During the 1950s and before, there was a slowly increasing awareness and interest in American traditional music, fed by collectors such as the Lomaxes, poet Carl Sandburg, and others, also fed by performers such as Burl Ives, Susan Reed, Richard Dyer-Bennet, et al. It was in the very early 1950s that I became actively interested.

At that time, if you mentioned that you sang folk songs, most people thought you were talking about Country and Western or what was referred to as "Modern Western Swing." It wasn't until a fair number of people, particularly college kids, started getting together spontaneously for song fests and to swap songs (what were originally called "hootenannies") that the commercial music interests woke up to the idea that there might be profit to be made in this music. The big turning point was when the Kingston Trio's rendition of "Tom Dooley" made the Hit Parade in 1958, and then what became known as "the folk revival" was off and running.

Was it really a folk revival?

One of the problems with folk music as far as the commercial interests were concerned was—who gets the royalties? These songs are all public domain. So not us! We gotta do something about that!

So—a lot of goofy stuff started going on. At one time, some nineteen different people claimed copyright on "Greensleeves." And "folk songs" were being ground out by professional song writers for commercially oriented groups such as The New Christy Minstrels to sing and record. Songs that sounded a bit like folk songs, but with a known composer who could garner the proceeds. Plastic "folk songs." And, for that matter, plastic "folk groups."

The Weavers came together because they were all into folk music before all this got started. They formed a group "to introduce the American people to their own traditional music" and their first recordings came out, I believe, in 1949 or 1950. That's when I first heard them on juke boxes and on the radio. They sang traditional songs.

The group Peter Paul and Mary was put together some years later by impresario Al Grossman. So rather that coming together spontaneously, they were a "manufactured" group. They sang some traditional songs, but mostly recently written songs.

So—there were people who were interested in traditional folk music. And there was the commercial "pop-folk" phenomenon. The latter spawned a fair number of manufactured folk groups and equally ersatz folk songs that were written to be sung by such groups—and on which, royalties could be collected.

I'm not making this up. I knew a guy who sang with the New Christy Minstrels for about a year and wrote a lot of songs for them.

So when someone mentions "the folk revival," I'm not quite sure what they're talking about—in the same way as when they start talking about "folk songs." I need a little clarification.

NO! Let's not start that discussion yet again!

Don Firth