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It was a very nice dream,I think. All in all it worked quite well.

JOYCE WEIN

UTOPIA

In the fall of 1962, the Weins drove to Beacon, New York, where Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi were building their log-cabin house. There, George Wein asked Pete for his help in reviving the Newport Folk Festival. Seeger agreed, but he had ideas of his own.

Most importantly, the folk festival, unlike its commercial brother, the jazz festival, would be run as a nonprofit entity. That wouldn’t free the festival from the responsibility of taking in at least as much money as it paid out, but it meant that everyone’s compensation would be set by the board of a Newport Folk Foundation, unlike in a for-profit business, where an owner or a group of shareholders gets whatever is left after expenses. In the nonprofit model, whatever is left after expenses and salaries goes to the furtherance of the organization’s mission.

That mission was laid out in a manifesto billed as the result of discussion among Seeger, Wein and Theo Bikel. It foresaw a seven-member board that would “be representative of every branch of the folk world.” They also proposed using the net income of the festival “to underwrite research of ethnic material … to the benefit of the entire field of folk music.”¹

The proposal envisioned three nighttime concerts with bills led by star performers but also giving a chance to lesser-known acts, along with a slew of themed daytime workshops that would offer a chance for “fans of one particular performer or idiom to really soak up all they want, and for the performer to really give more than a superficial glance at what they can do.”

It also said that performers’ fees would be set—no individual negotiating. Seeger said the fee should be union scale—$50 a day, no matter how many concerts or workshops a performer did in that time. The idea originally came from Toshi Seeger, inspired by Pete Seeger’s having donated his Newport fee in order to bring Quebecois fiddler Jean Carignan to perform.

Then as now, performers and managers were wary of any promoter who asked an artist to take much less than their normal fee for the good of the organization putting on the show and who swore that no one would pocket the money the performer was leaving on the table. Businessman George Wein would likely have a hard time asking someone used to getting hundreds or thousands of dollars a night to play for $50 to help keep alive the American folk tradition. But if Pete Seeger asked, that was different.

“There was only one Pete Seeger,” Wein remembered in 2009. “You need to have somebody whose integrity could not be challenged. And no one ever challenged Pete’s integrity. He had the respect, and he still does have it.”²

Joyce Wein told historian Carol Brauner in 1982, “Pete gives the whole folk field a conscience and an attitude and a dignity, and all the youngsters follow his lead. There are things they wouldn’t think of doing, because of Pete. And there are things they naturally do, because of Pete.”³

Members of the first board of directors of the Newport Folk Foundation would have curatorial responsibilities in a given musical field. There was Seeger; Bikel; Bill Clifton of the bluegrass kings, the Dixie Mountain Boys; gospel singer Clarence Cooper of the Tarriers; Erik Darling of the Rooftop Singers, who had succeeded Seeger in the Weavers; Jean Ritchie, an expert in Appalachian music; and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who represented the young performers of the urban coffeehouse scene. Wein was designated nonvoting chairman.⁴

This began a phase in the festival’s history that Wein described as “Utopia.” It was the high point of the melding of traditional music, popular folk artists and the conscience that ran through both, and Wein called it probably his proudest achievement in a lifetime of producing musical events. Each year, traditional performers opened young concertgoers’ ears to enduring musical traditions, while chart-topping singer-songwriters purported to give voice to contemporary concerns such as the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation.

“From ’63 to ’69 was seven years of the most beautiful relationship of artists with each other that I have ever seen,” Wein remembers.⁵ Yarrow says of the structure, “Something happens when you make it a nonprofit. Nobody’s getting paid anything really. The spirit is that you’re doing it for a cause—in this case, something that was near and dear to our hearts, which was what folk music embodied…. In its intent and in its performance, it was accessible; it was inclusive, and it was joyous.”⁶

In How Can I Keep From Singing, his biography of Seeger, David King Dunaway describes the Newport festivals of the early and mid-’60s as the realization of Seeger’s dream to make folk music America’s favorite music. “People parked ungrumblingly in vast lots and carried in instruments and picnic coolers. Campgrounds filled with singing teenagers and sleeping bags. When a downpour threatened an outdoor concert, performers and audience only laughed and sang rain songs. This was more than a concert; it was a gathering, Woodstock before drugs and electric guitars.”⁷

Yarrow agrees, saying that despite the obvious aesthetic differences, “the consciousness of Newport fed the impulse of Woodstock…. There were people who said, ‘We want morality; we want legitimacy; we want an ethical country; we want fairness. But also, we reject the restraints of conventional society, and we are going to live that way here for this one moment.’”⁸

Robert Cantwell said the festival “provided for the eruption into daylit social space the hidden underground life of an emergent youth culture.”⁹ Murray Lerner’s film Festival!—a documentary about the 1963–1966 Newport Folk Festivals—shows the continuation and the growth of the youth scene Susan Montgomery had described in 1960: Crowds of young people dash into the fields of Newport for afternoon and evening workshops and concerts;¹⁰ young people on motorcycles roar past the staid mansions before bunkering down in parks, beaches and sidewalks; “fresh” from such rough accommodations, they gather anew in and around the festival site to hear the music again.

Lerner says his original intention in shooting was merely to provide footage for the Foundation’s archive. He was inspired to turn his material into a film after seeing that do-it-yourself attitude among youthful folk devotees—not just in regards to music: “I thought, ‘Wait a minute; there’s something going on here that’s beyond entertainment.’ … It was growing in popularity … and it was being used to create a philosophy and a cultural movement. I thought I could make a very broad film about the meaning of that movement.”¹¹

“Why are we doing this?” Pete Seeger asks and answers in the film. “Because we believe in the idea that the average man and woman can make his own music in this machine age. It doesn’t all have to come out of a loudspeaker. You can make it yourself…. And it can be your own music.”

At the main venue, as well as at St. Michael’s School and Touro Field, there was room for workshops and small concerts in various styles: “You have 1,000 people over here, listening to fiddlers,” Seeger said in 2009, “and 500 people over there listening to some blues singers, and another 500 over there listening to Irish ballads.”¹²

In Jim Rooney and Eric Von Schmidt’s Baby Let Me Follow You Down: An Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years, Everett Alan Lilly, bassist of the young bluegrass hotshots, the Charles River Valley Boys, described the mosaic of workshop stages as “like taking an alcoholic to a picnic”:

Over in one field you had genuine Southern Comfort; over here you had Ballantine Ale; over there you had Seagram’s; then you had very fine, old wine somewhere else—maybe too many people wouldn’t go over there, but the ones who did really understood it.

I was tireless. I didn’t want to miss anything. Whenever we weren’t playing, I was out in the field going to hear Maybelle Carter or Doc Watson or Bill Monroe or Bob Dylan or Joan Baez. As young as I was, I was impressed by the range of music and styles and also the quality of the music. And then there were the parties in those mansions! Where else could you go and walk among so many truly great musicians?¹³

A lot of what Seeger envisioned for the nonprofit festival came to pass. The 1963 festival, held July 26–28, included recent rediscoveries such as Appalachian singers and songwriters Dock Boggs, Jim Garland and Dorsey Dixon, a North Carolinian who had spent more of his life as a millworker than as a musician; country bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee; Maybelle Carter; and Tony Saletan, a former Shaker-camp folksong leader who adapted the modern version of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”

Festivalgoers could learn from a workshop on music of the Kiowa tribe or pick up on the fine points of autoharp technique from Mother Maybelle Carter and Mike Seeger (including a Carter version of “Never On a Sunday”). Bob Davenport performed the unexpurgated version of the ballad “Seven Nights Drunk” (“Bollocks upon a rolling pin I never saw before”). John Lee Hooker told the crowd, “We are here to pay our dues to the natural facts,” while seagulls cawed around his introduction to the haunting “Freight Train Be My Friend.”

The Georgia Sea Island Singers contributed by chanting story-songs, overcoming a condescending introduction from Alan Lomax (“You probably won’t understand all the words”), who also saw fit to introduce each song. And the Freedom Singers brought raw, righteous power with “Fighting for My Rights” (to the tune of “Lonely Avenue”) and “I Love Your Dog,” a gospel-based chant of racial harmony.

The discovery of the festival, however, was bluesman Mississippi John Hurt. His distinctively honeyed voice made him a connoisseur’s favorite; his scarce recorded output—twelve sides for Okeh Records—made him a collector’s prize; and his mysterious whereabouts—no one knew where he lived, and many presumed he had died—made him a larger-than-life figure. So when he came to perform at Newport, rediscovered by blues historian and collector Tom Hoskins, it was more than a musical moment.

Jim Rooney later wrote of that appearance, “It was unreal. John Hurt was dead. Had to be. All those guys on that Harry Smith Anthology were dead. They’d all recorded back in the twenties and thirties. They’d never been seen or heard from since. But there was no denying that the man singing so sweet and playing so beautifully was the John Hurt. He had a face—and what a face. He had a hat that he wore like a halo. In another place, in another time, Eric might well have got on his knees, but he didn’t.”¹⁴

But people weren’t sleeping on Second Beach to hear Tony Saletan. The bill also included Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary (a Grossman creation who had already had hits with Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”); Baez; and Del McCoury and Bill Monroe. Baez was her usual incandescent, powerful self, including her by-then-routine Bob Dylan cover (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”), while Dylan himself slew the audience with the unapologetic “Masters of War” and joined Seeger in an afternoon-workshop version of “You Playboys and Playgirls Ain’t Gonna Run My World.”

More than 46,000 people attended the three-day festival, and the foundation cleared more than $70,000. Shelton exulted that “integrity in folk music had a field day at the box office.”¹⁵ To an extent it was true, but as Wein notes, it was always the case that the best-known artists, working for union scale, paid the way for the Dorsey Dixons. “When you look over the list of people we brought here, it’s amazing. And it was all paid for by the fact that the Peter, Paul and Marys and the Joan Baezes were popular. It was an idealistic situation, and it really worked. And it was great to be part of it.”¹⁶

In keeping with the activist tradition, some saw the musical alternatives presented at Newport and were inspired to provide alternatives to other aspects of mainstream American life. The civil rights movement was always a part of the Newport festival in the 1960s. Before the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, respectively, the presence of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had literature and information tables at the festival site, as well as performances by the SNCC–aligned Freedom Singers, lent an extra sense of purpose to the proceedings.

The cultural highlight of that year’s festival came at the finale, when Dylan led Baez, the Freedom Singers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Seeger and Bikel in his “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Seeger’s reworking of the spiritual “We Shall Overcome,” an anthem for the civil rights movement.

Great songs or great politically charged anthems can’t be written on command; indeed, it takes more than a songwriter and a performer to create them. The original “We Shall Overcome” had been around for years. The 1963 festival finale wasn’t even the first time that someone had sung it at Newport—Guy Carawan did the honors in 1960. But in July 1963—the year that Governor George Wallace tried to block the integration of the University of Alabama; the year that Dr. Martin Luther King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; a month before the March on Washington and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (an event at which Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez, and Dylan performed); and the summer that four girls in Birmingham, Alabama, were killed when the Ku Klux Klan bombed their church—the song rang out far past Newport.

Bikel later called it “the apogee of the folk movement. There was no point more suffused with hope for the future.” Robert Cantwell called it

the supreme moment in this national seance, in which the summons of folksong to the cultural dead populated the stage with a reunited family of heroes and heroines of the past…. It was a moment in which, like a celestial syzygy, many independent forces of tradition and culture, wandering at large in time, some of them in historical deep space and others only transient displays in the contemporary cultural atmosphere, briefly converged to reveal, though inscrutably, the truth of our national life.¹⁷

Yarrow says that “not everybody was on board” with making such a direct political statement, “but for me, that was where we were. To the degree possible, we were walking the walk on stage.”¹⁸ He adds that an assessment of the performance and the era has to take into account the continued legacy of the blacklist, most notably in its treatment of Seeger, who was in the middle of his long ban from the nation’s airwaves—including from the Hootenanny TV show, which kept him off even though virtually every performer it showcased was a disciple of Seeger’s and was profiting off the boom he did so much to create:

We were living a perspective that would have been abhorrent to those people who had blacklisted Pete. Remember that Pete was a huge enemieslist guy, and … here we were, jubilantly celebrating this amazing legacy, and saying that we are doing exactly what the blacklist would have abominated. And at that very time, he was under surveillance, and we knew that. We’re talking about not just music here; we’re talking about really living something that was in the avant-garde of building a better nation. And that’s what we felt…. We felt we were speaking to the aspirations of our country to be a moral nation. And for that reason, it was a very precious experience.¹⁹

The ethic of the folk festival—imagined by Seeger, championed by the board, and exemplified by the volunteers, the underpaid musicians and the stunning musicological finds—didn’t stop when the concerts were over. Many of the performers lived together for the duration of the festival, put up in dormitories at Mount Vernon Junior College, sleeping on navy surplus sheets and blankets, eating food cooked by local chefs—all arranged for by Joyce Wein, with an army of helpers.

In 1982, Joyce Wein, speaking with historian Carol Brauner, remembered the logistical challenges behind the scenes as an integral part of what the folk festival was all about. While the jazz festival largely featured professional musicians, she said, “Under the structure of the folk festival, the folk foundation, we agreed to put the people up, to pay their transportation, whether it was by car, or bus or airplane. And we were dealing with people who, in many cases, were not professionals. So it became a horrendous thing, because we had these mimeographed contracts that we sent out—sometimes we got answers, sometimes we didn’t; we tried to track them down.”²⁰

Thanks to the complexity of the logistics and the fact that the Weins had just moved to New York and Joyce Wein hadn’t found a job in her field yet, she said, “I started taking over…. We used to put up, oh, anywhere from three to five hundred people, I think, and then I used to put up a big tent behind one of the houses and there was a cook that was very nice to work with…. And we used to feed everybody three times a day…. And then in addition, we ran a party every night, at one of the houses.”²¹

Betsy Siggins was the doyenne of the Cambridge folk venue Club 47, where for eight years in the 1960s she handled the bookings and offered her couch to any musicians who needed a place to stay—and in the Boston area in the early and mid-1960s, most of the black players did. She volunteered at the Newport Folk Festival during those years and often booked the touring musicians who played the festival at Club 47 a few days after Newport was over. She recalls the festival as “one of the most startlingly important things that ever happened to any of us who cared about the music. Because right then and there we could be exposed to about fifteen kinds of American music.”²²

And as a volunteer, she got up close with many of the legends. Ralph Rinzler introduced her to Louisiana bluesman Robert Pete Williams, who when he was discovered had been serving a life sentence for a murder he said was in self-defense and was released into “servitude parole,” an arrangement which saw him work eighty hours a week without pay. Siggins recalls, “I remember taking his hand and breaking into tears. I could cry now. [It was] that immediate connection I got with (a) people who are being oppressed, and (b) the way we had treated people in this country for way too long—and that he had a kind of music I had never experienced before.”²³

And when the nighttime shows were over, the artists got together at the dorms or the houses Wein had rented in town for the festival and played yet more. Wein, in his memoirs, recalls a night when Hurt was playing in the backyard to a group of enthralled kids, Odetta was singing in the living room, a bluegrass band was picking on the front lawn, and Dylan and Baez were in a room by themselves, trading songs.

Bob Jones, who began as a festival volunteer in 1963 and rose to become producer in 1985, recalls a night in 1964 talking with Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters on the steps of the Blues House (a house in the center of town where the blues musicians would be quartered together).²⁴ “Monroe asked Muddy, ‘Do you even play in the South?’ And Muddy said, ‘Not really.’”²⁵

“When it came down to it,” Jones says, “everybody sang with everybody else. Everybody played with everybody else. The blues players were very happy to hear Bill play.”²⁶

“Moments like these,” Wein writes, “were what the Folk Festival was really all about.”²⁷

Jim Kweskin played at Newport with his seminal jug band (including Geoff and the future Maria Muldaur) and solo for five years in a row. While playing Newport carried with it a certain degree of validation, he says, “I would have gone to Newport whether I was on the bill or not…. I went to Newport because I wanted to see those great musicians,” such as Hurt, Skip James, Son House and Bukka White, as well as exotic fare such as the fife-and-drum of Ed Young and the penny whistling of Spokes Mashiyane. “And not just the older guys; I got to see these musicians I didn’t get to see that much, like Spider John Koerner, or Mavis Staples, Dick and Mimi Fariña, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—much as they were my contemporaries, we didn’t get to see each other that often. So it’s an opportunity to hang out with all these great musicians who were my age.”²⁸

Judy Collins, the singer-songwriter and activist best known for Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now,” whose Newport career has ranged from 1963 to 2009 and who served on the board of directors, remembers the festival similarly as “a gathering place. An old boys—and young girls—convention, where you could get together and hang out and sing songs and stay up late.” Her favorite Newport moments don’t involve her own performances or her years on the board—they all involve seeing and meeting other performers. To her, Newport meant hearing Pops Staples and his Singers, the Charles River Valley Boys, the Chambers Brothers and more. “I did my part,” she says—“I certainly sang and performed. But it was so important to be at midnight around a campfire listening to Son House and Mississippi John Hurt—I mean, those were the days.”²⁹

The 1964 festival was the most successful one yet and the first to outdraw the jazz festival, with a total of seventy thousand people streaming into Newport over three days and four nights (July 23–26). With 4,500 in attendance, acts ranged from Bikel, Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez and Dylan to Seamus Ennis, Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Kentucky’s Dewey Shepherd and a Jean Ritchie–led demonstration of a “Play-Party,” a mix of a cappella singing and children’s game-style movements that early settlers used to get around prohibitions on music and dancing.

It was also the year Skip James, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, Muddy Waters and others made appearances at Newport, which the blues writer and photographer Dick Waterman later called “the greatest collection of country blues singers” assembled to that point.³⁰ There was also a performance of Cajun music by a band including Dewey Balfa, and while it went largely unremarked at the time, it had a seismic effect, in both Rhode Island and the Cajun homeland of Louisiana. These performances were the first fruit of the Newport Folk Foundation’s efforts to promote and foster the development of folk music not just one weekend per year at Newport but year-round and across the country.