I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
course, and places to play, but the commercial success of music derived from American traditions had dried up. Performers such as Josh White, Burl Ives, Tom Glazer and many others mentioned in Red Channels—a publication dedicated to exposing so-called Communists in the broadcasting and entertainment fields—became better known for defending themselves, sometimes in front of the Un-American Activities Committee, than for their recordings.17
But in the same year the Weavers appeared finished, Asch’s Folkways Records released the Anthology of American Folk Music, assembled by the collector Harry Smith from his vast store of 78-rpm records from the 1920s and 1930s. A collection of Ballads, Social Music, and Songs (as the three records were subtitled), the eighty-four tracks revived and recontextualized “what had been, to the people who originally recorded it, essentially the music of the poor, the isolated, and the uneducated … as a kind of avant-garde art.”18
The Anthology inspired a generation of musicians, collectors and fans to rediscover the classics and, in some cases, to fan out across the country, looking for the original performers and/or their musical heirs. Interest grew in the music—no matter who performed it—among urban denizens, particularly college students. Writing in Mademoiselle, Susan Montgomery later pondered, “Why American college students should want to express the ideas and emotions of the downtrodden and the heartbroken … is in itself an interesting question. But there is certainly good reason for students today to find the world brutal and threatening.”19
By the time the Weavers re-formed in 1955 and began to tour on a limited schedule, the Red Scare was largely over, and a renewed appreciation for folk music was back in swing. Cantwell called the Folkways Anthology the folk revival’s “enabling document, its musical constitution.”20
Folk and folk-derived music such as calypso (exemplified by Harry Belafonte’s hits “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell”) and to a lesser extent skiffle (such as Lonnie Donegan’s cover of Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line”) began to make a dent in the charts as an answer to rock ’n’ roll. And singer, song collector and historian Ellen Stekert later claimed that interest in traditional material surged in the 1950s because “in this cowardly and intimidated era, the city sought expression behind the words of other—perhaps more ‘natural’—folk.”21
The new popularity of folk music changed the equation, Ronald Cohen writes. Following on from the evolutionist-functionalist split of the early collectors, the possibility of doing serious business in folk music for the first time in many years divided enthusiasts and performers in three camps: the “unadulterated commercial performers”; “those who preferred only traditional performers,” including Lomax and other folklorists; and “the city revivalists, whose love for the music translated into their own performance style as they strove to duplicate or reconstruct the older sounds.”22
In 1958, the Kingston Trio, three fresh-faced folksingers who met in college and who got early musical training from a conductor stranded in their native Hawaii during World War II, blew the ceiling off the folk music revival by topping the charts with “Tom Dooley,” a murder ballad from North Carolina that they learned from a book. But as we can see, by then the stage had been set for them by decades of conscious effort and cultural forces. And so the unadulterated commercial performers, in Cohen’s words, had their day: they saw a new kind of music to be made and a new kind of record to be sold, while considerations of where the music came from and what purpose it served were placed varying degrees of distance down the list of important considerations.
Cantwell writes, “It was precisely this momentary obscurity that opened the immense resources of folksong to the young and made it, by virtue of their recovery of it in the postwar period, their own. When folksong reemerged into the light of popular culture in 1958, with its ideological and cultural connections largely suppressed, abandoned, forgotten, or lost, it welled up with all the vitality of a cultural symbol eager for rediscovery.”23
Given the history of folk music so far, a record such as the Kingston Trio’s chart-topping “Tom Dooley” posed questions. The ballad of the hanging of the murderer Tom Dula in Wilkes County, North Carolina, shortly after the Civil War, was recorded many times over the decades, beginning in 1928 and most prominently in 1934 by Frank Proffitt of Tennessee. His version was collected and recorded by the folklorist Frank Warner in 1952 and saw several more incarnations before the Trio recorded it.
A listen to the Proffitt and Kingston Trio versions side by side shows the effects and the causes of the late 1950s folk boom all at once: Proffitt’s rendition sounds like a musical version of a local news report on a murder. His voice is low, somber and matter-of-fact, whether he’s addressing the murderer or speaking in his voice. He’s backed by his own speedy banjo (Proffitt was also a maker of fretless banjos) and leaves plenty of room in his vocal interpretation for the mystery of man’s inhumanity to man and to woman. The Kingston Trio’s version, on the other hand, is slow, as in a clichéd take on a momentous event, but the lead and background vocals, with their whispery quality and stagey enunciation, give the impression that a favorable opinion of the Trio’s vocal qualities is as important a goal for the record as telling the story. And the finger-snapping groove and jaunty syncopation is pure city—a non-English speaker could easily guess that it’s a song of romantic contentment. Cantwell described the difference as that between “a kind of sober, almost a pious duty, like planting a tree” and “an articulation and phrasing perceptibly polite and bookish.”24
Were these differences worth the benefits to the genre of having a folk song at the top of the charts? Activist Todd Gitlin would later write that in the early 1950s, “folk was the living prayer of a defunct movement, the consolation and penumbra of its children, gingerly holding the place of a Left in American culture.”25 Susan Montgomery claimed later that the new fans of folk were “young people who are desperately hungry for a small, safe taste of an unslick, underground world.”26 Was the clean, collegiate background of the Trio—or for that matter the music-theatre backgrounds of folk song performers such as Theo Bikel and Harry Belafonte—an evolutionary step from the bona fides of Lunsford or Proffitt or even the Weavers? Or was the process more of an appropriation—or even a straightforward theft? As folk music became bigger and bigger business, the debate around these questions became more and more heated, helping start and bring purpose to magazines such as Gardyloo, the Little Sandy Review and Caravan as well as the already legendary Sing Out! By the early 1960s, mainstream magazines such as Seventeen and Mademoiselle were covering and analyzing the folk scene. And the Newport Folk Festival, with the Kingston Trio headlining, jumped into the middle of the argument.
There were precedents to Wein and Grossman’s Newport idea: along with Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the Pinewoods Camp, a Massachusetts-based outgrowth of the Country Dance and Song Society, had proven that people would gather in the summer to listen to a variety of folk performers (many of whom went on to play at Newport), albeit in an instructional, residency-based setting; and the National Folk Festival, begun in 1934, brought folk performers together for multiday series of concerts in different cities each year. Several folk festivals had sprung up on college campuses, including at the University of California at Berkeley, whose festival featured many performers in common with Newport and began one year before, in 1958. But the specific idea for Newport was new. Robert Shelton, writing in the New York Times after the first festival, said that “there have been regional events for many years, but the program that sailed into Newport was a full-masted craft with a cargo from all over the country.”27 John Cohen, of the New Lost City Ramblers, remembers, “It was a strange strategy—Newport grabbed the center and said ‘We are important; we will deem what’s to be considered important.’”28
Wein knew from his experience with Odetta at Storyville that folk music could be good business. He also knew that the music’s activist tradition suited the integrated life that Wein had and the integrated world he wanted to see. What he didn’t know about folk music was pretty much everything else. Joe Boyd, who worked for Wein during the 1960s and was at the center of some of the most controversial moments in the folk festival’s history, says that Wein “knows what he likes,