I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
into the audience to see the teenager’s first major public performance, and Dave Van Ronk would remember immediately recognizing her performance as “the start of something big for all of us.”41 For Gibson’s part, he later eschewed any credit for having helped bring Baez to the limelight: “It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon. I may have introduced her to her first large audience, but do you think that girl was going to stay unknown in Cambridge?”42
Fifty years later, Baez told the Associated Press, “Looking back, I barely know that child who stepped onto that stage. That child … was 18 years old and had a high, high soprano and was as neurotic as anybody could possibly be—and was high, high maintenance…. I didn’t faint; I sang, and that was the beginning of a very long career.”43
In her autobiography, Baez writes of singing the song with Gibson:
He played the twelve-string, and with eighteen strings and two voices we sounded pretty impressive. I had a solo part next, and my voice came out just fine…. An exorbitant amount of fuss was made over me when we descended from the stage. Into one tent and out the other. Newspapers, student press, foreign correspondents, and, of course, Time magazine. I gave Time a long-winded explanation of the pronunciation of my name which came out wrong, was printed wrong in Time magazine, and has been pronounced wrong ever since.44
The next day, Baez sang with Gibson at a party in Newport, pocketing $120 for the performance. She wrote that that “impressed me more than anything else that year at Newport, aside from realizing in the back of my mind and the center of my heart that in the book of my destiny the first page had been turned, and that this book could no longer be exchanged for any other.”45
That Sunday evening, the very conflict between popularity and local tradition discussed at the morning panel played out under rainy skies in Freebody Park.
The Kingston Trio was supposed to close the show, befitting their run on the pop charts: “Tom Dooley” reached number one the previous year, and they hit the Top 20 three times that year with “MTA,” “A Worried Man,” and “The Tijuana Jail.” They also put out three chart-topping albums in 1959 and 1960.
While their set included the hard-driving “Saro Jane” and Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Ain’t It Hard,” the jingoistic lyrics and fresh-scrubbed harmonies of “Remember the Alamo,” the leering drunken joke of “Scotch and Soda,” and the pseudotragedy of “South Coast” were jarring in contrast with, say, the possessed howling of John Jacob Niles on “The Hangman, Or the Maid Freed from the Gallows,” the acoustic protometal of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, or Jean Ritchie’s gorgeous, reedy “Pretty Saro.” John Patterson wrote that the Kingston Trio’s songs were “not a record of traditions, but what a mass audience wishes to accept as traditions.”46
Still, the crowd loved every minute. And as one listens to the live recording fade out, the cheers audibly turn to dismay as the crowd realizes that it’s over. But real conflict would soon unfold: in his memoirs, Wein recalls that throughout the day members of the audience had been asking Louis Lorillard to put the Kingston Trio on in the penultimate slot, which had been reserved for bluegrass banjo king Earl Scruggs. The show was running late, and many young people and parents of young children needed to get home. Eventually, Lorillard talked Wein into flipping the two acts’ time slots. It was a mistake.
When the Kingston Trio finished, the audience wasn’t ready to let them go. Brand tried to quiet the crowd so as to let Scruggs come on stage to perform, but to no avail. Scruggs “just stood backstage, patiently, patiently, watching what was going on,” Cohen remembers. Dave Guard, of the Kingston Trio, also came out to beseech the crowd to pay Scruggs the respect due him. It eventually became clear that the only way to convince the crowd to give Scruggs a chance was to essentially promise that he would be only a minor annoyance: “They kind of had to plead with the audience, ‘Let Earl Scruggs go on; then you can have the Kingston Trio again,’” Cohen says. “It was bizarre; it was painful.”47
It worked for a while. But Scruggs played only a brief set before the Kingston Trio returned and finished the show. It’s no surprise that the popularizers had won a popularity contest, but they had done so in the worst way possible.
“I lost a lot of friends in the folk world because of that slipup,” Wein writes,48 adding later that it took years to earn back a sense of trust that he was more than a huckster. Scruggs was one of the kings of regional American folk music, and he’d been treated like a distraction from the real deal.
Bob Shane, the last surviving original member of the Kingston Trio, doesn’t recall the evening happening like that. “If I did [hear any commotion regarding Scruggs],” he says, “I didn’t pay any attention to it,” though he allows that the group played about 280 shows a year at that time, and that memories tend to run together after a while. (The Trio had even played at the previous week’s Newport Jazz Festival: “We were used in various situations because of the fact that we were honest to God a perfect anything-you-wanted live act,” Shane says.)
Shane argues that the Kingston Trio’s pop-tinged success helped the larger folk revival that eventually led to the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and more, as well as making possible a festival that would allow “genuine” performers such as Scruggs the chance to play in front of large audiences. “Everyone we met in the business was very happy that we had our success,” he says, “because it made them have success,”49 and he recalls Joan Baez and sister Mimi Fariña coming to see them at Storyville and asking for advice on breaking into the business.
But on this night, it simply looked like the real folk music got snubbed. One critic who loved Scruggs but hated the performances by the Trio, Odetta, Gibson and others wrote, “On the whole, Newport was a great disappointment to me. ‘Folk’ is such a debased and misused word, given far too wide an interpretation by some of its worst perpetrators.”50
The triumph of the commercial performers in Newport as well as the commercial world left critics feeling conflicted. In Gardyloo, Mark Morris wrote, “What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen [the Kingston Trio] have with a folk festival eludes me, except that it is mainly folk songs they choose to vulgarize.” He grudgingly admitted, however, that if the crowds such groups brought in would enable the festival to present roots performers, “I shall grit my teeth and welcome them.” In the end, he said, “It’s undeniably thrilling to see everyone gathered and jumbled up like a deck of playing cards and thrown together in a string of concerts, come rain or come shine. I’m for it.”
By the organizers’ lights, the festival was a success. Grossman told Shelton, “The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of Folk music.” Shelton wrote that Louis Lorillard told the Providence Journal that the inaugural festival was “great,” and that “number two is coming up.”
“Number two” was held in Freebody Park, June 24–26, 1960, and featured a more diverse lineup in terms of pedigree as well as geography: seven nations were represented, including the clarinets of the Oranim Zabar Israeli Troupe and the flamenco of the Spanish Romany guitarist Sabicas.
Earlier in the year, Seeger, his wife Toshi, his half-sister Peggy and her husband, Ewan MacColl, wrote to Wein about the festival. In the documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, Seeger says that “the first folk festival was mainly well-known performers. So we sat down and wrote a long letter to George and said ‘George, do you realize you could have … a real folk festival next summer? Because you could have old-timers from the country contrasted with the young-timers from the colleges.’”
That’s just what happened. “I always admired Pete Seeger,” Wein recalls, remembering their early encounters at a Seeger concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall and a Seeger booking at Storyville. “I always respected his idealism and his feeling about people, and so when I got letters from them I paid attention.”51
Along with the Brothers Four, a quartet of actual fraternity brothers who had reached number two on the pop charts earlier in the year with “Greenfields,”