Subject: RE: The Weavers and the McCarthy Era
From:
Don Firth
Date: 19 Mar 04 - 10:23 PM
Not to belabor the point, but to try to clarify what I am saying: I do not mean to imply that I think the Weavers started the whole folk music revival. I don't think that any more than I think (as some do) that The Kingston Trio started the folk music revival. I'm fully aware of those who went before.
In most people's minds, cowboy songs, country songs, and folk songs all came out of the same bucket (and, of course, in a way, they did). Folk songs were occasionally sung by singers such as Ella Fitzgerald (I remember that, back as far as 1940, I think. An early hit for Ella), and occasionally a singer of folk songs made it into the charts. The Carter Family, although a genuine folk phenomenon in their own right, were generally assumed by most people at the time to fall under the heading of "hillbilly" or "Country and Western" (which included The Sons of the Pioneers, Gene Autry, and the Hoosier Hotshots).
When I was a wee tot, I vaguely recall hearing Alan Lomax on a series of programs on folk music that he did on The American School of the Air. This was around 1939-40. This was probably why, when I became actively interested, I had the feeling that I'd heard a lot of these songs before. I was also aware of "Sing Out Sweet Land," and I had heard Marias and Miranda on the radio (it was a real thrill to actually meet them at one of the Berkeley Folk Festivals in the early Sixties), and although one heard a lot of "Negro Spirituals" on the radio, erroneously or not, I think most people regarded this in a category separate from folk music.
In the early Forties, my dad and I listened regularly to the Sunday morning radio program of a guy named Ivar Hagland. Haglund was a local, had a voice a bit like Burl Ives on an off day, and accompanied himself by playing an occasional chord on the guitar. He told stories and sang songs about the early days around Puget Sound, and had guests on his program like James Stevens, the man who wrote The Frozen Logger (in 1959, I had both Ivar Haglund and James Stevens as guest on my television series! That was a real snort!). In the mid-Forties, I heard Burl Ives on the radio, doing a program about the history of the Erie Canal. He told stories and sang songs, and I learned more about the Erie Canal from that program than I did in any history class. Also, shortly thereafter, I heard a legendary broadcast by Carl Sandburg, reading his poetry and singing folk songs, transcribed (I believe is the word) from a live performance at the University of Chicago (if I remember correctly). A friend of mine had an album of Richard Dyer-Bennet 78s. In 1948, I saw a movie called Glamour Girl starring folk singer Susan Reed. Apart from the pleasure of seeing and hearing Susan Reed play and sing many songs, the movie itself was singularly gawdawful (plot summary here). Burl Ives appeared in four movies up through 1949, Smoky (1946), Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), Station West (1948), and So Dear to My Heart (1949), in which he sang a lot and played, essentially, himself. It wasn't until later, especially The Big Country and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that anybody learned that the sucker could really act!
So folk music was definitely out there. By all means. But again I say, most of this was pretty specialized.
Out here on the West Coast, there were not very many people who were aware of the Almanac Singers at the time they were performing, or of many other performers that some folks back East may have been aware of. The San Francisco Bay Area folks, particularly those in Berkeley, were probably more aware than folks in Seattle. But that tends to substantiate the point that I am making: that the Weavers, with there slicked-up Gordon Jenkins arrangements and all, were the breakthrough group that brought folk music, at least in that form, to the majority of American people—or at least, up here in this benighted corner of the country. And identified it, not as pop and not as country, but specifically as "folk songs." Their later records (without Gordy and his baton), such as "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall" and their Christmas Concert, were much better. Much more alive. However, at least here in Seattle and environs, very shortly after those first manifestations in 1949 of the Weavers issuing from radios and juke boxes, there was a notable increase in guitar sales, and some pretty intense searching of hock shops for 5-string banjos, which, at least around here, were pretty rare. Most music stores thought you were off your rocker when you asked about 5-string banjos. Like asking for a five-string ukulele.
Maybe my view of the impact of the Weavers was just a local phenomenon, but . . . .
For anyone unaware of what led up the folk music revival in this country, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music by Benjamin Filene (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and Londen, 2000) gives a pretty good overview. Check it out.
Don Firth
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