Folk Music Revival in America

Subject: Folk Music Revival in America
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 07:32 AM

I have been reading "Which side are you on?" - An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America - by Dick Weissman.

A great read. Is it considered accurate? Is it the best in it's field?

Cheers

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 09:38 AM

I don't think there is a single book that you could call "definitive" or "best in field".   Weissman's book is good, but it is just one insiders view and I think needs some perspective.

I really like Ronald Cohen's book "Rainbow Quest". I thought it covered more territory and gave a better view of what was happening all across the country during the revival. There were various regional pockets of activity that produced distinct "sounds" and styles.   I think Cohen also gave a bit more insight on the political aspects of the early days of the revival and the "conservative" politics that were involved before "folk music" became more associated with the left.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 10:42 AM

Thanks Ron I will keep am eye out. I guess a similar book about the English/UK revival has yet to be written?

Cheers

Les

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,TJ in San Diego
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 11:26 AM

I can only speak from a purely U.S. perspective. I suppose one would have to outline some criteria for what constituted "revival." I was hearing folk music, or songs derived from folk traditions, as far back as I can remember - at least the mid-1940's. Burl Ives, Josh White and The Weavers, to name three more prominent acts, had a certain level of popularity, but were never considered on the same level as popular vocalists like Sinatra, Perry Como and Jo Stafford, for example. It was not until "Tom Dooley" hit the campus crowd in the late 1950's that folk music (or what passed for folk music, to some)began to emerge as a real phenomenon.

Prior to that, coffee houses were seen mostly as campus hangouts or venues for "beat" poets, chess players and assorted philosophers and hangers-on. Suddenly, they became the venues of choice for aspiring folk singers. As I remember the time, it was the first sort of popular music that invited participation and which many felt they could actually perform. That was what prompted me to become more serious about the genre.

For the more scholarly inclined, who may disapprove of acts like the Kingston Trio as "pseudo-folk" and somehow unworthy, I would point out that a lot of serious wine lovers began that pursuit by drinking Gallo, Red Mountain or Mateus rose'. If it opens doors and awakens people to greater possibility, why not acknowledge it?

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 11:33 AM

"Serious wine lovers"... That's a term that sends a shiver up my spine.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 12:05 PM

Fairenoughski McGrath, some people claim to be serious Man City fans but that doesn't sound right either.

Best account of the uk revival?

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 12:21 PM

TJ - you should check out both books because they do in fact discuss exactly what you are talking about. The revival did not start with the Kingston Trio and both books make that clear.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,TJ in San Diego
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 12:45 PM

For Ron Olesko:

I wouldn't dispute any of that. Perhaps it would have been more germane for me to differentiate between the "folk revival" and the broad popularization of folk music, its relatives and derivitives. Growing up in California, I was not privy to the Greenwich Village folk scene, which Liam Clancy vividly described in a book some years ago. I was very aware of the San Francisco-based folk scene, with people like Lou Gottleib, Malvina Reynolds, Travis Edmonson and many others performing several years before they became "known" as members of groups such as the Limeliters and Bud & Travis, for example. I will seek out both books. I look forward to an insightful read.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 12:55 PM

I think you will really enjoy Cohen's book TJ. Like yourself, I was very aware of the folk scene in the region I grew up in the NYC region and was not familiar with all the other great pockets of folk interest.   Cohen does a nice job of covering some of these.

As you noted, the "revival" did begin during the earlier part of the 20th century, and could probably be traced even further to the collectors who predated the efforts. The term has been alligned with the commercial interest of the late 50's and early 60's, but the revival in folk heritage and song goes back further.

There is another good book about the scene in and around Boston and Cambridge during the 60's - "Baby Let Me Follow You Down".

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 06:50 PM

Does Ron Cohen's book tell much about the Chicago folk scene?

Clay Eals' new bio "Steve Goodman--Facing the Music," mentions a good portion of it in it's nearly 800 pages.

I think I know Ron Cohen. There was a folk club in Northern Indiana back awhile that hired me once or twice. And I seem to recall that he was the head man there ??!! I'd appreciate it if someone with his book could check into that.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: bobad
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 07:10 PM

Ronald D. Cohen, professor of history at Indiana University Northwest-Gary, 1970-2005, wrote and edited numerous books and articles, many about American folk music, and co-produced compilations of folk and topical songs. He edited Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography, written by Agnes Cunningham (Sis) and her husband Gordon Friesen. Sis Cunningham was a songwriter and musician who performed with the Almanac Singers, a 1940s group of folk musicians, and the Red Dust Players, a 1939 radical agitprop group that performed plays in aid of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Gordon Friesen was a newspaper journalist and artist. Cunningham and Friesen fled anti-Communist harassment in Oklahoma and moved to New York City where they founded and published Broadside, a magazine that documented topical and folk songs, beginning in the early 1960s. The collection consists of papers, photographs, and audiovisual materials relating to Ronald Cohen, Sis Cunningham, Gordon Friesen, and Broadside. People figuring prominently in the collection include Barbara Dane, Josh Dunson, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Janis Ian, Ernie Mars, Phil Ochs, Richard Reuss, Malvina Reynolds, Pete Seeger, Irwin Silber, Sammy Walker, Alan J. Weberman, and Izzy Young. Broadside papers, 1957-1999, include original artwork; operations correspondence; transcriptions of songs; articles; press releases; and concert flyers. Cohen papers, 1932-2005, include correspondence; materials related to recording and book projects; and research files documenting his studies of American topical songs and protest songs, the folk revival movement, and McCarthy-era Communism. Sis Cunningham papers, 1914-1998, include correspondence, family memorabilia, and original songs, plays, and writings. Some materials relate to the Red Dust Players. Gordon Friesen papers, late 1930s-1983, include correspondence, drawings, and writings, many documenting his career as a newspaper journalist and novelist. Photographs consist of family photographs of Sis Cunningham, Gordon Friesen, and their family. There are also a few unidentified images of old downtown storefronts and cars. Audiovisual materials include Cohen's collection of audiocassettes with recordings of folk music radio programs, copies of 78 rpm records, interviews, and commercial recordings. Microcassettes include recordings of Cohen's interviews with folk musicians and others associated with folk music. Other audiovisual materials include Cunningham and Friesen's family films and videocassettes documenting the 1991 Richard Reuss Memorial Folk Music Convention.

From: http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/htm/20239.html

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,Gerry
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 09:55 PM

Another enjoyable read is the Dave Van Ronk, Elijah Wald book, The Mayor of Macdougal Street.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: johnross
Date: 30 Aug 07 - 10:47 PM

Along with Rainbow Quest, I would recommend these books: Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music by Benjamin Filene; When We Were Good: The Folk Revival by Robert Cantwell, and Ron Cohen's more recent Folk Music: The Basics. For a more academic perspective, look for Transforming Traditions: Folk Music Revivals Examined edited by Neil Rosenberg. And if you can find it, the 1967 Dell paperback, The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival contains a lot of still-essential esssays.

Dick Weissman's book contains a lot of good information, but I think it suffers from tunnel vision as it describes folk music as a business, and mostly ignores the social phenomenon that is an important part of the modern revival.

I'd also recommend several books about specific people and/or scenes: Baby Let Me Follow You Down about Cambridge and Boston in the Sixties, Positively 4th Street about Bob Dylan, Richard Farina and the Baez sisters, Dave van Ronk's The Mayor of MacDougal Street (with Elijah Wald), and Bob Dylan's Chronicles, among others.

For the transition from the folk music revival of the sixties into folk rock and beyond, Ritchie Unterberger's two volume history of folk rock is essential: Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High.

Add two books about important folk music record labels and how they both fed and were norished by the folk music revival: Jac Holtzman's Follow the Music about Elektra, and Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records.

Gary Cristall's history of folk music in Canada is a work in progress, but it's useful, considering the huge Canadian influence on the American revival: http://folkmusichistory.com/intro.shtml.

As for the revial in England and the UK, look for The British Folk Revival: 1944-2002 by Michael Brocken. It's not the definitve history of BritFolk, but it's a useful introduction.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: Phil Cooper
Date: 31 Aug 07 - 03:09 PM

I was also going to mention "The American Folk Scene." I bought a copy when I was in high school and got a lot of information from the selections.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 31 Aug 07 - 04:43 PM

Yes, but...

Did Ron Cohen's book go into the Chicago folk scene? If it did, how much and how deep?

Also, did he run a folk club called Miller Station in Miller, Indiana---a section of Gary?

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: johnross
Date: 31 Aug 07 - 08:24 PM

Rainbow Quest does talk about the Chicago scene, but not in any great detail. Cohen talks briefly about the Gate of Horn, WFMT, the U of Chicago Folk Festivals, and the Old Town School, but that's about as far as he goes.

I have not been able to find much in print about many of the folk music communities that have existed in major cities and college towns across the country since at least the 1950s (maybe earlier). All of the books about the revival that I have seen have concentrated on either the relationship between folk music and the movements for social change (civil rights, anti-war, women's movement annd so forth), or on the careers of the professional and semi-professional musicians who were more visible outside the community. Nobody pays much attention to the importance of the parties, camps and "insider" festivals like Fox Hollow and Sweets Mill (among many others) that have been the backbone of the revival.

There's certainly a potential book about the folk revival in Chicago (or the Midwest in general, including Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis and the various college campuses, and how they all interacted). Who wants to write it?

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 31 Aug 07 - 11:45 PM

johnross,
Thanks so much. It's appreciated.
I definitely would recommend Clay Eals' new biography of Steve Goodman for a good look into what that scene was like.

Also, folks, as I've said before, check my photos from the folk world as I experienced it at:

http://rudegnu.com/art_thieme.html

All the best,

Art

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 01 Sep 07 - 03:36 AM

Thanks to you all, you have given me much to think about and a lot of material to follow up.

johnross mentioned Foxhollow as an insider festival. In what sense was, or is, Foxhollow "insider"/

I visited Foxhollow whilst working on a Summer Camp in 1970. Seemed like a really good festival. I think Michael Cooney played banjo and sang "Blow away the Morning Dew" amongst other songs. I still have a tape that I made on the day "Trail of tears" was another song I think sung by a group in harmony, very emotional.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: johnross
Date: 01 Sep 07 - 11:56 AM

"Insider" may not have been the best choice to describe those events. The true "insider" events would have been things like Indian Neck, which was (and still is) by invitation only.

Fox Hollow in particular was started by Bob and Evelyne Beers as a way to gather their widespread musical friends in one place for a weekend. Many of those friends were working folksingers and musicians, but others were rarely seen and heard outside of their own communities, except perhaps on a Folkways or Folk Legacy LP.

Fox Hollow, and the camps at Sweets Mill on the West Coast, were the gatherings of the tribes, where people from different communities could share their music and catch up with one another. The social aspect was at least as important as anything that happened on a formal stage. And performers were a lot more accessible to the audiences than at bigger festivals like Newport and Philadelphia.

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: GUEST,Don Firth
Date: 01 Sep 07 - 03:10 PM

All good recommendations. I'm currently reading Rainbow Quest.

As early as the mid-1940s and very early 1950s, there were small groups of folk music enthusiasts here and there all over the country, probably most of them around college campuses. I recall as a teen-ager listening to Burl Ives on the radio early Sunday afternoons and enjoying the songs he sang and the stories he told.

And in Seattle in the very early forties, there was a fellow named Ivar Haglund who also had a radio program on Sunday mornings, doing essentially the same thing as Burl Ives, but singing songs and telling stories about early settlers in the Pacific Northwest. Haglund ran a small aquarium on the Seattle waterfront, opened a take-out seafood bar nearby, and eventually opened a full-service seafood restaurant, taking the name of the place from the last line of "The Old Settler's Song" which he used as the theme song of his radio show—"Acres of Clams." He opened several other restaurants, worked very hard at becoming a "local character," and made a pile of money in the process.

My interest developed in 1951 while I was going with a girl who was very much into learning songs from books by Sandburg and the Lomaxes and teaching herself to play the guitar. Her initial interest was ignited by hearing Walt Roberson sing at a party.

Walt, in turn, was in his mid-twenties and fresh back from Haverford College, and he (I think) had got turned on by attending the Swarthmore Folk Festivals in the late 1940s, where he heard people like Richard Dyer-Bennet, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, miscellaneous Lomaxes, Josh White, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. Not a bad intro!! [More on Walt here.]

So, in the early 1950s, there was a small (maybe a dozen people), but very enthusiastic group around here playing guitars, banjos, miscellaneous other instruments, and singing folk songs and ballads, along with several dozen aficionados who showed up when any of us sang anywhere. Early on, one of these singers was Sandy Paton, who subsequently picked up his guitar, hung out his thumb, and headed East.

There was also a very avid and active group at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. There was a fair amount of cross-fertilization between Seattle and the Reed College group.

All this was while the members of the Kingston Trio were still trying to figure out which way their guitars and banjos were supposed to point. And if you mentioned you were interested in folk music, most people thought you were talking about Country and Western or "Modern Western Swing," i.e., Sons of the Pioneers, "Grand Ole Opry," and such.

In Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, there is one of these "proportional maps" showing centers of interest in folk music around the country. New York, Boston/Cambridge, Berkeley, and a few other areas dominate the map, but the Seattle area isn't even represented. This doesn't reflect reality because, although the rest of the country may not have been aware of it, there was a very active and rapidly growing group of folk music enthusiasts up in the northwest corner of the country, and some of us were actually beginning to making a modest living from performing. In the mid-1950s, there was a series of arts festivals in the University District (The East 42nd Street Arts Festival—streets blocked off, outdoor exhibits, folk dancing, the Keith Pipe Band, lots of stuff good stuff) that included several concerts by local folk singers.

Noting this omission, some years ago I started an attempt to write a history of the folk music scene in the Seattle area, but very quickly realized that there was so much that went on here that I would be like the blind man groping his way around an elephant and trying to figure out what the heck it was! So I backed off a bit and started working on a book of my own experiences and personal reminiscences. I've got about 120,000 words written so far and I've got a way to go yet! That's some fairly serious wordage, and it's going to take some judicious editing to get it manageable, keep the good stuff, and cut it down to size.

I believe that John Ross (a writer by profession) once mentioned that he is working on a history of folk music in this area. Excellent! No conflict between what we are doing because what I'm writing is from a fairly personal viewpoint, and I think John's is probably more far-reaching and academic. John, if there's anything I can do to help (info and such, who did what, etc.), I'd be more than happy to.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: Stringsinger
Date: 01 Sep 07 - 03:28 PM

I prefer books that approach the subject from a personal viewpoint. Many factoids can be disputed. I would rather hear about how the Folk Scare impacted on individals rather than a so-called scholarly treatise which purports to be objective.

Having lived through the folk music revival I know that there is a lot of horseshit out there about how it was.

At least with a personal perspective, the facts might be disputed, but the feelings of the reporter would shed more light on the subject.

My opinion of course.

The most interesting accounts for me would come from someone who was there and had a point-of-view that was personal and emotional.

I would recommend Jim Longhi's book "Woody, Cisco and Me" for getting to know the real Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston.

I also recommend Ed Cray's "Ramblin' Man" about Woody for the reason that I've known Ed for many years and he was very much a part of the folk music scene and is connected to it on an emotional, personal level as well as a scholarly one.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: Folk Music Revival in America
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 01 Sep 07 - 11:25 PM

"Rainbow Quest does talk about the Chicago scene, but not in any great detail. "

Cohen's book covers a great deal of territory and it is too much to expect it to go into "great" detail. A book that covers so much detail would never find a publisher. I would catagorize Cohen's book as going into "good" detail about Chicago, Denver, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and more. It is meant to be an overview of the entire folk revival and I think it does more than an adequate job. I highly recommend it, as I would many of the other books mentioned.