POSTING RULES NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*
(A surprisingly affectionate review by an ultraright ex-Communist.)
NY Times Sunday Book Review, August 9 2015
‘Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival’
By RONALD RADOSH
FOLK CITY
New York and the American Folk Music Revival
By Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen
Illustrated. 320 pp. Oxford University Press. $39.95.
How New York City and specifically Greenwich Village came to be at the
epicenter of an American folk music revival between 1950 and 1965 is the
subject of Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen’s “Folk City.” This
handsome book, which includes rarely seen photographs, reminiscences of
participants and a lively narrative, adds depth to an exhibition of the
same name on view at the Museum of the City of New York until January.
The authors do a fine job of presenting the various facets of the folk
revival, including its impact on the city and its role in changing the
larger culture. However, they might have spent more time explaining why
traditional folk music, which concentrated on lost love and life’s woes,
had anything to do with the politics they emphasize throughout. There
is, after all, quite a distance between “Pretty Polly” and “Which Side
Are You On?”
Petrus, a fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, and Cohen, an
emeritus professor of history at Indiana University Northwest, range
from the arrival of Woody Guthrie in New York in 1940 through Bob
Dylan’s arrival some 20 years later in search of Guthrie. In between, we
are introduced to the musicians and entrepreneurs who created the
revival, which drew not only upon traditional music, but also on the
songs of European peasants and African slaves.
A theme that runs throughout the book is the importance of the left in
redefining “the genre of folk music from a quaint musical form
associated with rural life” to a “weapon” to be used in the
Communist-led Popular Front of the ’30s (and later by the civil rights
and anti-Vietnam War movements). The left’s dedication to folk music
paved the way for a younger generation that took to the music in the
1950s and ’60s.
These singers and musicians flocked to Washington Square Park where, on
Sunday afternoons, devotees congregated to play all strands of folk
music. Recalling those days, the folk singer Happy Traum writes in his
recollection that “the Square” was “an unorganized, free-form kind of
social club,” with a group of regulars that included Marshall Brickman,
Eric Weissberg and Dave Van Ronk. As the New Lost City Ramblers, John
Cohen, Mike Seeger and Tom Paley rescued old-time music for a new
audience. Roger Sprung was the man who introduced bluegrass to the city.
From these roots there soon developed a nationwide craze. Life magazine
put the Kingston Trio on its cover after its recording of “Tom Dooley”
became the country’s No. 1 song in 1958. Many folkies formed their own
groups, like the Tarriers, the Journeymen and the Rooftop Singers. Only
Peter, Paul and Mary enjoyed genuine success, but all carried on what
had been started by the Weavers in the late 1940s.
Bob Dylan gets a chapter of his own. He captivated everyone, both
because of his songwriting abilities and because he constantly
reinvented himself. Besides changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to
Bob Dylan, he claimed to be variously “an Okie, an orphan from New
Mexico, an Italian orphan or a descendant of the Sioux Nation” who
learned cowboy music from “real cowboys” in Cheyenne. All apparently
were attempts to gain some kind of authenticity in folk circles along
the lines of his hero Guthrie.
Dylan was drawn into politics, releasing “The Times They Are a-Changin’
” in 1964, but he soon rebelled against the prevailing political
orthodoxy. In a New Yorker article he declared, “I’m not part of no
Movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in
‘the Movement.’ I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for
me.” Of course, he broke one of the biggest rules of the folkies when he
turned electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, giving Pete Seeger
heartburn.
Dylan’s apostasy was the most significant indication that New York
folkies were broadening their musical range with electric instruments.
One Village-based group, the Lovin’ Spoonful, led by the Washington
Square veteran John Sebastian, became what was probably the city’s first
folk-rock band. They were connected to another city group, the Mamas and
the Papas, whose leader, John Phillips, had been one of the Journeymen —
and the success of these bands, Petrus and Cohen suggest, signaled the
end of the bustling New York City folk scene.
Ronald
