American folk music revival

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Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie emerged from the dust bowl of Oklahoma and the Great Depression in the mid-20th century, with lyrics that embraced his views on ecology, poverty, and unionization, paired with melody reflecting the many genres of American folk music.

The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music.

Overview

Office of War Information, 1944.[1]

Early years

The folk revival in

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine". The Weavers' career ended abruptly when they were dropped from Decca's catalog because Pete Seeger had been listed in the publication Red Channels as a probable subversive. Radio stations refused to play their records and concert venues canceled their engagements. A former employee of People's Songs, Harvey Matusow, himself a former Communist Party member, had informed the FBI that the Weavers were Communists, too, although Matusow later recanted and admitted he had lied. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee
in 1955. Despite this, a Christmas Weaver reunion concert organized by Harold Leventhal in 1955 was a smash success and the Vanguard LP album of that concert, issued in 1957, was one of the top sellers of that year, followed by other successful albums.

Folk music, which often carried the stigma of left-wing associations during the 1950s

North Beach, and in the college and university districts of cities like Chicago, Boston, Denver
, and elsewhere.

Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta speculate that:

[I]t is interesting to consider that had it not been for the explicit political sympathies of the Weavers and other folk singers or, another way of looking at it, the hysterical anti-communism of the Cold War, folk music would very likely have entered mainstream American culture in even greater force in the early 1950s, perhaps making the second wave of the revival nearly a decade later [i.e., in the 1960s] redundant.[6]

The media blackout of performers with alleged communist sympathies or ties was so effective that Israel Young, a chronicler of the 1960s Folk Revival who was drawn into the movement through an interest in folk dancing, communicated to Ron Eyerman that he himself was unaware for many years of the movement's 1930s and early '40s antecedents in left-wing political activism.[7]

In the early and mid-1950s, acoustic-guitar-accompanied folk songs were mostly heard in

hootenannies, and at college-campus concerts. Often associated with political dissent, folk music now blended, to some degree, with the so-called beatnik scene, and dedicated singers of folk songs (as well as folk-influenced original material) traveled through what was called "the coffee-house circuit" across the U.S. and Canada, home also to cool jazz and recitations of highly personal beatnik poetry. Two singers of the 1950s who sang folk material but crossed over into the mainstream were Odetta and Harry Belafonte, both of whom sang Lead Belly and Josh White material. Odetta, who had trained as an opera singer, performed traditional blues, spirituals, and songs by Lead Belly. Belafonte had hits with Jamaican calypso material as well as the folk song-like sentimental ballad "Scarlet Ribbons"
(composed in 1949).

The revival at its height

The Kingston Trio in 1958

National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album At Large. At one point, The Kingston Trio had four records at the same time among the top 10 selling albums for five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959 according to Billboard magazine's "Top LPs" chart, a record unmatched for more than 50 years[9][10][11][12][13][14] and noted at the time by a cover story in Life magazine. The huge commercial success of the Kingston Trio, whose recordings between 1958 and 1961 earned more than $25 million for Capitol records[15] or about $220 million in 2021 dollars,[16] spawned a host of groups that were similar in some respects like the Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, and more. As noted by critic Bruce Eder in the All Music Guide, the popularity of the commercialized version of folk music represented by these groups emboldened record companies to sign, record, and promote artists with more traditionalist and political sensibilities.[17]

The Kingston Trio's popularity would be followed by that of

"The Butcher Boy". She did not try to imitate the singing style of her source material, however, but used a rich soprano with vibrato. Her popularity (and that of the folk revival itself) would place Baez on the cover of Time magazine in November 1962. Unlike the Kingston Trio, Baez was openly political, and as the civil rights movement gathered steam, she aligned herself with Pete Seeger, Guthrie and others. Baez was one of the singers with Seeger, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan who appeared at Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington and sang "We Shall Overcome", a song that had been introduced by People's Songs. Harry Belafonte was also present on that occasion, as was Odetta, whom Martin Luther King introduced as "the queen of folk music" when she sang "Oh, Freedom". (Odetta Sings Folk Songs was one of 1963's best-selling folk albums). Also on hand were the SNCC Freedom Singers, the personnel of which went on to form Sweet Honey in the Rock
.

The critical role played by Freedom Songs in the voter registration drives, freedom rides, and lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early '60s in the South gave folk music tremendous new visibility and prestige.

Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with a cover of his song "Blowin' in the Wind". That trio also brought Pete Seeger's and the Weavers' "If I Had a Hammer" to nationwide audiences, as well as covering songs by other artists such as Dylan and John Denver
.

It was not long before the folk-music category came to include less traditional material and more personal and poetic creations by individual performers, who called themselves "singer-songwriters". As a result of the financial success of high-profile commercial folk artists, record companies began to produce and distribute records by a new generation of folk revival and singer-songwriters—

Billy Ed Wheeler, John Denver, John Stewart, Arlo Guthrie, Harry Chapin, and John Hartford, among others. Some of this wave had emerged from family singing and playing traditions, and some had not. These singers frequently prided themselves on performing traditional material in imitations of the style of the source singers whom they had discovered, frequently by listening to Harry Smith's celebrated LP compilation of forgotten or obscure commercial 78rpm "race" and "hillbilly" recordings of the 1920s and 30s, the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (1951). A number of the artists who had made these old recordings were still very much alive and had been "rediscovered" and brought to the 1963 and 64 Newport Folk Festivals. For example, traditionalist Clarence Ashley introduced folk revivalists to the music of friends of his who still actively played the older music, such as Doc Watson and The Stanley Brothers
.

Archivists, collectors, and re-issued recordings

During the 1950s, the growing folk-music crowd that had developed in the United States began to buy records by older, traditional musicians from the

white American audiences of the 1950s and 60s first heard country blues and especially Delta blues that had been recorded by Mississippi
folk artists 30 or 40 years before.

In 1952,

Grammy Award for his achievement in 1991.)[19]

Artists like

record stores
.

Living representatives of some of the varied regional and ethnic traditions, including younger performers like Southern-traditional singer Jean Ritchie, who had first begun recording in the 1940s, also enjoyed a resurgence of popularity through enthusiasts' widening discovery of this music and appeared regularly at folk festivals.

Ethnic folk music

Ethnic folk music from other countries also had a boom during the American folk revival. The most successful ethnic performers of the revival were the Greenwich Village folksingers,

Irish Gaelic. Paddy Clancy also started and ran the folk-music label Tradition Records, which produced Odetta's first solo LP and initially brought Carolyn Hester to national prominence.[21] Pete Seeger played the banjo on their Grammy-nominated 1961 album, A Spontaneous Performance Recording,[22][23] and Bob Dylan later cited the group as a major influence on him.[24] The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem also sparked a folk-music boom in Ireland in the mid-1960s, illustrating the world-wide effects of the American folk-music revival.[25][26][27][28][29]

Books such as the popular best seller, the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (1947), which contributed to the folk song revival, featured some material in languages other than English, including German, Spanish, Italian, French, Yiddish, and Russian. The repertoires of

Spanish-language
material in their repertoires, as well as songs from Africa, India, and elsewhere.

The commercially oriented folk-music revival as it existed in coffee houses, concert halls, radio, and TV was predominantly an

English-language phenomenon, though many of the major pop-folk groups, such as the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, The Highwaymen
, and others, featured songs in Spanish (often from Mexico), Polynesian languages, Russian, French, and other languages in their recordings and performances. These groups also sang many English-language songs of foreign origin.

Rock subsumes folk

The British Invasion of the mid-1960s helped bring an end to the mainstream popularity of American folk music as a wave of British bands overwhelmed most of the American music scene, including folk. Ironically, the roots of the British Invasion were in American folk, specifically a variant known as skiffle as popularized by Lonnie Donegan; however, most of the British Invasion bands had been extensively influenced by rock and roll by the time their music had reached the United States and bore little resemblance to its folk origins.

After Bob Dylan began to record with a rocking rhythm section and electric instruments in 1965 (see

Byrds
, whose individual members often had a background in the folk-revival coffee-house scene, were getting recording contracts with folk-tinged music played with a rock-band line-up. Before long, the public appetite for the more acoustic music of the folk revival began to wane.

"Crossover" hits ("folk songs" that became rock-music-scene staples) happened now and again. One well-known example is the song "Hey Joe", copyrighted by folk artist Billy Roberts and recorded by rock singer/guitarist Jimi Hendrix just as he was about to burst into stardom in 1967. The anthem "Woodstock", which was written and first sung by Joni Mitchell while her records were still nearly entirely acoustic and while she was labeled a "folk singer", became a hit single for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young when the group recorded a full-on rock version.

Legacy

By the late 1960s, the scene had returned to being more of a lower-key, aficionado phenomenon, although sizable annual acoustic-music festivals were established in many parts of North America during this period. The acoustic music coffee-house scene survived at a reduced scale. Through the luminary young singer-songwriters of the 1960s, the American folk-music revival has influenced songwriting and musical styles throughout the world.

Major figures

Gallery

  • Woody Guthrie in 1943
    Woody Guthrie in 1943
  • Burl Ives in 1955
    Burl Ives in 1955
  • Pete Seeger in 1955
    Pete Seeger in 1955
  • Josh White, Café Society (Downtown), New York, N.Y., c. June 1946
    Josh White, Café Society (Downtown), New York, N.Y., c. June 1946
  • Harry Belafonte speaking at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C
    Harry Belafonte speaking at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C
  • Odetta, 1961
    Odetta, 1961
  • Joan Baez playing at the March on Washington in August 1963
    Joan Baez playing at the March on Washington in August 1963
  • Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963
    Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the
    March on Washington
    , 1963
  • Bob Dylan in November 1963
    Bob Dylan in November 1963
  • Peter, Paul and Mary
    Peter, Paul and Mary
  • Judy Collins performing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 1967
    Judy Collins performing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 1967
  • The Smothers Brothers in 1967
    The Smothers Brothers in 1967

Other performers

Managers

Venues

Periodicals

See also

Notes

  1. ^ From the Washington Post, February 12, 1944: "The Labor Canteen, sponsored by the United Federal Workers of America, CIO, will be opened at 8 pm tomorrow at 1212 18th st. nw. Mrs. Roosevelt is expected to attend at 8:30 pm"
  2. ^ Szwed, John, Alan Lomax: The Man who Recorded Music, Penguin, 2010. Cf. p.144: "Margot Mayo was a Texan who pioneered folk music in New York and spearheaded the revival of folk dancing and square dancing there in the 1940s"
  3. ^ Cf. Cantwell, Robert, When We Were Good (1996), pp. 110, 253.
  4. ^ "To Hear Your Banjo Play", film short, 1947 with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Margot Mayo's American Square Dance Group and others. Written by Alan Lomax and narrated by Pete Seeger.
  5. ^ "The Biggest #1 Pop Songs in U.S. Chart History". Whitgunn.freeservers.com. May 3, 2011. Retrieved December 6, 2012.
  6. ^ Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, "From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States", Theory and Society, Vol. 25: 4 (August 1996): 501–543.
  7. ^ "Israel Young, who was deeply involved in the New York folk scene from 1945 onward, recounts (through personal correspondence) that he remained largely unaware of the role of the old left on the folk scene in the first decade of his activism", quoted in Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, op. cit., 1996, ff. p. 542.
  8. ^ Kingston Trio On Record, p. 33.
  9. ^ Fink, Matt. "Review of Here We Go Again". AllMusic Guide. Retrieved July 17, 2009.
  10. ^ Billboard Chart 11/16/59. November 16, 1959. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  11. ^ Billboard Chart 11/23/59. November 23, 1959. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  12. ^ Billboard Chart, 11/30/59. November 30, 1959. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  13. ^ Billboard Chart, 12/7/59. December 7, 1959. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  14. ^ Billboard Chart, 12/14/59. December 14, 1959. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  15. ^ "Tenderfoot Tenor for The Kingston Trio". Show Business. September 5, 1961. Retrieved July 16, 2009.
  16. ^ calculated @ 1960$1 = 2021$8.86 per Dollartimes.com
  17. ^ a b Eder, Bruce. "Biography of The Kingston Trio". AllMusic Guide. Retrieved July 17, 2009.
  18. ^ "Harry Smith biography". Harrysmitharchives.com. January 14, 2007. Archived from the original on July 11, 2011. Retrieved June 20, 2011.
  19. ^ "Top U.S. Artists by Category". Billboard. Vol. 76, no. 52. December 26, 1964. pp. 23–4.
  20. .
  21. ^ "A Spontaneous Performance Recording Page". The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem Website. Archived from the original on March 29, 2014. Retrieved June 1, 2014.
  22. ^ Zhito, Lee (May 5, 1962). "Disk Firms Vie for NARAS Honors: RCA Victor Leads List of Grammy Nominations". Billboard Music Week. 74 (18): 4.
  23. ^ "THE BONO VOX INTERVIEW JULY 8, 1984". www.interferenza.net.
  24. ^ Hamill, Denis (December 22, 2009). "Last Clancy brother Liam is buried, but clan leaves impression on Irish music". Daily News. New York.
  25. ^ Folk Hibernia (television). BBC 4. 2006.
  26. ^ Hamill, Dennis (November 7, 1999). "'Tis a Fine Way to Honor Paddy Clancy". New York Daily News. pp. City Beat (section).
  27. ^ Madigan, Charles M. (November 20, 1998). "Irish Folk Singer Patrick Clancy". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved April 19, 2014.
  28. ^ Library of Congress. Related Material – Woody Guthrie Sound Recordings at the American Folklife Center. Retrieved on November 27, 2007.
  29. ^ "This Land is Your Land: Rural Music & the Depression". Xroads.virginia.edu. Archived from the original on February 7, 2003. Retrieved December 6, 2012.
  30. ^ a b Spivey, Christine A."This Land is Your land, This Land is My Land: Folk Music, Communism, and the Red Scare as a Part of the American Landscape". Archived from the original on June 25, 2008. Retrieved July 12, 2012. The Student Historical Journal 1996–1997, Loyola University New Orleans, 1996.
  31. . Retrieved December 6, 2012.
  32. ^ a b "Odetta- American Folk Music Pioneer". Archived from the original on January 6, 2009. Retrieved June 21, 2011.
  33. .
  34. ^ Rothberg, Abigail. "Legendary Village folk artist remembered". Downtownexpress.com. Retrieved December 6, 2012.

Bibliography

External links