Читать книгу I Got a Song - Rick Massimo - Страница 9

1

I HAVE a song. Here it is.

PETE SEEGER

PEOPLE THINK THIS STUFF JUST HAPPENS

It’s a summer afternoon in Newport, Rhode Island, a small city on Aquidneck Island where some of the world’s richest people once had their summer “cottages,” and Pete Seeger takes the stage in Freebody Park, a quadrangle with baseball diamonds at opposite corners in the middle of the city.

While thirty-three-year-old George Wein, the producer of the show, busies himself with a million details backstage, the master of ceremonies, Studs Terkel, introduces Seeger by referring to his iconic status: “Whenever you see a young banjo player anywhere in the country with a banjo waist-high, head back, Adam’s apple bobbing, you can say ‘Like Kilroy, Pete Seeger has been there.’ Here, then, is America’s tuning fork—Pete Seeger.”¹

Despite the introduction, Seeger begins with a twelve-string guitar around his neck. Ever the educator as well as the entertainer, Seeger explains to the audience that the words to his first song, “The Bells of Rhymney,” were written “by a man in Wales, a man who was raised as a coal miner” who adapted a nursery rhyme to depict Wales’s mining towns and include a critique of the barons of the mines. Seeger adapted the song himself, adding, “Throw the vandals in court, say the bells of Newport.” He begins slowly, almost arrhythmically, but then picks up the pace, ending in a speedball of energetic righteousness.

From there he hoists his trademark banjo and goes into the gentle “Grains of Sand,” interrupting it halfway through to inform the audience that he used to sing the song to put his daughter to sleep—“until she realized my purpose in singing it” and asked for something “more exciting.” Instead, he begins his version of the Bantu story/song “Abiyoyo” about a giant who was neutralized by a father-son team using the very musical and magical skills that had gotten them cast out of their village. He encourages the audience to sing along. The conjoined voices float over the field and sweep on the wind over the roofs of the privileged and Newport’s oft-forgotten working class alike.

The show was vintage Pete Seeger; the year was 1959, and on that July weekend the Newport Folk Festival began.

On another summer afternoon in Newport, the sun begins to slant its light into the eyes of anyone to the left of the stage where Pete Seeger is playing again. Once again, it’s vintage Seeger as he plunks through classics such as “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Midnight Special,” and “This Little Light of Mine.” He explains that “This Land Is Your Land” is a song that was “never sold in any music store, never played on the radio. But the kids liked it.” And again, he gets the audience to sing: he says a couple of hours before taking the stage, “If the human race is here in a hundred years, [they] will find how important a word, in any language, is ‘participation’—in all walks of life.” In fact, he seems to gain energy from the voices around him.²

He could use the extra energy. It’s 2009; Pete Seeger is ninety years old. Freebody Park is quiet; Seeger is performing at Fort Adams, a Revolutionary War–era fort overlooking Newport’s harbor. More than nine thousand people are listening to Seeger in the field in front of the stage, with more taking in the concert from various boats bobbing in the water (as well as some too big to bob).

This time, Seeger isn’t by himself. With him on the stage is his grandson, Tao Rodriguez Seeger, thirty-eight, who performed earlier in the day with his own band. He’s not the only heir: also on stage with Seeger is Billy Bragg, the British singer and activist who has been raising a ruckus for thirty years but treats this appearance with the humility of a student. (Bragg had already given a performance in the afternoon, during which he called mocking attention to “the poor people who couldn’t afford tickets so they had to come free in their yachts.”) There too is Tom Morello, who performed in his solo acoustic, politically charged persona, the Night-watchman, and earlier in the day called Seeger “the living embodiment of justice and everything that is good about America.” (As guitar player with Rage Against the Machine, Morello started his musical life with the kind of electronic volume that, legend has it, sent Seeger looking for an axe to literally cut power to the sound system decades ago.)

Also with Seeger are Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, two keepers of the flame for roots-oriented, singer-songwriter-based folk music, as well as young singer-songwriters Iron and Wine and Ben Kweller and members of some of the hippest rock groups of the day: Fleet Foxes, the Decemberists, Low Anthem.

And even performers who are less than a third Seeger’s age, who played to cheering throngs of their own fans earlier and had to be shown the chords to some of Seeger’s songs, have spent the afternoon walking around in an anticipatory giddiness. Once on stage, they spend much of their time looking at each other in amazement that this is really happening. The next day, the scene will be repeated, with Low Anthem, Fleet Foxes and Elvis Perkins in Dearland returning to the stage—they all either got to Newport a day early or stayed a day late to participate—and Joan Baez, Levon Helm and his group, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band among the new arrivals.

In the audience, Henry Hotkowski of Connecticut is seeing Pete Seeger for the first time. He listens raptly, stopping to explain that he learned to play the banjo from one of Seeger’s books, all originally published long before Hotkowski was born. He’s twenty-one.

Radiating out from the two Seeger performances lies the history of the Newport Folk Festival, which continues to play out, grow and develop. Today, many performers at Newport are unaware that they’re not standing on the same stage or looking out over the same field that Seeger did in 1959 or that Bob Dylan did when he enraged Seeger by picking up an electric guitar in public for the first time. Throughout its tenure, the festival has added phases and levels with every major change in its organization.

Newport started off with the goal of presenting a form of music that was topping the charts in an era when rock ’n’ roll was still establishing a foothold, and it stepped into the controversies engendered by that popularity. It continued as what one observer called “Woodstock without drugs or electric guitars”—a multiday hangout that explored the power of music to change minds and by extension the world, while at the same time, and partially by dint of, keeping alive long-forgotten musical traditions—all years before the more celebrated rock festival.

The original festival reached its cultural apogee in 1965, when it hosted the first electric performance by the already-legendary Bob Dylan—a moment that wasn’t unforeseen (“Like a Rolling Stone” was the number-two single in the country at the time of the show). But it catalyzed the argument over what had happened to Dylan, to folk music and to rock music in the six years since the festival had begun. The debates, the insults and the declarations of allegiance—“It was a sad parting of the ways for many.… I choose Dylan. I choose art” was one critical reaction—continued for years afterward.

But the brushfire that Dylan’s performance ignited didn’t illuminate the Newport Folk Festival; it left scorched earth in its place. Dylan’s performance was a key step in the process of rock’s emergence as a music that could speak to the hearts and minds of America’s young people, and over the rest of the ’60s the folk festival became a symbol of a worn-out genre looking for a reason to continue to exist—an annual gathering of people in a field to wait for a second lightning strike. When the festival went down in a thicket of red tape and red ink, helped along by an incidence of violence at its big brother, the Newport Jazz Festival, it was worthy of a two-line announcement in 1971, and not many people cared.

In the mid-1980s, the festival came back to life as a different beast. Where it had been a nonprofit, utopian, determinedly egalitarian presentation onstage and backstage, in which everyone from Bob Dylan to the fiddler for the Greenbriar Boys got $50 a day, it reemerged as a sleek, commercial, corporately sponsored weekend of individual concerts. The festival’s focus changed as the times around it had changed: while attendees and organizers still made efforts to effect real-world changes, the musical ethos sprang from the desire of a generation of artists and fans—most from the same generation that had propelled the initial incarnation of the festival—not to be left behind as the music industry moved on to another new sound and crowd. This version of the festival lasted longer than any of the others have so far. By the early twenty-first century, however, attendance and enthusiasm had waned once again; even the Indigo Girls, the festival’s most reliable draw of the 1990s, couldn’t attract an audience.

After dropping out of Wein’s control for two years, the festival finished its first half century with its founder back at the helm and a reinvigorated focus. The festival presents a mix of music, much of which doesn’t seem to fit into a folk festival until you hear it at one. And it thrives under a new leader handpicked by Wein and his lieutenants, whose relative youth inspires him not to ignore the festival’s past but to recognize, honor and use its iconic stature among a new generation. Thanks to technological advances in communication and a youth culture that in many ways echoes that of folk’s glory days, the festival participates like never before in the celebration and creation of its own history.

Today, veteran stars come to Newport to entertain knowledgeable, appreciative crowds, while young performers come to prove that they deserve to share a billing and a stage with the audience’s musical heroes and their own. Indeed, some of the iconoclasts became festival mainstays themselves. The mix of experienced hands and young upstarts has always provoked conflicts—at least one of which got physical—over basic questions of what folk music is, who should play it, and how, but it has also produced what Billboard called “the longest-running and possibly the most visible example of American festival success ever.”³

On this afternoon in 2009, eighty-three-year-old George Wein sits off to one side of the stage listening, holding hands with Pete Seeger’s wife, Toshi Seeger. His image on a video introducing Pete has already received a standing ovation, and he’ll get another when the final chords of “This Land Is Your Land” fade away, the sun begins to set in earnest, and he thanks the audience, his staff, the musicians (“I’m so happy to know them”) and the Seegers for “never giving up hope.”

The musical businessman (though he won’t call himself that), who has curated jazz festivals in Newport and all over the world for more than half a century, didn’t know much about folk music fifty years ago and doesn’t know much about the young bands on the stage now. A few weeks before this afternoon, he summed himself up: “We all have what we do best. And my best skill is organizing things.”⁴ The reason he first organized a folk festival is simple—it was a commercial proposition. Why he continued it is a little less obvious.

Jazz is the music Wein grew up playing, loving and living, but he says the folk festival has given him some of the best memories of his life and remains one of his proudest achievements. Its mid-1960s era bore similarities to, though it predated, the hippie spirit. (Wein can go into a monologue about the trouble that the long-haired, rock-loving crowd brought down on his jazz festival in 1971.)

But when George Wein, a Jewish piano player, and Joyce Alexander, an African-American science major (who died in 2006) were married in 1959, their union was still illegal in nineteen states. The Newport Jazz Festival makes the case for a better, smarter, more racially integrated world tacitly and by example, but the folk festival stands up and shouts it out: over the years, it has embraced causes moving from civil rights to the anti-Vietnam War movement to the environment. While the folk festival may have begun like any other business expansion, and the tam-wearing Wein would appear to have little in common with the hacky-sackers on the Fort Adams lawn, it’s no accident that he created the space, both literally and figuratively, they’re inhabiting now.

“People think this stuff just happens,” Wein says. “It doesn’t. There’s thinking behind it.”⁵

Pete Seeger wrote “If I Had a Hammer,” most famously made into a hit by Peter, Paul and Mary. The song’s point is not only to impart the vision of “love between my brothers and my sisters / All over this land,” but to point out that not only the singer but the listener has the tools to bring it about. Seeger once said, “The last verse didn’t say ‘But there ain’t no hammer; there ain’t no bell; there ain’t no song, but honey, I got you.’ We could have said that! The last verse says, ‘I HAVE a hammer; I HAVE a bell; I HAVE a song. Here it is.’”⁶ Songwriters all over the world have heeded that call, whether it be a political vision or a personal one, and for more than fifty years they’ve come to Newport to share the results.

Each year, through the conscious acts of gathering performers and attracting audiences, the Newport Folk Festival asks anew, and tries to answer anew, two questions: What is folk music? And what can it do? Over the decades, the debate has not only continued but grown to include related questions: Is it folk music if it’s a professional musician singing it? Is it folk music if it has an electric guitar? Is it folk music if it’s popular? Is it folk music if it’s not popular? Is it folk music if it’s presented with the help of a corporate sponsor? Is it folk music if you have to plug your ears? These questions weren’t first asked at Newport, and they’ve never been answered—indeed, they may never be. And most of the people who ask these questions know that, but they ask anyway. John Cohen, who played at the first Newport Folk Festival with the New Lost City Ramblers, said at a panel discussion in 2015, “Maybe the festival needs controversies.” Perhaps even more accurately, maybe the fans do.

Through the years, the festival, and the questions behind it, have made different sounds—the earth-moving power of Odetta in 1959; the big-dreaming, group-singing “We Shall Overcome” of 1963; the electric shock of Bob Dylan in 1965; the out-and-proud Indigo Girls, who made nine appearances in ten years in the 1990s; the radio-ready strumming and shouting of the Lumineers today—but to hear the people who were and are there tell it, it feels like one conversation stretched out over a lifetime.