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Ralph and I would say,“OK; we’ll find them.”

BOB JONES

TEXAS WAS THE WORST

When Mississippi John Hurt, who had been living in obscurity for many years, came to the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, his reemergence was seen as an example of the long-lost and forgotten talent that could still be found living in North America’s backwaters. George Wein wrote in his memoirs, “If John Hurt could live in obscurity for 35 years, how many other hidden treasures were scattered across American soil? His presence at the Folk Festival was a confirmation of every impulse that ran through the folk collector’s psyche.”¹ The discovery, preservation and promotion of those treasures comprised an important part of the mission of the Newport Folk Foundation.

In January 1964, the foundation made its first cash grants to institutions—$250 each to schools in Brasstown and Pine Mountain, North Carolina, and Hindman, Kentucky; the folk publications Little Sandy Review and Broadside (both of which had been and would continue to be critical of the Newport Folk Festival in their pages); and the Cooperative Recreation Service of Delaware, Ohio, to print five thousand books of folk songs for members of the Peace Corps. Five hundred dollars each were granted to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Willmette, Illinois; the Council of Southern Mountains in Berea, Kentucky, and Boston’s WGBH. Two hundred dollars went to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They also gave performers Dorsey Dixon and Hurt a tape recorder and a guitar, respectively.

In the program for the 1964 festival, folklorist and historian Ralph Rinzler wrote that grants were “an obvious point of departure,” but he added, “unlike some Socialist countries, where the government assumes responsibility for the collection, stimulation and preservation of folk creation and culture, we live in a situation where the product of folk culture nets millions of dollars annually in the entertainment industry but neither the industry nor the government has sought to conserve its natural resources in this area.”

Toward that end, the foundation gave Guy Carawan two $500 grants for the production of a folk music festival on John’s Island, South Carolina, home of Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, who had performed at Newport in 1963, and a place many of whose natives ended up at Newport in the next few years.

And on the recommendation of board members Alan Lomax and Mike Seeger (half brother of Pete Seeger), the foundation hired Rinzler to scour the country looking for little-known local talent and to sign them up to play at Newport, as well as to find areas of the country where a Newportsupported festival would bring traditional cultures to light. In their memo to the board, Lomax and Seeger said that “if Newport interests itself professionally in the destiny of American folk artists themselves, through trained personnel such as this scout, the Foundation can greatly benefit the whole field.”

A former member of bluegrass revivalists the Greenbriar Boys and a fixture on the New York folk scene when Bob Dylan was still getting his feet wet there, Rinzler had already traveled many miles in pursuit of folk music by the time he signed on with the Newport Folk Foundation. In 1961, while on the road with the Greenbriar Boys in North Carolina, he found Clarence Ashley, a performer whose music was on the Folkways Anthology but had long been assumed dead; on a subsequent trip to record Ashley, Rinzler was introduced to the guitarist and singer Doc Watson. He became Watson’s manager (others he managed included Bill Monroe) and encouraged him to pursue traditional music rather than rockabilly. Along with John Cohen and Izzy Young, Rinzler founded the Friends of Old-Time Music, presenting and producing concerts with veterans such as Ashley, Watson and Monroe, thus spreading the gospel of American music through its great purveyors as well as playing it himself.

As a scout for the Newport Folk Festival, Rinzler’s main purview, according to Lomax and Seeger, would include Canada’s maritime provinces, as well as French Quebec, “the foreign minority neighborhoods of Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh,” Mexico’s southwest, rural Alabama and the Cajun areas of Louisiana. On many of these trips, Rinzler, who died in 1994, went with Mike Seeger, who died in 2009; on others, he went with Bob Jones.

Jones had spent the 1963 festival working as a volunteer with Joyce Wein. But starting after that festival, he and Rinzler traveled through the South and in Texas, in later years heading up to Canada. He began working for the festival full-time in 1965—“I didn’t have anything else to do”²—and was named producer of the festival in 1985, a title he holds to this day.

This was part of the point of becoming a nonprofit: the proceeds of the festival, after expenses, were to be spent on finding talent that met Seeger’s definition of “old-timers” and indigenous musicians. That meant beating the bush for interesting, traditional, yet overlooked players and singers, so that the Newport Folk Festival would truly represent America’s musical traditions and materially support them where they were based.

In those days, that required a lot of driving and searching, without many clues to guide them. “Alan would say, ‘I know there are some black Cajun players,’” Jones says, “and Ralph and I would say, ‘OK; we’ll find them.’” And off they went.

Sometimes they didn’t even have that much to go on: “We’d go to the last remembered town” of a musician they had their eye on, Jones says, and start asking questions. When Jones and Rinzler found someone who piqued their interest, they’d let them know they were interested in having them come up to Newport. “And for those who could—well, who could read, number one—we had stories and pictures of the festival, to show what we do. And we told them that everything would be paid for.” They’d then make a quick recording of the musician or group to play for the festival board, who would have ultimate say over their choices.

Jones says he and Rinzler didn’t have any sort of quota; they simply signed up whomever they liked. Often, the person they were scouting wasn’t necessarily the person they signed.

The duo had local contacts and scouts: Mack McCormack, in Texas, would hip them to blues players; Paul Tate, president of the Louisiana Folk Foundation, was good for lots of names and locations, as well as staying in contact with musicians when the board approved one of Rinzler and Jones’s choices. “You know the white Southerner in the white linen suit?” Jones says of Tate. “This guy was the picture-perfect [representation] of that. He was right out of a movie script. But he was an incredible fan of the music—black, white, everything.” Jones would call Tate and send him bus tickets for performers they wanted; Tate would find the musicians, give them the tickets and get them on the bus.

But Rinzler, Jones and Mike Seeger were the ones who put in the miles. In the pre–civil rights South, this could carry some dangers. “We ran into a little bit of ill will in Florida,” Jones remembers, “as far as being white guys going into the black communities in 1963 and 1964. We were a little bit crazy.”

It wasn’t just Florida. “Louisiana was not that difficult. Texas was the worst, and Alabama was fairly reasonable, in that they’d stop us and ask what we were doing, and we had the pictures of the festival. But then Elliot Hoffman, the lawyer for Festival Productions, got nervous…. From then on we had to call every night.”

The stories, not surprisingly, are endless.

Alan Lomax once sent the pair to Dothan, Alabama, the self-styled Peanut Capital of the World. “We heard of this guy who sang a song about Kennedy’s death,” Jones remembers, “and someone recorded it for a TV news thing.” But while they were there, they heard someone playing, with children singing along. They walked in the direction of the sound, “and there was a black guy playing the pan pipes!” This wasn’t much more common in mid-’60s Alabama than it is now, but Joe Patterson was an uncommon player. Jones remembers that Patterson had a steel plate that he would beat to keep the rhythm, and he would hoot when the song got to a note that he didn’t have on the pipes.

Rinzler and Jones signed him up for the festival, but in the process they ran into the Patterson family dynamic: “I remember the family was upset because we didn’t take them. I wouldn’t say [Patterson] was retarded, but he might have been a little slow. The family pushed him out in the back, and he was living in this little shack. He was part of the family, but not really.” Instead, Patterson came to the festival accompanied by guitarist Willie Doss, who worked in the mill there.

Jones remembers himself and Rinzler driving in the Florida Panhandle heading into Louisiana. It was about 6 p.m. and pouring rain, and they saw someone hitchhiking while carrying a caseless guitar. They stopped and picked him up. He was headed to a small town to play in a bar that Jones describes as one of three or four shacks that pretty much constituted the downtown. But even from outside, they could tell a great harmonica player when they heard one. “So we go in, and there’s a whole bunch of people milling around, some dancing. They were all black. Everyone’s looking at us. So the guy we picked up goes to this bar—not really a bar, more like a shelf—and he’s standing there, and this harmonica player is playing there with one microphone.”

The band consisted of their passenger, the harmonica player, and a drummer with a makeshift kit—“a bass drum, a cymbal stand, a snare, a hi-hat, and some device which looked like a drum but wasn’t really a drum—you could bang on it.” But the harmonica player was good enough, Jones says, to continue hanging around.

The good time didn’t last long. “Suddenly, we see this scuffle. And the guy we had brought in was involved in this scuffle. So the harmonica player says into the microphone, ‘GET OUT!’ And he’s looking right at us.

“We’re out of there. So we go out, across the street and get into the car. And it’s still pouring. And these guys come out and they’re throwing bottles.”

They escaped, but Jones says, “We were intrigued, so we didn’t go far.” They stopped for the night at a motel about twenty minutes away, then drove back the next day, still hoping to make contact with the harmonica player. Not only was the player gone; so was the bar. “The place was over with.” The bar was itself attached to a food store, and Rinzler went in to inquire about the situation, and came out saying, “The guy we brought in was a real badass guy. And he was the one who started the fight!”

No one knew who the harmonica player was—Rinzler learned he wasn’t from that town and had just blown in for the night—and the duo lost their quarry. There’s regret in Jones’s voice to this day as he remembers the lost opportunity. “We never found out who the hell he was. And I tell you, this harmonica player was unbelievable.”

He shrugs his shoulders: “Those are the risks.”

In Texas, they found the preacher/singer Doc Reese and surprised him on moving day: “We were helping him and talking with his wife and his kids.” Rinzler and Jones were familiar to Reese, an ex-convict, because Lomax had recorded him during his incarceration. Later, Reese’s lawyer drove up and advised the two to come over to his house to talk about groups and musicians to check out.

The police followed them to the lawyer’s house. But when Rinzler and Jones got to the lawyer’s house, the police stopped at the end of the driveway. “So the lawyer’s telling us about the choir they had, and he says, ‘Now, don’t worry about this police car. He will not move until you start moving. He will not come onto my property, because if he does I will shoot him.’ And we thought, ‘Oh, very interesting.’”

From there they headed to the Huntsville prison to scout singers, but they were pulled over. According to Jones, the officer invented a law that required all white people to notify him personally if they wanted to speak to a black resident, and he made them empty the car, looking for guns, pamphlets, tapes of Martin Luther King, or any other dangerous weapons. But thanks to Rinzler’s association with bluegrass king Bill Monroe, the search turned out to be the break the two scouts needed:

So [the cop] comes across this file box of Bill Monroe photos and letters to mail out. So he pulls them out and says, “What’s this?” Ralph says, “That’s photos of Bill Monroe.” “I know who that is; why do you have these photos?” So Ralph says, “I’m his manager.” The cop says, “I don’t believe this. Pack the car up. I happen to be a big fan of Bill Monroe’s.” So we pack the car up and he says, “I am gonna drive you to the line. You’re not going back to the lawyer; you have to go directly out.”

So we get beyond the town, and the car stopped. And he stopped because this is now state property, and a state police car is flagging us down…. The state police officer came over, who was white, and admonished the sheriff—“These people have an appointment with the superintendent of the prison; why are you bothering them?” So we got back in the car and followed this guy for an hour.³

In 1964, they were in Tennessee, looking for a black Sacred Harp singing group to balance the thirty-member white group from Georgia they had already signed up. They headed to a church where the occasion, known as a “singing,” followed the norm: hours of singing in the afternoon, then a big meal afterwards. The minister introduced them to the group and the congregation, saying they were the first white people to ever come to their church. After the singing, “which was great,” Rinzler and Jones joined the meal. “And this woman said, ‘I never sat beside anyone white. And I wouldn’t be able to touch that chicken after you touched it.’

“Pretty amazing. Those were the things that happened,” Jones said.

Usually, Jones says, it wasn’t difficult to find the people they were looking for: “Most of these people we found were stalwarts in their own community. Even if their community was a rough black section of town, they were all well known.” It also wasn’t too hard to get people to agree to come to Newport, particularly after the festival had been around for a few years. (Even in the Southern towns where they’d gotten hassled by the police, things would go more smoothly the next time, especially since they made a habit of sending clippings of the residents’ Newport exploits.)

There were exceptions, though. Jones remembers looking for the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Fiddle Player.” They found him digging a ditch outside his house, but he rebuffed their advances—“I don’t play the fiddle anymore,” Jones recalls him saying. “Because I have religion—my wife and me. It’s not a good instrument to play.”

Jones says that he and Rinzler spent two days trying to change his mind. He never relented on his claim of being the world’s greatest fiddle player. But he also never agreed to come to Newport and play.

DeFord Bailey (“the Harmonica Wizard”) was the first black man to play at the Grand Old Opry. He’d been playing “Pan American Blues” in 1927 and was a regular on the Opry in 1928, one of its charter members. While reportedly his race was no obstacle to the radio and touring audiences loving him, he was required to use separate accommodations and restaurants on the road.

By 1941, however, he was getting phased out of the Opry, not least because of the Opry’s licensing disagreement with ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Artists and Producers), which led in part to the founding of BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated). Bailey’s music was controlled by ASCAP, and he was told he’d have to learn new material. No one else had to do that, Bailey replied, and ignored the request. He was let go in May 1941, and in 1946, Opry founder George Hay’s history of the venue referred to him as “a little crippled colored boy who was a bright feature of our show for about fifteen years. Like some members of his race and other races, DeFord was lazy…. He was our mascot and is still loved by the entire company. We gave him a whole year’s notice to learn some more tunes, but he would not. When we were forced to give him his final notice, DeFord said, without malice, ‘I knowed it waz comin’, Judge, I knowed it waz comin’.’” Bailey, not surprisingly, saw it differently, claiming that he’d wanted to do different songs and was told to stick with what the audiences liked. “They seen the day was coming when they’d have to pay me right … and they used the excuse about me playing the same old tunes.”⁴

When Rinzler and Jones found him in Nashville, he was shining shoes. They asked him to come to Newport and play, but Jones says Bailey’s response was categorical: “He did not want to play for white people.” The pair would call on Bailey every time they came through Nashville, and it took three or four times to convince him to play.

It took three tries to get Pete Forge as well, Jones says. In that case, Rinzler’s Opry connections worked against them: “He felt that he had never been given his due. So he held it slightly against Ralph; he felt he’d be taken again.”

To this day, Jones kicks himself for not finding any good musicians in the Canadian Maritimes in the 1960s. He reasons that the generation that brought the region’s traditional music to the fore in the 1980s, such as Natalie MacMaster, the Rankins, Barra MacNeil and others, must have had parents and uncles who played and sang—although they got canned salmon, a sweater and a commitment from one singer.

Overall, Jones says his days on the road were “a little terrifying at times. [But] I loved it. I think that’s where I found out that I was very comfortable with musicians, in general. I never was awed by any musician on a star basis or anything like that. And I think these were humbling experiences, to see these guys who were great musicians in their own right and were just being musicians. I just got along very easily.”

And he was struck by the fact that virtually none of the artists whom he and Rinzler pulled out of rural backwaters and back porches had any problem suddenly playing or singing into a microphone miles away from home to thousands of strangers: “They never really were awed themselves by the idea that they were going to play in front of ten thousand people. They just went out and played. You would have thought they’d be terrified. But they just went out and played. I found that to be stunning.”

While the traditional musicians may not have been awed by the venue, Rinzler writes of helping to polish his discoveries’ live-performance techniques. More importantly, though, he sometimes also had to explain to them that their most traditional songs were what the Newport organizers and audiences wanted.

A craftsperson can make something that looks like something he’s just seen in a newspaper, thinking that that’s what’s the latest thing. So he’ll copy a crockpot that’s mass produced and sold at K-Mart because that’s what he sees in the paper…. Doc Watson wanted to play Eddie Arnold songs and Chet Atkins songs because he knew that Nashville was a symbol of success and he figured that for him to be successful he had to sing what was popular….

Doc, being an imitation of a Nashville performer, would never have been as successful as he was being himself. And that took time and fieldwork … to take out the deepest cut of tradition that they were in contact with through their family or community and encourage them not to imitate pop Nashville or pop Cajun or rock musicians but to play the grassroots stuff that was unique and distinctive regionally and familially.⁵

The efforts by the Newport Folk Foundation to foster and develop folk art and traditions, as well as their appreciation, had plenty of successes during the 1960s. In 1968, a grant to high school English teacher Eliot Wigginton and a group of his students at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School helped sustain and expand the Foxfire Project, which became a magazine and series of books on the oral history and traditions of Appalachian culture that continues to this day.

Local and regional music benefited from the exposure and efforts of Newport, of course: Ralph Rinzler wrote in a memo to the board in 1965 that Jimmie Driftwood organized a small festival in Mountain View, Arkansas, and “found that once the event had passed the singers and pickers had gotten so accustomed to coming to Friday night rehearsals that they just kept showing up at the courthouse every Friday night throughout the year. Several years have passed and now they come by the hundreds rather than the dozens.” The Moving Star Hall Singers, from the Georgia Sea Islands, made their public debut at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and by the next year had played two engagements in Los Angeles.

The greatest accomplishment of the Newport Folk Foundation, however, is probably the beginning of the revitalization of Cajun and zydeco music.

It’s been said that the performance by an ad-hoc Cajun band at Newport in 1964 was the first large-audience performance of Cajun music outside of Louisiana. Contemporary Cajun king Steve Riley, leader of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and his former bandmate David Greely agree that the show was critical for the cultural flowering of Cajun music—and that the appreciation worked in both directions.

In the 1960s, Cajun culture in Louisiana was generally considered an embarrassment. Burton Grindstaff wrote in the Opelousas Daily World, “I contend there is no more music coming from a fiddle, accordion and triangle when three Cajuns get together than seeps through the cracks in your house when crickets feel an urge to make themselves heard. Cajuns brought some mighty fine things down from Novia [sic] Scotia with them, including their jolly selves, but their so-called music is one thing I wish they hadn’t…. All we can do is sit back and wait for the verdict from Newport, scared stiff.”⁶

In the 1965 Newport Folk Festival program, Paul Tate of the Louisiana Folk Foundation wrote that the disdain for Cajun music came from the circumstances of the Acadians’ arrival in Louisiana: having been expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755 and spent ten years wandering down the coast of the United States, “the Acadian sought in Louisiana not a new life but the old life in a new location.”

This led to a lack of integration between the Cajuns and the rest of Louisiana, leaving most Cajuns with the choice between standing seemingly aloof from their immediate surroundings or renouncing their heritage. Cajun music, Tate wrote, “lay captive, isolated and dying, hedged in by a ‘sub-tradition’ of mediocre imitation of country or Western or popular music.”

While Dewey Balfa’s performance at Newport put the lie to Grindstaff’s fears and turned the New England region on to the beauty of the Cajun music and culture, David Greely, a former student of the late master’s, says that the reaction to that performance had a similar effect on Balfa.

In Newport, Balfa said he would “bring home the echo of the standing ovation” he received there to Louisiana. Greely says Balfa returned to Lafayette, Louisiana, determined that his music would no longer get second-class treatment. Balfa himself later said, “My culture is not better than anyone else’s culture. My people were no better than anyone else. And yet, I will not accept it was a second-class culture.”⁷

In 1965, Tate wrote to the board that the music was on its way back. Just in the year since the Newport performance, Tate related examples of Cajun music being played at official and quasi-official Louisiana events, including the first-ever performance of Cajun music in the governor’s mansion.

The foundation, he wrote, sponsored music competitions at such Louisiana institutions as the Dairy Festival in Abbeville, the Cotton Festival in Ville Platte, the Rice festival in Crowley, the Yambilee Festival in Opelousas and the Acadian-style Mardi Gras activities in Church Point, Kaplan and Mamou:

We had been greatly concerned about the rapid loss of status of Acadian music in favor of western and country music, rock and roll, and popular music….

The invitation of the Cajun band to Newport had the desired effect of giving stature to traditional Acadian music played on traditional instruments. Directly related to this recognition of authentic Cajun music, there has occurred a revival of interest in such music far beyond anyone’s expectations.⁸

In the 1966 festival program, Tate wrote that Cajuns had lit out for Minneapolis, Houston, Boston and Denver, as well as going on a four-week tour of Europe. “The Newport Folk Foundation is principally responsible for what is happening to Cajun music today,” he added, concluding that the promulgation of the music was resulting in “a greater appreciation and understanding of Acadian culture and the Cajun soul—by the Cajun as well as by those with whom he comes in contact.”

By 1968, the state formed the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. In 1977, several small festivals united to form what we now know as the Festival de Musique Acadienne, which has run ever since. Thanks to the tireless efforts of musicians, folklorists and fans alike, Cajun culture is now recognized as one of the distinct American cultures.

Alongside the foundation’s fieldwork, many of the blues players who came to Newport in the first years of the nonprofit era were discovered by record collectors. Inspired by the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, these aficionados began to look for the men behind the songs, figuring that at least some would still be alive—the original recordings had been cut in the 1920s and 1930s, which wasn’t so far in the past.

Indeed, Dick Spotswood’s introduction of Mississippi John Hurt at the 1963 festival was an entertaining example of the process: “This spring, Tom Hoskins, my friend, went down to Avalon, Mississippi, after we had decided that there was a good chance that John might be there. He heard his old record of Avalon Blues and on there was a line, ‘Avalon’s my home town, always on my mind.’ Putting two and two together, we decided there must be an Avalon, Mississippi. We went there; the first person we asked knew where he was, he played a few notes for us, and we said, ‘That’s all.’”⁹

(Hurt, speaking from the stage, remembered it a little differently: “Spotswood discovered me down in Avalon, Mississippi. I thought it was real funny. I said ‘Why? What have I did? Is the FBI looking for me? I ain’t did nothing’”).

It was a transcendent moment. Dave Van Ronk, who followed Hurt onto the stage, told the crowd, “I feel like fainting.” Many artists were plucked from obscurity and given a chance to see and feel the appreciation that people had for their long-ago work.

But the process didn’t always work like it was supposed to. Folklorist Phil Spiro said, “I’m half inclined today to say that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it.” Some of these artists were only part-time musicians even in their prime, Spiro explained, and bringing them into the entertainment business thirty years later was a shock.

We … consciously or unconsciously tried to shape the music they played on stage. The same statement could be made for the guys running Paramount during the thirties, but at least their motive was simple profit, which motive the artist shared. Our motivation was a strange combination of ego, scholasticism and power. I wonder now what would have happened if we had just left them alone instead of telling them what songs to sing and what instrument to play them on….

Worst of all, aside from a couple of people like Chris Strachwitz and Dick Waterman, the rediscoverers all too often didn’t see the old guys as real, breathing, feeling, intelligent people. In general, we were collectors of people, who we tended to treat as if they were the very rarest of records—only one copy known to exist.¹⁰

And Jack Landron, who performed as Jackie Washington in the Club 47 scene and at Newport in the mid-1960s, says that as with so many other processes, the experience of musical integration was very different for white and nonwhite players and fans:

For the white kids, they were put into contact with black musicians [about whom] they said, “Oooh; I admire what they’re doing, and I wanna learn how to do it, and these people aren’t what Daddy told me they were.” They were having a sense of discovery, whereas I think nonwhite people were having a sense of a lessening of tension. Which is a different experience.

And one enters an experience like that with a certain level of apprehension or distrust; “How far is this gonna go?” … The white kids were discovering something that the nonwhite people knew. So [for us] there wasn’t a sense of excitement about it.¹¹

Still, the rediscovery by the Newport Folk Festival and Foundation in the 1960s of long-forgotten artists and the unearthing, development and encouragement of traditional performers tucked away in America’s hollows and highlands had effects that spread across the nation and outlasted the first incarnation of the festival itself.

During his travels, including those for the Newport Folk Foundation, Rinzler began to notice that music wasn’t the only old-time tradition that fascinated him. “Often while listening to people sing,” he later said, “I’d sit down on a folk chair or put my foot on a folk basket, or kick over a folk table.”¹²

That appreciation for folk art, craft and story led Rinzler to start collecting items from the places he’d been and eventually to present them at the folk festival, both as exhibits and for sale. It didn’t work out very well; later, he said, “At Newport I persuaded the board to do traditional craft and found to my chagrin that Newport was the wrong venue. I personally paid for the inventory and I shudder to think now the enormous physical effort and danger that was involved with hauling a 15-foot U-Haul with a bumper hitch behind an old station wagon, loading, unloading and repacking it at every stop with pots and rugs which weighed a ton.”¹³