It had some amusing features, that film. I wouldn't take "Mitch and Mickey" as being anything much like Ian and Sylvia, though...I don't see much resemblance at all there in either their appearance or their performing style...all you can say it has in common with Ian and Sylvia is that it's a couple who are singing together, and there were a number of those over the years. I recall a South African pair named Marais and Miranda, for example, and much later there were Sonny and Cher but Mitch and Mickey don't look much like them either, I don't think. Nope...Mitch and Mickey don't remind me of any specific act I can ever remember seeing...but their part in the movie is definitely amusing.

All the supposed "folk" music acts shown in the movie (with the possible exception of Mitch and Mickey) positively reek of the specific period in collegiate folk music when groups of neatly dressed young men with short hair played an assortment of acoustic instruments with the ever present banjos and guitars, etc....in other words the period that preceded the folk phenomenon of the Sixties that was ushered in by new young singers and singer-songwriters....most notably Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and Ian and Sylvia (many of whom were signed with Vanguard records at the time). Later came others, like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Melanie...part of the same general movement of singer-songwriters doing original stuff.

As such, the music in "A Mighty Wind" is a parody of a kind of folk music that already seemed corny and passe to me...almost archaic...by about 1963 if not sooner! ;-) I was no longer listening to my Kingston Trio records by that time, although I had loved them a few years earlier. They had become totally uncool as far as I was concerned. They were replaced by Dylan, Baez, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and others of that ilk.

Since "A Mighty Wind" was therefore taking a humorous look and making a gentle parody of a style of folk music that had become redundant already to me by the time I was, oh, 15 years old, it didn't annoy me at all...it amused me.

This giant group...the "Neuftet"...briskly singing their bogus songs of life on the road (or not)...and all looking just so freshly scrubbed and enthusiastic while doing so! Ha! Very funny indeed.

Not that there weren't a lot of fine musicians back then, making fine music of that sort. There were. But it was a very brief window in time, and time moved on.

The movie, for some reason, chose to focus on that particular era of folk music...the pre-Baez, pre-Dylan, basically to all intents the pre-60's folk ethos.........a time that the word "hootenanny" stems from....the time of striped shirts, ties, short haircuts, plonky banjos, and songs that Mitch Miller and the gang might soon co-opt for their lifeless, bloodless choral renditions...as long as there was no hint of leftist political sentiment to be found anywhere in the lyrics.

God, how tiresome it seemed by just a few years later! If I were 10 years older I might see it differently, I suppose, but folk music really hit its stride for me with the new people that appeared from '59 on...Joan Baez being the first of those...and that coincided with the great social issues of the time...integration and Vietnam...and that made folk music serious business that went deep to the heart of things that really mattered.

That era and the political ferment that it was inextricably tied to was not even commented on by "A Mighty Wind". They chose instead to focus on something that had preceded it by a few years, something which was most evident in the years of the Kingston Trio's greatest commercial success, I would think.

Was it "folk music"? Yeah...I guess...it was a sort of folk music, but it wasn't what comes first to my mind when I hear the term "folk music". It was one single narrow drawer in a very large storage cabinet that you could label "the history and offshoots of folk music in the English-speaking world of the 1900s".