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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Celebrating Randy Weston by Jeff Taylor and Hank Williams Music and Identity in Mel Brooks’s The Producers by Katherine Baber In Search of Aaron Copland: Review by Wayne Schneider American Opera: Reviews by Jeff Taylor and Bruce MacIntyre |
Staging the Folk: New York City’s Friends of Old Time Music by Ray Allen
The cultural revolution of
the Sixties was waiting to happen when Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village
in late January 1961. In Chronicles: Volume One, he
recalls that up and down MacDougal Street one could hear angst-ridden beat
poets, modern jazzers, and subversive comedians. But it was Dylan’s
passion for folk music that drew him to clubs and coffeehouses like the Café
Wha?, the Gaslight, Gerdes Folk City, and the Village Gate that were
overflowing with musicians eager to carve out a place in the burgeoning folk
music revival. There Dylan could hear
a wide range of styles that at that time fell under the folk umbrella: the
slick arrangements of the Journeymen and the Clancy Brothers; the edgy
topical songs of Tom Paxton and Len Chandler; the old left pronouncements of
Pete Seeger; the laments of transplanted bluesmen Sonny Terry and John Lee
Hooker; and the old-time mountain music and bluegrass styles of the New Lost
City Ramblers and the Greenbriar Boys.1 Dylan would
soon leave his own indelible imprint on the revival, alloying traditional
country and blues styles with social commentary and abstract poetry to
produce a potent sound that would seduce the baby boom generation. But Dylan wasn’t the only new arrival in the Village during the winter of 1961. In March the New York Times music critic Robert Shelton announced that “Five farmers from the Blue Ridge Mountains brought a ripe harvest of traditional music to the city Saturday night.”2 The farmers turned out to be a group of unknown mountain musicians led by Tennessee banjoist ClarenceAshley and featuring the blind guitar virtuoso Arthel “Doc” Watson. The concert, held at P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village, was sponsored by a loosely knit organization of urban folk enthusiasts with the down-home moniker the Friends of Old Time Music (FOTM), a group Shelton characterized as “a sort of Anglicized, folk-oriented Pro Music Antiqua.” A month prior to the Ashley/Watson presentation the FOTM had staged their inaugural concert with Kentucky banjoist and songster Roscoe Holcomb, and over the next four years would sponsor performances by an array of country, blues, and spiritual singers. FOTM artists Mother Maybelle Carter, Dock Boggs, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Almeda Riddle, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Gus Cannon, and Bessie Jones, along with the aforementioned Ashley, Watson, and Holcomb, would become heroes to urban folkies who favored homegrown southern styles over the sanitized commercial folk music that had reached a national audience in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The FOTM was the brainchild of urban folk musicians John Cohen and Ralph Rinzler, with the advice and support of musicians Mike Seeger and Jean Ritchie, square dance teacher Margaret Mayo, and folk music promoter Izzy Young.3 Cohen and Seeger performed with the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio specializing in southern mountain music learned from old records and field recordings. Rinzler played with the New York-based Greenbriar Boys, one of the first and most influential northern bluegrass bands. All three were city-bred, but had traveled to the Appalachian Mountains in recent years to discover and record traditional mountain music that would be released on Moe Asch’s Folkways label. The purpose of the organization, as Cohen, Young, and Rinzler reported to readers of Sing Out!, was to pay tribute to the rural musicians who were the “original source” upon which the urban folk revival was built.4 Urban audiences who had heard only recordings and city interpreters of traditional styles were ready, the FOTM organizers believed, to experience “the real thing” in person. Of course this was not the first time urbane New Yorkers had been directly exposed to southern folk artists. Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Josh White, and Jean Ritchie had been part of the city’s musical fabric since the 1930s, but they had settled in New York and developed their own careers and cosmopolitan ways. John Hammond’s legendary 1938 Spirituals to Swing Concert had included rural blues and spirituals singers, and Alan Lomax’s 1946 and 1947 Town Hall midnight concerts and his Carnegie Hall “Folksong ’59” show had introduced a variety of blues, spiritual, and hillbilly performers to midtown audiences.5 But the FOTM brought the sound of raw rural music to New York at a pivotal moment when folk music was blossoming into a national fad and growing numbers of urban players were eagerly searching for authentic roots music untainted by commercialism or artsy affectations. Perceptions of “authenticity” were key to the FOTM project, and they found a powerful ally in Shelton. In an attempt to differentiate the FOTM’s farmer musicians from their more polished and professional city counterparts, he described them as purveyors of “real folk music, without any personal or commercial axes to grind.” They were utterly “down-to-earth” performers whose music had “the well-worn quality of fine antiques, a rut and a scratch here and there only heightening the character of a family heirloom.” In a provocative move to reveal the sublime aesthetic power of such unadulterated folk traditions, Shelton went so far as to compare the interplay of Ashley’s banjo and Watson’s guitar on a plaintive ballad to “fine chamber music.”6 In retrospect it is clear that claims of pure authenticity by Shelton and the FOTM organizers involved a degree of hyperbole, for with the exception of Roscoe Holcomb, all of the FOTM performers had made commercial recordings, appeared on southern radio broadcasts, and performed on stage within (and in some cases outside) their home communities. John Cohen, whose poster for the March 1961 FOTM concert was the source of the Shelton’s description of the Ashley/Watson entourage as “farmers,” later admitted that: There was a misconception about Clarence Ashley by many of us who had heard him originally on the 1952 Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music LP. Here is this man with an incredible, high, clean voice, carrying on with great naiveté the purity of this music, the Appalachian sound. And this old guy comes out on stage, snapping his suspenders—he was a Vaudeville entertainer—in that tradition. And then we found out he had done blackfaced comedy. He was a great entertainer, but we couldn’t cast him in the mold of the pure mountaineer, when the pure mountaineer wasn’t so pure.7 Yet at the time Cohen and Shelton did position Ashley and the others as exemplars of pure tradition, in a conscious move to present them as an alternative to the commercial city folk music that, to their minds and tastes, lacked cultural and aesthetic credibility. FOTM’s attempts to present white mountain musicians in the heat of the civil rights movement to a progressive New York City audience steeped in the leftist folk song tradition of Guthrie and Seeger proved politically sticky. John Cohen recalls a group of young students hanging out at Izzy Young’s MacDougal Street Folklore Center in early June 1961 wondering out loud if the upcoming FOTM concert would showcase “those southern white guys in the white sheets.” When the March 1961 Ashley/Watson program ended with all the participants singing a powerful rendition of “Amazing Grace,” Cohen observed that the secular, heavily Jewish audience was deeply moved at what some New Yorkers might have viewed as a display of redneck Bible-thumping. Later he realized: The act of finding linkages between people who would otherwise be opposed to one another was interesting and political. We were putting our stamp of approval on these white guys who [whose culture] until that time had been stereotyped as racists, lynchers, and all those nightmarish things about the South. We were trying to turn Ashley and Watson and the Stanleys into real people, and I thought this was a good thing—acknowledging those people and their culture was political. … We were looking for deeply human, positive connections rather than confrontations.8 The FOTM was an almost
exclusively white organization, and one that seemed to have no overt
political agenda with regard to race and the civil rights movement. Its
members were, however, aware and appreciative enough of southern black folk
music to include African American performers on many of their programs. Their
June 1963 concert featured three African American singers, jug-band legend
Gus Cannon, and Memphis bluesmen Furry Lewis and Willie Borum. In October of the previous year the FOTM
had paired the black one-man-band performer Jesse Fuller with Doc Watson, and
a December 1963 show matched black songster Mississippi John Hurt with white
Virginia coal miner and banjoist Dock Boggs. The racial implications of the
June 1963 blues concert, taking place only a month after the Birmingham riots
had shocked the nation, were not lost on Shelton
in his Times review. He noted that while in the past white
intellectuals read James Baldwin “to get an insight into the thinking
and emotion of the Southern Negro,” perhaps the time had come to
“listen to the joys and troubles of the ‘unlettered’ as
they express themselves in their blues songs.”9 In their work as cultural mediators between southern folk and
northern urban audiences, Cohen and the FOTM were engaging in a form of
advocacy that Alan Lomax would later articulate as “cultural
equity.” Lomax coined the term in calling for global recognition that
all cultures produced worthy art and that local communities worldwide could be empowered if their cultural
expressions were given equal time in the media and educational institutions
of society.10 The practice of cultural equity meant educating northern audiences about southern music and culture, black and white. On the Folkways albums they produced, Seeger, Cohen, and Rinzler included copious notes about the history of southern folk music, sources for repertoire, instrumental techniques, and lyrics to songs. Working with live performers in workshop and concert settings offered them the opportunity to expand their educational mission. Only a week before the first FOTM concert in New York, Seeger and Cohen had helped arrange for Holcomb, black guitarist Elizabeth Cotten, and Virginia bluegrass legends the Stanley Brothers to appear at the first University of Chicago Folk Festival. In workshops and on the concert stage, Seeger and Cohen provided background introductions for the individual musicians, advised with repertoire selection, led informal discussions about instrumental and vocal technique, and served as musical accompanists.11 The idea of on-stage presentation and interpretation that had been so successful in the Chicago festival spilled over into early FOTM programs, infusing them with moments of informality that blurred the boundaries between concerts and workshops. Cohen, who had located Holcomb on a field trip to eastern Kentucky in the spring of 1959, appeared on stage with him at the first concert, providing guitar accompaniment and interjecting information about Holcomb’s repertoire and banjo style. Rinzler, who had run across Ashley at the Union Grove Fiddler’s Convention in 1960, introduced the second concert. Prior to the program he and Seeger worked with the musicians for several days in selecting an appropriate repertoire, and he had earlier convinced Watson to lay aside his electric guitar and revive his traditional family repertoire. Seeger, who had tracked down Boggs in southwestern Virginia in the summer of 1963, served as emcee and accompanist for the Boggs/Hurt program that took place in December of that year. When programs featured
musicians with whom they had little personal contact, the FOTM organizers
called in additional experts. The
Canon/Lewis/Borum blues concert was introduced by Samuel Charters, whose 1959
publication The Country Blues had brought considerable attention to
the neglected field of rural blues. Alan Lomax, a veteran stage and radio
commentator on folk music, presented Mississippi cane fifer Ed Young, Georgia
Sea Island singer Bessie Jones, and blues guitarist Fred McDowell. Shelton
judged that Lomax and the musicians achieved a satisfactory blend of
entertainment and education, concluding that their presentation was “as
musically appealing as it was intellectually stimulating.”12 The efforts of Cohen,
Rinzler, and Seeger to stage traditional folk musicians for urban audiences
at the Chicago Folk Festival and the FOTM concerts would be further refined
at the Newport Folk Festival where Rinzler and Seeger served as advisers and
field workers between 1963 and 1967.
These early attempts to recontextualize informal folk performance in
formal stage settings served as models for Rinzler when he became director of
the first Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in 1967. That festival,
staged on the National Mall in Washington with federal government support,
grew into an annual summer celebration of folk music, dance, and crafts from
around America and the world. The
Smithsonian Festival was the culmination of the vision Rinzler, Cohen, and
Seeger were working out in the early 1960s folk festivals and FOTM concerts:
the dignified presentation of local artists, located through field research,
in an arena that mixed education, entertainment, and the politics of cultural
equity. As the festival’s
current director, Richard Kurin, has reflected: For Rinzler, the festival could be a massive demonstration of the desire of grassroots people for aesthetic justice … the festival would give voice to the people and announce to the public, the media, and Congress that there was “culture” back home and that that culture was worthy of national pride, attention, and respect.13 Achieving pride, attention, and respect for southern folk culture, and forming the sorts of cross-cultural “linkages” that Cohen alluded to, were not always easily obtainable goals. The restaging of folk artists in venues foreign to their home environments could be fraught with problems. Cohen and Rinzler worried that Ashley and other artists might slip into their old vaudeville and blackfaced minstrel routines. Although he found the blues concert moving, Shelton noted that “Guitars were out of tune” and that the “dialect was so totally esoteric that those who have not listened to the recordings or read the growing literature in praise of it [country blues] may not have been able to understand what was going on.”14 Presenters needed to be mindful not to indulge in the sorts of patronizing romanticism that inadvertently might reduce mountain farmers and delta bluesmen to exotic others for the voyeuristic pleasure of urban audiences familiar only with hayseed or minstrel stereotypes of southern folk. And culture critics pointed out that large and impersonal folk festivals could tear local traditions free from their cultural moorings, resulting in decontextualized restagings that could not possibly communicate the subtle complexities of original aesthetic or social intent of a tradition. Such events, cultural historian Robert Cantwell has argued, are more likely to serve the political agenda of the presenters, not the folk themselves.15 From our present vantage point it is impossible to surmise exactly what sorts of aesthetic, social, and political messages were conveyed to those who experienced the FOTM concerts firsthand; undoubtedly the country/city cultural gap was too wide for everyone to fully appreciate the art they were witnessing, and preconceived notions of folk primitivism were probably reinforced for some. Yet despite these inherent problems, the FOTM organizers appeared to resist the temptations to over-romanticize, patronize, or otherwise exploit the rural artists they presented to their fellow New Yorkers. Perhaps it was their individual experiences as musicians, folk music collectors, and educators that led Cohen, Rinzler, and Seeger to forge such deep personal ties with their folk mentors and to communicate so genuinely the respect and admiration they felt for southern mountain music. By the early 1960s they had joined Alan Lomax as pioneering cultural brokers who creatively mediated between America’s rural folk and the urban audiences who fuelled the folk revival. * * * There is no evidence that Bob Dylan ever attended
any of the FOTM concerts. However, in Chronicles he
recalls meeting FOTM performers Clarence Ashley, Gus Canon, and other
“unmistakably authentic folk and blues artists” at Izzy
Young’s Folklore Center on McDougal Street. Later he recounts hearing
Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Dock Boggs, and Mississippi John Hurt at Alan
Lomax’s Third Street loft parties, events he characterized as
“spiritual experiences.” Dylan also reported that upon first
hearing Mike Seeger perform at one of the Lomax gatherings he was so stunned
by Mike’s total mastery of traditional styles, genres, and repertoire
that he realized that only by “writ[ing] my own folk songs, ones that
Mike didn’t know” would he be able to make a viable contribution
to the folk music revival.16 Dylan would certainly go on to write his
own “folk songs,” and transform the music into the new genre of
folk rock, but as cultural historian Benjamin Filene points out in surveying
three-and-a-half decades of Dylan’s work, his best compositions have
always remained deeply rooted in traditional
American folk ballads, blues, country, and gospel music.17 By introducing southern folk styles and
living practitioners of those styles into the Greenwich Village folk scene in
the early 1960s, the Friends of Old Time Music reminded Dylan and many lesser
known New York citybillies where their music came from and what invaluable
sources of inspiration traditional performers could be in the ongoing transformation
of American roots music. The Friends of Old Time Music concerts were
recorded in the early 1960s by Peter Siegel. Forty years later Siegel has
selected and mastered material from the original concert tapes to produce a
three CD box-set which will be released on Smithsonian Folkways in fall 2006.
Notes 1 Bob Dylan, Chronicles:
Volume One (Simon and Schuster, 2004). See the first two chapters for
Dylan’s description of Greenwich Village when he arrived in early1961. 2 Robert Shelton,
“Folk Group Gives ‘Village’ Concert,” New York
Times (27 March, 1961). 3 Information on the
organization and presentations by the New York Friends of Old Time Music was
gathered from John Cohen, interview with Peter Siegel, 18 February 2005,
Putnam Valley, NY; and John Cohen, interview with Ray Allen, 13 December
2005, Putnam Valley, NY. 4 John Cohen, Israel
Young, and Ralph Rinzler, “The Friends of Old Time Music,” Sing
Out! 11 (February/March 1961): 63. 5 Background on the early
folk music revival in New York City is found in Ronald Cohen’s Rainbow
Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 3-124. 6 Shelton,
“Folk Group Gives ‘Village’ Concert.” 7 Cohen interview, 13
December 2005. 8 Ibid. 9 Robert Shelton,
“Folk Trio Sings Memphis Blues,” New York Times (8 June 1963). 10 Alan Lomax,
“Appeal for Cultural Equity,” Journal of Communication 27
(Spring 1977): 125-38. 11 For an account of
the early University of Chicago Folk Festivals, including workshop
descriptions, see John Cohen and Ralph Rinzler, “University of Chicago
Folk Festival,” Sing Out! 12 (April/May 1963): 8-10. 12 Robert Shelton,
“Third Folk Concert in Series Performed,” New York Times
(10 April 1965). 13 Richard Kurin, Reflections
of a Cultural Broker: A View From the Smithsonian (Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1997), 128. 14 Shelton,
“Folk Trio Sings Memphis Blues.” 15 A useful
reflection on the cultural and political ramifications of recontextualing
folk culture for urban audiences via the folk festival is found in Robert
Cantwell, “Feasts of Unnaming: Folk Festivals and the Representation of
Folklife” in Public Folklore, eds. Robert Baron and Nicholas Spitzer
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 263-305. See especially pages 295-97 for
Cantwell’s discussion of the problems of interpreting folk practices
through concert/theatrical and exhibitory festival presentations. 16 The three Dylan
quotes are from Chronicles, pp. 19, 72, and 71 respectively. 17 Benjamin Filene,
Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (University of
North Carolina Press), 218-32. ISAM home Who we
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