The nighttime performances were sparsely attended, but the Sunday-afternoon shows were sold out—packed with college kids from across the river in Cambridge, where venues such as Club 47 were incubating a seemingly incongruous boom in folk music among young people of means. It was Wein’s first inkling of the folk movement and of a young generation of music fans more interested in Lead Belly than Lester Young.4
Wein had already decided to hold a folk afternoon during the Newport Jazz Festival of 1959 (he had held blues and gospel days in previous years) featuring Odetta, Pete Seeger and the Weavers. But it soon dawned on Wein that there was even more of a scene going on than he realized: “When I saw the young people filling the club Sunday afternoon, drinking ginger ales, a crowd I had never seen before, I realized that we had enough for a folk festival.”5
By the time Wein was clued in, folk music was in the midst of a revival that had started much earlier and had generated the kind of controversy that in one form or another has surrounded the festival throughout its history.
While the historian Benjamin Filene writes that the first “explicitly historical collection” of folk songs was A Collection of Old Ballads, published in 1723, folk music was most likely identified and distinguished from popular music first by nationalist movements in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the folklorist Neil Rosenberg writes.6 Between 1857 and 1858, Francis Child, a Harvard professor who collected ballads mainly through correspondence with sources in England, released the eight-volume collection English and Scottish Ballads. He topped himself by releasing, between 1882 and 1898, the ten-volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The dispositive implication of “The” in the title was no accident.
Child’s thoroughness was impressive, with more than three hundred ballads and more than thirteen thousand annotations documenting additions and evolutions, but he worked out of a conviction that no new folk songs had been created in centuries—since the invention of the printing press, really. “Like many of his predecessors,” Filene writes, “Child felt that although in premodern times the ballad had been ‘a common treasure’ passed on orally and enjoyed by all, it was now a long-dead art.”7
In the United States, the Library of Congress established the Archive of American Folk-Song in 1928, with Robert Winslow Gordon at the helm, the same year the performer and collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford opened the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. Gordon traveled the country in search of folk music, and when John Lomax succeeded him in 1933, Lomax, who had published books of folk songs in the early twentieth century, put in thousands of miles collecting and recording hundreds of singers and players performing songs that went back generations (later traveling with his son Alan, who continued the process on his own).
From the beginning, those who sought out folk music began to fall into two camps, identified by the historian Ronald D. Cohen. The first, the evolutionist mode, held that “folk songs belonged to an early stage of cultural development that required respect and preservation.” The idea was to treat the music like a collection of artworks that required not only painstaking preservation—the way a restorer brushes away dust and debris from a recently found artwork—but a diligent watchfulness against degeneration, akin to the way paintings are displayed in rooms with carefully monitored levels of light and humidity. Lunsford, Gordon and the Lomaxes undertook their work as evolutionists, working in the cause of holding regional music and culture safe against the forces of twentieth-century modernity. This was in keeping with a personal and political conservatism: “As folk music and crafts symbolized the grassroots democracy of preindustrial America,” wrote folk historian Robert Cantwell, “they also embodied the values of rootedness and authenticity characteristic of patriarchal aristocracy.”8
Others interested in folk music comprised what Cohen calls the functionalist wing, which believed that “folk songs might have not only an ancient lineage but a dynamic present; they could serve practical purposes, energizing the folk to struggle against racism and oppression.”9 This wing came to the fore as the 1930s dawned. Almost from the beginning, labor groups and unions such as the International Workers of the World had written folk-style songs and rewritten traditional material to suit their purposes. (They began with complex, modernistic compositions, on the theory that a new age called for new music, but they soon found that it didn’t make for good rallying cries.) During the Great Depression, leftist, Communist and Communist-influenced groups began to tap into the power of folk and traditional music to use as their anthems and sometimes to write their own. Logically so: If old folk songs could have a dynamic present and serve practical purposes, how much better would be a new song written specifically for the times? These lines of thought led by 1940 to the formation of the Almanac Singers, featuring Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell and later described in Time as “young men who roam around the country in a $150 Buick and fight the class war with ballads and guitars,” singing protest ballads old and new. The onset of World War II led to the dissolution of the Almanacs, but Seeger and Hays would resurface, along with Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, as the Weavers, a group that was itself an outgrowth of People’s Songs, a collective including Seeger and Woody Guthrie that issued albums of labor and leftist songs after the war.
Commercial record companies mined folk music nearly from the beginning, bringing “hillbilly” and “race” music to the masses using the same technology. Vernon Dalhart’s “The Wreck of the Old 97,” backed with “The Prisoner’s Song,” sold more than a million copies in 1924; Southern musicians began performing on the radio earlier than that. And the commercial potential of folk music only grew.
The Weavers hit it big beginning in 1950 with songs such as Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” and Woody Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” as well as “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Wimoweh,” “Midnight Special,” and more. The sound was often sweetened with horns and strings from producer Gordon Jenkins’ orchestra, but Lee Hays recalled later that “Jenkins never told us to change a note of anything we sang. He surrounded us with fiddles and French horns and trumpets and things, but when people sang ‘Goodnight Irene,’ they didn’t sing the fiddles, they sang the words.”10
Meanwhile, as the Weavers began to perform in some of the country’s top nightspots, they continued to play for the benefit of leftist and Communist causes, which, combined with their People’s Songs’ roots, quickly brought them into the purview of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1952, Harvey Matusow, a former Communist turned paid informant for the FBI, testified before Congress and a separate Ohio committee on un-American activities that the Weavers’ popularity was being used by the Communist Party to drive young people into the movement.11 After that, the bookings began to dry up, until “there was no work to be had,” Gilbert has said.12 The Weavers broke up in 1952.
Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good, an essential examination of the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, details the chill that fell over the music, and much of American culture in general, thanks to anticommunist hysterics. Sing Out!—the folk music magazine that sprang up as part of the People’s Songs’ movement—“urged its readers to carry the folk gospel to schools, summer camps and other small venues.”13 Cantwell describes “a new posture of permanent alert that read subversion into almost any form of deviance,” leading to “the utter starvation of political and cultural discourse.”14
In such an atmosphere, folk music didn’t stand a chance. America was remaking itself, Cantwell posits, with World War II as a wall against the past not to be looked beyond and with the marketplace and militarism at the center of the nation’s field of vision. This was not the blippy, fragmented marketplace that the Weavers had managed to conquer: modern communications, particularly television, had a homogenizing impact. Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, described the effect: “An American became an ‘average man.’ He dressed, acted, wanted and behaved in the image of what the advertiser and manufacturer and song plugger said was ‘normal.’”15
Cantwell adds, “Participation in the market … had a peculiar new imperative to it, as