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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: The Composer, the Work, and Its Audience by Adrienne Fried Block Jewish American Music:
Review by Evan Rapport More News from Nowhere: Review by David G. Pier Reviving the Folk: Review by Ray Allen |
Reviving
the Folk
Advertisement for Josh White's
spiritual recordings, ca. 1933
For folklorists, the dam finally broke in
1993 with the publication of Neil Rosenberg's volume Transforming
Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, a compilation of essays by folk
music scholars—many of them musicians who had come to the study of
folklore via the revival—who grappled with issues of authenticity and
invented tradition. Three years later came Robert Cantwell's When We
Were Good: The Folk Revival, a provocative and personal account of the
revival that pondered the cultural construction of "folkness" among
post-war urban Americans who embraced musical traditions with which they had
little prior contact.1 The first comprehensive historical account
of America's post-war revival has arrived with the publication of Ronald
Cohen's Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society,
1940-1970 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002; $24.95).
Cohen, a social historian and long-time observer of the revival, draws on
interviews, personal journals, and period press criticism to tell the
compelling story of urban America's embrace of southern folk music. He
anchors the post-war revival in the early collecting efforts of John and Alan
Lomax, the introduction of the music to northern audiences by Lead Belly,
Woody Guthrie, and the Almanac Singers, and the efforts by culturally minded
progressives to integrate folk music into unions and leftist movements of the
1930s and early 1940s. The story continues with the initial attempts to
popularize folk music by Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the early 1950s, the
forcing of the music underground by the Red Scare, and its subsequent
re-emergence in the late 1950s as a commercially viable music in the hands of
the Kingston Trio and flock of sweet-swinging popularizers. The commercial
revival peaked in 1963 with ABC's nationally televised show Hootenanny, and
began to spiral into decline from a combination of internal squabbles, the
post-Beatles revitalization of rock music, and the transformation of folk to
folk rock by young rebels like Bob Dylan. Although Cohen does not challenge the
standard narrative of the urban folk revival as it has previously appeared,
somewhat piecemeal, in the popular press, he does offer a unique insider's
perspective that focuses less on the star performers and more on the cultural
workers—record producers, promoters, club owners, festival organizers,
magazine editors, and journalists—who In addition to covering three decades of
intense folk music activity, Rainbow Quest extends a broad geographic
reach. New York City's Greenwich Village is positioned at the center of the
study, but ample attention is paid to folk clubs and festivals in Boston,
Chicago, and the Bay area, and considerable space is devoted to the legendary
Newport Folk Festival that became a national showcase for folk music in the
early 1960s. Given its chronological scope, Rainbow Quest offers only
a glimpse of the ongoing force folk music would play in post-1970 America. A
lengthier final chapter might have further expanded Cohen's closing
observation that a variety of folk styles, ranging from bluegrass, old-time
fiddling, and blues to Cajun, klezmer, and Celtic, have flourished in the
wake of the 1960s' commercial revival. Yet Cohen has managed to pack a
tremendous amount of information into this lucidly written and meticulously
documented work that will provide a solid historical baseline for future
research. Inquisitive readers will undoubtedly want
to know more about the revival's founding fathers and mothers highlighted
throughout Cohen's study. Recent biographies of Woody Guthrie and Josh White
now take their place on the shelf next to Kip Lornell and Charles Wolfe's The
Life and Legend of Leadbelly, David Dunaway's How Can I Keep from
Singing: Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie's Singing Family of the
Cumberlands, and Shelly Romalis's Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly
Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. Ed Cray's Ramblin' Man: The Life and
Times of Woody Guthrie (W.W. Norton, 2004; $29.95) presents a richly
detailed and impeccably sourced account of one of America's most heralded
folk figures. Drawing on scores of interviews and written materials from the
Woody Guthrie Archive, Cray narrates Guthrie's tumultuous life, opening with
his troubled childhood in Oklahoma and West Texas, then tracing his sojourn
west to California and his transformation from a hillbilly radio singer to a
topical songwriter and voice of downtrodden working people. In 1940, the twenty-eight-year-old
Guthrie landed in New York City where, through his association with Alan
Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Folkways Records producer Moe Asch, he became a
pivotal player in the burgeoning urban revival. While touting his
achievements as a songwriter, performer, and activist, Cray conveys Guthrie's
deep frustrations at not achieving more success as a journalist and fiction
writer. Nor does the biographer shy away from the darker side of Guthrie's
life—the alcoholism, the three failed marriages, and the devastating
and eventually fatal thirteen-year bout with Huntington's disease. Cray
deftly paints a balanced picture that avoids the romantic mythologizing and
heavy-handed politicizing that characterize much of the previous writings on
Guthrie. Following Lead Belly, the most influential
African American figure in the post-War folk music revival was South Carolina
native Josh White. Ignored for decades by critics and folk music specialists
who found his style too slick and his politics compromised following his 1950
voluntary appearance before the House on Un-American Activities Committee,
White's story has finally been told in Elijah Wald's informative biography, Josh
White: Society Blues (Routledge Press, 2000; $22.95). Wald recounts
White's childhood years of beating a tambourine and passing the cup as a lead
boy for blind South Carolina singers, his initial success at recording
Piedmont-style blues and spiritual numbers, and his migration to New York
City in the early 1930s where he would eventually join Guthrie and Lead Belly
in the early folk music revival. Like his Oklahoma and Louisiana-bred
counterparts, White was a product of humble rural roots who suddenly found
himself swept into a leftist cultural movement that embraced him as an
authentic voice of the oppressed folk and a champion in the struggle for
racial equality. But unlike the rough-voiced Guthrie and Lead Belly, White
was able to polish his sound and professionalize his act for white listeners
who frequented establishments like Greenwich Village's Café Society in the
1940s, allowing him to reach a broader audience and land occasional
appearances on Broadway and in Hollywood productions. Blacklisted in the
1950s and subsequently denounced by his leftist admirers for his partial
cooperation with red-baiting government officials, White limped through the
1960s without proper recognition of his earlier accomplishments that helped
set the stage for the commercial folk music boom. Wald's engaging biography
and the recent reissue of White's early recordings should help restore his
legacy. One figure who loomed large over the
revival and whose biography has yet to be written is folk music collector,
promoter, record and radio producer, and scholar Alan Lomax. The recently John and Alan Lomax surface
as pivotal figures in Benjamine Filene's provocative study, Romancing
the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (University of North
Carolina Press, 2000; $19.95). Filene focuses on a group of cultural
mediators—folklorists, record producers, and performers—who
bridged the gap between local music cultures and broader American audiences,
and the ways in which those mediators shaped popular perceptions about the
folk and their music. The Lomaxes' promotion of Lead Belly in New York City
during the 1930s and 1940s, for example, brought urban audiences in direct
contact with a bona fide southern folk performer, while maintaining an image
of the Louisiana songster as an exotic and perhaps dangerous primitive. That
legacy, according to Filene, ultimately prevented Lead Belly from achieving
more commercial success and broader recognition in his lifetime. Filene's
commentary on Seeger and Dylan, figures he identifies as cultural outsiders
who became emissaries for the traditions they embraced, provides fresh
insight into the process by which new styles and songs, perceived by their
makers to be folk, emerged as an important component of the folk revival. Romancing
the Folk is a valuable work that provides an intriguing new perspective
on how modern urbanites constructed ideal images of authentic folk music and
used those perceptions for their own personal, social, and political agendas.
The scholarly literature
devoted to folk music revivals in America has focused almost exclusively on
the period stretching from the late Depression through the mid-1960s, and on
the introduction of southern folk stylesblues, ballads, spirituals, work
songs, and string band musicto northern urban audiences. The survival and
revival of ethnic music and dance traditions among immigrant communities that
Lomax noted some forty years ago are only now being fully documented by
folklorists and ethnomusicologists working in government-supported positions,
but to date have failed to receive adequate attention from scholars. An exception in this area is the work of
ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin, whose brief but insightful monograph, Fiddler
on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (Oxford University Press,
2000; $26.00), points the way toward serious analysis of ethnic music
revivals. Struggling for language to describe the transformation of
centuries-old European Ashkenazic musical traditions following their
transplantation, decline, and revival in Jewish American communities, Slobin
draws on a concept developed by folklorist/cultural studies specialist
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett who defines "heritage music" as
"... music that has been singled out for preservation, protection,
enshrinement, and revival" (pp. 12-13). Klezmer is one of many styles of
contemporary heritage music, Slobin argues, that has been shaped by a
combination of overlapping forces including allegiance to a real or imagined
national homeland, the desire to reconnect with one's roots, the attraction
of the exotic, the diasporic cycling and recycling of cultural forms and
ideas, and the power of transnational media networks. Slobin presents a
useful framework for navigating the complex crosscurrents of identity
politics, community building, aesthetic preferences, and market forces that
have swirled around the klezmer revival over the past three decades. An
additional volume edited by Slobin, American Klezmer: Its Roots and
Offshoots (University of California Press, 2002; $19.95), includes
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's must-read essay on heritage, revival, and tradition,
as well as accounts of the klezmer revival as seen through the eyes of
influential musicians such as Michael Alpert, Hankus Netsky, Walter Zev Feldman,
Henry Sapoznik, and Alicia Svigals. Slobin and his collaborators have provided
valuable direction for the further study of American heritage and folk music
revivals that today range from decades-old interest in klezmer and Celtic
styles to the more recent proliferation of Afro-Caribbean, Latin American,
and Asian folk music and dance ensembles in immigrant communities across the
United States. Urban ethnomusicologists and folk music specialists willing to
turn their attention to the wealth of revived and self-consciously
transformed local music cultures in their own backyards will find no dearth
of fascinating material to study. —Ray Allen Note 1 For a review of When We Were Good by Robert Cantwell, see
Nancy Groce, "Singing Folk," in ISAM Newsletter XXVI/1 (Fall
1996): 13. |
