I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
talent that could still be found living in North America’s backwaters. George Wein wrote in his memoirs, “If John Hurt could live in obscurity for 35 years, how many other hidden treasures were scattered across American soil? His presence at the Folk Festival was a confirmation of every impulse that ran through the folk collector’s psyche.”1 The discovery, preservation and promotion of those treasures comprised an important part of the mission of the Newport Folk Foundation.
In January 1964, the foundation made its first cash grants to institutions—$250 each to schools in Brasstown and Pine Mountain, North Carolina, and Hindman, Kentucky; the folk publications Little Sandy Review and Broadside (both of which had been and would continue to be critical of the Newport Folk Festival in their pages); and the Cooperative Recreation Service of Delaware, Ohio, to print five thousand books of folk songs for members of the Peace Corps. Five hundred dollars each were granted to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Willmette, Illinois; the Council of Southern Mountains in Berea, Kentucky, and Boston’s WGBH. Two hundred dollars went to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They also gave performers Dorsey Dixon and Hurt a tape recorder and a guitar, respectively.
In the program for the 1964 festival, folklorist and historian Ralph Rinzler wrote that grants were “an obvious point of departure,” but he added, “unlike some Socialist countries, where the government assumes responsibility for the collection, stimulation and preservation of folk creation and culture, we live in a situation where the product of folk culture nets millions of dollars annually in the entertainment industry but neither the industry nor the government has sought to conserve its natural resources in this area.”
Toward that end, the foundation gave Guy Carawan two $500 grants for the production of a folk music festival on John’s Island, South Carolina, home of Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, who had performed at Newport in 1963, and a place many of whose natives ended up at Newport in the next few years.
And on the recommendation of board members Alan Lomax and Mike Seeger (half brother of Pete Seeger), the foundation hired Rinzler to scour the country looking for little-known local talent and to sign them up to play at Newport, as well as to find areas of the country where a Newportsupported festival would bring traditional cultures to light. In their memo to the board, Lomax and Seeger said that “if Newport interests itself professionally in the destiny of American folk artists themselves, through trained personnel such as this scout, the Foundation can greatly benefit the whole field.”
A former member of bluegrass revivalists the Greenbriar Boys and a fixture on the New York folk scene when Bob Dylan was still getting his feet wet there, Rinzler had already traveled many miles in pursuit of folk music by the time he signed on with the Newport Folk Foundation. In 1961, while on the road with the Greenbriar Boys in North Carolina, he found Clarence Ashley, a performer whose music was on the Folkways Anthology but had long been assumed dead; on a subsequent trip to record Ashley, Rinzler was introduced to the guitarist and singer Doc Watson. He became Watson’s manager (others he managed included Bill Monroe) and encouraged him to pursue traditional music rather than rockabilly. Along with John Cohen and Izzy Young, Rinzler founded the Friends of Old-Time Music, presenting and producing concerts with veterans such as Ashley, Watson and Monroe, thus spreading the gospel of American music through its great purveyors as well as playing it himself.
As a scout for the Newport Folk Festival, Rinzler’s main purview, according to Lomax and Seeger, would include Canada’s maritime provinces, as well as French Quebec, “the foreign minority neighborhoods of Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh,” Mexico’s southwest, rural Alabama and the Cajun areas of Louisiana. On many of these trips, Rinzler, who died in 1994, went with Mike Seeger, who died in 2009; on others, he went with Bob Jones.
Jones had spent the 1963 festival working as a volunteer with Joyce Wein. But starting after that festival, he and Rinzler traveled through the South and in Texas, in later years heading up to Canada. He began working for the festival full-time in 1965—“I didn’t have anything else to do”2—and was named producer of the festival in 1985, a title he holds to this day.
This was part of the point of becoming a nonprofit: the proceeds of the festival, after expenses, were to be spent on finding talent that met Seeger’s definition of “old-timers” and indigenous musicians. That meant beating the bush for interesting, traditional, yet overlooked players and singers, so that the Newport Folk Festival would truly represent America’s musical traditions and materially support them where they were based.
In those days, that required a lot of driving and searching, without many clues to guide them. “Alan would say, ‘I know there are some black Cajun players,’” Jones says, “and Ralph and I would say, ‘OK; we’ll find them.’” And off they went.
Sometimes they didn’t even have that much to go on: “We’d go to the last remembered town” of a musician they had their eye on, Jones says, and start asking questions. When Jones and Rinzler found someone who piqued their interest, they’d let them know they were interested in having them come up to Newport. “And for those who could—well, who could read, number one—we had stories and pictures of the festival, to show what we do. And we told them that everything would be paid for.” They’d then make a quick recording of the musician or group to play for the festival board, who would have ultimate say over their choices.
Jones says he and Rinzler didn’t have any sort of quota; they simply signed up whomever they liked. Often, the person they were scouting wasn’t necessarily the person they signed.
The duo had local contacts and scouts: Mack McCormack, in Texas, would hip them to blues players; Paul Tate, president of the Louisiana Folk Foundation, was good for lots of names and locations, as well as staying in contact with musicians when the board approved one of Rinzler and Jones’s choices. “You know the white Southerner in the white linen suit?” Jones says of Tate. “This guy was the picture-perfect [representation] of that. He was right out of a movie script. But he was an incredible fan of the music—black, white, everything.” Jones would call Tate and send him bus tickets for performers they wanted; Tate would find the musicians, give them the tickets and get them on the bus.
But Rinzler, Jones and Mike Seeger were the ones who put in the miles. In the pre–civil rights South, this could carry some dangers. “We ran into a little bit of ill will in Florida,” Jones remembers, “as far as being white guys going into the black communities in 1963 and 1964. We were a little bit crazy.”
It wasn’t just Florida. “Louisiana was not that difficult. Texas was the worst, and Alabama was fairly reasonable, in that they’d stop us and ask what we were doing, and we had the pictures of the festival. But then Elliot Hoffman, the lawyer for Festival Productions, got nervous…. From then on we had to call every night.”
The stories, not surprisingly, are endless.
Alan Lomax once sent the pair to Dothan, Alabama, the self-styled Peanut Capital of the World. “We heard of this guy who sang a song about Kennedy’s death,” Jones remembers, “and someone recorded it for a TV news thing.” But while they were there, they heard someone playing, with children singing along. They walked in the direction of the sound, “and there was a black guy playing the pan pipes!” This wasn’t much more common in mid-’60s Alabama than it is now, but Joe Patterson was an uncommon player. Jones remembers that Patterson had a steel plate that he would beat to keep the rhythm, and he would hoot when the song got to a note that he didn’t have on the pipes.
Rinzler and Jones signed him up for the festival, but in the process they ran into the Patterson family dynamic: “I remember the family was upset because we didn’t take them. I wouldn’t say [Patterson] was retarded, but he might have been a little slow. The family pushed him out in the back, and he was living in this little shack. He was part of the family, but not really.” Instead, Patterson came to the festival accompanied by guitarist Willie Doss, who worked in the mill there.
Jones remembers himself and Rinzler driving in the Florida Panhandle heading into Louisiana. It was about 6 p.m. and pouring rain, and they saw someone hitchhiking while carrying a caseless guitar. They stopped and picked him up. He was headed to a small town to play in