Читать книгу I Got a Song - Rick Massimo - Страница 10

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THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS LIKE SLEEPING BEAUTY

George Wein’s road to putting on the Newport Folk Festival was circuitous. The first music festival he ever produced was in his own house.

George Theodore Wein was born October 3, 1925, in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in nearby Brookline. His parents, Barnet and Ruth, were second-generation Americans of Eastern European Jewish ancestry; his father was a doctor, and in his memoirs Wein recalls that “his clientele included people from every station in life.” Both his parents also loved music and show business, and Wein was singing from an early age around the house and occasionally on children’s radio shows.

Wein started playing jazz piano in school, and he and his older brother Larry spent many nights of their adolescence driving around New England—and sometimes to New York City—listening to giants of jazz such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and others.

Sometimes they did more than listen. If a good band was playing nearby, the Wein brothers would invite the musicians back to their family home for a late dinner cooked by their mother; jam sessions invariably happened afterwards. “For whatever reason, my parents saw nothing unusual about the situation,” Wein later wrote. “They welcomed these musicians into their house as close friends.”¹

Wein joined the army in 1943 and served in France, then finished his military time serving at a hospital in New Jersey, the better to make the scene on New York’s 52nd Street after hours. After the army, he began playing in better and better places in the Boston area while he was supposed to be attending classes at Boston University. He loved playing the music, but the closer he looked at the life of a jazz musician, the less he liked it. Great musicians, players he knew were better than he, were living in poverty. He didn’t see much of a future in an onstage life.

In 1949, he was playing with clarinetist Edmond Hall at the Savoy, in Boston. At the end of their first monthlong run, the manager wanted to re-sign them. Wein asked club manager Steve Connolly for more money—Hall was making $120 to play eight shows a week; Wein and the rest of the band were paid $60 each. Connolly, Wein remembers, was sympathetic, but no more money was forthcoming.

Wein had another suggestion: in lieu of more money, he asked for every other Saturday night off. This would allow Wein and Hall to take better-paying gigs elsewhere. Connolly agreed, and the system worked. But when March 1, 1949, loomed without an engagement, Wein and Hall rented Jordan Hall, at the New England Conservatory of Music, and put on their own show.

“I knew [the Hall-Wein group] was not enough to fill the hall,” Wein writes. “We had to do something special.” They put together a bill with some of the other heavyweights of Boston jazz, and “Edmond Hall and George Wein Present: From Brass Bands to Bebop” went off without a hitch and made $1,200.

Later that year, Wein ran the series Le Jazz Douxce out of a suite in the Hotel Fensgate, in Boston, with the trumpeter Frankie Newton, and he promoted an unsuccessful series of rhythm and blues shows in Maryland. Even so, the life of a promoter, even an only occasionally successful one, was making more sense than that of a freelance piano player.

Wein was still playing, but as he writes, “I had neither the confidence [nor] the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” The lack of confidence stemmed from his experiences with great pianists such as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson and Earl “Fatha” Hines; the lack of desire came from the hard financial times he and his compatriots were experiencing.

Determined to find another way to keep music in his life, Wein opened the nightclub George Wein’s Storyville in Boston’s Copley Square Hotel in September 1950. That location lasted only six weeks, but a new place in the Buckminster Hotel in Kenmore Square was successful enough that by mid-1953 he was running two clubs at the Copley: Storyville and Mahogany Hall. (He would also run seasonal Storyvilles in the towns of Gloucester and Magnolia.) The clubs ran until 1960, but in 1953 Elaine and Louis Lorillard met Wein at Storyville and proposed a jazz festival in Newport to liven up the boring society summers.

According to Burt Goldblatt’s history of the jazz festival, the Lorillards helped put on two concerts by the New York Philharmonic in Newport’s Casino Theatre in the summer of 1953. (Originally scheduled to be held outdoors, they were forced inside by the weather.) They didn’t do well artistically or financially.

Later that summer, John Maxon, at the time the director of the Rhode Island School of Design, was at a lunch at the home of George Henry Warren and his wife in Newport. Maxon remembers telling Elaine Lorillard, “Do you really think people want to hear what they undoubtedly hear in the wintertime? They would like to hear something different. If you want to do something, why don’t you put on a jazz festival? It would be a wild success. You can’t fail.” So the Lorillards ended up in Storyville, pitching the idea of a Newport jazz festival to owner George Wein. In 1967, he recalled thinking, “I’d never thought about Newport before then, but I figured it might work, and I knew I wanted to do more in life than own a jazz club, and so I kept saying, ‘Sure, sure, but call me in a couple of days if you’re really interested,’ half knowing that these people wander into the club and unburden themselves of some great project and never call you back, and half hoping that she would.”

The sleepy resort city seemed an unlikely choice for such a show, but then, Maxon said, the unlikely sometimes takes hold in such terrain: “Newport is a very strange place. They really are terribly unimpressed. They’re bored and worldly, but they are nice people, and they’re terribly grateful for something new.”²

The first festival, entitled “The First American Jazz Festival,” was held July 17 and 18, 1954, presenting the full spectrum of jazz “From J to Z.” The first day’s concerts featured Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lee Konitz, Oscar Peterson and more. The second day included an afternoon panel discussion on “The Place of Jazz in American Culture” and performances by Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Lennie Tristano, Gerry Mulligan and Gene Krupa. A reported eleven thousand people showed up, even though it rained on the second day, and Down Beat magazine said that the festival “opened a new era in jazz presentation.” The producers cleared $142.50.

Patrick O’Higgins—who handled festival publicity for three years and wrote the Helena Rubinstein biography Madame—later said, “I think what happened was they said we’ll all go to this bloody Festival because it’s going to be a terrible flop. Mrs. Lorillard was going to be chased out of town, and much to their surprise it had the opposite effect.”³

For the next five years, Wein and his fellow board members made the jazz festival the preeminent showcase of the genre in America, while he also ran his nightclubs and instituted other fests, including the Midwest Jazz Festival, in French Lick, Indiana, which ran for two years. In 1958, he booked Odetta, “The Queen of Folk,” to sing at Storyville in the usual format of “the eight-day week,” as he describes it—a show every night and a Sunday matinee.

The nighttime performances were sparsely attended, but the Sunday-afternoon shows were sold out—packed with college kids from across the river in Cambridge, where venues such as Club 47 were incubating a seemingly incongruous boom in folk music among young people of means. It was Wein’s first inkling of the folk movement and of a young generation of music fans more interested in Lead Belly than Lester Young.⁴

Wein had already decided to hold a folk afternoon during the Newport Jazz Festival of 1959 (he had held blues and gospel days in previous years) featuring Odetta, Pete Seeger and the Weavers. But it soon dawned on Wein that there was even more of a scene going on than he realized: “When I saw the young people filling the club Sunday afternoon, drinking ginger ales, a crowd I had never seen before, I realized that we had enough for a folk festival.”⁵

By the time Wein was clued in, folk music was in the midst of a revival that had started much earlier and had generated the kind of controversy that in one form or another has surrounded the festival throughout its history.

While the historian Benjamin Filene writes that the first “explicitly historical collection” of folk songs was A Collection of Old Ballads, published in 1723, folk music was most likely identified and distinguished from popular music first by nationalist movements in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the folklorist Neil Rosenberg writes.⁶ Between 1857 and 1858, Francis Child, a Harvard professor who collected ballads mainly through correspondence with sources in England, released the eight-volume collection English and Scottish Ballads. He topped himself by releasing, between 1882 and 1898, the ten-volume collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The dispositive implication of “The” in the title was no accident.

Child’s thoroughness was impressive, with more than three hundred ballads and more than thirteen thousand annotations documenting additions and evolutions, but he worked out of a conviction that no new folk songs had been created in centuries—since the invention of the printing press, really. “Like many of his predecessors,” Filene writes, “Child felt that although in premodern times the ballad had been ‘a common treasure’ passed on orally and enjoyed by all, it was now a long-dead art.”⁷

In the United States, the Library of Congress established the Archive of American Folk-Song in 1928, with Robert Winslow Gordon at the helm, the same year the performer and collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford opened the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. Gordon traveled the country in search of folk music, and when John Lomax succeeded him in 1933, Lomax, who had published books of folk songs in the early twentieth century, put in thousands of miles collecting and recording hundreds of singers and players performing songs that went back generations (later traveling with his son Alan, who continued the process on his own).

From the beginning, those who sought out folk music began to fall into two camps, identified by the historian Ronald D. Cohen. The first, the evolutionist mode, held that “folk songs belonged to an early stage of cultural development that required respect and preservation.” The idea was to treat the music like a collection of artworks that required not only painstaking preservation—the way a restorer brushes away dust and debris from a recently found artwork—but a diligent watchfulness against degeneration, akin to the way paintings are displayed in rooms with carefully monitored levels of light and humidity. Lunsford, Gordon and the Lomaxes undertook their work as evolutionists, working in the cause of holding regional music and culture safe against the forces of twentieth-century modernity. This was in keeping with a personal and political conservatism: “As folk music and crafts symbolized the grassroots democracy of preindustrial America,” wrote folk historian Robert Cantwell, “they also embodied the values of rootedness and authenticity characteristic of patriarchal aristocracy.”⁸

Others interested in folk music comprised what Cohen calls the functionalist wing, which believed that “folk songs might have not only an ancient lineage but a dynamic present; they could serve practical purposes, energizing the folk to struggle against racism and oppression.”⁹ This wing came to the fore as the 1930s dawned. Almost from the beginning, labor groups and unions such as the International Workers of the World had written folk-style songs and rewritten traditional material to suit their purposes. (They began with complex, modernistic compositions, on the theory that a new age called for new music, but they soon found that it didn’t make for good rallying cries.) During the Great Depression, leftist, Communist and Communist-influenced groups began to tap into the power of folk and traditional music to use as their anthems and sometimes to write their own. Logically so: If old folk songs could have a dynamic present and serve practical purposes, how much better would be a new song written specifically for the times? These lines of thought led by 1940 to the formation of the Almanac Singers, featuring Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell and later described in Time as “young men who roam around the country in a $150 Buick and fight the class war with ballads and guitars,” singing protest ballads old and new. The onset of World War II led to the dissolution of the Almanacs, but Seeger and Hays would resurface, along with Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, as the Weavers, a group that was itself an outgrowth of People’s Songs, a collective including Seeger and Woody Guthrie that issued albums of labor and leftist songs after the war.

Commercial record companies mined folk music nearly from the beginning, bringing “hillbilly” and “race” music to the masses using the same technology. Vernon Dalhart’s “The Wreck of the Old 97,” backed with “The Prisoner’s Song,” sold more than a million copies in 1924; Southern musicians began performing on the radio earlier than that. And the commercial potential of folk music only grew.

The Weavers hit it big beginning in 1950 with songs such as Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” and Woody Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” as well as “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Wimoweh,” “Midnight Special,” and more. The sound was often sweetened with horns and strings from producer Gordon Jenkins’ orchestra, but Lee Hays recalled later that “Jenkins never told us to change a note of anything we sang. He surrounded us with fiddles and French horns and trumpets and things, but when people sang ‘Goodnight Irene,’ they didn’t sing the fiddles, they sang the words.”¹⁰

Meanwhile, as the Weavers began to perform in some of the country’s top nightspots, they continued to play for the benefit of leftist and Communist causes, which, combined with their People’s Songs’ roots, quickly brought them into the purview of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1952, Harvey Matusow, a former Communist turned paid informant for the FBI, testified before Congress and a separate Ohio committee on un-American activities that the Weavers’ popularity was being used by the Communist Party to drive young people into the movement.¹¹ After that, the bookings began to dry up, until “there was no work to be had,” Gilbert has said.¹² The Weavers broke up in 1952.

Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good, an essential examination of the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, details the chill that fell over the music, and much of American culture in general, thanks to anticommunist hysterics. Sing Out!—the folk music magazine that sprang up as part of the People’s Songs’ movement—“urged its readers to carry the folk gospel to schools, summer camps and other small venues.”¹³ Cantwell describes “a new posture of permanent alert that read subversion into almost any form of deviance,” leading to “the utter starvation of political and cultural discourse.”¹⁴

In such an atmosphere, folk music didn’t stand a chance. America was remaking itself, Cantwell posits, with World War II as a wall against the past not to be looked beyond and with the marketplace and militarism at the center of the nation’s field of vision. This was not the blippy, fragmented marketplace that the Weavers had managed to conquer: modern communications, particularly television, had a homogenizing impact. Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, described the effect: “An American became an ‘average man.’ He dressed, acted, wanted and behaved in the image of what the advertiser and manufacturer and song plugger said was ‘normal.’”¹⁵

Cantwell adds, “Participation in the market … had a peculiar new imperative to it, as if the very survival of the social order were at stake.”¹⁶

There were still pockets of folk music, of 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, but he also has the bigger vision, which is so rare and so valuable, that can step back and say ‘I don’t know about this stuff,’ or ‘I’m not the right person to do this—let’s let so-and-so do it.’ And that’s what he did with the folk festival, I think brilliantly.”²⁹

Throughout the history of the Newport Folk Festival, Wein has employed four men to act as native guides to the world of folk music. Each of these guides has stamped the festival with his ideas of what folk is and should be and in so doing has helped define the genre each step of the way.

Wein’s first native guide showed up on his doorstep when he booked Odetta at Storyville. Albert Grossman was born in Chicago in 1927 and had a degree in economics from Roosevelt University. In 1956, he too opened a nightclub—a Chicago folk spot called the Gate of Horn (“the inside place for inside people”)—in the basement of the Rice Hotel on Chicago Avenue and Dearborn Street. He hosted performers such as Odetta, Bob Gibson and a then-unknown Joan Baez, all of whom would figure prominently in the first Newport festival, and soon began managing some of the acts who played there.

Grossman would go on to become one of the most important and bestknown managers in musical history, spanning the folk and rock worlds and with a client list that included Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band and Janis Joplin. He was a big man with a big, deep voice, and he was considered a businessman in a world where business wasn’t supposed to matter. A lot of people in the folk world considered him an anomaly. In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Michael Gray wrote of Grossman, “In a milieu of New Left reformers and folkie idealists campaigning for a better world, Albert Grossman was a breadhead, seen to move serenely and with deadly purpose like a barracuda circling shoals of fish.” David Braun, a lawyer who worked for both Dylan and Grossman, said, “He was the first person to realize that there was real money to be made in the music business.”³⁰ Grossman was no stranger to lawsuits, including from Dylan, who would eventually call him, in the documentary No Direction Home, a “Colonel Tom Parker figure … you could smell him coming.”

But not everyone felt that way. Indeed, Grossman carried with him many of the conflicts and contradictions of the folk revival itself. Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, calls Grossman “a person who was misunderstood and resented by some people, because of his bellicose nature. But frankly, I think he made as great a contribution to folk music as any of we artists, with the exception of Pete Seeger.” Yarrow also claimed that Grossman

believed in Bob Dylan, and he protected Bob, so Bob could be what he was. Bobby was allowed to make those decisions for himself, as were Peter, Paul and Mary, because Albert protected him. And made contracts that allowed him to sing the songs he wanted, rather than having an A&R person tell him what to do. And record them the way he wanted, with the producers and the engineers he wanted; to decide what the record album would look like, and entirely be free to be an artist. Albert was a genius in that, and he changed the field to make that happen. And he made that happen for all his artists.”³¹

After Grossman’s death in 1986, Yarrow told Musician magazine’s Rory O’Conner that Grossman “was concerned first and foremost with authenticity,” but that he “realized that it wasn’t enough just to write and perform songs, that there was a multitude of ways to be successful and to happen, to become important, to be wanted by that public. It was necessary to couple artistic success with enormous economic success in order for that to take place.”

Wein recalls sitting up with Grossman until 3 a.m. every night of Odetta’s Storyville engagement. “I found out that he knew the entire world of folk music, and he was a brilliant guy, and we became very close friends.”³² They also became partners, forming Production Artists and Management Associates. Their first project was the Newport Folk Festival. Wein remembers that the idea of a separate festival was an easy sell to the board of directors of the Newport Jazz Festival and the city. “We were riding high at that time. The festival was doing well, and we didn’t have any problems.… Everybody wasn’t excited about folk music per se, but the concept of doing a second festival met with unanimous approval.”

The first festival was held Saturday and Sunday afternoon and night, July 11 and 12, 1959, in Freebody Park. Studs Terkel was the MC for the first day, Oscar Brand for the second. Billy Faier, editor of the folk music magazine Caravan, welcomed festivalgoers in the program by writing, “The Scholars, the city-bred folksingers, and the ‘authentic’ singers are here to give you what is probably the very first representative picture of American Folk Music ever held on the concert stage.”

John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, a group of young players reviving old-time American music, recalls that they “were odd birds there.… Everybody else was a pretty smooth, professional act, so to speak, and we were just musicians dressed in our everyday clothes. And there was nothing like us there. And somehow we were well received.”³³

Frederic Ramsey Jr., writing in the Saturday Review of July 25, said that there was no “consistent mood that was established early and maintained … there were slumps, swells, wallows and heights.”³⁴ Still, he found plenty of heights, including John Jacob Niles and Cohen’s Ramblers. In the New York Times of July 19, Robert Shelton called the festival “perhaps the most ambitious attempt ever made at delineating a cross-section of the nation’s folk music…. The range of the programs … stressed the American idiom, and within that framework it was far-reaching, if not encyclopedic.” He added that Odetta’s performance was “the crowning performance of the week-end…. Here was folk music identification married to theatrical vocal artistry at its very best.”³⁵

Shelton was a little more conflicted about the festival in private. In a letter to folklorist Archie Green, he wrote that “I rather consciously held back on negative criticism at Newport in both my Times piece and Nation piece. I may be wrong, but I think a new venture like this needs public support now. There’ll be time enough to tear into it after it is old enough to stand on its own feet.”³⁶

On Sunday morning, a panel discussion was held at Rogers High School on the topic “What Is American Folk Music?” The panel, moderated by critic and musicologist Marshall Stearns, took on some of the questions that had been swirling around the folk revival, debating whether indigenous regional folk music would survive in an increasingly commercialized musical world. Folklorist Alan Lomax argued, according to the Providence Journal’s account, that “the very essence of folk music and style is rooted in particular localities and warned that the destruction of local traditions and cultures in a mass-communication age would make a ‘gray world.’”³⁷

After an afternoon program including Seeger and the duo of Tom Makem and Paddy Clancy that drew 2,500 people, 5,500 turned out for an evening bill that included Jimmie Driftwood (including his hit, “The Battle of New Orleans”); Leon Bibb, whose volcanic voice set spirituals ablaze; the country blues of Barbara Dane; the bluegrass of the Stanley Brothers and more.

John Cohen remembers the Stanley Brothers, which of course featured the seemingly immortal bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, for two reasons. He says the rest of the band was a sight to behold as well: “One guy, Bill Napier, the mandolin player—he was dressed up like Grandpa Jones, with a big old funky mustache. And then Chubby Anthony, the fiddler, was in overalls. And the bass player was this crazy Cousin Mort, who … did these crazy imitations of sounds, like a hog eating garbage, and he made you aware of a tomato going down his throat. Or starting an old Ford. Weird stuff!”³⁸

Second, Cohen saw the Stanley Brothers with a young girl who had seen the Ramblers rehearsing on the back of a truck: she was “barefoot, looking at us with a rose in her hair. I was immediately attracted to her, and she started asking about us, and she and I walked around, this and that, and when the Stanley Brothers played … she and I were right next to the stage, and she’d never heard this kind of music…. And the next evening, she and I were standing around, and suddenly she says, ‘I’ve got to go on the stage; this guy’s inviting me up.’”³⁹

The guy was Bob Gibson, a frequent performer at Grossman’s Gate of Horn and a lower-tier star through the early 1960s. The girl who had attracted Cohen’s attention was Joan Baez (or, as the Providence Journal mangled her name, “Joan Byers”), whose spectral soprano rose out of “Virgin Mary Had a Son” like a revelation. Gibson once described Baez as “bare feet, three chords, and a terrified attitude!”⁴⁰ But years later, Oscar Brand would recall other members of the Ramblers, as well as would-be headliners the Kingston Trio, running out 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,” the essential hard-and-heavy bluesman John Lee Hooker performed, as did the Louisiana fiddle-and-guitar duo of Butch Cage and Willie B. Thomas, who had recently been discovered by the traveling folklorist Harry Oster. The field also included the Weavers (who had replaced Seeger with Erik Darling in 1958) and Joan Baez (or Boez, as the Providence Journal continued to err⁵²).

And on Sunday afternoon, Freebody Park hosted a hootenanny—an opportunity for amateur musicians among the attendees to strut their stuff for one song each. Shelton, of the Times, wrote that the amateurs’ songs ranged in subject matter from the recently downed U-2 spy plane to the discipline of psychoanalysis, and while he danced around the question of how good any of them were, he called the hoot “a welcome idea…. Folk music is more than an art for spectators. It is a participation sport.”⁵³

In 2009, Seeger remembered the performance of the eighty-eight-year-old retired Canadian lumberjack, O. J. Abbott:

He came down with his daughter, and sang a song she didn’t approve of:

An old man come a courtin’ me

Fa la la loodle

An old man come a courtin’ me

Hi-diree-down

An old man come a courtin’ me

Offered to marry me

Maids, when you’re young, never wed an old man

He has no fa loodle

Fa la la loodle

He has no fa loodle

The divil a-one

He has no fa loodle

He’s lost his ding-doodle

So maids, when you’re young, never wed an old man.

Oh, the audience loved it! But his middle-aged daughter was a little embarrassed.”⁵⁴

The festival drew about 10,000 people, down from the previous year’s 12,000 to 14,000, Shelton estimated in the Times. But already the festival was serving as a focal point for the youth culture that drove, and took sustenance from, folk music’s commercial revival. Susan Montgomery, in Mademoiselle, described the scene in terms befitting the transmission of sacred texts:

Each night the music continued long after the regular performances were over, when it became the property not of professionals but of small groups of students who carried their sleeping bags and instruments down to the beach.

There, around fires built in holes scooped out of the sand to keep off the fog … [they] sang and clapped to songs like “It Takes a Worried Man”…. Before the morning was over students would be playing and singing again—on the beaches, on the narrow strip of grass dividing the main boulevard. Inevitably students sat huddled in little groups as if drawing warmth from one another. Their faces were solemn, almost expressionless, while they were singing, and they moved quickly from song to song without talking very much.⁵⁵

While the attendance had slid, the organizers had said that it was good enough to keep the festival going. But they didn’t get the chance. The 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, held the next weekend, started off strongly, with performers including Eubie Blake, Willie “the Lion” Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and their bands and an estimated 8,500 people at the evening show. The next night, however, was nearly the end of music in Newport.

About 16,000 people packed Freebody Park the night of Saturday, July 2, for the bill, which included the Oscar Peterson Trio, the Horace Silver Quintet, the Ray Charles Orchestra, and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. But outside, thousands of young people roaming around the periphery of the park tried to break down the gates of the park and climb its stone wall. After they were repelled by the police, they roamed through downtown Newport, throwing bottles and beer cans at police officers and vandalizing shops. City Manager George A. Bisson was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “We simply don’t have the manpower to cope with the situation.”⁵⁶ The state police and the Rhode Island National Guard were called out; tear gas and fire hoses were used to clear youths from the gates of the park, while the Newport police shuttled arrestees into holding cells.

Inside the park, the festival continued relatively normally. Indeed, the police asked Wein to keep the music going—and concertgoers inside the park—while the security forces tried to clear things up. The show lasted until 2:15 a.m., after which, Wein writes, “the musicians left in a phalanx of cars, with a police escort, the fans streaming out onto streets littered with broken glass, beer cans, overturned cars, smashed windows, and the lingering, diffuse odor of tear gas.”⁵⁷ In all, 182 people were arrested, plus another 27 the next day on the city’s beaches, which were then closed.

Later that day, the Newport City Council voted to cancel the rest of the festival, save a blues show scheduled for that afternoon featuring Jimmy Rushing, Otis Spann, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and more. The city’s taverns were also shut down for two days. Afterward, Louis Lorillard announced his intention to sue: “The audience was well behaved and enjoying the performances. It was only the unruly element outside of the jazz festival park that created the disturbances…. City officials publicly claimed they could handle any situation arising which proved to be completely untrue and they took the unnecessary step of canceling our remaining performances even though the jazz festival itself was entirely blameless.”⁵⁸

Not everyone in Newport agreed with the council’s decision. Leonard Scalzi, board president of the Newport Chamber of Commerce and manager of the Viking Hotel, was opposed to the action, as were at least several concertgoers, who told the Times that the police had at least as much to do with the violence as anyone else.

As befitting the era, Harold Boxer, music director of the Voice of America, called the decision “food for the Communists.”⁵⁹ His colleague Willis Conover added, “The Russians are going to pick up on this incident. They will say that this proves that jazz bands are hoodlums.”⁶⁰ But it didn’t matter.

While the council didn’t explicitly rule out future jazz or folk festivals, Bisson was adamant: “As far as I am concerned that’s the last jazz festival of a similar nature that will ever come to Newport.”⁶¹ When Lorillard tried to get a license for a 1961 festival, the council voted down his request.

It only took a few months to prove Bisson’s words wrong: A new group, called Music at Newport and comprising city businessmen and fans, acquired a license to put on a festival in Freebody Park. They hired concert promoter Sid Bernstein (who later brought the Beatles to America for the first time) to produce the festival, to be held June 30 through July 3, 1961, and the bill included Bob Hope, Judy Garland, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing and Julie Wilson. Crowds were decent, and the festival passed peacefully: “as sedately as a Tanglewood concert,” the Times reported.⁶² Newport police chief Joseph A. Radice agreed that “Newport has regained its good name and can produce a successful jazz festival without riots.”

But the festival lost a reported $70,000. (Hope canceling probably didn’t help.)

Wein says he was driving with Joyce one day and heard Bernstein being interviewed on the radio. Asked whether he’d be returning to Newport, Wein remembers Bernstein saying, “No. I can’t make any money there. No one can make any money there except George Wein.” Wein turned to his wife and said, “He’s right.”⁶³

Wein applied for a license for a 1962 Newport Jazz Festival. Louis Lorillard had been the liaison with the city, but Wein says that the Lorillards were in the process of splitting up—“she sued him for divorce three separate times,” Wein says. Louis was out of the country, not to be found; all the other investors dropped out, convinced that Newport had gone cold as a music venue. The license was granted with a few conditions: the festival was limited to three days; capacity was set at ten thousand; the shows had to be over by 12:15 a.m. Wein, speaking today, is fairly certain that he had to put up some money for possible security expenses (as had the Bernstein group). The festival included Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and a program that exhibited the relationship between tap dancing and jazz.

The folk festival would return to Newport the next year, but there would be changes on the producers’ side as well—Grossman was out. He had already become one of the busiest and hardest-working managers in the music business, and the company he’d formed with Wein was dissolved (“a huge financial mistake on my part,” Wein writes, “and Grossman never failed to remind me that I had ended the association, not he”⁶⁴).

So Wein needed a new native guide—someone whose name would open doors in the folk world and whose life and work would keep them open. That’s where Pete Seeger came in.

Seeger was already the dean of American folk music by this point. Born in New York and the product of prep schools and a stint at Harvard, he changed tracks dramatically after first hearing folk music while traveling with his father, musicologist Charles Seeger, at Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. After dropping out of Harvard in 1938, he’d worked with Alan Lomax and ridden the rails with Woody Guthrie himself. He’d performed with Paul Robeson in a 1949 concert that ended in a hail of rocks thrown by anticommunists claiming to be defending American freedom. (The concert was the second of two planned shows; the first was canceled thanks to a similar outbreak of freedom-loving violence.)

He’d toured the country with Guthrie and the Almanac Singers, singing labor songs from coast to coast, and cofounded the Weavers, whose political message may have been sweetened by the state-of-the-art (for 1950) arrangements but was never muted. Even after their hit with “Goodnight Irene,” Seeger had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to say whether he had ever been a Communist. (The sentence and conviction were overturned in 1962.)

The Weavers’ reunion concerts at Carnegie Hall were sold-out affairs, but Seeger later left the group—over their decision, he said, to record a jingle for a cigarette commercial. And while his conviction was overturned in 1962, he “mysteriously” didn’t appear on TV or radio for seventeen years, as he continued to be tailed by the FBI. Unaccountably for someone who was considered a dangerous subversive, he was allowed to continue performing for children and teaching the banjo. Many of the figures of the folk revival credited him with inspiring them and creating their audience from the children he had taught and performed for. Not for nothing was he called “the Johnny Appleseed of folk music.”

In short, he’d walked the walk. He’d earned his credibility. Wein had listened to Seeger back in 1960, when he wrote about having a more diverse, authentic folk festival, and he was the man Wein turned to when he needed another key to presenting—and helping to create—the folk world.