The folk festival would return to Newport the next year, but there would be changes on the producers’ side as well—Grossman was out. He had already become one of the busiest and hardest-working managers in the music business, and the company he’d formed with Wein was dissolved (“a huge financial mistake on my part,” Wein writes, “and Grossman never failed to remind me that I had ended the association, not he”64).
So Wein needed a new native guide—someone whose name would open doors in the folk world and whose life and work would keep them open. That’s where Pete Seeger came in.
Seeger was already the dean of American folk music by this point. Born in New York and the product of prep schools and a stint at Harvard, he changed tracks dramatically after first hearing folk music while traveling with his father, musicologist Charles Seeger, at Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. After dropping out of Harvard in 1938, he’d worked with Alan Lomax and ridden the rails with Woody Guthrie himself. He’d performed with Paul Robeson in a 1949 concert that ended in a hail of rocks thrown by anticommunists claiming to be defending American freedom. (The concert was the second of two planned shows; the first was canceled thanks to a similar outbreak of freedom-loving violence.)
He’d toured the country with Guthrie and the Almanac Singers, singing labor songs from coast to coast, and cofounded the Weavers, whose political message may have been sweetened by the state-of-the-art (for 1950) arrangements but was never muted. Even after their hit with “Goodnight Irene,” Seeger had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to say whether he had ever been a Communist. (The sentence and conviction were overturned in 1962.)
The Weavers’ reunion concerts at Carnegie Hall were sold-out affairs, but Seeger later left the group—over their decision, he said, to record a jingle for a cigarette commercial. And while his conviction was overturned in 1962, he “mysteriously” didn’t appear on TV or radio for seventeen years, as he continued to be tailed by the FBI. Unaccountably for someone who was considered a dangerous subversive, he was allowed to continue performing for children and teaching the banjo. Many of the figures of the folk revival credited him with inspiring them and creating their audience from the children he had taught and performed for. Not for nothing was he called “the Johnny Appleseed of folk music.”
In short, he’d walked the walk. He’d earned his credibility. Wein had listened to Seeger back in 1960, when he wrote about having a more diverse, authentic folk festival, and he was the man Wein turned to when he needed another key to presenting—and helping to create—the folk world.
3
It was a very nice dream,I think. All in all it worked quite well.
JOYCE WEIN
UTOPIA
In the fall of 1962, the Weins drove to Beacon, New York, where Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi were building their log-cabin house. There, George Wein asked Pete for his help in reviving the Newport Folk Festival. Seeger agreed, but he had ideas of his own.
Most importantly, the folk festival, unlike its commercial brother, the jazz festival, would be run as a nonprofit entity. That wouldn’t free the festival from the responsibility of taking in at least as much money as it paid out, but it meant that everyone’s compensation would be set by the board of a Newport Folk Foundation, unlike in a for-profit business, where an owner or a group of shareholders gets whatever is left after expenses. In the nonprofit model, whatever is left after expenses and salaries goes to the furtherance of the organization’s mission.
That mission was laid out in a manifesto billed as the result of discussion among Seeger, Wein and Theo Bikel. It foresaw a seven-member board that would “be representative of every branch of the folk world.” They also proposed using the net income of the festival “to underwrite research of ethnic material … to the benefit of the entire field of folk music.”1
The proposal envisioned three nighttime concerts with bills led by star performers but also giving a chance to lesser-known acts, along with a slew of themed daytime workshops that would offer a chance for “fans of one particular performer or idiom to really soak up all they want, and for the performer to really give more than a superficial glance at what they can do.”
It also said that performers’ fees would be set—no individual negotiating. Seeger said the fee should be union scale—$50 a day, no matter how many concerts or workshops a performer did in that time. The idea originally came from Toshi Seeger, inspired by Pete Seeger’s having donated his Newport fee in order to bring Quebecois fiddler Jean Carignan to perform.
Then as now, performers and managers were wary of any promoter who asked an artist to take much less than their normal fee for the good of the organization putting on the show and who swore that no one would pocket the money the performer was leaving on the table. Businessman George Wein would likely have a hard time asking someone used to getting hundreds or thousands of dollars a night to play for $50 to help keep alive the American folk tradition. But if Pete Seeger asked, that was different.
“There was only one Pete Seeger,” Wein remembered in 2009. “You need to have somebody whose integrity could not be challenged. And no one ever challenged Pete’s integrity. He had the respect, and he still does have it.”2
Joyce Wein told historian Carol Brauner in 1982, “Pete gives the whole folk field a conscience and an attitude and a dignity, and all the youngsters follow his lead. There are things they wouldn’t think of doing, because of Pete. And there are things they naturally do, because of Pete.”3
Members of the first board of directors of the Newport Folk Foundation would have curatorial responsibilities in a given musical field. There was Seeger; Bikel; Bill Clifton of the bluegrass kings, the Dixie Mountain Boys; gospel singer Clarence Cooper of the Tarriers; Erik Darling of the Rooftop Singers, who had succeeded Seeger in the Weavers; Jean Ritchie, an expert in Appalachian music; and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who represented the young performers of the urban coffeehouse scene. Wein was designated nonvoting chairman.4
This began a phase in the festival’s history that Wein described as “Utopia.” It was the high point of the melding of traditional music, popular folk artists and the conscience that ran through both, and Wein called it probably his proudest achievement in a lifetime of producing musical events. Each year, traditional performers opened young concertgoers’ ears to enduring musical traditions, while chart-topping singer-songwriters purported to give voice to contemporary concerns such as the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation.
“From ’63 to ’69 was seven years of the most beautiful relationship of artists with each other that I have ever seen,” Wein remembers.5 Yarrow says of the structure, “Something happens when you make it a nonprofit. Nobody’s getting paid anything really. The spirit is that you’re doing it for a cause—in this case, something that was near and dear to our hearts, which was what folk music embodied…. In its intent and in its performance, it was accessible; it was inclusive, and it was joyous.”6
In How Can I Keep From Singing, his biography of Seeger, David King Dunaway describes the Newport festivals of the early and mid-’60s as the realization of Seeger’s dream to make folk music America’s favorite music. “People parked ungrumblingly in vast lots and carried in instruments and picnic coolers. Campgrounds filled with singing teenagers and sleeping bags. When a downpour threatened an outdoor concert, performers and audience only laughed and sang rain songs. This was more than a concert; it was a gathering, Woodstock before drugs and electric guitars.”7
Yarrow agrees, saying that despite the obvious aesthetic differences, “the consciousness of Newport fed the impulse of Woodstock…. There were people who said, ‘We want morality; we want legitimacy; we want an ethical country; we want fairness. But also, we