With all the discussions about what is real and fictional in the Dylan movie, this seems like a good time to straighten out the record on Alan Lomax's role -- which serious historians keep getting wrong and the movie gets mostly right.
Lomax did not hate electric instruments or rock 'n' roll. He was indeed a folk "purist," but not in that way. For him, folk music was the vernacular music of working class communities -- so, for example, the folk music happening in New York in the late 1950s was what groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were singing in Harlem, not middle class college students playing banjos in Washington Square.
As far as I can determine, he was the first folklorist to record a band with electric guitar, back in 1941. In 1959, when he got back from sitting out the McCarthy Era in Europe, he held a homecoming "Folksong '59" concert that included Muddy Waters playing electric and was supposed to have the Cadillacs (of "Speedoo" fame), though in the end he had to substitute a Detroit "girl group." As he wrote at the time, he was thrilled by the transformation of US pop music:
"A stampeding herd of youngsters—hillbillies, citybillies, rockabillies—had broken through the gates and set America singing, dancing, rocking to its own rhythms. The juke boxes were pouring out the wild expressive singing that I once had to hunt for in the Mississippi Delta…. I saw rock and roll audiences clapping time on the off-beat and watched the kids dancing more expressively than ever in my memory. When I closed my eyes I often couldn’t tell a Negro from a white singer. Tin Pan Alley with its stifling snobby European standards was spinning on its pinnacle."
He loved all of that; he did NOT love folks like Dave Van Ronk and the New Lost City Ramblers; he was a close friend of Pete Seeger's, but detested Pete's idea that everyone should pick up guitars and banjos and try to sing folksongs -- to Lomax, that was dumbing down and disrespecting music with deep, complex traditions and skills -- and he had no interest in Dylan or any of the other young songwriters and did his best to keep them out of the Newport limelight, which he thought should be shining on authentic folk artists.
He was prepared to modify his views when he saw a chance for major stars to direct attention to the authentic artists: when the Broadway star Libby Holman fell in love with folk music, he provided her with material and teamed her up with Josh White; when Jo Stafford recorded an album of traditional folk songs, he played it regularly on his radio show; and he could see the advantage of using the star power of people like Peter, Paul and Mary to bring audiences to Newport and expose them to the real thing. But that didn't mean he liked the adulterations.
The famous fight between Lomax and Grossman was not over Dylan's set, nor was it over electricity. It was over the fact that the first full Chicago blues band to be invited to Newport was fronted by three young white guys -- and his (accurate) belief that Grossman was interested in the Butterfield Blues Band specifically because they were white and hence more marketable to a mass white audience than, say, Junior Wells or Buddy Guy.
As it happened, the first night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival included a hot electric set by the Chambers Brothers, and Lomax jumped onstage at the end to say, "I’m very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock ’n’ roll!”
Nor was Lomax a lone outlier; there were plenty of people whose definition of "folk music" was based on class consciousness rather than acoustic instruments -- after all, a lot of them were socialists or communists. Bo Diddley was on the bill for the first Newport Folk Fest in 1959, though he didn't make it. A few weeks before Newport '65, Dave Van Ronk programmed a blues concert in New York that included Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Mose Allison, the Muddy Waters Blues Band, and Chuck Berry -- and Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out!, applauded Berry's appearance, only complaining that the sound system was not powerful enough to convey the full force of his music.
There were all kinds of disagreements about all this stuff: Silber famously took Dylan to task for shifting from topical songwriting to introspective songwriting; Lomax had no interest in Dylan, either way; Van Ronk was equally excited by electric blues and by Dylan's fusion of folk tradition with symbolist poetry.
To finish up... my most recent book, "Jelly Roll Blues," has Alan Lomax as a central character, and tries to explore some of his complications -- he was a complicated, often difficult, and very opinionated man, and I owe him a huge debt but also note a lot of problems with his views and work. I'm not in any particular camp on any of these issues -- Van Ronk was by far my most important teacher, and if there are camps, I'm in his, but he was interested in erasing musical boundaries rather than policing them. I'm not writing this as a defense of Lomax, just as a corrective to the way he tends to be mischaracterized in pieces about Newport '65. He thought Dylan was destructive, but electricity was not the issue -- and, in Dylan's phrase, he was right from his side: when Dylan left the folk scene and became a rock star, most of the folk audience went with him. As George Wein (the founder of the festival) put it, “[the Newport Folk Fest] lasted four more years, but it was never the same. After that we were no longer ‘It,’ we were no longer hip, we were no longer what was happening. We were just old-time folksingers.”
Obviously this is not the whole story: I wrote a book about Dylan, Seeger, and Newport, and it isn't the whole story either. But I was pleased that the movie showed Lomax objecting to the Butterfield Band because they were white and suggesting they were as fake as Peter, Paul and Mary (I don't agree, but that was his view). So far it looks like almost no one is picking up on that, and the dominant narrative continues to mischaracterize him as hating electricity and rock 'n' roll... which is why I'm writing this. Feel free to share it.