the timber low.
The swamper and the teamster, they haul it to and fro.
You’d ought to hear our foreman soon after the break of day.
“Load up your team two thousand feet—to the river you’ll steer away.”
Crack! Snap! goes my whip, I whistle and I sing.
I sit upon my timber load as happy as a king.
My horses they are ready and I am never sad.
There’s no-one now so happy as the jolly shanty lad.
Noon will soon be over, to us the foreman will say,
“Put down you saws and ax, my boys, for here’s your pork and beans.
” Arriving at the shanty, ’tis then the fun begins.
A’dippelin’ in the water pail and dinglin’ of the tin.
And then to us the cook will say “Come fella, come fly, come Joe.
Come pass around the water pail as far as the water goes.”
As soon as lunch is o
ver, to us the foreman will say,
“Put on your coat and cap, my boys, to the woods we’ll bear away.”
We all go out with a cheerful heart and a well-contented mind,
The days don’t seem so long among the way pine;
You ought to hear our foreman, soon after the sun goes down,
“Put down your saws and ax, my boys, to the shanty we are bound.”
Arriving at the shanty with wet and damp cold feet.
We all put off our larragians, our suppers for to eat.
We all play cards till nine o’clock, then into our bunks we climb.
To wear away the winter months a-whaling down the pine.
This selection is taken from Smithsonian Folkways 5323.
* * *
Most of the sharp commercial interest focused on younger, city-bred performers, and Bob Dylan emerged as the one performer who the major companies could not ignore. After shifting his home from Hibbing, Minnesota, to New York City in 1959, Dylan’s personality and music gradually impacted upon this burgeoning scene. Broadside magazine published his songs “Masters of War,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “It’s All Right,” and he appeared on the cover of Sing Out! in October 1962. Dylan himself was dismissed as a performer early in his career. “Can’t sing, can’t play . . . nothing special” was the rap against him. However, he not only caught the attention of commercial folk-based music enthusiasts but also the ear of Columbia Record executive John Hammond, who had previously committed Count Basie and Billie Holiday to contracts. In late 1963 Bob Dylan became a Columbia Record artist. One decade later Hammond’s aural facilities for spotting talent once again proved correct when he signed Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records.