by Kip Lornell
Pete Seeger at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Diane Davies photo, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
Bob Dylan has profoundly affected American popular music and culture. Except for his early recording (on harmonica) with Mississippi blues man Big Joe Williams, Dylan’s music had few direct connections with regional or racial genres of American folk music. He was genuinely inspired by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and others and continues to acknowledge his debt to the genre. The blues also struck Dylan as powerful music, particularly the message of a song such as Skip James’s evocative and poetic “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” which he initially recorded in 1931:
Hard time here, everywhere you go.
Times is harder, than ever been before.
Well the people are drifting from door to door.
Can’t find no heaven, I don’t care where you go.
But his most significant contribution lies with topical songs and more personal messages aimed at a general audience. Dylan provides the quintessential example of folk-based music reaching a mainstream, popular audience. The importance of this distinction becomes clearer in light of Dylan’s audiences in 1963 and thereafter.
The famous August 28, 1963, march on Washington, D.C., during which Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech was attended by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and many other “city-billy” commercial folk singers. Dylan lent his heartfelt support to the voting rights and civil rights movement in an event that drew international attention, and he was not the only one to sing out about social injustice and problems. The course had been charted many years before by the Almanac Singers and the Weavers, among others. Tom Paxton, Peter Krug, Phil Ochs, and countless others felt it their duty to comment upon topical issues of the day, but they also wrote songs based on their own personal discontent, malaise, and social injustice. This trait set them apart from their earlier models and established clear precedents for the careers of popular singers/songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Tom Rush, Cat Stevens, and Neil Young. These folks, in turn, influenced younger European-born pop performers like Sting, the Edge, and Bono, both of whom have demonstrated a social conscience in their songwriting while reaching massive audiences. Performers caught up in the folk boom often included their own interpretations of traditional material in their repertories before gaining fame for their own writing.
Although television shows like ABC’s Hootenanny were broadcast to audiences nationwide, the apex of this revival came with the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. This gathering of protest singers, topical songwriters, commercial folk groups, and traditional musicians such as Doc Watson, Frank Profitt, and Clarence Ashley drew an unprecedented, huge crowd of 37,000 people and made a major media splash. Music festivals were nothing new—fiddle contests had been held in the South for decades and Newport itself had been home to jazz festivals since the mid-1950s. The 1963 Newport Folk Festival stood as the largest such conclave and a raving success, both from the popular press and within the folk community’s own publications. Its $70,000 profit also underscored the commercial viability of this music.
The folk revival was not confined to New York City and New England. Coffeehouses and small clubs offered folk entertainment in cities and college campuses across the entire country. In Minneapolis, the white blues trio of Kerner, Glover, and Ray played in churches that turned over their meeting space of a coffeehouse, for friends, and eventually at larger folk clubs like the “Extraordinaire.” Paul Nelson began a small folk music magazine, The Little Sandy Review, in 1959. The North Beach of San Francisco was home to many clubs featuring both jazz and folk music. In Los Angeles, the Ash Grove was for many years the home to folk concerts and the informal home for traveling musicians. Lou Curtiss started selling instruments and hosting concerts in San Diego in the early 1960s and is still going in the 2000s.
A few musicians caught up in this movement branched out in a new direction. Erik Darling, Roger Sprung, Bela Fleck, and Billy Faier all began their careers by learning to play old-time or bluegrass. But within a few years they began bringing elements of jazz and influences from nonwestern music into their playing. These experimenters from the 1960s found only a small audience for their hybrids and were about forty years ahead of their time—by the early 2000s they seemed to be much closer to the mainstream.
The year 1965 marked a dramatic change in commercial folk music. After a halcyon half a decade of success, commercial exposure, and a wave of recordings, two major events rocked the relatively small world of American folk music. The summer brought the next Newport Folk Festival with Bob Dylan as one of its principal attractions. Dylan now possessed a public persona that had begun to conflict with the event’s self-perception. His motorcycle jacket and electric guitar brought Dylan immediate disfavor. He violated a well-established perception that folk music can’t be played on anything that needs to be plugged in—never mind that many country blues players had been using electric guitars for more than a decade. Moreover, his repertoire reflected the undercurrents that flavored his recent Columbia issue, Another Side of Bob Dylan.
Dylan had transcended his role as a folk singer, but was not entirely clear about being an American spokesperson. The moralizing tone of his previous songs was tempered by uncertainty and the feeling that he might not have all of the answers. This new persona, so quickly and unexpectedly revealed at Newport, had serious repercussions within the community of commercial folk singers. Over cups of coffee and in the folk press the debate raged over this turn of events: had Dylan sold out, where was folk music headed, have we lost our focus, is folk music becoming too commercial? This angst only fueled the winds of change blown in by the new records from England.
During the folk revival rock ’n’ roll and black R&B had entered a near moribund phase. Elvis had joined the army, Chuck Berry was in jail, Jerry Lee Lewis became persona non grata after marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin, and then Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. Furthermore, no new cult heroes emerged in the popular music scene. Black pop music remained equally quiet, though the Motown sound was about to emerge from Barry Gordy’s Detroit studio. In fact, there was precious little new to prick the ears and libidos of white and black teenagers. Folk songs offered adults a brief respite from the nasty, African American inspired music of rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll. This bucolic era lasted until the British Invasion of 1964 brought the equally subversive sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, and others into homes across the United States. By 1965 the British had arrived and American pop musicians were reeling.
Doc Watson performing in the middle 1960s. Diane Davies photo, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
From a purely commercial perspective the folk revival (albeit diminished) lasted into the late 1960s. It helped to create some hybrids, such as the folk/rock of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, who reached across the United States with their blend brewed at clubs like the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. Post-1965 Bob Dylan can also be considered a folk/rocker. His records with The Band are particularly fine examples of folk-based rock music. The careers of Simon and Garfunkel, Tim Hardin, and Leonard Cohen also benefited from this movement. On the West Coast, folk/rock was smoothed out yet more and popularized by the Mamas and the Papas as well as Sonny and Cher. The peak of commercial success for folk-inspired rock and pop music was 1965 and 1966.
Inevitably, the rise of Haight-Ashbury and “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” heralded another shift in American popular culture, one that expanded people’s minds away from folk music into other realms. By 1970 Americans had lived through acid rock, the 1968 Democratic Convention, massive music festivals at Woodstock and Monterey, Richard Nixon’s election, the “Summer of Love,” as well as the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the folk revival. Meanwhile
the Vietnam War staggered on into the 1970s.
But this grassroots movement continues today, and the interest in folk culture remains very eclectic though much more highly organized. Individual coffeehouses can be found across the United States, but now folk music associations abound from Norfolk, Virginia, to Seattle, Washington. The Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metropolitan area alone contains the Middle Maryland Folklore Association, the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, The Western Maryland Folklore Society, The Baltimore Folklore Society, and several other smaller organizations. These groups are supported by thousands of members, and each one publishes a monthly newsletter that lists not only musical events at local clubs, informal shape note sings, and workshops for learning to write folk songs but they also include schedules for English morris dancing, swing dance events, New England contra-dancing, square dances, Swedish couple dancing, and other events related to ethnic and folk dancing. One look at the Web sites maintained by these organizations underscores the fact that folk-related activities are alive and thriving both within and just outside of the Beltway.
A BRITISH INVASION
Shortly after Dylan’s Newport appearance, the number of records by British musicians became a full-fledged onslaught. Their music began to appear on the American charts, supplanting Motown artists, pop vocalists, and the commercial folk balladeers. The Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, the Kinks, Rolling Stones, Dave Clark Five, and the Animals became fixtures on American Top Forty radio. By late 1964 these groups, and others, had begun to tour the United States. The early appearances by the Beatles represented a phenomenon in American popular culture that surpassed the mania displayed for Elvis Presley when his career was launched a decade before.
Significantly, most of these British groups displayed a strong propensity toward American vernacular culture and music. Led by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who, British groups assaulted our popular culture with their unique hybrid of electric guitars, working-class English sensibilities, and a distinctive love for black American music. Many of these musicians had been attracted to this music beginning in the skiffle-band (a British version of folk music mixed with rockabilly) era of the middle- to late 1950s. This led many British youth to discover the imported recordings of Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, and Lead Belly. The middle 1960s saw “cover” versions of American blues music by English rock groups appearing on radios and records in homes across the United States. American youth raved over the Rolling Stones’s version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster,” Cream’s cover of “Outside Woman Blues” (Blind Willie Reynolds), Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight to the Blind” by the Who, and Led Zeppelin’s rendition of “You Shook Me” (penned by Willie Dixon). No doubt only the most hip American listeners understood the arcane British allusions to blues culture, such as the fact that the Moody Blues are named for a song performed by Louisiana harp blower Slim Harpo in 1963.
American blues musicians such as Big Bill and Muddy Waters (who shocked his British audience with his electric guitar—they were expecting a folk musician!) began touring England and Europe in the middle 1950s. By 1963 packaged “folk blues” tours became annual overseas events that lasted for several years, and the Yardbirds (featuring Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton) began recording with touring stars like Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Slim. The combination of touring American blues heroes and the easy availability of early and current blues records only helped to reinforce the popularity of blues in England. So did its lyrics about fun, sexuality, and alienation, tripart themes that appealed to aspiring adolescent musicians.
Some of the early blues reissue records also had profound impact upon future rock megastars. Eric Clapton liked the urban-styled electric blues, but the country blues was his first true passion. Mississippi Delta blues singer Robert Johnson was his hero:
I was around fifteen or sixteen, and it came as something of a shock to me that there could be anything that powerful . . . if you didn’t know who Robert Johnson was I wouldn’t talk to you. It was as if I had been prepared to receive Robert Johnson, almost like a religious experience [and] his music remains the most powerful cry that I think that you can find in the human voice, really. (Larry Cohn and Stephen LaVere, Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, 1991, 22–23, Columbia C2K 46222)
THE BLUES BOOM
This lionization of the African American blues tradition by Europeans not only led to increased record sales and tours overseas, but a renewed interest in this country. The swift change in popular tastes and the general interest in blues truly surprised Sam Charters, who recalls:
I wrote The Country Blues and it come out in 1959, and I went to Europe for one year . . . I had gone simply to get myself away from what I had been doing steadily for ten years. I wanted to get on with my own creative work, I’d always thought of myself as a writer, not as a researcher. I came back in 1961 and the whole world was searching for their local blues singer. They had a copy of The Country Blues in one pocket and a tape recorder in hand! To go with the book I did the first RBF album, which sold and sold and sold. Virtually every song on it was picked up, like “Statesboro Blues” and “Walk Right In,” of course. I think that record did as much as anything to introduce the blues. It was the first time that anyone had really heard this. RBF [a reissue record company owned by Folkway’s Moe Asch] was set-up to be my window to the world. I did twenty-four or twenty-five of them rather quickly. At about the same time I did the Lightnin’ Hopkins recording, which caused an enormous stir. So suddenly it was obvious that there was something out there. (Personal interview, Storrs, CT, December 29, 1988)
Significantly, the consciousness-raising occurred primarily among young whites. Worn copies of race records began appearing on tapes that circulated within a small circle of dedicated fans, and in 1964 OJL (Origin Jazz Library) became the first record company devoted to reissuing this music on long-playing records. The interest on the part of younger whites also resulted in the rediscovery of older blues musicians who had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Using clues gleaned from race records, Tom Hoskins, Nick Perls, John Fahey, and others traveled across the Deep South locating Robert Wilkins, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, and Bukka White. These men launched new, albeit brief, musical careers complete with concert tours and recordings. Due to declining health or shifts in interests other surviving musicians from this era—Gus Cannon, Memphis Minnie, Peg-Leg Howell, or Kokomo Arnold, for example—only marginally benefited from the revival.
The impulse to relocate black blues singers was not unique to the middle 1960s. Alan Lomax was scouring northern Mississippi for the late Robert Johnson when he located Muddy Waters on Stovall’s Plantation in 1941. Samuel Charters traveled to Memphis as early as 1954 to speak with Furry Lewis, Will Shade, Milton Robie, and other veterans. The primary differences were the development of a younger (nearly entirely white) audience for blues, making concert tours and the sales of albums possible. Their way was paved by the folk revival of the early 1960s, followed by the “blues boom” of the middle 1960s.
From a cultural point of view, these shifts also underscore important changes in the consumption of this vital form of American folk music. The blues boom existed through the support of white audiences, not under the aegis of black listeners. Folk blues singers in the 1960s often played in coffeehouses and concert halls, though in the rural South musicians such as R. L. Burnside continued to labor in the juke joints and rough clubs of northwestern Mississippi. While the blues revival affirmed that not all of the older blues singers had died with the advent of rock ’n’ roll and soul music, it also reaffirmed that this tenacious music still enjoyed some grassroots support. Not only was R. L. Burnside still playing blues in Mississippi, but other “unknowns” such as Baby Tate, Mance Lipscomb, Bill Williams, Elizabeth Cotten, Elester Anderson, and Jack Owens also had kept the tradition going. Today, however, this grassroots support from the black community is all but gone—the down-home
blues has been commodified to such a degree that its base of support is virtually all white.
Alan Lomax and his sister, Bess Lomax Hawes. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS
Not surprisingly parallel activity was occurring in white folk music as younger scholars and collectors returned once more to the source. Mike Seeger, the talented multi-instrumentalist of the Seeger family that included Pete, Charles (an eminent musicologist), Ruth (a composer), Peggy (another musician), and Tony (an ethnomusicologist), became interested in bluegrass and old-time music in the early 1950s. By the late 1950s he and two other city-billy musicians, John Cohen and Tom Paley, formed the New Lost City Ramblers, the first of the truly conscious revival string bands to explore the many avenues of their roots. The New Lost City Ramblers performed various types of American folk music, though most of it emanated from the South. Many younger people were first exposed to string band music through the ensemble work of the Ramblers. They learned their music directly from folk musicians, older records, and field recordings.
New Lost City Ramblers Tracey Schwarz, Mike Seeger, and John Cohen (1996). Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
A keen field collector with an inquisitive mind, Mike Seeger was also interested in learning the fate of the older musicians that he had heard on Harry Smith’s pioneering Anthology of American Folk Music. Seeger, Bob Pinson, Joe Bussard, Malcolm Blackard, Donald Lee Nelson, Dave Freeman, and others scoured the South, particularly the southeastern mountains, locating both original 78 rpm records as well as the early recording artists: Dock Boggs in Wise County, Virginia; the daughters of Fiddlin’ Powers in neighboring Coeburn; Clarence Ashley of Mountain City, Tennessee; and Dorsey Dixon in Rocking-ham, South Carolina.