Folk Music in the City: New
York’s Friends of Old Time Music
Conference
– 18 November 2006
CUNY Graduate Center, 365
Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, Manhattan
Proshansky Auditorium
10am-5pm, free to public
Friends of Old Time Music Tribute Concert
with Doc Watson and the New Lost City Ramblers
8pm, Town Hall
New York City’s Friends of Old-time Music was a loosely-knit organization
founded by urban folk musicians John Cohen and Ralph Rinzler, with support from
musicians Mike Seeger and Jean Ritchie and folk music promoter Izzy Young. From
early 1961 through 1965, the FOTM would sponsor thirteen concerts introducing
New York audiences to an array of southern hillbilly, blues, and spiritual
singers including Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Dock Boggs, the Stanley
Brothers, Maybelle Carter, Roscoe Holcomb, Gus Cannon, Hobart Smith, Furry
Lewis, Bill Monroe, the McGee Brothers, Bessie Jones and the Sea Island
Singers, Doc Watson, and Clarence Ashley. These artists would become heroes to
urban folkies who favored homegrown southern styles to the sanitized commercial
folk music that had reached a national audience in the late 1950s and early
1960s.
The Institute for Studies in American Music, in conjunction with City Lore, will host a conference exploring the history and cultural impact of this pioneering folk arts presenting organization. The FOTM provides a window for peering into the noncommercial dimensions of the post-War urban folk revival, which has received little attention by scholars or popular writers. The efforts of the FOTM organizers to locate, document, and present rural folk artists to city audiences at concerts and folk festivals in the early 1960s has had a profound influence on the larger folk revival, and has provided early models for the cultural conservation and festival projects that have become central to the work of public sector folklorists and ethnomusicologists over the past four decades.
Folk Music in the City is sponsored by the Institute for Studies in American Music and City Lore, and made possible by the generous support of the New York Council for the Humanities and the Baisley Powell Elebash Endowment.
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Friends
of Old Time Music Conference Schedule
Proshansky Auditorium at
CUNY Graduate Center
Conference
Panels
Panel 1 (10am) – In Search of the Authentic Folk
– The FOTM mission to introduce traditional folk music into the early
1960s Greenwich Village folk music scene.
Chair/overview – Ron
Cohen (historian and folk music revival specialist)
John Cohen - FOTM founder,
member of the New Lost City Ramblers
Izzy Young – FOTM founder, proprietor of the McDougal Street
Folklore Center
Kate Rinzler – Biographer
and wife of the late Ralph Rinzler (FOTM founder and director of the first
Smithsonian Folklife Festival)
Peter Siegel – Record
producer who recorded the FOTM concerts
Panel 2 (1pm)– Staging the Folk in the City – The
cultural politics of staging traditional folk music in workshop and concerts
settings at the FOTM concerts, the early 1960s Chicago and Newport Folk
Festivals, and the contemporary Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Chair/overview – Ray
Allen (folklorist)
Mike Seeger – Member of
the New Lost City Ramblers, long-time folk music performer, documenter, and
presenter.
Richard Kurin – Director
of the Smithsonian Office of Folklife Programs
Henrietta Yurchenco – Host
of early public radio folk music programs
Interview with Doc
Watson (3pm)
Panel 3
(3:30pm)– The Southern Folk
Meet the Northern Citybillies – The relationship of southern country
music and the urban folk revival; the interaction of southern folk artists and
northern folk enthusiasts at the FOTM concerts.
Chair/Overview – Bill
Malone (country music historian)
Jean Ritchie – FOTM
organizer and performer
Mary Wright Hurt – Granddaughter of Mississippi John Hurt (FOTM
performer)
8pm Concert at Town Hall with Doc Watson and the New Lost City
Ramblers
(for additional information on the evening concert, go to: http://www.worldmusicinstitute.org/WMICAL/MAIN.ASP)
and click on November concert listings.
For further information please contact us at:
isam@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Tel: 718-951-5655
Fax: 718-951-4858
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