Lund and Denisoff - The Folk Music Revival

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The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions Author(s): Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 334 (Oct. - Dec., 1971), pp. 394-405Published by: American Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/539633Accessed: 09-05-2015 12:06 UTC

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JENS LUND and R. SERGE DENISOFF

The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions'

OBSERVERS OF THE SO-CALLED "COUNTER CULTURE" have tended to portray this phenomenon as a new and isolated event. Theodore Roszak, as well as numerous music and art historians, have come to view the "counter culture" as a new reaction to technical expertise and the embourgeoisment of growing segments of the American people.2 This position, it would appear, is basically indicative of the intellectual "blind men and the elephant" couplet, where a social fact or event is examined apart from other structural phenomena. Instead, it is our contention that the "counter culture" or Abbie Hoffman's "Woodstock Nation" is an emergent reality or a product of all that came before, sui generis. More simply, the "counter culture" can best be conceptualized as part of a long historical-intellectual progres- sion beginning with the "Garden of Eden" image of man.

The theme of man removed from the state of nature has recurred throughout Judeo-Christian-Greco thought. Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Calvin, and nearly all social philosophers and metaphysicians have chosen to idealize an existence prior to primordial man when all was well, and life was simple and free of the "social nausea" ascribed to us by the existentialists.

Socrates urged the young to adopt an ascetic style of life. This sentiment was repeated by early Catholic theologians, particularly Francis of Assisi. The Euro- pean Romanticists, in the wake of Rousseau, lauded the "noble savage." In North America, James Fenimore Cooper exhibited a preoccupation with the hero of the wilderness. The transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau and Emerson, deified the man behind the plow. The force of these arguments led to some action. For example, the writings of such German Romanticists as Joseph von Eichendorff and Nikolaus Lenau produced the Wandervoigeln, a movement

1 This is a revised and expanded revision of a paper originally presented at the Ohio-Indiana American Studies Association meetings at West Lafayette, Indiana, April 22-24, 1971.

2 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N. Y., 1969).



THE FOLK MUSIC REVIVAL AND THE COUNTER CULTURE 395

which inspired many of Weimar Germany's young people to roam Central Eu- rope, begging for food, composing poetry, and singing folk songs.3 Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, on a lesser scale, had a similar impact, as did popular romantici- zation of the cowboy and the hobo. The products of John Steinbeck, and particularly, Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan, have invited the young to experience "the road." In a sense, the "counter culture" can be considered a suc- cessor to all of these intellectual and literary trends.

Political thinkers, such as Marxists, anarchists, syndicalists, and even Social Darwinists, all included in their sociopolitical theorems the state of nature. This "state of nature" coloration of man, reinforced by Aldous Huxley's Savage in Brave New World, was widely accepted by left-wing radicals, particularly after the success of the Bolshevik revolution. American Communists, particularly those loyal to the Comintern, were no exception. During the late 1930s, the Communist Party-U. S. A. idealized the American rural folk as being identifiable with the pro- letariat. The Okies and Arkies were seen as characters from a Gorky play, and rural folk music was declared "people's songs."4 It was in this ideological frame- work that "folk music" came to town, to be nurtured and cherished for several decades by politically oriented intellectuals and the occasional folk music buff.5

After World War II the "people's artists" trend was interdicted by the advent of the McCarthy era and the application of the media blacklist to folk-styled singers, such as Pete Seeger and the Weavers. As members of People's Artists, Inc. were being summoned to testify before Congressional subcommittees, an artistic and literary fad which explored the traditional "road" concepts of the American experience came into existence in the bohemian communities of several large metropolises. This movement was called the Beat Generation, or by journalists such as Herb Caen, "beatniks." The beats proclaimed disaffiliation from American society and its institutions. In place of the Protestant Ethic, they adopted the posture of the "White Negro," a concept coined by Norman Mailer. The "White Negro" idealized stereotypes of black behavior and advocated imitation of such traits. Jazz, the music of urban blacks, became the language of the Beat community, and the musician the ideal man.6 Many of the founders of jazz, such as Jelly Roll Morton, had begun their careers as house musicians in Southern "red light" districts. They often affected argot, dress, and life-styles that were ostentatiously unconventional.' At first the jazzmen and their followers were generally black, but as the music's popularity widened, it generated an interracial subculture. From the esoteric "bop" era of the late 1940s there emerged a highly definable subculture known as the "jazz community."s Many of the attitudes of this "community," such

3Irmgard Hunt, "Towards Soul: The American Hippie-A German Romantic?" Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (Spring, 1970), 736-749.

4See William Wolff, "Use Traditional Tunes for New Union Songs," Daily Worker, November 16, 1939, p. 7; and Marjorie Crane, "The Folksongs of Our People," Sunday Worker, September 21, 1941, p. 4 (section 2).

5 R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana, Ill., i971). 6 Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," in The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, ed. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York, 1959), 371-394.

7 Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" (New York, 1950), xi-xii.

8 Alan P. Merriam and R. W. Mack, "The Jazz Community," Social Forces, 38 (1960), 211-222.



396 JENS LUND and R. SERGE DENISOFF

as the use of marijuana as a social drug and averseness to conventional fashion, survive today in the "counter culture." It has also contributed many terms to the contemporary youth culture, including the word "hippie" itself, which was originally derogatory.9 For the Beat, the noble savage of the fifties was the black jazz musician, in time to be replaced by the folk singer.

During the time New York's Greenwich Village was the East Coast's version of San Francisco's North Beach, beats encountered the remaining leftists and intellectuals interested in folk music. Various songfests were still held in the Village as rent-parties or fund-raising events to fight Pete Seeger's congressional con- tempt citation or to help finance the shaky Sing Out! magazine. In time, these sporadic events were routinized into weekly affairs held in the Village's Washing- ton Square Park.

In Greenwich Village, the beats and the folk-aficionados came into contact with each other, resulting in a synthesis of attitudes and appearances. For the neophyte beats, a loosely defined form of "folk music" took the place of jazz as the dominant musical genre. This was, in part, due to the increasing commercialization of the music and the "Crow Jim" attitudes of those jazz musicians being attracted to black nationalism. The person interested in folk music often affected the bohemian appearance and life-style, and the blacklisted performers thus found themselves with a new audience. Alan Lomax, the distinguished folklorist, perhaps best enunciated the life-style aspect in his paper, "The Folkniks-And the Songs They Sing." Lomax declared, "To be folk, you live folk. 10 Many col- legiates and bohemians took this dictum quite seriously. Time magazine, in its profile of Joan Baez, made note of the life-style associated with the nonstudents at Boston's Harvard Square: "Drifters, somewhat beat, with Penguin classics pro- truding from their bluejeans . . . 'they just lie in their pads, smoke pot, and do

stupid things like that.' "11 The fact that such individuals existed as early as 1962 seemed to be a harbinger of what would later occur on campuses across the nation on a much larger scale.

The "folkniks" were, of course, still a very esoteric minority, while the majority of popular music concerned itself over ninety percent of the time with themes of courtship and everlasting love.12 Even the ostensibly offensive offerings of Elvis Presley usually ended in a vine-covered cottage. The magic of the early Presley years was soon dissipated by the conscription of its namesake, public hostility to his black counterparts and the misfortunes that befell his imitators. For the "taste culture" of this period, a vacuum was created which allowed folk music to capture the attention of the disgruntled rock-and-roll fan. This void was first filled by the

Kingston Trio. The Kingston Trio was originally a pop-calypso group organized to cash in on the brief calypso fad generated by Harry Belafonte in 1957. In

9 It has even been suggested that the word may have African origins. Paul Oliver, Savannah Syn- copators: African Retention in the Blues (New York, 1970), 93, cites the Wolof word hipi, meaning "to have one's eyes opened."

to Alan Lomax, "The Folkniks-And the Songs They Sing," Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, 9 (Summer, 1959), 30-31.

11 "Folksinging: Sibyl with a Guitar," Time, November 23, 1962, p. 52. 12 Donald Horton, "The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Songs," American Journal of Soci-

ology, 62 (May, 1957), 569-578.




1958 they rearranged a North Carolina ballad, "Tom Dula," which became a phe- nomenal success under the title, "Tom Dooley." This helped to set the stage for the commercial "folk" boom of the sixties, but did not, as some have suggested, cause it. Originally, the success of the Trio was not transferable to other endeavors. The sponsors of the Newport (R.I.) Jazz Festival attempted to stage similar pro- ductions around the folk genre in 1959 and 1960. The first was an economic failure and the second not successful enough to weather the conflicts that appeared in the wake of the 1961 Jazz Festival disturbances. "Folkniks," on the other hand, roundly condemned the Trio for their commercialization and for their use of "Tom Dula" which had been gleaned from Frank Proffitt, a North Carolina traditional musician. This triggered, even at this early stage, the first value conflict of the folk music revival. The conflict was between the "ethnics" or "purists" who advocated the romantic ideal of "traditional" music, as opposed to the faddish Kingston Trio, Limeliters, and Brothers Four fans. For the "purists" in Green- wich Village and Cambridge, Berkeley, and other major cosmopolitan university communities, "folk music" was symbolic of much more than just the hand- clapping entertainment that the popularizers were implementing. With the steady acceptance of folk-styled material by increasing segments of the record-buying public, this one-sided polemic was minimized since all tastes were being served. The popularizers, despite their ddclasse posture in "folknik" circles, helped to pay for the less well-known performers on records and at folk-festivals.

With the infusion of the popularizers, the folk-festivals, particularly Newport, resumed in 1963 and helped to transform the esoteric "folknik" subculture into part of the popular culture. The "Hootenanny" craze of 1963, centered around the ABC television show, was but one example of this process.

Another result of the growing interest in folk music was the reemergence of the topical songwriter in the so-called "Seeger-Guthrie" tradition.13 Most of these individuals had begun by singing old-left songs, but many of them became involved in the civil rights movement, which had its own songs of protest. Those who went South as volunteers found themselves involved in confrontatory demonstrations with the forces of authority, thus linking the idea of demonstrations and folksinging in the minds of both the participants and the public. Most of the protest singers were eventually writing original material. The topical songwriters, especially those to be found in the pages of Broadside (NYC) were to be the prophets of protest who would, in time, leave the fold for the more exciting and rewarding pastures of Rock. The Dylans, Paxtons, Skys, Chandlers and others did not subscribe to the socialist models of the past. Rarely did the word "we" enter their lyrics. This was in juxtaposition to the well-known songs of the civil rights movement with which many New York "folk-singers" identified. More and more, the singular "I" predominated. "Hattie Carroll," "Masters of War," and "With God on Our Side" were individual statements not conducive to group singing. In-

13 Compare Gordon Friesen, "Something New Has Been Added," Sing Out!, I3 (October- November, 1963), 12-23. For the scholastic aspect of the revival see Dick Reuss, "So You Want to be a Folklorist?," Sing Out!, 15 (November, 1965), 40-42; Donald M. Winkleman and Ray B. Browne, "Folklore Study in Universities," Sing Out!, I4 (September, 1964), 47, 49; and Irwin Silber, "Traditional Folk Artists Capture the Campus," Sing Out.!, 14 (April-May, 1964), 8-14.




deed, they took many liberties with the traditionalistic values of the "folkniks." Nevertheless, the topical songwriters, by the summer of 1964, were the vanguard of the folk music revival. The significance of this quasi resurrection of the

"people's singer" was the injection of political ideology into the revival. The topical writers of this period were certainly not akin to the Almanacs or their succes- sors, but they did suggest yet another criterion for evaluating singers and their material-their dedication to civil rights and antiwar causes. Bob Dylan changed all of this in the summer of 1965 when he adopted the techniques and styles of rock-and-roll. For many this was heresy. For others it signaled the end of the folk music revival.1-

The birth of the "counter culture" has been correlated with the emergence of the so-called "hippie" phenomenon that stressed a casual ideology of human love, respect for life, and the experiential tenets of hallucinogenic drug use. Large self- conscious groups of young people identified as "hippies" first began to appear on the streets of New York and San Francisco about 1965-1966. They learned about the experimental use of hallucinogens and eagerly sought the experience for themselves. They were also faithful followers of the trends that had given new

vitality to popular rock-and-roll, in particular Bob Dylan's use of this music as a vehicle for personal statement (he had already abandoned political protest), and the fresh musical innovations of such English groups as the Beatles and the Roll-

ing Stones. The large-scale appearance of an LSD black market in some urban areas and the open advocacy of its use by former Harvard researchers and some

avant-garde intellectuals gave the movement sacraments and even demagogues. The first "hippies" were by-and-large apolitical, much to the distress of the mentors of folk music and protest songs.

Irwin Silber, for nearly fifteen years the editor of the influential folk music

magazine Sing Out!, originally perceived the blossoming of the "counter culture" with trepidation. In a piece subtitled "Concerning Marshall McLuhan, Al Capp, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, the CIA, and the End of the World ..." he wrote: "Give them just enough room to be as 'kooky' as they can imagine, harass them

enough to let them feel they're an 'underground' and that you're really worried about them, and let nature (and acid) take its course."''5 Silber restated his "opiate is the religion of the people" position on several occasions. In yet another column entitled "Fan the Flames" (an old IWW slogan), he indicated: "One does not call love into being by mesmerizing oneself with a sound or a cube of sugar. If

you think that you can wish love into being by changing your mind with trying to change-and, if necessary, destroy-the disease-racked society which has killed

love, then your love will be an illusion.""6 Silber's antipathy toward the "counter culture" did not reflect the dominant

mood of many of Sing Out! readers. More importantly, he did not survive an editorial board disagreement and was ousted. Nonetheless, Silber did represent the

14 Compare Happy Traum, "The Swan Song of Folk Music," Rolling Stone, May I7, 1969, pp. 7-8; Ed Budeaux, "The Spectacle Moves On," Sing Out!, i7 (August-September, 1967), 11-14; and R. Serge Denisoff, "Folk-Rock: Covert Protestor Commercialism ?," Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (1969), 214-230.

15 Irwin Silber, "Fan the Flames," Sing Out!, 17 (April-May, 1967), 33. 16 Irwin Silber, "Fan the Flames," Sing Out!, 18 (March-April, 1968), 39.




thinking of a number of folk music enthusiasts, especially those with an Old Left tradition. For a time Pete Seeger included in his vast repertory an antidrug song, "Bag on the Table," which was directed at the "counter culture." On the other hand, Sing Out! itself was not averse to courting the drug culture by printing the words and music of a blatantly pro-drug song, David Peel's "Have a Marijuana," complete with praises for "a new party to take the place of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party-the Pot Party." This song, with a small drawing of a Cannabis plant sprouting the word "Salvation" appeared in Sing Out! late in 1968.17 Ideologically, then, the folk music revival and the "counter culture" exhibited several links, though highly contradictory and selective. This mixed relationship is further evidenced in the structural differences and interrelationships between the two phenomena. B. A. Botkin, in his oft-quoted piece, "The Folk Song Revival: Cult or Culture?" landed in the middle of his rhetorical title. He acknowledged that the revival possessed many of the qualities of a religious cult with "conversion, salvation, mass hysteria, and fanaticism. There are also rituals and festivals, notably the Sunday afternoon singing and strumming in Washing- ton Square Park."'s Moreover, the revival, for Botkin, was a take-off point toward a greater political and intellectual awareness, particularly by the young. Given the perspective of 1964, the folklorist was not far off the mark in saying, "Every revival contains within itself the seed not only of its own destruction ... but also of new revivals."

Despite the arguments of some critics the folk music revival was not a totally political phenomenon. Protest was only one avenue of concern. The other major component was the so-called "ethnic" or "purist" strain. The "ethnics" had generally been introduced to material of traditional origin by nontraditional performers. Pete Seeger's role in carrying on the leftist folk-revival also served to popularize actual traditional songs, singing styles, and instrumental styles. Second generation "folk-singers," such as Joan Baez, needed only to provide guitar- accompaniment to a Child ballad to make it acceptable on the coffeehouse circuit.

The first performing group in the urban "folk" scene to specialize in material of traditional rural origin was the New Lost City Ramblers.19 They were organized in 1958 by Mike Seeger, youngest son of the famous ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger; John Cohen, Yale-educated photographer; and Tom Paley, a New York mathematician and photographer. The earlier literary organs of the folk movement took an ambivalent attitude towards the music of the white South, extolling it when it could be used for progressive social purposes, but denigrating the re- corded examples of "hillbilly" music. This was unfortunate because most of the "hillbilly" records of the twenties and thirties were genuine folk songs of a far greater authenticity than anything heard at the early urban "folk-festivals." Fur- thermore, a number of the early "hillbilly" artists were still performing to a rather esoteric audience within the country and western genre, and many others were

17 Sing Out!, 18 (December, 1968-January, 1969), 6-7. 18s B. A. Botkin, "The Folk Song Revival: Cult or Culture?," in The American Folk Scene:

Dimensions of the Folk Song Revival, ed. David A. DeTurk and A. Poulin, Jr. (New York, 1967), 95.

19 Jon Pankake, "Ten Years in New Lost City," Sing Out!, i8 (October-November, 1968), 30-31, 73, 75, 78.




living in retirement or semiretirement still quite willing to play "the old songs" for anyone who cared to listen.

The New Lost City Ramblers played fiddles, mandolins, guitars, and banjos in careful imitation of the early Southern recording artists, always crediting the origins of each song. Compared to the "hootenanny" craze, the Ramblers' audience remained quite esoteric, and their ugly black albums on the Folkways label sold at $5.95 back when most popular albums could be had for $2.98 monaural or $3.98 in stereophonic. But the Ramblers appeared at Newport in 1963, their repu- tation already established by numbers of concerts at New York City's Town Hall.

The Ramblers characterized their type of music as "old timey," after the name assigned to early rural recordings by the record companies during the 192os. Al- though their music was generally apolitical, they attempted to satisfy the folk revival's social consciousness by identifying themselves with the Depression in rural America. One of their most successful record albums was Songs of the De- pression, which provided a common ground on which the "ethnic" and "protest" folkniks could meet. Speaking of the early folkniks, John Cohen of the Ramblers wrote, "There is an element in young people today which feels a yearning for the thirties as a desire to have a clear and humane cause to fight for."20 Early Ramblers concerts were sometimes advertised with the Blue Eagle of the N.R.A., and the slogan, "I am lost. Take me back to 1935.'"21

Aside from "old timey" music, another form of rural, traditionally derived music came to the attention of the "ethnic" folkniks, namely, bluegrass. Bluegrass music was a type of commercial country music which appeared during the 1940s. It was a reaction against electrification and the cowboy image which by then permeated the country music industry. Originated by Bill Monroe, a Kentucky mandolinist, it became popular in the urban "hillbilly" ghettos of the North.22 Its sound was dominated by the five-string banjo, especially as played by Earl Scruggs. The first college bluegrass concert, the Osborne Brothers at Oberlin College, was a smashing success, and the promotion of the five-string banjo by the Starday Record Company put country albums into the collections of numerous collegiate folk-music buffs.23 Home-grown bluegrass groups were organized at colleges and bohemian enclaves in the North and West. At many universities, notably Harvard and Yale, the folk subculture became completely enraptured with bluegrass. Yale's Grey Sky Boys, Harvard's Charles River Valley Boys, and Greenwich Village's Greenbriar Boys were a fixture at both commercial "hootenannies" and "in-group" parties. The most successful southern-authentic bluegrass band, Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, were double-billed with Joan Baez at Carnegie Hall in 1963. Even more remarkably, northern collegiate groups entered musicians' conventions in the South and captured prizes. A nameless Greenwich Vil-

20 John Cohen, in liner notes to Folkways Records FH 5264, Songs of the Depression by the New Lost City Ramblers.

21 Mike Seeger and John Cohen, eds., The New Lost City Ramblers Songbook (New York, 1965), 245.

22 Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: A History of the Popular Arts in the United States

(New York, 1970), 346-347. 23 Neil V. Rosenberg, "Don Pierce: The Rise and Fall of Starday and the Perplexing Patriot

Problem," Bluegrass Unlimited, i (May, 1967), 5.




lage bluegrass band took the grand prize at the Union Grove, North Carolina, Fiddler's Convention in 1964 after quickly dubbing itself the New York Ramblers for want of a better name. To this day the annual Union Grove and Galax, Vir- ginia, Fiddlers' Conventions have attracted mobs of Northern devotees, many of whom have appeared in full counter-cultural regalia to the amazement and bewilderment of the local people in those two communities.24

In many ways the bluegrass explosion on campus was no less a fad than goldfish- swallowing or telephone-booth-stuffing. It did produce a number of very talented musicians-talented enough to compete successfully with people raised on the music in the South. It also produced some valuable folk-music scholars, notably Ralph Rinzler, former Greenwich Village Greenbriar Boy, who now directs the annual Festival of American Folklife for the Smithsonian Institution. When the folk revival merged with the new rock, a number of former bluegrass musicians went along, affecting much of the country flavor of such rock groups as the Byrds. In New York City, an organization known as the Friends of Old Time Music brought "old timey" to Town Hall in New York, where they experienced brief periods of celebrity with their new urban fans.25 Their contact with the "beatniks" was often less than pleasant. Singer and banjoist Roscoe Holcomb was reportedly hounded at his home in Eastern Kentucky by college girls offering him wine and conversation, and he has since withdrawn in bewilderment from the campus and folk-festival circuit.26 D. K. Wilgus told an American Folklore So- ciety seminar about an embarrassing party which he attended at which two southern bluegrass musicians were obviously suffering from acute self-consciousness in the midst of a racially integrated group of college liberals.27 Bluegrass originator Bill Monroe was reportedly infuriated by the audience at his first Newport appearance in 1963, but he has since taken a very tolerant attitude towards his new fans, possibly because his selection to the Country Music Hall of Fame was largely effected by the appearance of a new audience for his music. On the other hand, bluegrass banjoist Earl Scruggs' rapport with the "counter culture" reached the point where he actually performed at a Moratorium March on Washington protesting the Vietnam War. Such a case, however, is highly unusual.

The campus bluegrass revival is, of course, over on a large scale, but vestiges of it still survive. Harvard University's Boston Area Friends of Old Timey and Bluegrass Music still packs the Freshman Union Auditorium with its monthly concerts featuring mostly southern bluegrass bands. Bill Monroe's annual Bean Blossom Festival in southern Indiana draws a large share of its crowd from universities and hippie ghettos. One of the authors of this paper walked through the parking lot of the 1968 Berryville, Virginia, Bluegrass Festival, and lost count of the number of cars bearing either McCarthy or Wallace stickers, but nothing in between. The amount of fraternization between "freaks" and "rednecks" at these

24 Perry Deane Young, "Let Us Now Praise the Old-Time Fiddlers at Union Grove," Rolling Stone, July 22, 1971, pp. 28-32.

25 "The Friends of Old Time Music," Sing Out!, ii (February-March, 1961), 63. 26 John Cohen, "Roscoe Holcomb at Zabriskie Point-Some Twentieth Anniversary Thoughts,"

Sing Out!, 20 (September-October, 1970), 20-21. 27 D. K. Wilgus, quoted in "Discussion From the Floor," following D. K. Wilgus, "Country-

Western Music and the Urban Hillbilly," JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, 83 (I970), 183-184.




events is truly remarkable. In an interview for Newsweek magazine last summer, Bill Monroe remarked, "My hippie fans know when the music is played right. And the college kids are my biggest audience."28 Indeed, the college audience for Bill Monroe's music is even mentioned in the inscription on the plaque placed in his honor at Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame.29

Somewhat later in the folk music revival an infatuation with the blues appeared among the "ethnic" faction. In many ways this was more justifiable philosophically than were the "old timey" and bluegrass crazes, as blues has primarily been a music of social dissatisfaction. This is not to suggest that white country music does not contain this factor as well, but the blues makes dissatisfaction a more central concern. It was perhaps easier for many of the "folkniks" to romanticize rural blacks than rural whites, thus avoiding the problem of dealing with the thorny questions of prejudice and reaction except from the morally superior position of the black.

In any event, by 1964 country blues had "come to town." A few blues artists, such as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter and Josh White had been prominent in the old-leftist folk music circles, and injustice against blacks had always been a social ill to which the Communist Party-U. S. A. called attention. A number of

English jazz enthusiasts, including Paul Oliver and Brian Rust, had rediscovered the blues of the old "race records" during the fifties. This developed into an

English blues following complete with periodicals, clubs, and specialized record stores. The American blues revival, however, came as part of the general folk- music revival. Part of this was undoubtedly due to field trips to the South by northern white folklorists, record producers, and general enthusiasts who were

seeking to rediscover lost rural talent or perhaps even to find an artist that had never before been noticed out of his own county. Mississippi John Hurt, Mance

Lipscomb, Son House, and Bukka White were among the many southern blacks

brought to northern folk festivals, colleges, and coffee houses. The identification with a stereotypical image of the black which had occurred during the jazz-beatnik years experienced a rebirth among urban-collegiate white blues singers. "To be folk, you live folk," acquired new meaning among middle-class guitarists, some of whom imitated black southern dress and speech patterns. In an article sharply satirical of the new "white Negroes," Ken Spiker sarcastically wrote, "consider the question of image at this point. It is of great advantage to your status if you can carry off a consistent and plausible image . . you must think, feel, live, be like ... a Southern Negro, . . . or whatever ... But don't go too far; you may limit your vocabulary to the point where you will no longer be able to communi- cate."'30

One of the major controversies of the folk-music revival years, almost rivalling "ethnic" versus "protest," was the problem of whether or not white folksingers of comfortable middle-class background had the right to imitate poor, rural, black musicians. The fact that the former often made more money doing so than the

28 Bill Monroe, quoted in "Pickin' and Singin'," Newsweek, June 29, 1970, p. 10o. 29 Cover photograph on Bluegrass Unlimited, 5 (December, 1970), i. 30 Ken Spiker, "A Study in the Interpersonal Dynamics of a Subculture Structured on Traditional

Music--or: Folkmanship in Berkeley, California," in American Folk Music Occasional Number One ,964, ed. Chris Strachwitz (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), 44.




latter did, purveying the genuine item, made the imitation even less flattering. Two articles in Sing Out! in 1964 illustrate the point well. The first, by Paul Nel- son, titled "Country Blues Comes to Town," began with a series of biographical capsules of such white folksingers as John Hammond, Jr., Dave Ray, Dave Van Ronk, and others. It concluded, in terms mildly suggestive of Norman Mailer, with a philosophical explanation of the white middle class's new blues infatuation, complete with logical justifications for this contradictory spectacle and heaps of praise for the new performers' musicianship and spirit.31 The second article appeared two months later. It was written by the black, militant folksinger Julius Lester and titled, "Country Blues Comes to Town?: The View From the Other Side of the Tracks."32 In somewhat overstated terms, he castigated the Nelson article for its presumptuousness, referring particularly to a statement by Barry Hansen of The Little Sandy Review ("it seems inevitable that by 1970 most of the blues worth hearing will be sung by white men") that Nelson had quoted and accepted."" Lester pointed out many of the fallacies of assuming that white middle- class youngsters could "be like" poor, rural blacks. He also bitterly called attention to the exploitation inherent in the financially profitable imitation of the folk music of people who receive little or no profit for their original expressions.

As with any lengthy infatuation, fads within a fad appeared on the "folk- scene." There was a brief period of interest in what was called "jugband music." Some of the traditional jazz material of the 192os and 1930s jugbands was re- vived as part of this craze, but it was generally just an excuse for "old timey"/ bluegrass "ethnics" to cooperate with blues "ethnics" in group music making. As the protest singers drifted into the new rock, many of the blues enthusiasts, such as John Hammond, Jr., and Richard Farifia, rediscovered and canonized as "genuine" folk, the rhythm-and-blues music that had spawned early rock-and-roll. By experimenting with rhythm-and-blues forms, many white blues "folksingers" were making the transition from folk to rock which would add considerable vitality to the later "new rock" bands. The breaking of the taboo against electrified instruments allowed many "old timey" bluegrass "ethnics" to begin to appreciate a broader spectrum of white country music. Many of the musicians among them actually learned to play country-and-western music, thus giving country music a back door of its own into the "new rock."

The popularity of Johnny Cash, and now Merle Haggard, among the "counter culture" can be traced back to some of the attitudes prominent in the folk music revival. Indeed, Cash's familial tie to the Carter Family, and Haggard's stylistic similarity to the "Singing Brakeman," Jimmie Rodgers, bestowed the mantle of tradition upon both. Haggard's current popularity within the "counter culture," while providing a historical link to the revival, also underscores some of the contradictions and conflicts between the two. Merle Haggard's claim to urban and collegiate fame is partly based upon his controversial song "Okie From Musko-

31 Paul Nelson, "Country Blues Comes to Town," Sing Out!, 14 (July, 1964), 14-15, 17, 19- 20, 23-24. 32 Julius Lester, "Country Blues Comes to Town?: The View From the Other Side of the Tracks," Sing Out!, 14 (September, 1964), 37-39. Also see LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963). 33 Nelson, 23; and Lester, 37.




gee," a strong denunciation of the counter culture, campus protest, mod fashions, and, particularly, the use of drugs. The song opens with the line, "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don't take our trips on LSD ... ." The follow-

up to "Muskogee" was the "Fightin' Side of Me," a song which took an even more militant stance against dissenters. Both songs received extensive under-

ground airplay. Arlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs use "Okie From Muskogee" in their concert performances. Merle Haggard has been the subject of a feature article in

Sing Out!, hardly a conservative journal.34 The "folk freaks," as they are now called, sing many of Haggard's songs such as "Mama Tried," "Swinging Doors," and "Working Man Blues." This practice, not unexpectedly, has generated considerable criticism from those still adhering to the "Seeger-Guthrie" tradition.

Haggard, himself, has shown a typical entertainer's perception of how to avoid

alienating a disparate audience. When interviewed by the press, he avoids utter- ances which could be construed as hostile to his "counter culture" fans. In a recent Look magazine interview, he even went as far as to say, "If I were to come out

with another song like 'Okie' or 'Fightin' Side', I'd be jeopardizing my career."35 Broadside (NYC) has been most articulate and outspoken in criticism of the

"folk freaks' " interest in country and western singers. Gordon Friesen, in several editorial statements, has roundly condemned the relationship of the "topical song movement" to Cash and Haggard. Friesen outlined his position in a critique of Sing Out!: "The sad disintegration of the magazine can be seen in recent issues, with laudatory articles about Johnny Cash, who supports Nixon's blood and

slaughter, and Merle Haggard, writer of inciting Birch-type songs against war dissenters." 36 While this was only one of many such pieces directed at performers who have supported the war, gone to the White House, or transgressed in some way against the antiwar movement, it did hit upon a rather tender nerve for the

politically involved, both in the revivalist days and contemporarily.37 The fact that most country and western singers supported George Wallace or Richard Nixon was conspicuously ignored by the folk revivalists in both 1964 and 1968.38 Indeed, the racial policies of the rural South, so decried in the songs of New York

folksingers were rarely, if ever, associated with southern performers. Folklorist and labor historian Archie Green has for some years argued that the

relationship of northern political protesters to country music has been a most curious one, considering the fundamentally conservative and, at times, racist nature of the music and its proponents. At a recent lecture at the University of

Chicago Folk Festival titled "Politics and Country Music," Professor Green played a tape of a number of politically oriented country songs. Included was a "coon" song, a World War II anti-"Jap" song, Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee," and a number of songs expressive of a more contemporarily acceptable protest, in-

4 Alice Foster, "Merle Haggard," Sing Out!, 19 (March-April, 1970), 11-17. 35 Merle Haggard, quoted in Christopher S. Wren, "Merle Haggard: He Sings for the Folks

Who Fought World War II," Look, July 13, 1971, p. 37. 36 Gordon Friesen, "Editorial," Broadside (NYC), 107 (June, 1970), ro. 7 See Irwin Silber, "An Open Letter to Bob and Evelyne Beers, Folksingers," Broadside (NYC),

104 (January, 1970), 5; "An Open Letter to Irwin Silber," Broadside (NYC), io6 (April-May, 1970), 5-6; and Gordon Friesen, "Editorial," Broadside (NYC), io8 (July-August, 1970), 10o.

38 " 'Name' Artists Come To the Aid of the Party," Billboard, November 16, 1968, p. 30.




cluding Fiddlin' John Carson's "The Farmer Is the Man." The reaction of the predominantly collegiate-"hippie" audience to some of these songs was one of extreme discomfort.39

The counter culture, while subsuming aspects of the folk revival such as the outdoor festival, gathering of the committed, and the like, is a much broader phenomenon. It is not one-dimensional or focused at a specific genre of music, politics, fashion, or ideology. As Roszak notes: the counter culture "finds its own identity in a nebulous symbol or songs that seems to proclaim .., .we are outward bound from the old corruptions of the world."40 As such, the counter culture per se exhibits litle interest in promulgating a specific musical form or political ideology. The counter culture is eclectic in both taste and politics, and time bound. One day found them at Woodstock or Altamont, the next at the Washington Monu- ment protesting the expansion of the Indo-China war or celebrating the advent of Earth Day. The folk revival was a public group of interested individuals with common foci of attention, and almost a subculture in the sense that it constituted a quasi culture within a culture.41 The notion of an alternative culture is a far cry from just popularizing a musical genre in an existent culture. Interest in folk music did not numerically affect an entire generation. Folkniks were by-and-large politically reformist, believing in the possibility of social change. Conversely, those in the counter culture lack this singularity of purpose, resolve, or the belief in the efficacy of change. Theirs is a quest for a new style of life: a state of nature only suggested by the revivalists.

Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio

39 Archie Green, "Politics and Country Music," lecture delivered at University of Chicago Folk Festival, January 31, 1971.

40 Roszak, 49. 41 J. Milton Yinger sees the "counter culture" as in conflict with the dominant society, while a

"subculture" is "separate and different" but not in opposition. See "Counter Culture and Sub- culture," American Sociological Review, 25 (October, 1960), 625-635.



Documents

Lund and Denisoff - The Folk Music Revival