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“Blowin’ in the Wind”:Politics and Authenticity
A well-known image from the closing concert of the 1963 Newport Folk Festival sums up the folk revival’s sense of its political mission. The concert culminated with Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, the SNCC Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul & Mary joining together to sing ”We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A widely circulated photograph of the performers, arms linked, testifies to the movement’s ideal of interracial solidarity. Like so many images from the sixties, the image tells only part of the story.
Although “Blowin’ in the Wind” inspired real political activity, its lyrics carried an undertone of romantic passivity that contrasted with the increasingly aggressive approach of the black movement. “How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man? / How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?” For black singers like Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder, who covered the song after Peter, Paul & Mary made it a hit, the last line expresses the yearning for rest after a long and bitter struggle. When King called out “How long?,” his black supporters responded “Not long.” Even so-called moderates demanded “Freedom Now!” The black SNCC members who would soon ask whites to leave the organization were rapidly losing patience with what they saw as a white willingness to answer Dylan’s question with sorrowful resignation to the universality of injustice. For black participants in the Southern movement, moving forward was a matter of life or death. And while the white students who went to Mississippi put themselves at real risk—witness the murders of civil rights workers Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner—the difference in urgency showed up daily in the sound of the folk revival.
Especially in the years before Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village and announced himself as the second coming of Woody Guthrie, folk music often turned away from the present to gaze back on a half-imagined rural past. John Jacob Niles, a formally trained singer who specialized in reviving traditional music, observed at Newport in 1960 that “My audiences thank all folk singers for comfort, for assurance, for the nostalgia that seems to connect them with times past.” For many listeners in those early days, Joan Baez exemplified folk. When she made her national debut at Newport in 1959 singing “We Are Crossing Jordan’s River,” it’s doubtful whether anyone in the audience was particularly attuned to the masked meanings that would have been obvious at movement rallies in Mississippi or South Carolina. There’s something mournful, haunting, in the sound of Baez’s early albums, which consist almost entirely of traditional ballads lamenting lost love. Her voice filigrees the edges of emotions, evoking a past dimly seen through the mists rising up over the Scottish hills and English moors. Baez’s music almost requires silence, freeing listeners for inward-looking reveries that have little in common with either the explosive responsiveness or the expectant silence of a gospel congregation. As folk revival historian Robert Cantwell observes, despite Baez’s personal ideals, her ethereal voice and repertoire of what the Newport festival program called “utterly pure, nearly sacrosanct folk songs” was widely received as a “residue of authentic Anglo-American identity.”
It wasn’t something Baez, who grew up in a pacifist Quaker family and passionately supported the freedom movement, sought. Along with Ochs, she was the most consistently political of the folk revival singers. After Baez met Dylan, her concerts featured movement standards “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome” alongside Dylan’s most piercing political songs “With God on Our Side” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Inspired by the idealism of the Port Huron Statement and the moral heroism of the Southern movement, she encouraged the folk revival to assume a more aggressive political stance. But Baez could never really overcome the barriers her musical form and voice set up between her and the black listeners whose cause she espoused.
It wasn’t just a problem of aesthetics. Even as it highlights the folk revival’s commitment to racial justice, Baez’s autobiography reflects its somewhat romantic sense of the movement. Her description of a concert she presented at all-black Miles College just outside Birmingham at the height of the SCLC campaign there points to the revival’s strengths and its problems. Baez remembered her surprise when whites, who had obviously never been on the Miles campus before, began arriving for her performance. Imagining the spiritual connection between her music and the demonstrators who were being jailed and beaten just a few miles away, Baez writes: “Images of the kids gave me courage, and the concert was beautiful. It ended with ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and the audience rose and held hands, swaying back and forth while they sang. The singing was soft and tentative and many people were crying.”
That was what the folk revival did best. Star performers like Baez and Dylan could bring people who would otherwise have been content with escapist popular entertainment into at least momentary contact with the larger political world. For a few years in the mid-sixties all but the least aware Top 40 fans knew a few movement standards. Despite being banned by numerous Top 40 radio stations, Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” reached number one on the pop charts with a lyric that demanded listeners concerned with the “hate there is in Red China” wake up and “take a look around at Selma, Alabama.” No doubt, many of those listeners shed a few tears over violence and injustice and left it at that. But a handful marched out and put their lives on the line.
Within a few years of the Freedom Summer, as the folk revival faded, things had changed in ways very few of the students who’d gathered at Port Huron could have imagined. A Southern president elected on a peace platform solemnly intoned “we shall overcome” while SNCC expelled its white members. A new wave of English bands inspired by R & B and the electric blues forged new connections between black and white music. For the students of Port Huron, the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud,” the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and the Beatles’ “Help” were more authentic than anything the musicologists might recover from old black men toiling in the Delta sun.
12
Music and the Truth:The Birth of Southern Soul
The South was at least half myth to the Bob Dylan who carefully placed a copy of Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues in the background on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. But it was something very real to the homegrown musicians who made Southern soul into something harder, grittier than the sweet sounds coming out of Detroit and Chicago. No doubt it had something to do with the fact that most Southern whites didn’t even pretend to accept integration, a word which the Klan used to conjure up visions of bestial black men defiling the flower of Southern womanhood. George Wallace said it about as clearly as it could be said: “Segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”
Almost forty years have passed since Wallace’s ringing declaration made him the symbol of Southern white supremacy and lifted him to national prominence in a series of telling presidential campaigns. Few Americans recall that Wallace won 90 percent of the white vote on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1964, or that he consistently polled more than 20 percent of national support during most of the 1968 presidential campaign. The amnesia concerning everyday life under Jim Crow, encouraged by white indifference to racial problems and a growing tendency among some blacks to see segregation as a golden age of self-sufficiency, is even more disturbing. In his biography of black activist Robert Williams, Radio Free Dixie, historian Tim Tyson rips away the veil of nostalgia and forgetfulness cloaking the realities of daily life under segregation:
The power of white skin in the Jim Crow South was both stark and subtle. White supremacy permeated daily life so deeply that most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water. Racial etiquette was at once bizarre, arbitrary and nearly inviolable. A white man who would never shake hands with a black man would refuse to permit anyone but a black man to shave his face, cut his hair, or give him a shampoo. A white man might share his bed with a black woman but never his table. Black breasts could suckle white babies, black hands would pat out biscuit dough for white mouths, but