I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
for roots-oriented, singer-songwriter-based folk music, as well as young singer-songwriters Iron and Wine and Ben Kweller and members of some of the hippest rock groups of the day: Fleet Foxes, the Decemberists, Low Anthem.
And even performers who are less than a third Seeger’s age, who played to cheering throngs of their own fans earlier and had to be shown the chords to some of Seeger’s songs, have spent the afternoon walking around in an anticipatory giddiness. Once on stage, they spend much of their time looking at each other in amazement that this is really happening. The next day, the scene will be repeated, with Low Anthem, Fleet Foxes and Elvis Perkins in Dearland returning to the stage—they all either got to Newport a day early or stayed a day late to participate—and Joan Baez, Levon Helm and his group, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band among the new arrivals.
In the audience, Henry Hotkowski of Connecticut is seeing Pete Seeger for the first time. He listens raptly, stopping to explain that he learned to play the banjo from one of Seeger’s books, all originally published long before Hotkowski was born. He’s twenty-one.
Radiating out from the two Seeger performances lies the history of the Newport Folk Festival, which continues to play out, grow and develop. Today, many performers at Newport are unaware that they’re not standing on the same stage or looking out over the same field that Seeger did in 1959 or that Bob Dylan did when he enraged Seeger by picking up an electric guitar in public for the first time. Throughout its tenure, the festival has added phases and levels with every major change in its organization.
Newport started off with the goal of presenting a form of music that was topping the charts in an era when rock ’n’ roll was still establishing a foothold, and it stepped into the controversies engendered by that popularity. It continued as what one observer called “Woodstock without drugs or electric guitars”—a multiday hangout that explored the power of music to change minds and by extension the world, while at the same time, and partially by dint of, keeping alive long-forgotten musical traditions—all years before the more celebrated rock festival.
The original festival reached its cultural apogee in 1965, when it hosted the first electric performance by the already-legendary Bob Dylan—a moment that wasn’t unforeseen (“Like a Rolling Stone” was the number-two single in the country at the time of the show). But it catalyzed the argument over what had happened to Dylan, to folk music and to rock music in the six years since the festival had begun. The debates, the insults and the declarations of allegiance—“It was a sad parting of the ways for many.… I choose Dylan. I choose art” was one critical reaction—continued for years afterward.
But the brushfire that Dylan’s performance ignited didn’t illuminate the Newport Folk Festival; it left scorched earth in its place. Dylan’s performance was a key step in the process of rock’s emergence as a music that could speak to the hearts and minds of America’s young people, and over the rest of the ’60s the folk festival became a symbol of a worn-out genre looking for a reason to continue to exist—an annual gathering of people in a field to wait for a second lightning strike. When the festival went down in a thicket of red tape and red ink, helped along by an incidence of violence at its big brother, the Newport Jazz Festival, it was worthy of a two-line announcement in 1971, and not many people cared.
In the mid-1980s, the festival came back to life as a different beast. Where it had been a nonprofit, utopian, determinedly egalitarian presentation onstage and backstage, in which everyone from Bob Dylan to the fiddler for the Greenbriar Boys got $50 a day, it reemerged as a sleek, commercial, corporately sponsored weekend of individual concerts. The festival’s focus changed as the times around it had changed: while attendees and organizers still made efforts to effect real-world changes, the musical ethos sprang from the desire of a generation of artists and fans—most from the same generation that had propelled the initial incarnation of the festival—not to be left behind as the music industry moved on to another new sound and crowd. This version of the festival lasted longer than any of the others have so far. By the early twenty-first century, however, attendance and enthusiasm had waned once again; even the Indigo Girls, the festival’s most reliable draw of the 1990s, couldn’t attract an audience.
After dropping out of Wein’s control for two years, the festival finished its first half century with its founder back at the helm and a reinvigorated focus. The festival presents a mix of music, much of which doesn’t seem to fit into a folk festival until you hear it at one. And it thrives under a new leader handpicked by Wein and his lieutenants, whose relative youth inspires him not to ignore the festival’s past but to recognize, honor and use its iconic stature among a new generation. Thanks to technological advances in communication and a youth culture that in many ways echoes that of folk’s glory days, the festival participates like never before in the celebration and creation of its own history.
Today, veteran stars come to Newport to entertain knowledgeable, appreciative crowds, while young performers come to prove that they deserve to share a billing and a stage with the audience’s musical heroes and their own. Indeed, some of the iconoclasts became festival mainstays themselves. The mix of experienced hands and young upstarts has always provoked conflicts—at least one of which got physical—over basic questions of what folk music is, who should play it, and how, but it has also produced what Billboard called “the longest-running and possibly the most visible example of American festival success ever.”3
On this afternoon in 2009, eighty-three-year-old George Wein sits off to one side of the stage listening, holding hands with Pete Seeger’s wife, Toshi Seeger. His image on a video introducing Pete has already received a standing ovation, and he’ll get another when the final chords of “This Land Is Your Land” fade away, the sun begins to set in earnest, and he thanks the audience, his staff, the musicians (“I’m so happy to know them”) and the Seegers for “never giving up hope.”
The musical businessman (though he won’t call himself that), who has curated jazz festivals in Newport and all over the world for more than half a century, didn’t know much about folk music fifty years ago and doesn’t know much about the young bands on the stage now. A few weeks before this afternoon, he summed himself up: “We all have what we do best. And my best skill is organizing things.”4 The reason he first organized a folk festival is simple—it was a commercial proposition. Why he continued it is a little less obvious.
Jazz is the music Wein grew up playing, loving and living, but he says the folk festival has given him some of the best memories of his life and remains one of his proudest achievements. Its mid-1960s era bore similarities to, though it predated, the hippie spirit. (Wein can go into a monologue about the trouble that the long-haired, rock-loving crowd brought down on his jazz festival in 1971.)
But when George Wein, a Jewish piano player, and Joyce Alexander, an African-American science major (who died in 2006) were married in 1959, their union was still illegal in nineteen states. The Newport Jazz Festival makes the case for a better, smarter, more racially integrated world tacitly and by example, but the folk festival stands up and shouts it out: over the years, it has embraced causes moving from civil rights to the anti-Vietnam War movement to the environment. While the folk festival may have begun like any other business expansion, and the tam-wearing Wein would appear to have little in common with the hacky-sackers on the Fort Adams lawn, it’s no accident that he created the space, both literally and figuratively, they’re inhabiting now.
“People think this stuff just happens,” Wein says. “It doesn’t. There’s thinking behind it.”5
Pete Seeger wrote “If I Had a Hammer,” most famously made into a hit by Peter, Paul and Mary. The song’s point is not only to impart the vision of “love between my brothers and my sisters / All over this land,” but to point out that not only the singer but the listener has the tools to bring it about. Seeger once said, “The last verse didn’t say ‘But there ain’t no hammer; there ain’t no bell; there ain’t no song, but honey, I got you.’ We could have said that! The last verse says, ‘I HAVE a hammer; I HAVE a bell; I HAVE a song. Here it is.’”6 Songwriters all over the world have heeded that call, whether it be a political vision or a personal one, and for more than fifty years they’ve come to Newport to share the results.
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