In Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals, co-authors David King Dunaway and Molly Beer say there were three folk revivals in the 1900's:
The first revival early in the 20th century was driven by collectors, who combed through old manuscripts for new discoveries, publishing as many versions and variations as they could find. Most famous among these collectors were John Lomax, father of Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger, father of Pete, Michael, and Peggy Seeger.
During the New Deal, Alan Lomax roamed the back woods collecting on a tape recorder for the Library of Congress. During that time, he roomed with Pete Seeger for awhile. Lomax's Library of Congress recordings were a major source of material for folk singers who inspired one another in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1930's and 40's
The Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, and Leadbelly
The Almanac Singers were different from performing groups today. They were a loose group of social democrats whose concerts and group sings featured different combinations of people who hung around, slept at, or ate at the Almanacs' communal house in the Village.
Woody Guthrie and Hudie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter were part of that orbit. So was Burl Ives, who later named names for the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The Weavers and the Blacklist
Lee Hays and Pete Seeger of the Almanacs formed The Weavers, a group that would rehearse more seriously and concentrate on bringing folk music to a mass audience. They succeeded. Before they were blacklisted, they had several singles on the pop charts, and two best-selling albums.
Leadbelly's "Good Night Irene" was a Number One single for the Weavers, who also appeared on TV variety shows, including Ed Sullivan. The Weavers were at the top of their fame in 1950, when the House Un-American Activities Committee branded them as Communists. All their TV and concert dates disappeared, and radio stations stopped playing their records.
Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers said, in the Public Broacasting (PBS) documentary The American Experience: Pete Seeger, that she stopped believing the U.S. was a democracy and a free society where people could think what they wanted to.
On the same documentary, Pete Seeger acknowledged that he carried a Communist Party card briefly in the 1930's. "They were for labor unions; I was for labor unions. They were for racial justice; I was for racial justice. They were for peace; I was for peace."
Many liberals in the 1930's were sympathetic to the Soviet Union until its totalitarianism became more clear, especially when Communist leader Joseph Stalin signed a treaty with Adolf Hitler in 1939.
After World War II, Seeger and many other idealistic social democrats became active in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. Seeger traveled the country with Wallace, and opened his campaign rallies with songs. Many people active in that campaign were branded Communists or "Communist Sympathizers," the PBS documentary said.
During the blacklist, Pete Seeger, and many other folk singers, made a living singing folk songs for children at elementary schools. Enforcers of the blacklist thought that could do no harm. How wrong they turned out to be!
The Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary
In the late 1950's and early '60's, The Kingston Trio, and several other small groups of clean-cut young people became wildly popular singing traditional folk songs in close harmony, accompanying themselves on guitars, banjos and other folk instruments.
The Kingston Trio, the most popular of these groups, had the nerve to record Pete Seeger's anti-war song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." Radio stations played it, and there were no significant boycotts of the Trio, their concerts, or their records. It was an early example of how the blacklist was weakening.
John Phillips, who later started The Mamas and the Papas, was a member of one of these clean-cut folk groups, The Travelers. When Mama Cass Elliot mentions "living on the American Express card" in her number one hit about the Mamas and Papas' early days, the card holder was The Travelers.
Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Berkeley, Calif., young artists like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and many others were going to one small club after another, honing their craft, occasionally getting paid by the management, often just passing the hat at the end of their sets. One by one, the good ones got record contracts and paid appearances at clubs and colleges.
Sing Out magazine, the unofficial publication of this folk revival, called Dylan, Ochs, and Paxton, the best song writers of the time, "Woody's Children.."
The movement began to rip at the seams over the issue of Authentic or Commercial. Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, The New Lost City Ramblers were authentic. Peter, Paul, and Mary, with their souped up versions of folk songs, were commercial. The Kingston Trio was too commercial to even talk about.
Bob Dylan was one of the most authentic, but he betrayed his fans at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival when he came out with an electric guitar. He was booed off the stage. After several minutes, he re-emerged with an acoustic guitar to sing the bitter "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."
His next hit single, "Positively 4th Street" in 1965, was a defiant slam at the people who rejected him, who thought he should stay the way he was when he was performing in 4th Street coffee houses in Greenwich Village. Even Pete Seeger, who emerges in this book as completely open to change in the people's music, stopped talking to Dylan that day.
Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd
Since the beginning of the century, the authors say, topical and protest songs were part of the music of the people. Most murder ballads and outlaw songs were about current events when they were written. "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Jesse James" were popular songs about real robbers.
"Little Sadie" and "Banks of the Ohio" are traditional ballads about murders that are only remembered in song. But the murder ballad :"Hiram Hubbard," recorded by mountain music collector Jean Ritchie, preserves the name of the killer, and claims he was not guilty.
"They say folk songs never lie. I've always believed Hiram Hubbard was not guilty," Ritchie says, introducing the song on a Folkways recording.
Most crime songs are sympathetic to the alleged criminal, the authors say. "Little Sadie" and "Banks of the Ohio" are exceptions.
Solidarity Forever, and Union Maid
All the way back to 1910, folk music played an important role in the labor, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam movements.
The International Workers of the World (IWW, known as "the Wobblies") tried to organize workers from different industries in a single union. This brought them into conflict with the two dominant labor organizations, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the U.S. government.
The U.S. Justice Department began rounding up Wobblies and putting them in jail in the years leading up to World War I. Anybody they missed was arrested and jailed in the Palmer Raids following the war.
But the Wobblies contributed several great songs to the American songbook, mostly new words set to familiar tunes:
"Solidarity Forever [for the union makes us strong]" is to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." "We Shall Not Be Moved" puts union words to an old gospel hymn with the same name, and "You'll Get Pie in the Sky When You Die [that's a lie!]" mocks the gospel hymn "In the Sweet By and By" and the notion that poor, oppressed workers should accept their lot in life , and wait for a better life (pie in the sky) when they die. "That's a lie," the audience responds after each chorus.
The United Mine Workers (UMW) in Appalachia was a militant union in the 1930's led by John L. Lewis. They lived in worse conditions, and faced more violence from the mine owners, than most workers who were trying to unionize. That probably accounts for the songs, which were designed to keep workers' spirits up in the face of degrading poverty and violent strike breakers.
"Union Maid" is a light-hearted song about a woman "who never was afraid of goons and geeks and the company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raids." She attended meetings at the union hall, and always stood her ground when the company boys came around. "Oh you can't scare me, I'm sticking with the union.... till the day I die."
Much harder songs came out of the miners' union: "We say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there. You either are a union man or a scab for J.H. Blair. Which side are you on?"
Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other folk singers made a good part of their livings singing at union rallies, motivating the rank and file.
We Shall Overcome
The authors say music was more important to the civil rights movement in the South than to any other movement that used song to unite and motivate the people. That's because the movement began and was nurtured in Southern African-American churches. Their church music and preaching tradition were really all about freedom, as far back as slavery time.
In the PBS documentary, Pete Seeger says he did not write "We Shall Overcome," as many people now believe. "I added verses, but a lot of people add verses," he said. That hymn-like song, often sung holding hands with the people on your left and right, lifted, inspired, and comforted people facing Southern law enforcement, and in dangerous Southern jails. It became the movement's universal anthem.
An upbeat song in the gospel mode says "Before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free." The defiance in that song is a little bit more out there than the more peaceful defiance in "We Shall Overcome."
On his 1964 album of civil rights songs We Shall Overcome, Seeger introduces a little-known song he heard children practicing before going out on the picket line. They were told to wait until the sheriff placed them under arrest, then stand up, do a little dance step, and sing, "Ain't a-scared of your jail cuz I want my freedom now."
Country Joe and the Fish
The anti-Vietnam movement produced a lot of songs, and revived many more. Pete Seeger's "Big Muddy," a very good, very moving song, gained immortality when CBS TV censored it from the Smothers Brothers TV show. When Tommy Smothers stared the network down and stimulated a large popular outcry, Seeger was invited back on the show and allowed to perform his protest song.
One song by Country Joe McDonald and the Fish became an unofficial anthem because the combination of sarcastic, gallows humor and rousing tune was so much fun to sing:
"And it's one-two-three what are we fighting for
Don't ask me I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's five-six-seven
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee we're all gonna die."
Dunaway and Beer say the third folk revival is going on now, driven by the sons and daughters of the second folk revival of the '60's: Johnny Cash's daughter Roseanne, Arlo Guthrie's son, Pete Seeger's children, and names like Janis Ian and Annie di Franco.
Oral History
In the hands of great craftspeople like Studs Terkel, Laurence Ritter (The Glory of Their Times) and Donald Honig (Baseball When Grass Was Green) oral history can be an entertaining way to learn a whole lot about people who lived in an interesting time.
But there is more to oral history than tape-recording interviews, pulling out quotes, and arranging the quotes by topic. That seems to be all Dunaway and Beer did in Singing Out. It reads like notes for a bookthat the authors forgot to write, a really bad book about a really great topic.
SOURCES
- Dunaway, David King, and Beer, Molly, Singing Out: an Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals, Oxford University Press, ISBN 976-0-19-5327834-4, 2010, 255 pp.
- Public Broadcasting System, The American Experience: Pete Seeger, 2005
Ken Braiterman - Ken Braiterman writes columns for the Concord (NH) Monitor print and online editions. He also writes and lectures on recovery from ...
