I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
the reporting and writing of the original stories, and G. Wayne Miller, Mark Patinkin, Mike Stanton and especially Bill Reynolds in the early stages of this project.
I’d also like to thank all who shared their stories of Newport and the festival over the decades. I appreciate the time and attention paid by dozens of people, whom you’ll find in these pages, but special mention has to be made of George Wein, who was particularly generous with his time, and Murray Lerner, who provided valuable contact information for other sources. Similarly, Carolyn McClair smoothed the way for many interviews.
Jeff Place, Cecilia Peterson, Stephanie Smith and the staff at the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian Institution provided a wealth of photos, as well as access to Rinzler’s papers regarding Newport, including board minutes, financial records and personal correspondence. Likewise, Todd Harvey, Jennifer Cutting and the staff at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress provided access to tapes from the early Newport Folk Festivals, as well as Alan Lomax’s papers, which included illuminating correspondence as well.
The documents in those archives, as well as other resources in the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress (particularly the American Folklife Center), were invaluable in piecing together the events of the history of the Newport Folk Festival, particularly in its early days. So too were the memories of the people who created that history.
Inevitably, however, these sources sometimes clashed. Every effort has been made to reconcile people’s years- and decades-old memories with accounts from primary documents and recordings. In probably one of life’s more predictable ironies, some of the most confidently expressed memories were among those proven incorrect.
At other junctures in the history of the Newport Folk Festival, there’s no clear-cut answer as to what actually happened, and in that case the differences of opinion and of recollection stand as testimony to the size of the event and the many angles it could be viewed from.
This appears most obviously in the structure and form of chapter 7: the recently available tapes in the Jackson/Christian Collection at the American Folklife Center settle pretty much all questions as to what happened on the stage. That’s not, however, the full answer to the question “What actually happened at Bob Dylan’s electric performance on July 25, 1965?” That answer lies in the minds and memories of the people who were there and in their thoughts, analyses, arguments and actions thereafter. In this context, it’s not a matter of weeding through the many responses in order to find the answer; the fact that the community to and in which the performance was delivered could generate such responses is in fact the answer itself.
More people’s efforts need to be mentioned and appreciated. Carole Sargent and Marcia Chatelain at Georgetown University were instrumental in putting me in touch with Wesleyan University, and thanks of course to the past and present staff of the Wesleyan University Press, including Suzanna Tamminen, Marla Zubel, Dan Cavicchi and Parker Smathers. Thanks also to John Spangler, who helped with interview transcription, and Aaron Winslow for the index.
Large portions of this book were written while tagging along on my wife’s residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Program and the Bogliasco Foundation. While I wasn’t the official resident, the hospitality, time and (especially) respect that both these institutions afforded me were instrumental in the development of this work.
Finally, special acknowledgment must go to my wife, Christine Evans, who not only was endlessly morally and emotionally supportive through the entire process but was a sharp and perceptive reader and editor throughout.
I GOT A SONG
1
I HAVE a song. Here it is.
PETE SEEGER
PEOPLE THINK THIS STUFF JUST HAPPENS
It’s a summer afternoon in Newport, Rhode Island, a small city on Aquidneck Island where some of the world’s richest people once had their summer “cottages,” and Pete Seeger takes the stage in Freebody Park, a quadrangle with baseball diamonds at opposite corners in the middle of the city.
While thirty-three-year-old George Wein, the producer of the show, busies himself with a million details backstage, the master of ceremonies, Studs Terkel, introduces Seeger by referring to his iconic status: “Whenever you see a young banjo player anywhere in the country with a banjo waist-high, head back, Adam’s apple bobbing, you can say ‘Like Kilroy, Pete Seeger has been there.’ Here, then, is America’s tuning fork—Pete Seeger.”1
Despite the introduction, Seeger begins with a twelve-string guitar around his neck. Ever the educator as well as the entertainer, Seeger explains to the audience that the words to his first song, “The Bells of Rhymney,” were written “by a man in Wales, a man who was raised as a coal miner” who adapted a nursery rhyme to depict Wales’s mining towns and include a critique of the barons of the mines. Seeger adapted the song himself, adding, “Throw the vandals in court, say the bells of Newport.” He begins slowly, almost arrhythmically, but then picks up the pace, ending in a speedball of energetic righteousness.
From there he hoists his trademark banjo and goes into the gentle “Grains of Sand,” interrupting it halfway through to inform the audience that he used to sing the song to put his daughter to sleep—“until she realized my purpose in singing it” and asked for something “more exciting.” Instead, he begins his version of the Bantu story/song “Abiyoyo” about a giant who was neutralized by a father-son team using the very musical and magical skills that had gotten them cast out of their village. He encourages the audience to sing along. The conjoined voices float over the field and sweep on the wind over the roofs of the privileged and Newport’s oft-forgotten working class alike.
The show was vintage Pete Seeger; the year was 1959, and on that July weekend the Newport Folk Festival began.
On another summer afternoon in Newport, the sun begins to slant its light into the eyes of anyone to the left of the stage where Pete Seeger is playing again. Once again, it’s vintage Seeger as he plunks through classics such as “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Midnight Special,” and “This Little Light of Mine.” He explains that “This Land Is Your Land” is a song that was “never sold in any music store, never played on the radio. But the kids liked it.” And again, he gets the audience to sing: he says a couple of hours before taking the stage, “If the human race is here in a hundred years, [they] will find how important a word, in any language, is ‘participation’—in all walks of life.” In fact, he seems to gain energy from the voices around him.2
He could use the extra energy. It’s 2009; Pete Seeger is ninety years old. Freebody Park is quiet; Seeger is performing at Fort Adams, a Revolutionary War–era fort overlooking Newport’s harbor. More than nine thousand people are listening to Seeger in the field in front of the stage, with more taking in the concert from various boats bobbing in the water (as well as some too big to bob).
This time, Seeger isn’t by himself. With him on the stage is his grandson, Tao Rodriguez Seeger, thirty-eight, who performed earlier in the day with his own band. He’s not the only heir: also on stage with Seeger is Billy Bragg, the British singer and activist who has been raising a ruckus for thirty years but treats this appearance with the humility of a student. (Bragg had already given a performance in the afternoon, during which he called mocking attention to “the poor people who couldn’t afford tickets so they had to come free in their yachts.”) There too is Tom Morello, who performed in his solo acoustic, politically charged persona, the Night-watchman, and earlier in the day called Seeger “the living embodiment of justice and everything that is good about America.” (As guitar player with Rage Against the Machine, Morello started his musical life with the kind of electronic volume that, legend has it, sent Seeger looking for an axe to literally cut