How does it feel?
Bob Dylan
Murray Lerner, a filmmaker and folk music fan, took his camera to the Newport Folk Festival to engage in a little conservation. Old or odd or both, increasing numbers of shape note singers, Gullah-speaking and spiritual-singing vocal groups, hillbilly string bands, and Delta blues guitarists performed on the stages and at workshops and mingled in the crowds at the three festivals in 1963, 1964, and 1965 that the documentary maker shot. Lerner believed he could help preserve these commercially marginal musical forms. The fans he filmed had larger plans. They were using the resources associated with folk music to save not just the musical genres, song repertoires, and performance styles they believed were in danger of dying. They were using the music to save the very idea of an alternative expressive culture. They were using the resources of people they imagined as marginalized, isolated, and poor to save themselves. Lerner’s footage not only salvaged old music, capturing Newport’s spectacular juxtaposition of young, middle-class musicians and fans and musicians the folk music community labeled “traditionalists.” It also recorded the birth of the broad and homegrown American bohemia that would become the counterculture.1
At the beginning of the 1967 documentary Festival that Lerner made from the film he shot in Newport, Fritz Richmond, a member of the Boston-based Jim Kweskin Jug Band, wears dark shades and acts stoned as Lerner interviews him. Why, he asks, would he want to tell the filmmaker about himself since he would only come across as strange? He does not need to talk for that. “When I pick up a jug and start playing it,” Richmond says as he looks into the lens, “you know I am a freak, right?” Lerner’s camera pans to his bandmate Mel Lyman, who wears a dark fisherman’s cap and cultivates a direct and disarming eccentricity. “We’re trying to take, like, our understanding or our perception of truth,” Lyman says, “and put it in a form so you can hear it sensually, like with your ears, like a painter takes what he knows of the truth and puts it on canvas so the people can dig it in a sensual way. Music just happens to be an ear thing, that’s all.” A member of the early sixties folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary defines folk music more earnestly: “Folk music is really the personification of a human being extending his hand to another human being, without losing his dignity. The music says,’We feel this way about it. Walk with us.’ “ 2
Extending a hand became more than a metaphor in the now iconic 1963 Newport sing-along that Lerner left out of his documentary. Except for the microphones, the scene looks like a picket or a voter rally or a march. Blacks and whites stand singing with their arms linked and crossed, ready for a charge or a blow. The blacks wear dark suits, crisp white button-downs, and pleated dresses, the middle-class clothes civil rights activists use to tell the country they are citizens. Their faces are serious, earnest even, and their voices are strong.
We shall overcome,
We shall overcome,
We shall overcome someday.
Oh deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.3
In photographs and film footage of the Friday night finale, the stage is crowded. Peter, Paul, and Mary are there, at the height of their fame. Joan Baez is there too, the beautiful star of the folk revival, in love with the music and Bob Dylan. Pete Seeger brings the gravitas, over two decades of political and cultural work—the Old Left, the folk song movement, playing with Woody Guthrie, the Red baiting of the Weavers, and the blacklist. Well practiced in joining his politics and his music, Seeger had been playing benefit concerts for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) since the fall of 1962. But it is SNCC’s Freedom Singers, the four field workers Bernice Johnson, Cordell Reagon, Rutha Harris, and Charles Neblett, who bring the authenticity and the romance to this stage. These singers did not just sing on stages. They led hot churches full of worried people in song after song. They sang on marches and picket lines, at sit-ins and voter registration rallies, and in the paddy wagons and crowded jails in Selma and Albany and McComb. They were the conduits of an “authentic” African American rural culture that stretched back centuries. They were the “real” folk. With them on the Newport stage, the other folk-singers and the audience could evoke, at least temporarily, a simple world where black and white, the old and the new, the people left out of the present and the people alienated from it and looking to the past, can come together, where people can clasp hands and sing and conjure integration. Exactly one month later, Dylan and Baez and the Freedom Singers reenacted this powerful merging. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, they lent their voices as Mahalia Jackson led one quarter of a million marchers in “We Shall Overcome.” 4
In the late fift ies and early sixties, the Newport Folk Festival sat at the center of a new folk music revival that formed an important part of popular culture even as it critiqued that culture. Listening to and making their own folk music, young people learned that romanticizing “the folk” was a form of rebellion against mid-century middle-class values and what people then called mass culture. Modern America, folk music implied by providing a counterexample, was fake, plastic, slick, mass-produced, usually segregated, and new. Feelings were packaged and clear there. Passions were tidy and controlled. Folk music was the opposite of all these things. It could be gentle and pure or wild and raw, but it was always deep and real and full of feeling. It was something to be crazy about, something to love. It was the opposite of mainstream commercial music with its slick production values and racially segregated genres. It seemed like a living piece of a time before the world was mass-produced, advertised, and sold. A fan could listen to all four-plus hours of the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music straight through or go to a folk festival and see musicians like Mississippi John Hurt walk out of the past of the records and onto the stage to play. She could spend days trying to master every nuance of Maybelle Carter’s or Elizabeth Cotton’s guitar style. Or she could sing along in Washington Square or in a neighbor’s den or in a coffeehouse near her college. Mass culture asked people to make a purchase. The folk revival asked people to participate. And participating, joining with the folk, the real outsiders—and it was crucial that some of them were black—made young middle-class whites outsiders too.5
If early rock and roll had given many white middle-class teenagers a taste of what rebellion in the form of playing black could feel like, by the late 1950s the liberating force of the music seemed spent, buried under derivative product and an outpouring of criticism from politicians, ministers, and parents, as well as the growing force of the segregationists. Folk music filled in the gap. It gave these white middle-class teenagers a seemingly pure and noncommercial version of the last decade’s teenage rock rebellion. It gave them a music they could grow up into but that still signaled their opposition to their parents’ culture. It offered a rich and serious story, locating the outsider in a specific place and time, a pre-modern, pre-capitalist historical moment when people made music for the pleasure of expression rather than for cash. And it smoothed over the contradictions between self-invention and meaningful connections. Rock and roll worked like minstrelsy, displacing incompatible desires onto fantasies of blackness and then taking them back up, cleansed of contradiction, through identification with African Americans. For many white middle-class fans, folk music provided this kind of release or psychological disassociation as it broadened minstrelsy’s fantasies to include rural whites as well as blacks. But folk music also offered a temporal and geographic displacement as well. Identifying with another place and time where people seemed to live connected to the land, their past, and each other enabled folk music fans to evade the incompatibility of their dreams. And identification could quickly shift into impersonation. Playing “the folk,” acting like a farm lass or a member of a chain gang or a hobo, satisfied the desire for self-invention while also offering a sense of being grounded in something old and deep. Playing “the folk” enabled revivalist musicians and fans to create an alternative world filled with sounds, symbols, clothes, food, and even values that stood in opposition to the suburban middle-class prosperity in which most of them had been raised. Identification became impersonation. The folk music revival, like Lerner’s documentary Festival, fantasized about the past to build a future.6
Civil rights activists, on the other hand, learned that playing the part of “the folk” provided access to white middle-class sympathy and support outside the South. No organization did this better than SNCC, which used whites’ fantasies about southern blacks as the folk to raise money, educate people, and recruit new volunteers. SNCC’s Freedom Singers toured college campuses and liberal churches and synagogues, playing the part of the singing black folk and teaching folk fans about the southern civil rights struggle.7
In the mid-1960s, it looked like shared feelings of alienation from American society might serve as the basis for a new politics. Folksinger Bob Dylan anchored one end of this dream by transforming these emotions into songs people could hear and feel and sing. And he modeled the life story, the way white middle-class kids could remake themselves as outsiders by playing the folk. For a moment, Dylan’s art and life made the romance of the outsider seem capacious enough to hold back the conflicts between being black and being white, between being poor and being middle-class, between loving and using the folk.
On those stages in Newport and at the March on Washington, two streams of people came together to try to change history. For a moment there, the children of postwar plenty, the insiders, the people the whole postwar world was supposed to be for, met and joined the people they thought of as the outsiders, Americans locked out of the dream by the color of their skin. One group wanted to get out, to express their alienation from the suburbs, the Ivy League expectations, the late-model cars and other markers of status, the whole life completely laid out for them. And the other group wanted to get in, to the good jobs and the good neighborhoods and the possibility of upward mobility, to have the very security that the first group was fleeing. It was an odd coalition, shaky at best, full of irony and dependent on the romance of the outsider.
“I Shall Be Free”
In the fift ies, simply listening to something called “folk music” marked a fan as rebellious. after the peak of the Red Scare, clubs, little magazines, and concerts began to draw scattered folk fans together, and a small folk music movement emerged. In 1959, this movement broke into the broader popular culture when the Kingston Trio’s earnest cover of the North Carolina murder ballad “Tom Dooley” became an unlikely pop and country hit. Folk music, an ever-evolving category in the music business, remained hugely popular well into the sixties.8
From the standpoint of American history more broadly rather than the history of the pop charts, the folk music revival appeared as a particularly high peak in the long history of folk revivalism. In the late nineteenth century, song collectors and folklore scholars combed Appalachia in particular looking for “Anglo-Saxon” ballads, traces of the medieval old country surviving unchanged in the new. In this revival, the folk were white and the politics were generally conservative. In the early twentieth century, scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Howard Odum, and John Lomax challenged this revivalism by studying and collecting the spirituals and “the secular songs of the Southern Negros.” White southerners Odum and Lomax, however, celebrated African American music using a kind of sentimental racial primitivism that would have been at home on the minstrel stage. This kind of romanticism became a key characteristic of the rapidly professionalizing folklore field, even as folklore scholars saw their own position as promoting a kind of scientific knowledge of African American expressive culture at odds with both white racism and blackface minstrelsy’s images of black life.9
In 1933, John Lomax filled the trunk of his Ford sedan with a then state-ofthe-art 315-pound acetate disc recorder and set off with his teenage son Alan across the rural South looking for what they understood as traditional, noncommercial music. The discs they made on this trip—recordings of African American musician Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter at a Louisiana prison—and the many trips that followed formed the basis of the Library of Congress’s new Archive of American Folk Song. Following the Lomaxes’ example, scholars and collectors increasingly preserved folk music as audio recordings rather than textual transcriptions.10
In the late 1930s and 1940s, another wave of revivalism peaked in what became known as the folk song revival. Folk singing then became closely linked to the Popular Front, the Communist Party’s broad Depression-era effort to make allies across the American left by finding, circulating, and even inventing an alternative, indigenous radical culture. Folk songs, in this kind of thinking, provided evidence of the long history of class struggle. Communist Party cultural politics firmly linked folk singing and interest in both black and white folk music to the left. Folksingers performed at union meetings and political rallies, and the party helped popularize the songs of striking mine and mill workers like Gastonia, North Carolina’s Ella Mae Wiggins (killed by the mill’s armed men) and Harlan County, Kentucky’s Aunt Molly Jackson, who fled the mines to live in New York City. Blues musicians like Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy wrote and recorded blues protest songs in the thirties and early forties for the Popular Front audience. When the musician and song-writer Woody Guthrie brought his Okie songs and left ist politics to New York City in 1940, the radical community embraced him. His “This Land Is Your Land,” written as a Marxist response to “God Bless America,” eventually became a kind of alternative national anthem.11
Alan Lomax played an essential role in creating the stars of this revival. He met Guthrie in 1940 when they both played a New York City benefit, a “Grapes of Wrath evening,” for a Popular Front group, the John Steinbeck Committee for Agricultural Workers. Lomax helped make Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Jackson into the biggest stars of this revival. Lomax, like Pete Seeger and other participants in this revival, worked a kind of earnest, left populism. As Lomax wrote in the preface to the 1947 collection Folk Song U.S.A.:
It is our identification with the common man that has carried my father and myself on our ballad hunt across this continent—into thousands of work camps and honky-tonks, into a thousand small houses, into the little churches up back-country roads, and through the still horror of a score of penitentiaries. It is this enthusiasm that laid the basis for the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, where we added the voice of the common man to the written record of America.
In this revival, folk music became the voice of the people—their past, their politics, and the basis for their future.12
After the war, People’s Songs, founded in a Greenwich Village basement by Seeger, Guthrie, other folk singers, scholars, and union officials, kept up the Popular Front tradition. People’s Songs combined song collecting and publishing, concerts, and hootenannies (a kind of secular revival meeting for the cause) with left political organizing. They sent folksingers, for example, out on the campaign trail for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace. Folk songs remained broadly popular, and singers backed by orchestras performed adaptations of folk songs. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Weavers—Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman—worked this territory to great fame. They turned the Leadbelly song “Goodnight, Irene,” for example, into a number one pop hit in the late summer and fall of 1950. At the peak of the Weavers’ popularity, however, anti-Communism killed the folk song movement. An informant testifying at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in 1952 attacked the Communist Party ties of the group’s members. Blacklisted and unable to book concert venues or television appearances, the Weavers stopped performing. Seeger retreated with his family to a cabin in the country north of New York City. At Yale at the time, John Cohen, future member of the revivalist string band the New Lost City Ramblers, described for a reporter the small group of art and math students, “left wing, out group and odd scene,” still interested in folk music in those bleak days: “We heard of actual fist fights, held in dormitory rooms, where students tried forcibly to prevent their roommates from going to the hoots— on the grounds that it would seriously impair their future chances, particularly for Government jobs, if it were known that they associated with people like us.” The very word “folk” conjured up the Communist menace so strongly that the music industry changed the name of “hillbilly” music again, replacing its postwar labeling of “folk” with the less tainted term “country.”
Record collector Harry Smith and Folkways Records founder Moe Asch could not have had worse timing when they released a six-record set of folk music in 1952. Smith, an artist, filmmaker, and, for a time, graduate student in anthropology, had begun buying “exotic” records, odd music “in relation to what was considered to be the world culture of high-class music,” in 1940. After collecting the blues, he had moved on to the hillbilly acts. In the early fift ies, he tried to sell some of his records. Asch bought some, but he also suggested Smith should put out an anthology of the music he had collected.13 In 1952, Folkways released the collection Smith assembled from his records as the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music. It took a while for the multiple-record set to catch on, and Folkways never made much money from it. Asch kept almost all his releases available for years, though, and as a result, a record set that should have disappeared stayed available throughout the decade, listened to in dorm rooms and cheap apartments by a growing number of folk fans. Eventually, the songs on the Folkways Anthology, along with some Library of Congress field recordings, became the canon of the folk music revival.
Unlike the Library of Congress materials collected by the Lomaxes and others, however, Smith’s 1952 anthology presented music recorded commercially in the 1920s and 1930s for smaller markets—country blues sold to black Deep South migrants recently settled in cities, for example, and hillbilly music sold to mountain whites living in mill towns—as folk music, as some kind of indigenous form of avant-garde art. Most importantly, Smith drew no racial distinctions:
Before the Anthology, there had been a tendency in which records were lumped together into blues catalogues or hillbilly catalogues, and everybody was having blindfold tests to prove they could tell which was which. That’s why there’s no such indications of that sort (color/racial) in the albums. I wanted to see how well certain jazz critics did on the blindfold test. They all did horribly. It took years before anybody discovered that Mississippi John Hurt wasn’t a hillbilly.
Smith’s collection forced people to listen across the categories, which had always been more about marking racial boundaries for commercial purposes than about the sound of the music. The blues and other forms of black music, Smith insisted in the way he arranged the songs, were as important as the Anglo-American ballad singing tradition. All of these forms, in turn, influenced each other. On the Folkways Anthology, African American musicians reworked the blatant racism of the coon songs, popular late nineteenth-century minstrel hits sold as sheet music, into expressions of their own sexuality. Hillbilly artists adapted blues songs to new instrumentation and used them to express their own sense of loss. Musically, the songs were integrated. The Folk-ways Anthology aurally asserted, in a way the Library of Congress recordings accompanied by their careful scholarly notes and racially defined musical genres could not, the musical miscegenation at the heart of American folk music. As the later blues revivalist Dave Van Ronk remembered, “That set became our bible. It is how most of us first heard of Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and even Blind Lemon Jefferson. And it was not just blues people … It was an incredible compendium of American traditional musics, all performed in traditional styles.” 14
Like the anthology, major folk music concerts too were integrated, even if the fan base was mostly white. In 1959, Alan Lomax organized Folksong 59, a concert at Carnegie Hall that popularized the new folk music revival. The recording of the concert captures Lomax offering up his own live version of the Smith anthology: Jimmie Drift wood, a Mountainview, Arkansas, school-teacher and ballad singer who hoped “you all can understand my southern brogue”; Earl Taylor and the Stony Mountain Boys, a bluegrass band “discovered” by Mike Seeger, a member of the New Lost City Ramblers; Memphis Slim playing, Lomax drawled as MC, “a blues you can relax on”; and Muddy Waters, a Lomax “discovery” from Mississippi and by then famous bluesman, singing, Lomax announced, “’Hoochie Coochie Man,’ a song about voodoo down in the Mississippi valley. Go ahead, Muddy.” That same year, the first Newport Folk Festival, a day of folk singing held the weekend after the well-established Newport Jazz Festival, featured Robert Pete Williams, a blues musician “found” by a folklorist at Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, a group of Nigerian dancers, and a gospel choir, along with the bluegrass banjo player Earl Scruggs and a very young Joan Baez. At a time when the FBI listed racially integrated gatherings as a sign of Communist influence, the racially mixed folk music scene with its miscegenated history and its live mixing of black and white performance seemed subversive to many Americans.15
All these pasts, the long history of folk revivalism, remained alive in the present. A racially ambiguous, bohemian, vaguely left ist and thus forbidden aura, completely at odds with white suburban middle-class plenty, made folk music popular. Tainted by its connections to Communism and the Old Left, folk music gave many young musicians and fans a way to push against the pervasive liberalism of mid-century America. Liberalism insisted that the past did not matter, that there were no limits on what the individual or the nation could accomplish, that the future would inevitably be better than the past. Folk revivalism suggested instead that the past had value, that the loss of history was something not to be celebrated but to be mourned.16
As folk music became popular yet again, overt radical politics were largely missing. Alan Lomax, for example, had traded in his past ties to Communism for vaguely political statements like “The recording machine can be a voice for the voiceless.” The press presented folk music fans as bohemians, cultural rebels, or at least wannabe rebels, not socialists and Communists. And in New York City’s Washington Square every Saturday afternoon, when they put their difference on display, their clothes were much more conspicuous than their political ideology. Young women wore black leotards, Mexican sandals, and peasant skirts, their hair unset and natural and their faces bare. Young men wore flannel shirts, overalls, raggedy jeans, and railroad caps. Many women and men brought guitars, banjos, harmonicas, and autoharps. A reporter described college students attending the 1960 Newport Folk Festival who “carried their sleeping bags and instruments down to the beach” and there, around fires built in holes scooped out of the sand to keep off the fog,” played folk music until dawn. “Many of them, in some small detail of their appearance, looked ever so slightly beat,” the beard at odds with the “expensively tailored Madras shorts,” the “wrought iron jewelry” at odds with the crisp blouse:
There is a connection, one begins to suspect, between the way a lot of students like to look and their feeling for folk music … This generation of college students is not exactly beat, but it is composed of young people who are desperately hungry for a small, safe taste of an unslick, underground world. Folk music, like a beard or sandals, has come to represent a slight loosening of the inhibitions, a tentative step in the direction of the open road, the knapsack, the hostel … Some of the trappings and tastes of a Bohemian minority group have been gradually assimilated and adapted by a student middle class.
The folk music revival helped democratize bohemian cultural rebellion. But what exactly attracted these middle-class college students to folk music? 17
Hootenannies and festivals, concerts and cafés and singing in Washington Square Park—sharing folk music, its fans claimed, created a kind of communal warmth and elation. The music, they insisted, simply made them “feel good,” “a part of something.” It often started with a more commercial song like the Kingston Trio hit “Tom Dooley” or Harry Belafonte’s hit “Grizzly Bear,” a song originally collected in 1951 by Pete Seeger and John Lomax in a southern prison camp. Soon the new fan was buying records and making small devotional steps on a pilgrimage toward the sacrament of the Folkways Anthology or the very bones of the saints, what Time magazine called those scratchy recordings of “all the shift less geniuses who have shouted the songs of their fore-bears into tape recorders for the Library of Congress.” Jeff Todd Titon, a folk musician and scholar, remembered learning to play a few chords in high school, listening to popular folk musicians like Peter, Paul, and Mary, and playing Atlanta coffeehouses. By the time he entered college in 1962, he had begun to listen to musicians like Joan Baez “who tried to sing and play what they regarded as a traditional body of material.” Soon he “spent hours a day practicing the finger-picking style of Etta Baker or Elizabeth Cotton.” Authenticity became a folk musician’s most important quality, “who was’more ethnic’ (as the saying went) than whom.” Participation, on a continuum from singing along to learning to play to forming a string band like Mike Seeger’s New Lost City Ramblers, was the key. Folk music made its fans part of a new community of outsiders.18
Folk music fans square dance in Washington Square Park in 1959. Associated Press.
What this new community did was share its feelings. For Alan Lomax, emotions were central to the new folk music revival. “In order to acquire a folk singing style, you have to experience the feelings that lie behind it, and learn to express them as the folk singers do … Here,” Lomax argued, “the city singer of folk songs is playing his full and serious role—that is, to interpret for his city audience the lives and feelings of the past or a far-off society—to link them emotionally.” Without this emotional connection, folksingers merely represented the “shell of the song.” Scholars claimed this “psychological and imaginative identification with the folk” was essential. Even critical press reports described this practice. A 1959 Mademoiselle piece laughed at a “young woman in a tweed shirt and sandals” who “sang in a wispy plaintive voice” from the steps of the Washington Square fountain: Early in the morning, as the sun was rising,/I heard a maid sing in the valley below./Oh, don’t deceive me. Oh, never leave me./How could you use a poor maiden so. “Yet in actuality—that is, on weekdays—Sally is a fashion copy writer,” the reporter sneered. “Her long black pony tail is a false hair piece she discovered advertised in the shopping column of the magazine she helps to write. What’s more, the depth of feeling she invested in her song had originated in a highly emotional but inconsequential tiff she had the night before with her account-executive beau.” Other “fountain musicians” were also fakes. “The Scholar or Folk Bore” with the bad voice used every song as “an excuse for an explanation.” “The Weeper,” wailing “in a barely audible alto, cried always that true love is never true.” “The Peacemonger” shouting his songs of protest, his look and tone full of indignation and belligerence, was simply “an injustice-collector,” “equally happy complaining about Welsh mining conditions as about neighbors who refuse to tolerate his guitar playing after midnight.” The new city folksingers, critics claimed, could not possibly be sincere. Their use of traditional songs to express their contemporary feelings was, for some commentators, a nasty kind of emotional ventriloquism, a form of minstrelsy in beards and sandals instead of paint.19
For many fans and performers, the shared emotions were exactly the point. Joan Baez, the revival’s first big star, sang an integrated repertory of folk songs categorized as “Anglo-American” (the ballad “Black Is the Color,” for example) and “Negro” (the lullaby “All My Trials”). Fans praised her for avoiding the “fake ethnic” approach. “Joan does not pretend to be a Negro or a British Maiden broken by a feudal lord,” an admirer argued. “What she gives are her own feelings about these people. She’s like a passionate biographer; and more than that, she makes these songs contemporary by identifying with their emotional content as herself—as Joan Baez.” In that way, “her audience immediately identifies with her.” The point was not historical truth or even knowledge. “I don’t care very much where a song came from or why—or even what it says,” Baez told a Time reporter in 1962. “All I care about is how it sounds and the feeling in it.” Baez and her fans cared about the emotional truth. “The songs are so clear emotionally,” Baez claimed, “that they can speak for themselves.” 20
Mike Seeger was a very different type of folk musician, for many folk purists the most serious and talented of the young white revivalists. But his fans too praised him for getting the emotional truth of the old hillbilly or country music right. “Imitation of specific individual vocal mannerisms and labored mirroring of unique instrumental techniques” was one “obvious” way of “approaching country style.” Some of these revivalists, called by one critic “the imitators,” even began to dress and speak like Appalachian whites. Seeger practiced this form of mimicry, taking on “the mannerisms of the southern mountaineers” and wearing old-fashioned clothes like plain white cotton “Sunday” shirts with narrow bow ties like the people whose music he was trying to master. Critic John Pankake felt that what made Mike’s music great, for all Seeger’s positioning as a serious musical revivalist and folk scholar, was the same quality Baez’s fans found in her music: “It is the texture, mood, and depth of country music that distinguish his performances, thoroughly integrated into and reshaped by his own personality, itself colored by over a decade of close proximity with both the musical and non-musical aspects of the country experience.” 21
White bluesmen Dave Van Ronk, John Hammond Jr., and John Koerner followed similar strategies. Van Ronk, one of the first of the “new city blues” players, began performing and recording the blues songs he heard on Smith’s anthology and old 78s in the late fift ies: “I first came into contact with Negro traditional songs through a chance encounter with a recording of’Stackolee’ made by Furry Lewis, a southern street singer.” He had never heard white people perform black music before, he recalled, except his mother when she sang old “cakewalk and ragtime songs” around the house. “So, having only such singers as Furry Lewis, King Solomon Hill, and Leadbelly for models, when I tried to sing these songs I naturally imitated what I heard.” Though he did not think about it this way, he combined his own imitation of African American musicians with the example his mother gave him of the tradition of whites singing like blacks.22
Robert Shelton, the New York music critic who a year later would help launch Bob Dylan’s career, described Van Ronk’s style in 1960: “a distinctive, rough-hewn voice that alternates from a rough, representative’gravel-pushing’ sound to a purring trail of lonesome country memories; a rock-of-Gibraltar rhythmic sense on guitar, and a natural, yet often dynamic, stage presence.” Van Ronk, like Presley before him, sounded “black.” The difference was that Van Ronk played blues music popular in the twenties and thirties, as well as more recent versions of this music by black musicians like Leadbelly, not the rhythm and blues popular with contemporary black audiences. He also tried to make his voice sound exactly like the voices of the black blues singers he heard. Hammond Jr., the son of John Hammond, the man legendary in the music business for signing Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan, took his imitation even further. He left college, as the 1963 Newport Folk Festival Guide informed concertgoers, “to migrate to the South in search of the origins of the Delta blues,” to hear and learn the music in its original context. Back in the city and up on the stage, Hammond Jr. displayed the scruffy clothes, rough voice, and country blues guitar style he had picked up on his trip.23
While white performers could still impersonate poor whites, this kind of imitation, white performers impersonating poor African Americans, became increasingly difficult to pull off after the mid-sixties. Critics railed against “young city-bred whites … who try to sing as if they had been born black and on the land fift y years ago … Until we have a time and color changing machine, it is impossible to recreate someone else’s history.” “Well-intentioned white singers in blackface” had a hard time convincing some fans and critics that they could express the emotions of poor southern blacks. after all, the early twentieth-century Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, a group of rich southern whites who dressed like antebellum planters and sang black sacred songs in dialect and in Gullah, had sounded “black” too. A music critic’s mention of Hammond’s 1964 album Big City Blues in a review of recent records put it bluntly: “I wish he hadn’t.” Another reviewer wrote that the album shows “his obvious infatuation for the sounds of the greatest old bluesmen. But it should be a private love affair.” 24
Defenders of white middle-class blues musicians stressed the centrality of feeling. “The blues is a general expression of feelings engendered by an event,” a self-identified eighteen-year-old folk fan wrote in Sing Out! in early 1965 in defense of white bluesmen. “The event is not the important thing. The emotional content of the event is what is important … The important thing is sensitivity, not skin color.” Revivalists’ adaptations of folk songs were important not as historical reporting—old recordings survived to accomplish the task of providing information on poor rural life—but as emotional reporting. It was not what the lyrics said, exactly, as much as the tone and the mood a revivalist’s live or recorded performance conveyed. It was the feelings. Revivalists helped build an emotional connection between the people and traditions imagined as folk and white middle-class folk fans. These connections, in turn, helped white young people build their own music-centered alternative culture.25
If the old definitions of authenticity did not work—and the problem existed for revivalists, whether they played music originally performed by either blacks or whites, and for traditionalists, who could no longer really claim they grew up in isolation from outside cultural influences—then one solution was to change the meaning of “authenticity.” Performer and scholar Sam Hinton mused about this dilemma. Folk music, he argued, was “not so much a body of art” as it was “a process, an attribute, and a way of life.” Hinton, however, had no organic access to this process. He could only be a revivalist, imitating the songs and performing styles of traditionalist musicians. Still, “unless the performer has an extraordinary sense of dialect and of musical expression, the imitation will not be a faithful one, and may easily descend to caricature. If a folksong loses its sincerity, it loses its most poignant attribute— and it ceases to be a folksong.” Folk sound, in this kind of thinking, can only grow out of genuine feelings. The answer, “the one facet of folklore” that Hinton could “try to preserve intact,” was “its emotional content”: “My desire is to arouse in the audience emotions similar to those felt by the’original’ folk audience.” This emphasis on feelings made authenticity into an internal rather than an external quality. Being alike on the inside, as people who shared emotions and the need for self-expression, replaced being alike on the outside, as people who shared a history of oppression and isolation. Emotionalism replaced materialism. Revivalist imitators served as important intermediaries in this cultural shift. Feelings, not historical connection or faithful reproduction, created the new community of outsiders. As the critic Nat Hentoff claimed, “The quest for authenticity must be pursued from within.” 26
Somehow, the emotions of the songs—the twangy heartbreak of the new mill worker who has lost his mountain home, the wailing lament of the black man, forced to travel for work, at finding “another mule in his doggone stall”— gave the new fans access to their own feelings. As one very perceptive reporter suggested, “When they sing about the burdens and sorrows of the Negro, for example, they are singing out their own state of mind as well.” Traditional black music articulated not only “the Negro’s longing for liberation”; the songs also expressed “any man’s bid for freedom.” As John Cohen argued in reply to Lomax’s criticism of city folksingers, “The emotional content of folk songs is a different thing to different people—and it is hard to say that there is a simple, correct way to emotional content … If we from the city are attracted to folk music, it is because we appreciate the clarity of the limitations within which folk music developed. But ultimately, what we appreciate is the order that comes out of these limitations … If it is order for which we search, we can make and find that within ourselves. There is no truth except that which we make for ourselves.” In playing folk music, “each person’s individuality finally asserts itself.” Unlike Lomax, many new folk fans and musicians did not see emotional connections with people of different times and places as the main point. They saw folk songs as a way to express their own feelings. “The need for their own self expression,” Irwin Silber insisted in Sing Out!, had always been the reason people everywhere wrote and sang folk songs.27
The folk-loving kids of the fift ies and sixties turned to fantasies about the past to find their way. It was important that in this revival folk music circulated in an aural rather than a written form. Changes in technology made this possible, from the invention of field recording equipment to the development of the LP record, the most important format in which the music circulated, and the inexpensive phonograph. Fans and performers mostly heard rather than read the music, and the songs published in Sing Out! and elsewhere were intended to help readers learn to play the songs. In the foreword to The New Lost City Ramblers Song Book, for example, Silber quoted a letter written by the transcriber soon after she signed on to work on the project: “Learning from listening is the unquestionably best way, the only way that suits this kind of music … If you could do it, it would be good to have a legend across each page reading: Listen to the record if you want to learn the song.” The Folkways Anthology and the Library of Congress recordings seemed like little pieces of the real. The pop and crackle of old records, the indecipherable lyrics, the tinny high end—these quirks only made the songs sound more like messages from a lost world.28
Recording brought the past into the future, and when musicians like Mississippi John Hurt stepped off the Folkways Anthology and onto the Newport Folk Festival stage in 1963, it almost seemed like ghosts had learned to play and sing. The fact that the past seemed so literally to be in the present suggested that other things were possible, that maybe there was an alternative to the white suburban vision of the good life. Maybe there was more to feel than contentment and smug satisfaction and optimism. If there had been a different past, maybe there could be a different future.
Folkies attached their feelings to the songs and lives of people in other places and times. How else, exactly, could they describe a threat as abstract and real as nuclear annihilation? How could they express their desire for a different world when McCarthyism had pushed political alternatives on the left underground and conservatism was still understood as preserving the status quo? When, as a scholar insisted, they were part of a “people of plenty”? When politics seemed closed off and their problems, less material than psychological, even cultural, seemed impossible to put into words? “When I started singing,” Baez remembered in 1962, “I felt as though we had just so long to live, and I still feel that way. It’s looming over your head. The kids who sing feel they really don’t have a future—so they pick up a guitar and play. It’s a desperate sort of thing, and there’s a whole lost bunch of them.” “Studying a song,” Israel “Izzy” Young, owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, told a reporter in 1960, made “a student feel allied to it. It enables a girl who grew up surrounded by the best of everything to sing with some conviction the kind of blues and spirituals that theoretically could be sung honestly only by a prisoner on a southern chain gang.” As Bob Dylan remembered half a century after the revival, “Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension … and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it … It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified.” Folk songs conjured another world. One college student fan in 1960 explained, “My great desire is to go to the places where these songs began so I can know these people and their lives … and learn their music firsthand. Only then can I feel content reproducing their songs with my voice, finger tips, and emotions.” Knowing “the folk” suggested the possibility of transformation. An alternative to the present existed somewhere. Revivalist musicians from Hammond Jr. and Mike Seeger to Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan increasingly claimed, in their songs and their dress and their mannerisms, that they had found this better, more authentic place. Maybe fans could find it too.29
Folk fans, mostly white college students, usually experienced a very different kind of alienation—a sense that political and economic struggle were over and yet the world still needed saving—than the traditionalist musicians, often working-class people with rural roots, whose work they championed. But the message that self-expression —cultural rebellion—was what was possible resonated deeply with both groups. A college boy performing Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” could feel like he was working the rail line or the prison farm.
Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong
Lawd you gonna miss me when I’m gone.
Oh the Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line.
Oh the Rock Island Line is the road to ride.
Old African American lullabies and Scottish folk songs wove the same spell, making a performer or even a fan into a slave woman calming her baby while boiling the white family’s clothes or into an innocent girl, in a castle tower or a plantation cabin or a mountain shack, mourning the loss of her love. Joan Baez was a medieval Scottish maid or a slave mother, not the daughter of a Mexican physicist. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, reviving old cowboy and Okie songs and channeling Woody Guthrie, was a raggedy hobo hopping the freights or a bow-legged cowboy riding the trail, not the son of a Brooklyn ophthalmologist. In the folk song revival, middle-class young people could sing themselves into almost anything. All they needed was a record to copy, an instrument, and even if it was only their parents back home in Boise upset about their new clothes or change of career plans, an audience.30
Pete Seeger described the process quite clearly:
We are used to this happening in the opposite direction; a country youth goes off to college and then gets into business in the city … Nobody calls him abnormal … My guess is that there will always be young people who for one reason or another will feel that they have to violently, radically reform themselves. A personal revolution. They abandon the old like a hated mask and rebuild on new foundations.
But Seeger mixed his metaphors. Masks are superficial and decorative while foundations are structural and essential. Masks suggest the playacting of minstrelsy, the act that knows it is an act, while foundations suggest fixed materials that provide grounding and stability. Seeger here conflates a change in class status with a phenomenon more accurately described as a change in psychological status. Choosing to “violently, radically reform” oneself is not the same as moving away from a rural home in order to make more money. Romanticizing the folk— listening to and performing their music, traveling through the places where these traditions lived and might somehow still survive, and even, at the extreme, trying to live in the present in an imagined folk past—all of these acts suggest a class status, a middle-class or higher level of privilege. And this class identity, money but also an education and a sense of mattering in the world, could not be given up as easily as a taste for pop music and a preference for preppy clothes.31
The major difference between the traditionalists and their original fans, on the one hand, and the revivalists and their mostly white middle-class fans, on the other, was that the middle-class fans did care about the “real” Ma Rainey. Actually, they did not care much about Ma Rainey and her 1920s blues hits at all. She was too obviously urban and modern for them, too powerful and too directly sexual, too free of the bonds of family, despite the “Ma,” to fit easily into any fantasy of “folk” womanhood. Revivalists were interested in country blues and early hillbilly music, in forms forgotten enough to give free reign to their fantasies, in materials they could discover and control and fix in place and time. They wanted folk music to help them find their bearings, to help them find themselves. As Dave “Snaker” Ray, a white blues musician, made clear, “I play the blues because I feel it is important to me to express myself.” They needed to see folk music as old-fashioned, as pre-modern, as the music of poor, rural people different from themselves, in order to see it as a fixed alternative to the present.32
In taking the possibility of transformation for themselves, they took it away from the people they imagined as “the folk.” Musicians had long traded in the transformative possibilities inherent in other musicians’ forms, the way the emotions growing out of a particular situation could be used to express the emotions of a very different place and time. This potential for emotional ventriloquism drew Jewish singers to blackface at the turn of the twentieth century. It drew blues musicians, in an ever more circular fashion, to rework coon songs, already acts of emotional impersonation, for new expressive purposes. It drew white southerners like Presley and Carl Perkins to rework rhythm and blues songs. This kind of appropriation and exchange was exactly what made American popular music so rich. But the revival insisted that “the folk” give up on transformation and borrowing and hold steady. In order for the new folk fans to “radically reform” themselves, the folk had to be authentic, set in some essential identity. The folk had to stay the same. Jack Elliott, in Seeger’s words, “reborned himself’in Oklahoma.’ He didn’t just learn some new songs; but he changed his whole way of living.” An Okie who came to New York and learned to play classical violin, on the other hand, would no longer be a member of the folk. The older minstrel model of performing a self, of valuing transformation, became the new, revivalist model of performing the self, of valuing authenticity. Other identities were mutable, but the folk must stay the same.
Libba Cotton was no Ma Rainey. She was revivalists Mike and Peggy Seeger’s maid, and “Libba” was Peggy’s childhood name for Elizabeth Cotton. The Seegers were the royal family of folk music—parents Charlie (a musicolo-gist) and Ruth Crawford Seeger (a composer and transcriber) worked on writing down the music, as opposed to the lyrics, of songs collected by the Lomaxes, and half brother Peter was already a legend for his work with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers. According to family lore, little Peggy got lost one day in front of a department store in downtown Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Cotton, who worked in the store, found Peggy and brought her home to the Seeger house in Chevy Chase. Her “reward,” as one article phrased it, was a job as a “Saturday” maid at the Seegers’. There she ironed, baked bread, and performed other household tasks, one of which was listening to the growing Seeger kids practice folk songs on banjo and guitar. One day she announced to Mike that she had played the guitar herself as a girl before giving it up for God. He gave her his instrument, and she strummed and picked a few notes and phrases left -handed and then played him some songs. “Libba,” as the Seegers called her, had been quite the player as a young girl and had even written a few songs. The Seeger kids were awed. They had discovered their very own live authentic folk musician right in their home.
Cotton later began performing with Mike’s New Lost City Ramblers around Washington. She even put out her own record on Folkways in 1958, Negro Folksongs and Tunes. Cotton earned a little money (several versions of her best-known song, “Freight Train,” became hits, although there were copyright problems) and a little fame (she performed at Newport in 1964). As importantly, she gave Mike and Peggy Seeger a way to claim a kind of deep connection with the folk. Cotton had lived most of her life without playing the guitar, but what those years had been like and who she was with her own family and friends, away from the Seegers and her revival celebrity, was not part of this act. In Cotton, the Seegers had their very own folk-singing mammy.33
For many white middle-class fans and musicians, the folk were real precisely because they were isolated and marginal, somehow outside of time. The folk were real when they acted out the revival’s romantic fantasy. Robert Shelton went south to hear the singers in mass meetings, and he compared the music of the civil rights movement there to the music of the urban folk scene then flourishing in places like New York: “The beatnik guitar-pickers of Greenwich Village are trying to say something in their music, but they don’t know quite what it is that they want to say. The Negroes of the South know what they are singing about and what they want out of life. Because they know their music rings with more meaning and conviction. Because their music is not just a’kick,’ a hobby, a form of exhibitionism, or a’gig,’ it is a different story of folk music than one encounters among the pampered, groping, earnestly searching young people one meets in the Greenwich Villages of the North.” Theodore Bikel, star of the Broadway musical The Sound of Music and a popular folksinger as well, claimed “that Negroes, by tradition and natural inclination, are incapable of conducting a gathering without punctuating and underlining what is being said with music and song.” Traditionalists like Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Son House, Dock Boggs, and Hobart Smith were the “real” folk.34
The mid-century revival, however, never acknowledged its minstrel influences, the way revivalists’ efforts to copy not just the songs but the vocal tones of older folk musicians they worshipped drew from the performance conventions of minstrelsy. A great deal of self-conscious acting went into making these “real” folk. In this sense, old musicians like Mississippi John Hurt and Dock Boggs, who had second careers in the revival, and younger musicians like Leadbelly, who had their main careers there, performed a role similar to that of blacked-up black men (“the only real coons around”) on the turn-ofthe-century minstrel stage. What the revival hailed as the “real” folk were actually musicians playing revivalists playing the folk. The folk, the musicians Time called “country’authentics’ “ and “all but unapproachable gods,” were looking for work, and they adapted their repertories and performance styles to fit the folk music revival. Music critic and folk music fan Paul Nelson argued that before 1965, the “traditional musicians” at Newport played “the unhappy role of the Masses, tolerated, present to be philosophized over, talked down to, [and] abstractly worshipped as minor saints.” 35
Fan Tom Hoskins “found” Hurt—the musician, of course, did not consider himself lost—living in the same town, Avalon, Mississippi, where he was born and had been farming since his 1920s recording career ended. In 1963, Mike Seeger found the hillbilly banjo player Boggs living in his hometown, Norton, Virginia, where he had worked in the mines after the Depression ended his musical career. Hobart Smith, another Virginian musician, remembered, “I went into this popular stuff and got to playing on that and then when I got in with Alan Lomax in 1942, he wanted me to pull back into the old folk music. And he said,’Don’t you ever leave it again.’ “ Around the same time, Pete Seeger sent Smith the first banjo he had owned in twenty-five years. Both these men were happy to play their old songs for new audiences. In fact, the folk revival did not just resurrect particular musicians. It also revived entire genres of music like bluegrass that seemed destined to disappear as forms of commercially viable music and gave them a second life. Under the influence of the revival, many country musicians became more traditional—Johnny Cash, for example—adding “old-timey” and hillbilly songs to please this new audience. Revivalists even managed to supply the “the gods” with some “new” old songs. Revivalist Paul Clayton, recording in the mountains around Charlottesville, Virginia, collected the song “Laid Around and Stayed Around.” Someone then recorded Clayton singing it with Roger Abraham at an informal concert. The recording traveled, and someone carried it to Nashville, where Bill Monroe heard it and added it to his repertory. “Authentics” understood they were performing more than their music, as traditional musician Clayton McMichen made clear when he yelled at the crowd at a Newport Folk Festival workshop in 1964, “You don’t know anything about the music. I could play the worst fiddle in the world and you’d still applaud. You just like us because we’re old.” Ironically, the folk music revival cut traditionalist musicians off from the possibilities of transformation that their music often celebrated.36
The folk music revival gave middle-class musicians and fans, however, a way to change themselves. Playing and listening to folk music, they rebelled against the culture they had been given and found their own means of self-expression. In their fantasies of the folk and in the relationships they built around the music, they found the paradoxical sense of historical and social grounding they also craved.
For young white Americans, the folk music revival’s acknowledgment that black as well as white people made American folk culture suggested, however vaguely in terms of political strategy, that a precedent existed for some integrated future. Joining black and white gave revivalists a way to stress other categories, to build a rough fence between the commercialized mass culture they grew up with and some “real” folk culture carrying over from the past. Their folk music, of course, was never so pure—there simply were no songs or playing styles left untouched by commerce. But the boundary they created and worked to maintain—all the ranting against “folkum” music, or fake folk music, for example, in the pages of the Little Sandy Review and even in the national press—gave young people a way to escape mass culture. Even the most casual fan, listening to Harry Belafonte (dubbed Belephony by the purists) on the radio, believed she was stepping outside American life at mid-century. But more dedicated revivalists also learned that they could take a more serious step outside of American mass culture, that they could “discover,” the making and the finding all mashed up together, an alternative. Maybe, the revival suggested, American mass culture was not so monolithic as the word “mass” implied.37
The paradox, of course, was not only that the folk music revival revived earlier commercial music as folk music, but that the revival itself was commercialized. As Joan Baez told a reporter in 1961, “The public may demand this and that, but if you don’t want to give in, you don’t have to. I just don’t think in terms of being well known or not well known.” A folk music concert promoter said in response: “If she keeps on feeling and acting this way, she’ll make more and more money, no matter how genuinely uninterested she is in such irrelevancies. Her kind of audience must believe that she is entirely truthful … With these kids, it’s a different kind of show business. To be commercial, you have to be non-commercial.” The folk music revival was simultaneously a rebellion against American commercialized mass culture and a part of it.38
The folk gave revivalists a way to separate themselves from the pervasive middle-class character of mid-century America. In all of these versions of romanticizing the folk, people of one class (and sometimes race as well) used the cultural forms and resources of people more marginalized and isolated, poorer, than themselves. Even as folk revivals, on some level, celebrated the art and lives of poor people, then, these movements also highlighted the divisions between people. They crossed some boundaries and courted sameness in order, ultimately, to strengthen other boundaries. In the late nineteenth century, educated and wealthy whites cultivated an interest in folk ballads to separate themselves from the many Americans who preferred Tin Pan Alley hits and coon songs. The fans and musicians of the left -wing folk song revival of the Depression era positioned themselves, with their participa-tory sing-alongs and protest songs, against the popular mass culture of Hollywood movies and big band swing. “Success and folk music are, by rights, at opposite extremes of the American spectrum,” Irwin Silber, cofounder and editor of Sing Out!, wrote in 1964. “Folk music, after all, is the voice and expression of generations of ordinary folks who were on familiar terms with hard work, poverty, hunger, and homemade, handmade culture. They kept their art alive outside the pale of professional show business and despite the impact of successive Establishments. Success, on the other hand, is the’American dream,’ the middle class confusion of illusion and reality.” Folk revivalists, no matter their individual intentions, set themselves apart symbolically from the American middle class. And this act, in turn, made these revivals politically promiscuous. The folk could be a medium for being anti-middle class without being explicitly aristocratic. It could also be medium for invoking left ideas without using overt ideology. Playing both top and bottom against the muddled mass middle of American life, folk revivals could go either direction, toward the right or the left.39
But revivalists did not become the folk. Moving to the mountains or the Delta, learning to play the banjo or the guitar, wearing string ties and vests, beards or workingmen’s clothes, long hair, coarse skirts, and sandals—none of these acts stripped young educated Americans of their class psychology, of their sense that they mattered in the world. Folk fans accepted few limits on their own self-invention. They believed transcendence—escape from the limits of history—was possible. Again, revivalists confused illusion and reality. Playing the top and bottom against the middle, revivalists positioned themselves as a cultural, if not material, elite. They built their coalition on the new definition of authenticity—emotions, raw, real, and shared. The folk music revival of the late fift ies and sixties rehabilitated American individualism by re-imagining class status as a cultural choice.
The possibilities of transformation and transcendence, however, moved in two very different directions. For musicians who learned to play folk music in the Ozarks or the Appalachian Mountains or the Delta, the revival gave them a new audience, another way to make a living, another self, “the folk,” to perform. In the twenties and thirties, the blues had given musicians and fans a view of transformation, change, a way out of poverty, a way up. The goal was not authenticity but a better life, richer in terms of dollars or experience, less isolated, more pleasurable. Each person made his own call. But the new psychological understanding of authenticity only worked if revivalists could believe they knew the folk. The folk, whether black or white, must give up transformation. They must stand still. They must be knowable, down to their emotional core. The fact that some of the folk still lived, the fact that these people were supposedly unchanged in any meaningful sense by the postwar world, meant that the revivalists too could go back, could travel to a simpler world, a place without the bomb and the cold war and the corporate life, a world of innocence. Revivalists—insiders wanting out—allied themselves with outsiders, the poor and the oppressed, the victims of racial discrimination. What the revivalists got in return for giving up their belonging was some of the innocence of people without the agency to be responsible for the present. What they got was a new morality.40
Black Music, the Folk, and the Civil Rights Movement
No single group of people evoked this simpler world and this new morality better than southern blacks. The folk music revival and the mass movement phase of the southern struggle for civil rights reached the peak of their influence simultaneously in the middle of the sixties. Young white middle-class Americans from outside the South often learned about the southern civil rights movement in a context framed by the revival. Folk music taught them to love the folk just as people who fit the folk image created a successful and growing political movement. Southern civil rights activists were often black. Some of them were poor. They came from places few middle-class white kids could find on a map. And they sang.
Music became a central tool of the civil rights movement in the South because activists found that singing together connected people, gave them courage, and aurally marked their claim to spaces segregation denied them. Outside the southern movement and its local contexts, however, the sounds and pictures of singing protesters helped produce and circulate an alternative image of the South as a place where African Americans preserved a distinct and “authentic” rural culture. If the South was the place that racism flourished, it was also the place, paradoxically, where “real” black folk survived. The idea of southern black people as the folk helped broaden support for the southern movement by attracting many folk music fans to the cause. The folk music revival suggested real music and real morality went together. The momentary merging of the revival and the southern civil rights struggle gave the vague coalition of the alienated—the children of plenty and the other Americans—a powerful and concrete form.41
No one did more to fuse the folk music revival, the civil rights movement, and the idea of southern blacks as the folk than Pete Seeger. For Seeger and other folksingers with connections to the earlier Old Left folk song movement, songs about contemporary events and politics were folk songs because “the people” had always “created songs about things happening around them— hard times, the struggles of unions, peace and war.” The Freedom Songs of the civil rights movement, in this way of thinking, were authentic folk songs, songs that linked the old singing traditions to the present struggles.42
Sometime in the first half of 1962, the black attorney Len Holt wrote Jim Forman, executive secretary of SNCC: “We have sang the song’We Shall Overcome’ so much that it seems that by the mere force of the song[‘]s timbre the theme is coming true. What am I talking about? Simply this, Pete is concerned enough to give SNCC a helping hand, a helping voice, and a helping banjo … There is a need for a bard of the Southern protest movement, an entertainer whose life reflects the ideals they are singing for or portraying. I hope that the Pete Seeger tour will push some SNCC person in that direction.” This kind of cultural program “could serve the same function for the movement as the Jubilee Singers did for Negro education.” 43
Beginning in the 1870s, the Jubilee Singers had traveled the nation and Europe, singing “authentic” Negro spirituals polished and adapted to appeal to audiences more accustomed to hearing classical music, in order to raise money for Fisk University. The Fisk students had not grown up singing these songs— they were largely part of the upwardly aspiring black middle class in the South that worked hard to distance itself from behaviors and forms of cultural expression linked to slavery. But the Jubilee Singers and other groups inspired by their success sang right over any easy distinction between interpreting a historical form of black cultural expression and playing music that appealed to rich white people by confirming their folk image of blacks. In fact, explorations of black folk culture throughout the twentieth century displayed this tension, whatever the politics of the revivalists or audiences.44
Seeger, like the Jubilee Singers, would be performing in a folk tradition that he had not grown up with but that he had self-consciously learned. The Jubilee Singers, however, were black. Schooled by white supremacy and the long history of minstrelsy, most whites did not need much imagination to see these middle-class college students as the literal embodiment of rural, pre-modern black folk. In 1962, however, SNCC was broke and in no position to turn away help, and Seeger was popular. “If I Had a Hammer,” a song he had written, was a top hit for Peter, Paul, and Mary on the Billboard charts. And Seeger, who had played a benefit in Birmingham for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association back in 1956, had a deep interest in civil rights. As the press reported on the growing role of music in the movement, Seeger could hardly contain his excitement. Here at last was a successor to the union drives of the thirties, a movement that combined folk music and left ist politics at a grassroots level. Seeger wanted to be a part of it.45
That fall, the man Alan Lomax called “America’s greatest folksinger” played a series of benefits for SNCC across the South. In Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, he performed at historically black colleges, where informal SNCC support groups tried to raise volunteers and funds. At Miles College, the student council joined SNCC in sponsoring the Pete Seeger Freedom Concert, and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights endorsed the event: “Come and hear Pete Seeger as he sings about the Freedom Riders and the sitins.” SNCC heavily promoted the Seeger concert at Morehouse College in Atlanta, writing to ministers, past supporters, and local folk music fans: “You, no doubt, are aware … of the tremendous power of music to convey the deepest and most fundamental convictions of people. These mass movements for social justice obviously are expressions of the most elemental concerns of the people of our time.” An integrated audience turned out for the event.46
Still, Pete Seeger often called his concert at a mass meeting in Albany, Georgia, that October the worst performance of his life. Activists there had invited Seeger to come and share his years of experience joining his music and his politics. He remembered arriving alone at the church as Georgia State Patrol cars circled the building like buzzards, waiting for trouble. A crowd of jeering whites, some of them armed with lead pipes, stood outside the church. Seeger was scared, he recalled, as he grabbed his gear and went inside. The meeting had already started, and the air was hot, sticky, and full of song: “And before I’ll be a slave/I’ll be buried in my grave/And go home to my lord/and be free.” Bertha Gober led the next song, a commemoration of the murder of civil rights worker Herbert Lee, which she had adapted herself from a traditional hymn: “We been’buked/and we been scorned/We been lied to, sure’s you’re born/But we’ll never,/No we’ll never turn back.” As the meeting progressed, people stood up and described how they had been harassed and beaten trying to register to vote. after a while, the minister introduced Seeger.47
From the start, Seeger made all the wrong choices. Many African American Christians saw banjos as secular instruments, good for accompanying minstrel songs and rowdy dances, definitely not acceptable in church. But there was Seeger, at the front of the sanctuary, singing and playing “If I Had a Hammer” for all he was worth. Few joined in. Next he sang the union version of “Hold On,” but his verses, his rhythm, and his key all clashed with the way his audience tried to sing along. People stirred in their seats, confused, and Seeger, worried that they were tired, launched into a long ballad: “There I was, repeating the same unrhythmic melody over and over with little or no variation … The story was so ancient and so unfamiliar as to have little meaning to the listeners. I sang with a deadpan expression purposefully not to detract from the words. And this only made the melody seem more boring.” after muddling though more songs, Pete finally played “We Shall Overcome,” and the audience at last joined in and sang along.48
Seeger’s mistake had been to try to educate the audience on the history of left politics and folk song, on how in the days of the Old Left union organizers had adapted hymns for use in their own struggles. These people in Albany did not care. They were right in the middle of their own fight—one thousand protesters had already been arrested and jailed. More would face arrest in the days and weeks to come. How was this skinny middle-aged white radical going to teach them anything when he did not even know how to play their songs? 49
Despite his reception in the Albany church and on historically black campuses, where most students preferred rhythm and blues to folk, Seeger was popular on historically white campuses outside the South and at folk clubs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities. He saw all his concerts, whether they were SNCC benefits or not, as chances to educate folk music fans about the civil rights movement. “We’ll tell your heroic story everywhere we possibly can,” Seeger wrote Bob Moses and others in Alabama’s Kilby State Prison in May 1963. “We’ll sing it, we’ll speak it until the whole country knows about it. You guys are working for the freedom of our whole country.” Seeger might not sing the songs as well as that congregation in Albany, but he was mobile—he went on a world tour in the second half of 1963—and he was at the height of his popularity. “We Shall Overcome” and other Freedom Songs became, for people who heard Seeger perform them in concert or on records, folk songs simply because he was singing them. Seeger made the music of the civil rights movement part of the folk music revival. That, in turn, connected the civil rights movement, especially the young activists of SNCC, to a whole new group of potential supporters and volunteers, young white folk fans. But Seeger also understood the power of authenticity, of performances of folk music by “the folk” themselves. “Don’t forget to make sure that the Freedom Singers or some group will be coming to the Newport Folk Festival the last week in July,” he wrote Jim Forman in 1963.50
The Freedom Singers had their own link to Albany. Sometime in late 1961 or early 1962, folksinger Guy Carawan had gone there and recorded an audio documentary of the movement. Freedom in the Air, originally sold by SNCC to raise money for the Albany Movement, was later released on Folkways Records. Like Seeger, Carawan believed the music of the movement had the power to make folk music fans into civil rights supporters. “I am convinced now after playing the Albany documentary for a number of good-sized audiences of people who are not in the South and are uninformed about what goes on there that it can really move and exhilarate them,” he wrote to Forman in May 1962. Forman wrote back in November that SNCC had formed its own “group of Freedom Singers.” The Seeger tour had not “raised that much money.” Why not send out a group with a direct connection to the movement and the songs? 51
SNCC’s group had its genesis in Albany that fall, the same fall Seeger toured the South, when Cordell Reagon began to pull together a changing lineup of musicians to travel and perform Freedom Songs. Forman encouraged him. The Freedom Singers, SNCC’s top administrator believed, could become a powerful tool for fund-raising, and SNCC desperately needed funds. Rutha Harris and Bernice Johnson (who would become Bernice Johnson Reagon in 1963) were right there in Albany. Reagon had met the talented Charles Neblett in the Cairo Movement. Carver “Chico” Neblett, his younger brother, and Bertha Gober also sometimes joined them. In October, the Freedom Singers performed a few songs in a civil rights benefit in Chicago, the Gospel Sing for Freedom, that failed to raise much money for the cause. Still, people who heard the group there praised their work. Their formal debut occurred on November 11, 1962, when they played with Pete Seeger at his benefit concert at Morehouse.52
Johnson, then just nineteen, met Pete Seeger in the home of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Andrew Young the day of the concert and talked to him about her interest in singing. By then, Johnson had been expelled from Albany State and joined SNCC’s full-time staff. Seeger told Johnson about the Almanac Singers, the group he, Woody Guthrie, and others had formed in the forties to sing folk and labor songs to raise support and funds for the union movement. Inspired, Johnson envisioned the Freedom Singers touring the country performing the same function for the civil rights movement. after Pete left Atlanta, Johnson called his wife, Toshi Seeger, and asked her to set up a tour for the Freedom Singers. No one knew better than Toshi, who had been booking Pete for fift een years, how to put folk music to work for a cause. Until the Seegers left the country on a world tour in August 1963, Toshi served as the Freedom Singers’ unpaid manager, giving SNCC the benefit of her connections and fund-raising knowledge and connecting the group with sympathetic activists and journalists across the country. Toshi sold the Freedom Singers to the remaining Old Left audiences that had loved Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie in the past and the growing audiences of young folk music fans that loved Peter, Paul, and Mary and Pete Seeger.53
In the folk music revival, “great” meant “authentic,” defined either as being a representative of the folk, a traditionalist, or as perfectly copying or representing the musical style of the folk, a revivalist. From the perspective of SNCC leaders, Johnson, Reagon, Harris, and Neblett were authentic because they had worked and suffered in Albany and other SNCC projects—they had been expelled from school, arrested, beaten, and jailed. “The primary importance of this music,” the Freedom Singers’ earliest press materials argued, was “not the tune or the beat, but the words and the desperation with which they are sung.” For the larger folk music world, the Freedom Singers were authentic not only because of their movement activities—rare was the press release that did not mention their arrests and time in jail—but also because of their song choices and their performance styles. As music critic Robert Shelton wrote in the New York Times: “The unaccompanied voices, the rhythmic drive, and their sense of conviction put the Freedom Singers in the top level of American folk groups.” “If folk music is an expression of the forces at work in the people,” music critic Ralph Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, “this group is as authentic an American folk singing group as ever walked the earth. They are real, they write their own material and above all, they can sing … There is a’mystique’ about SNCC.”
Even SNCC staff ers fell under their sway. As white staffer Dorothy Zellner remembered, the Freedom Singers “practiced in the SNCC office and when they sang, it was impossible to do any work. You just sat there transported.” Most SNCC people, she recalled, were “really musical”—people sang as they worked in the national office, and singing played an essential role in the periodic national staff meetings. Still, Zellner suggested, “I don’t know if the SNCC people really knew we were in the presence of one of the greatest singing groups of the century. Peter Seeger probably knew and Bob Dylan. But I don’t know if we knew they were really that great … They were just real—no orchestral backup, no [instrumental] arrangements. They were just extremely hip.” 54
For white middle-class folk fans, the Freedom Singers were folksingers because they sang versions of old-time songs like “Pick a Bale o’ Cotton” as well as protest songs like “We Shall Not Be Moved” on their album We Shall Overcome, sold to raise money for SNCC. They were folksingers because 1963 was the height of the folk music revival, and they sang a cappella. And they were folksingers because they were black. Their race and their politics made them traditionalists—actual representatives of folk communities—even as most of them were in fact former black college students, more like revivalists.55
The Freedom Singers, performing for mostly white audiences outside the South, raised a lot more money than Seeger had trying to sing for mostly black audiences inside the South. In their first tour, from February to June 1963, the group played sets at the Club 47 in Cambridge, Community Church in Boston, Judson Memorial Church in New York, a series of reform synagogues in Connecticut, and the Newark YMCA. They joined Pete Seeger onstage at his concert at Civic Auditorium in Chicago. They played benefits sponsored by young, mostly white middle-class Christian groups—the University Christian Association at Penn State, the University Christian Fellowship at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut, and the Christian Family Movement in Chicago. One area council of the National YMCA alone set up about ten of the 1963 college dates in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, and they played concerts sponsored by other campus groups at colleges and universities including Bucknell University, West Virginia University, Swarthmore, Ohio Wesleyan, Miami University (Ohio), Iowa State, and the University of Missouri.
Future tours would concentrate on college campuses outside the South. Over the next three years, with an ever changing lineup of musicians, the Freedom Singers played everywhere from elite universities like Yale and Columbia to liberal colleges like Reed, Oberlin, and Smith and big state universities like the University of Illinois and Ohio State. “Our real purpose is to carry the story of the movement to the North,” Charles Neblett told a student newspaper in 1963. “Newspapers and UPI won’t give the real story and SNCC had to find another way to get it out.” Descriptions of concerts and reviews of SNCC records circulated SNCC’s name and reports of its activism in college newspapers, music magazines, and national publications like the New York Times.56
The Freedom Singers became an essential part of SNCC’s effort, beginning in 1962, to create a northern white fund-raising network. Dinky Romilly and Betty Garmen, white SNCC Atlanta staff members charged with coordinating the new SNCC offices in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere and with creating Friends of SNCC support groups outside the South, quickly saw how the Freedom Singers might generate interest in and money for the organization among white middle-class folk fans. While some politically active students would come to meetings to hear the southern student activists SNCC sent on tour, campus Christian action groups like the Dartmouth Christian Union and Friends of SNCC groups like University SNCC in Berkeley could tap into the growing campus interest in folk music by hosting the Freedom Singers. More students turned out for concerts than speeches. In 1963, the money began to pour in, just as the Freedom Singers began to perform around the country. In 1963 alone, their solo concerts and larger benefit events at which they appeared with other performers raised about one third of SNCC’s funds for the year, approximately $93,000. Presenting the Freedom Singers as genuine singing black folk created an image of SNCC as the most “authentic” civil rights organization and attracted young white liberal supporters.57
Press materials certainly promoted the Freedom Singers as “the folk.” Under a photo of a young black man looking out a barred window and striped by its shadows, the caption reads, “The songs the Freedom Singers sing come from the country churches, the stockades, the prisons and the dusty roads of the South.” “Freedom singers are the freedom movement for everyone in the movement sings the freedom songs,” another promotional sheet announced. “They sing them in the field; they sing them at rallies and conferences, and they sing them when they leave the South, bringing to others the spirit of freedom. All civil rights workers, all persons who work for justice are freedom singers… The Freedom Singers have traveled widely across the country, raising the spirits of Americans everywhere, giving them a feeling of what it means to break the bonds of oppression.” Indeed, the letters, college-paper press clippings, and even bad student poetry that groups hosting the musicians sent SNCC afterward suggested that their audiences saw and heard the Freedom Singers as missionaries coming to tell the outside world about the folk and their fight for civil rights.58
At SNCC benefits and concerts, the Freedom Singers described the story of the fight for equality in local movements in places like Albany and then sang Freedom Songs. Singing along became a way for audience members to share the emotions of the struggle, to hear the sounds of the jail and the mass meeting, to feel the power of the picket and the march. “Everywhere they sang,” Dottie Zellner remembered, “people jumped up and wanted to go south.” Not everyone who heard them, of course, could drop everything and go. But singing was a way to participate, to experience the movement and not just financially support it. The Freedom Singers, Bernice Johnson Reagon argued, made “people who were not on the scene feel the intensity of what was happening in the South.” Somehow, the Freedom Singers’ records never quite did it, and SNCC never made much money selling them. Only singing along in person took people there. The trip did not require white college students to quit school or work and live on a SNCC salary, a pittance the organization only sometimes even paid. It did not require them to confront their racist or worried parents and friends or to face being beaten, gassed, kicked, arrested, and even killed. Singing together enabled people to feel the music. Deep in the heart, singing was not an argument or an ideology. It was a feeling. It was the tap of the foot and the leap of faith. While some people were inspired to go south and work, all a person had to do to “feel” like part of the movement was to sing along.59
It did not matter that the sources and the contours of the alienation that brought people to hear the Freedom Singers concerts were different from those of the performers. Being denied a decent-paying job or the vote was not the same thing as rejecting the vision of the good life society promoted, but for a moment, in the singing, these differences did not matter. Certainly the opponents of integration had no trouble seeing what these groups had in common. Someone sent the Atlanta office a copy of a SNCC fund-raising ad that ran in the New York Times. Across the text in thick capital letters he had written “NIGGER LOVERS.” In the corner of the ad, over the coupon with SNCC’s address made for cutting out and sending in with a contribution, he had written “Beatnicks.” The manager of the radio station at Bob Jones University returned SNCC’s “cheap trashy record entitled’The Freedom Singers Sing Freedom Now!’ “ with its “obnoxious music” and accused Mercury Records of “crusading for a few beatniks.” Beatniks, folk music fans, supporters of equal rights—what was the difference? 60
The association between folk music and the civil rights movement made support for civil rights in the South popular among many middle-class white kids—another way for them to express their rebellion against the world of their parents. Time explored the rising popularity of “integration songs” among folk music fans: “In a cocktail lounge in Ogunquit, Maine,” Time reported, “a college girl shouts out’Sing something about integration.’ “ The fact that folksingers supported the civil rights movement helped turn many folk fans into movement supporters too. Some of those college girls asking for integration songs would go hear the Freedom Singers. Some would send money. Some would join northern Friends of SNCC support groups. Some might even go south themselves.61
In July 1963, SNCC was at Newport to take advantage of the power of the folk music revival. The Freedom Singers played an early set on Friday night, before returning to the stage for the all-star sing-along. Festival audiences crowded SNCC’s photo exhibit—a throwback to the presentations of FSA photographs at farm fairs across the South. And on Saturday night, after the concerts ended, Baez and SNCC organizers led more than five hundred people on a march through the town of Newport. The march ended in a rally, where the Freedom Singers sang again and Jim Forman asked the audience to join SNCC a month later at the March on Washington. The day before that event, Harry Belafonte chartered and paid for a plane to fly the Freedom Singers from California, where they were touring, back to Washington. Their last-minute inclusion on the program, along with long-scheduled folk stars like Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary, suggested that March organizers too recognized the role the “real” folk could play in attracting white supporters to the cause.62
The folk music revival taught white students—and folk fans were mostly white—to love blacks, especially rural southerners, as the folk, as the real outsiders. These were the people who created the Negro spirituals and blues that whites like Baez and Dylan sang. Mississippi John Hurt and Son House were the folk in the flesh, never mind their actual histories. And so were the Freedom Singers, with their pure voices and their real politics. Folk music concerts and Freedom Singers benefits gave some whites the South as they wanted to see it, a place of good and evil, black and white, where innocence fought against hatred and violence. Listening to the music, white audience members could connect with the “authenticity” of the folk and renew their own innocence. They were not responsible for the evil down there. They were on the side of morality and right.63
Never mind the messy protests the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was busy sponsoring in suburban Boston and all over New York City, activities that occurred as SNCC held concerts in these cities. Never mind the local movement in Philadelphia. Folk music and the romance of the outsider pushed white young people from outside the South to care about the fight there. As longtime civil rights activist Virginia Durr noted in a letter to a friend in 1965, “The South and the Negro has become rather a fashionable cause as you can … make a big splash by spending a few weeks in the South, when the people in Harlem also need help very badly, but the South is more glamorous.” While SNCC was carrying out the most radical civil rights work in that region, the organization’s use of the romance of the folk and the Freedom Singers to raise funds for those programs helped some white northern liberals ignore the organizing work under way right outside those concert halls.64
The romance of southern blacks as the folk, as authentic outsiders, as different, a romance circulating in folk music and elsewhere, helped advance the long African American freedom struggle in the early sixties. It appealed to white folksingers, folk fans, and northern college students, and it generated positive national press. Once again, music as a cultural form helped prove to some whites that African Americans had a culture. Some civil rights activists, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, decided to use this romance— they could not have stopped it if they wanted to—in their fight for equality. Romanticizing southern blacks as outsiders just might, paradoxically, help end African Americans’ status as outsiders, as people left out of American economic prosperity and American democracy. In this way of thinking, African Americans deserved equality because they were better than other Americans. But dependent as it was on the idea of black difference, of blacks as more authentic and real than other Americans, the romance of the outsider could not help generate equality on an individual, psychological level. It also had little to offer African Americans in the urban North, where people did not live in shacks and farm for whites and did not need to march and sing to get the vote, where people were not the folk. The greatest beneficiaries, in the end, were those white middle-class young people who used their attraction to blacks as the folk to transform themselves.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform together at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. Associated Press.
Bob Dylan and the Magic of Transformation
In the early 1920s, a black pianist and composer and a white arranger published a pamphlet called How to Sing and Play the Blues like the Phonograph and Stage Artists. It covered all the basics, “blue notes,” “minor keys,” “breaks,” and “wailings, moanings and croonings.” The music would not take too long to learn, the pamphlet insisted. Just don’t forget to “play the role of the oppressed or depressed.” Bob Dylan probably never read it, but when he came to New York City in 1961, he figured out on his own how to play the role by copying Woody Guthrie.65
Woody Guthrie’s music was not widely known around 1959 when Dylan first heard the musician and songwriter playing and singing solo on a set of 78s. There had been a concert in New York City in 1956 to raise money for Guthrie’s children because their dad had become too sick to play. A grand reunion for the old left -wing folk community, the Almanac Singers and the old People’s Songs folks and others, the concert put the full range of Guthrie’s songwriting on display and ended with a crying Pete Seeger leading the whole hall in a cheering rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” But Red baiting had discredited the once popular musician. For Dylan, listening to Guthrie was the most formative moment in his young career. He still remembered the impact of those Guthrie records half a century after he first heard them. Woody was “so poetic and tough and rhythmic. There was so much intensity, and his voice was like a stiletto … His mannerisms, the way everything just rolled off his tongue, it all just about knocked me down. It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room.” 66
In high school in Hibbing, Minnesota, in the 1950s, Robert Zimmerman had fallen in love with the romance of the outsider. He listened to Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and rhythm and blues, watched Marlon Brando and James Dean movies, wore his hair long, and played in rock and roll bands. And as soon as he graduated, he moved “out of the wilderness” of rural Minnesota to Minneapolis, where he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1959.
Minneapolis had its own bohemian enclave, full of real-life rebels, right next to campus. For Zimmerman, Dinkytown was magic. At the Ten O’Clock Scholar coffeehouse, young white men like him played the blues. There, he met Dave Morton, a local musician who not only played folk standards but also wrote his own songs about civil rights to old folk melodies, and Dave Whitaker, an intellectual and political radical who read Henry Miller and the Beats. Whitaker had spent part of the late 1950s on a kind of bohemian world tour. Checking off odd characters and music scenes the way other travelers visit cathedrals and monuments, he met William S. Burroughs in Paris and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in San Francisco and hung out with musicians in London’s skiffle scene and Greenwich Village’s folk scene. Whitaker introduced Zimmerman to pot and gave him a copy of Guthrie’s out-of-print memoir, Bound for Glory.67
In 1960, Zimmerman learned the art of transformation. In the spring, he began playing local venues like the Purple Onion Pizza Parlor. Sometime that year he read On the Road and later insisted the book “changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” In the summer, he copied the adventures of Jack Kerouac’s semi-fictional characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and hitchhiked to Denver. He ended up playing in nearby Central City for tourists looking for the Wild West. Like other young folk musicians, he began playing Guthrie songs, but he also adopted Guthrie’s left politics and his hobo style and speech: work shirts, worn jeans, few baths, and bad grammar. In October 1960, when Robbie Zimmerman got his own gig at the Ten O’Clock Scholar and the owner asked him his name for the bill, he replied, “Bob Dylan.” 68
Being a college student did not fit the Guthrie model, and in December 1960 Dylan left school. College, Dylan later explained, was “a cop-out from life, … from experience.” Like Guthrie or Kerouac, he needed to be out on the road or at sea in the big city. In January, Dylan arrived in New York “wearing a pair of dusty dungarees, holey shoes, [and] a corduroy Huck Finn cap” and carrying “a beat-up Gibson guitar and two squeaky harmonicas.” He headed straight for the Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Cafe Wha? was holding its weekly hootenanny, the folk music revival’s version of those Popular Front sing-alongs, a song swap where anybody who stopped by could play. Dylan performed a few of what he called his “folky” songs. The next day, he took the bus to Greystone Hospital in New Jersey to meet Woody Guthrie.69
The move to New York City gave Dylan, like a thousand kids from the sticks before him, the chance to remake himself completely. Israel “Izzy” Young, the founder of the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street in the West Village, a small, second-floor hybrid music store, concert venue, and archive where many musicians and folk fans hung out, kept records in his diary in the fall of 1961 of his conversations with Dylan. Young talked about folk music and played songs for Dylan from his vast collection of 78s, sides like blues musician Big Bill Broonzy’s “Somebody’s Got to Go.” Dylan in return talked about himself, using the opportunity to work on manufacturing a folk past. He told Izzy he was born in Duluth in 1941 and went for a while to the University of Minnesota. About the rest of his past, he lied. He had lived, he told Young and others, in Iowa, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, North Dakota, and New Mexico. At ten, he picked up guitar and piano and played in carnivals. Four or five years ago, Dylan told Young, a blind Chicago street singer named Arvella Gray had taught him the blues. While he had written “hillbilly” songs for Carl Perkins in the past, he now wrote “Talking Blues on Topical things.” In Young’s descriptions, Dylan was both defensive and proud of his personal style. “The less hair on my head, [the] more hair inside my head,” he told Young in a line he would often repeat over the next few years. “Let my hair grow long to be wise and free to think.” In Cheyenne, Dylan claimed, he learned “cowboy styles” from “real cowboys.” Dylan did, however, have a source closer at hand. He told Young he had come to New York to meet Woody Guthrie, and he visited the folksinger often in his first year in New York. Picking up Guthrie’s jerks and tics and odd speech, Dylan did not seem to realize he was mimicking the symptoms of Huntington’s disease, a hereditary disorder then crippling the older man, a fact well known in New York folk circles.70
Amazingly, Dylan not only copied Guthrie’s identity. He somehow absorbed Guthrie’s way with identity, what Guthrie before him had learned from blues and hillbilly musicians—about playing with personas and the power of transformation. In their music, Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie, two singers Dylan later remembered listening to and loving in the early sixties, could, at least temporarily, be anybody they chose. Performance did not always have to stop at the edge of the stage and the end of the song. Fans did not care who early blues stars really had been—they wanted to see who they were onstage, who they could become. Guthrie had not been an Okie, a Dust Bowl refugee, when he became popular playing protest songs in the early forties, just as he had not been a cowboy when he played country music on the radio in the 1930s. He became those people in his songs and in the articles he wrote for a West Coast Communist Party newspaper.71
When Guthrie came to New York in 1940, however, he faced a dilemma. Transformation, the play with masks and lyrics and styles that animated his music, was at odds with the political ideology and the image of the worker central to the Popular Front–era folk song revival. His music sounded “folk” to the folk music enthusiasts and left ists who first championed him in California and then in New York. The left ists, Communists mostly but also socialists and others, were concerned more about his politics than about his musical style. The fact that, beginning in the late thirties, Guthrie wore his political radicalism on his sleeve was good enough for them. In New York, he developed an easy integrationism in keeping with the Popular Front vision, playing and staying with blues musicians Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, African American stars of the Popular Front–inspired folk song revival. On one notable occasion, he even overturned the buffet at a banquet gig when he was told he would not be able to eat with the musicians he had just played with because they were black. But the left ists wanted him to have a working-class background, to be part of the great proletariat, to be a real live member of the folk. The scholarly folk music crowd wanted Guthrie to be one of the folk in order to see the songs Guthrie was writing as real folk music, as the past in the present, the old folk creativity surviving the flood of commercialism and offering an alternative to it. So Guthrie took the minstrel model of identity, the transformation, play, and self-invention, beyond the edge of the stage and out into the world. His best-selling 1945 memoir anchored his act, creating a romantic image of “a dusty little man wandering around the country with a guitar slung over his shoulder, making up songs that helped people to understand themselves and encouraged them to fight back.” Guthrie had succeeded not only in sounding like but also in being the folk. He performed both the music and the identity.72
Dylan probably did not learn this magic directly in his visits with Guthrie. The young musician would have had no way to know the long history of Guthrie’s life. Guthrie certainly did not give out the facts—he used them instead like phrases and melodies from old songs, as useful materials with which to build something new. Dylan must have brought some sense of how making music offered the possibility of transformation with him to New York. He had listened to early rock and roll growing up and to rhythm and blues and hillbilly music in Minneapolis. Minnesota might not have been on the main touring circuits for these acts, but Dylan must have seen some country and rock and roll musicians on television. Minstrelsy’s playing with characters, its focus on transformation, still haunted these recordings and performances. Dylan also picked up the romance of rebellion floating around the youthful edges of fift ies culture, from Catcher in the Rye (he later claimed he dreamed about playing Holden Caulfield in a movie version of Salinger’s novel) to On the Road and the Beats. Guthrie’s music, with its evocation of a folk past outside of modern time and a working-class left ist politics completely different from the middle-class mid-century present, offered Dylan a vision of an alternative life. “Woody’s songs were having that big an effect on me,” Dylan later recalled, “an influence on every move that I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know, who I didn’t.” 73
Dylan was not the first young folk revivalist to channel Guthrie. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, previously Buck Elliott, had also started life with another name, Elliot Adnopoz. Elliott was older than Dylan and had actually traveled and played with Guthrie, learning his music and his style firsthand. Dylan, however, possessed a lot more talent. He had also learned, by the time he started to get noticed in New York, to play Guthrie, not just in the sense that Elliot did but also in the way that Mike Seeger played a folk song. He absorbed the texture and mood as well as the more obvious external manifestations and reproduced the hobo, Okie, traveling-man-with-his-guitar, left ist voice-of-the-people performance that was Guthrie for Dylan’s own place and time. Dylan began to write songs about the events of his day and connect himself to the current left cause, that equivalent of union organizing in the thirties and forties, the civil rights movement.74
Just as Woody Guthrie had, Dylan solved the dilemma of the contradiction between the self-invention that made the music magical and the folk music revivalists’ obsession with authenticity by inventing his own folk autobiography. While Guthrie had actually ridden in boxcars, slept in hobo camps, and met working men at union meetings all over the country, Dylan read about and listened to Guthrie describing these experiences. Dylan performed another performer—Guthrie—performing the Popular Front’s vision of rural poor people as the folk. He copied a copy of a fantasy.
Young was certainly not the only person Dylan lied to in 1961 about his past. All his friends from this period remember different versions of these stories and that Dylan had told everyone he was an orphan. The journalist Robert Shelton saw through the act from the start. In his influential New York Times review of Dylan’s performance at Gerde’s Folk City in September 1961, Shelton wrote that Dylan’s voice was “anything but pretty,” a conscious effort “to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch. All the’husk and bark’ are left on his notes and searing intensity pervades his songs.” Dylan, then, in Shelton’s description, sounded like the folk—like Guthrie playing an old hillbilly tune. Yet Shelton did not believe that Dylan had any more in common with farm laborers than a love of music. “Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik,” the performer, Shelton noted politely, was “vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going.” Sheldon was using an understanding of authenticity as a perfect copy, as, in the case of music, the aural fidelity of a contemporary musician to the sound of musicians now dead.75
But Dylan understood the folk music fans who made up his first audience better than Shelton did. More people would buy the music if they could buy the authenticity—defined not as sounding like the folk but as being of the folk—of the man. In February 1962, a little over a year after Dylan moved to New York, Columbia released his first album, Bob Dylan. Dylan’s takes on folk songs fill the record, which includes only two of his own compositions, “Talking New York,” a description of his first days in Greenwich Village, and “Song to Woody.” This Guthrie tribute, the first good song Dylan wrote, fused Dylan’s lyrics with the melody of Guthrie’s own song “1913 Massacre,” an account of the deaths of seventy-three Michigan children, trampled when armed men hired by the mining company locked all the doors at the Christmas party for the miners’ kids and yelled “Fire!” Dylan’s lyrics evoke the man who wrote songs about the murder of working people:
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down.
I’m seein’ your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
‘Bout a funny ol’ World that’s a comin’ along.
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn,
It looks like it’s a dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.
Dylan’s “Talking New York” used Guthrie’s talking blues style, a little-known musical form he had borrowed from blues musicians, to narrate his own arrival in New York City as the Woody of his day. The train becomes a subway as Dylan, guitar in tow, arrives at a coffeehouse: “Got up on stage to sing and play,/Man there said,’Come back some other day,/You sound like a hillbilly;/We want folk singers here.’ “ The song even quotes Guthrie: “Now a very great man once said/That some people rob you with a fountain pen.” Unlike his album, Dylan’s performances in New York, Boston, and Chicago at the time were full of his own songs, all Guthrie inspired, that had not made it onto the record—from the farcical blast at anti-Communists, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” to his first civil rights song, “The Death of Emmet Till.” 76
Folkies generally liked Bob Dylan. But Dylan’s second album, The Free-wheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, left them baffled. The editors of the Little Sandy Review —folkies Dylan had known in Dinkytown—wrote: “Dylan bases everything here almost 100 percent on his own personality; there is hardly any traditional material, and most of the original material is not particularly folk-derived. It is pure Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan’s dream, as it were), with its foundations in nothing that isn’t constantly shifting, searching, and changing.” Dylan, people who heard him said either as an insult or a compliment, sounded like no one but himself. “Sopping up influences like a sponge,” as Shelton had written in the New York Times, he combined Guthrie with
Leadbelly, traditional ballads with the blues and country music, to make his own sound. It was, of course, a fine line. Folkies in the early sixties liked a musician who made a song his own and still somehow remained true to the original. In what sense, though, could Dylan be an authentic folk musician if he was not born folk and wrote his own songs? 77
The answer, of course, could be found in the new kind of “authenticity” that Dylan’s growing success helped create. Dylan was authentic because the folk traditionally wrote songs to protest their oppression and Dylan was continuing the practice. Still, he composed and recorded a lot of songs in the early sixties that were not protest songs. More important in the long run, though, Dylan was authentic because he experienced, shared, and expressed not so much the details of the daily lives of the folk but their emotions. Guthrie’s life on the road with the hobos and Leadbelly’s firsthand acquaintance with white southern injustice were no longer required. Dylan helped create a new kind of popular musician who fused the seeming contradictions of the folk revival’s obsession with authenticity with the playacting of minstrelsy, a performer whose authenticity lay in expressing the emotions he shared with the folk. This paradoxical melding of invention and authenticity, of freedom and grounding, helped generate the seductive power of mid-sixties rock and roll.78
By 1963, Dylan was famous. His April performance at New York’s Town Hall, his first solo show at a major venue, was the hippest ticket of the spring. In May, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out to critical acclaim, despite its dismissal by diehard folkies. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan’s vaguely left ist questioning of contemporary society, became a college anthem. “Masters of War” was an angry anti-war dirge: “How much do I know/To talk out of turn/You might say that I’m young/You might say I’m unlearned/But there’s one thing I know/Though I’m younger than you/Even Jesus would never/Forgive what you do.” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” fused poetry and politics in a wail against the threat of nuclear apocalypse: “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin,’/I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin,’/I saw a white ladder all covered with water./I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken … “ “Oxford Town” describes the bloody integration of the University of Mississippi. Love songs like “Girl of the North Country” and absurdist romps like “I Shall Be Free” balance the seriousness and politics well. “I Shall Be Free,” in fact, has fun with all the things serious folksingers in 1963 were supposed to love. Dylan’s lyrics even manage to laugh at southern segregation while suggesting the image of blackface:
I’s out there paintin’ on the old woodshed
When a can of black paint fell on my head.
I went down to scrub and rub.
But I had to sit in the back of the tub.
In another verse, President Kennedy calls for advice—”My friend Bob, what do we need to make the country grow”—and Dylan seems to predict here the fact that critics and fans will soon call him the spokesman for his generation. He also tells them even then that he does not have the answer. Still, the protest songs fueled Dylan’s fame, a trend he continued on his January 1964 release The Times They Are A-Changin. He did not have to be Guthrie the hobo Okie anymore. He was Guthrie the voice of the oppressed, the post-blacklist, not particularly ideological sound of the New Left. He was Guthrie the protest singer. He was “Bob Dylan.” 79
In early July 1963, Pete Seeger took Dylan along when he and Theodore Bikel traveled to Mississippi to join the Freedom Singers at a SNCC voter registration rally outside of Greenwood. A photograph by SNCC photographer Danny Lyon shows Dylan with his guitar behind the SNCC office in Greenwood, surrounded by staff members and local activists, talking, drinking cold drinks, and just hanging out. Bernice Johnson Reagon leans close as Dylan looks at her intently, plays a chord, and sings a line now lost. Later that month, Dylan conquered the Newport Folk Festival, singing a list of his protest songs, both solo and with folkie queen Joan Baez, who became his lover and whose support that year helped make him a star. His song “Blowin’ in the Wind” closed the festival.80
In interviews with the National Guardian, a radical newspaper, and the New York Daily News, Dylan both encouraged journalists to present him as a spokesman for the left —”the same guy who sucked up my town wants to bomb Cuba”—and discounted the role—”there is nobody that looks like me or represents the way I feel.” Dylan’s ambivalence, his angst and his ambition and his playing with positions, demonstrated his debt to the minstrel model of transformation even as one of the characteristics he performed was authenticity. “You ask’how it feels t’ be an idol?’ “ Dylan wrote in the liner notes of The Times They Are A-Changin. “It’d be silly of me t’ answer, wouldn’t it … ?” 81
By 1963, it was no secret that Dylan had manufactured his rebel past. A Newsweek exposé that November revealed his middle-class, midwestern, Jewish roots and his living parents. Dylan, the article insisted, hid his past because it spoiled “the image he works so hard to cultivate—with his dress, with his talk, with the deliberately atrocious grammar and pronunciation in his songs.” But by then, the facts hardly mattered. His fans believed his songs expressed emotional truth. Dylan had become less a folksinger than a “religion,” as even Newsweek admitted, to his fans. “I am my words,” he told the magazine. The performance was everything. The new Dylan refused to be bound by the revivalists’ image of the folk. The artifice of his early identity played in 1964 and 1965 as a kind of protest against the strictures of the folkie revival and its obsession with the past and only increased his later status as a rock and roll star. A rebel, his act suggested, had to keep moving. Opposition was a performance that could not stand still. Dylan responded to people who said he was not who he said he was by announcing he was not the person they thought he was, that “Bob Dylan.” He fused the old quick change of minstrelsy with the new authenticity of emotions. He insisted that the truth was that there were many Bob Dylans.82
His August 1964 Another Side of Bob Dylan sounded like exactly this kind of rebellion. The album did not contain a single song demanding civil rights or condemning war. Instead, he pushed the dense symbolism and sexuality of his poetry even further in songs like “Chimes of Freedom,” which celebrated a much more interior kind of release. “I Shall be Free No. 10”—its title is clearly a joke—laughs at critics’ and fans’ desires to see meaning in his songs: “Now you’re probably wondering by now/Just what this song is all about/What’s probably got you baffled more/Is what this thing here is for./It’s nothing.” Both these songs played with the message and form of the by then increasingly well known Freedom Songs. In “All I Really Want to Do,” Dylan rejects his role as a model: “I ain’t looking for you to feel like me,/See like me or be like me.” “It ain’t me babe,” Dylan insists in a song with this name, “it ain’t me you’re lookin’ for.” Life in his protest songs, he says in “My Back Pages,” is “black and white … but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.” Another Side of Bob Dylan serves as Dylan’s protest against his status as a writer and singer of protest songs, against having to have the answers. Dylan had adopted the blues model of identity.83
Many of Dylan’s most popular protest songs had advanced a rather vague politics. Like Jack Kerouac’s ellipses and Jackson Pollock’s drips, the allusive symbolism and vague questions of Dylan’s songs enabled listeners to fill up the ideological space themselves. It was arguably more democratic, a creative process that enlisted the listener in the process of making meaning, blurring the lines between the artist and the audience and between the art and the creative act. But the answer in the wind or the changing times could be filled with many different kinds of desires—Dylan was brilliant at being political without actually expressing a political ideology and thus being polarizing—and journalists and critics filled these spaces with the artist himself. Fans could pour themselves into the gaps. Dylan’s political vagueness, a quality he shared with the early New Left, made the emotions, and not which political plan might actually solve the problem, the point.
By 1964, Dylan’s short career had already evoked the whole history of postwar rebellion His early songs presented a 1960s version, channeled through Guthrie and others, of 1930s Popular Front culture and the image of the rebel as a working-class hero seeking justice for his people. An older meaning of rebellion meant some connection to organized political protest, and the folk music revival resurrected traces of this kind of politics along with the traditional ballads. Mid-1950s popular culture from James Dean movies to rhythm and blues and less popular productions like Beat writing imagined a much more psychological and individual rebellion—sex, drugs, and emotional freedom. When Dylan began writing songs that explored a whole range of feelings beyond the righteous anger and absurdist humor of his early work, he did not invent this new version of rebellion. But he brought with him from the folk scene a sense of seriousness that, fused with his poetic imagination, made the Beats’ and the teen films’ emotional alienation seem deep and important, even mystical. And unlike the Beats in the fift ies, Dylan was increasingly, hugely popular, and covers of his songs by other musicians were often even more successful than his own versions. His new protest songs imagined alienation as an individual state of mind rather than a communal condition. Dylan romanticized cultural rebellion for the masses.84
Notoriously lax in the studio, Dylan treated his recordings as the record of an act, how he played a song on a particular day, not a piece’s Platonic, perfect form. Dylan kept, for example, the false start as the beginning of his 1963 song “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” Somehow, beginning, going back, and beginning again only added to Dylan’s distance from his own barely passed past, making more poignant his nostalgia for his early days in New York when he wrote songs in his friends’ cheap rooms: “As easy it was to tell black from white/It was all that easy to tell wrong from right./… I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,/That we could sit simply in that room again,/Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,/I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.” Like the folksingers and fans that were his first audience in the mid-sixties, Dylan went back to the beginning, using his own past as the place of origins, as a substitute for the pre-modern, anti-modern, anything but modern revivalist vision of the folk. The folk music revival saw all folk music, whether or not the lyrics originally expressed this nostalgia, as a lament for a “world done gone.” (The earliest blues, not surprisingly for music made by people so recently enslaved, were not nostalgic, while early hillbilly songs, not surprisingly for music made by people experiencing their first industrial employment, did express this wistful longing for a romanticized past.) Dylan brilliantly got the emotions right by turning his nostalgia back on himself. In the past, before Dylan became famous, he was not responsible, just as the folk, as imagined by the revival, were not responsible. What he was looking for, like the revivalists, was a little bit of innocence. The pieces of his autobiography became, like the old melodies, song forms, and performance styles used by the new folksingers, the raw materials of his new art. He would use his own life the way a folksinger used the folk even when he was not playing folk music.85
At the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, Bob Dylan walked out onstage in an orange-yellow shirt, black leather jacket, and pointy boots, strapped on an electric guitar, and sang three songs. For the folkie establishment, playing an electric guitar was a gesture equivalent to giving the audience the finger. The folkies had listened to the whiny-voiced kid from small-town Minnesota who covered his middle-class Jewish past with lies about hopping freights and playing the streets for change with old black bluesmen. They had made him a star. He belonged to them. But the times, as Dylan himself had sung, were a-changin’. At Newport, backed by a rock band, Dylan played “Maggie’s Farm” and then his new ballad of psychological alienation, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “How does it feel,” Dylan drawled with an undercurrent of rage on the bootleg recording, “To be on your own/Like a complete unknown/With no direction home?” The crowd, in the myth anyway, booed him then. They are certainly yelling something on the available recording, although some who were there remember that people were shouting because the guitar was so loud in the sound mix that they could not hear Dylan’s voice. As the band and Dylan finished and fled backstage, Pete Seeger stood in the wings and cried. The booing continued throughout Dylan’s new tour, from Forest Hills, New York, to London’s Royal Albert Hall. Still, Dylan emerged from this transformation more popular than ever. “Like a Rolling Stone,” released as a single in the summer of 1965, peaked at number two on the pop music charts in August. The folk musician had become a rock star.86
No matter how much folk revivalists criticized him, Dylan had succeeded in pushing their own definition of authenticity as emotional truth to its logical limit. In Dylan, transformation and transcendence merged. Becoming someone else, with all its theatricality, was a form of self-expression too. If your emotions demanded reinvention, who was to say that this change was not your own emotional truth? Who was to say that transformation was not authentic? Transformation, change, imagined now not as class mobility but as insisting that everything was possible, that the present does not have to flow out of the past, could be its own form of transcendence, a way paradoxically to escape the limits of history. Change could be the new truth. Dylan, of course, did not single-handedly transform rock and roll from the soundtrack of sock hops and parking spots into the soundtrack of the radical politics and the counterculture. No musician did more, however, with the possible exception of the Beatles, to fuse the contradictions, to meld authenticity and self-invention into a new whole, to transform rock and roll in the second half of the sixties and the early seventies into the music of rebellion.
Throughout his career, Dylan continually reworked his own image the way blues musicians reworked their songs. His life was a gesture, an act in every sense of the term. He was still at it when he published his memoir, Chronicles, in 2004, returning to that moment before fame hit, before he was responsible, crafting a much more subtle image of his own connections to the folk than he had years before in Izzy Young’s Folklore Center. Rather than claiming his own folk past, he instead placed his artistic career in a genealogy reaching from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain to Jimmie Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, and Big Bill Broonzy. Dylan helped make transcendence, self- expression sliding completely into self-invention, and the privileging of emotional rather than material truth into the sixties definition of “authenticity”: I exist because I express myself. In 1966, an interviewer asked Dylan about the turn away from the politics of his protest songs like “The Ballad of Medgar Evers” and “Masters of War” in the music he had recently recorded. “Every one of them is a protest song,” Dylan insisted; “all I do is protest.” Four decades later, in Chronicles, Dylan demonstrated that he was still a master of this act.87
In the late fift ies and early sixties, the two versions of this “I exist because I express myself” blues identity, this romance of rebellion, collided in a particularly interesting moment, the mass movement phase of the civil rights movement. Transformation (I need to feel for a moment that I could be somebody else, somebody with more resources) and transcendence (I need to feel for more than a moment that I really am somebody else, somebody with different emotions and morals), the recognition of limits and the giddy sense that history did not have to apply—both played their roles in building a new politics. Perhaps it didn’t matter in the end if your imagination of the folk was wrong, colored by more than a century of romance, by cakewalks, coon songs, Uncle Remus, and Appalachian jugs, Child’s ballads and Alexander’s Ragtime Band, summer camp singing, Porgy and Bess, and college song swaps. It didn’t matter so much that you were playing both ends against the middle, the history of elite romanticism and poor lives against the postwar middle class’s suburban vision of mass-produced plenty. It didn’t matter that your politics were completely contradictory, coupling liberalism’s sense of the individual’s unlimited ability to make her very self with conservatism’s belief in the essential otherness of the poor. It didn’t matter. Folk singing required you to feel someone else’s life, just for a moment, even if that life was more a product of your own imagination than any life lived in Mississippi. Performing the songs, performing the feelings, meant feeling them too. The mid-century folk music revival was flawed as both political analysis and social history, but it was a perfect exercise in empathy. And this, in the end, despite some revivalists’ lack of a sense of the politics of their own appropriations, proved to be a route into politics. “While the great blues tradition of the Mississippi Delta was being kept alive at the Newport Folk Festival,” Irwin Silber insisted in 1964, “the urgent freedom songs of today became the same Delta’s most vital expression.” By the early sixties, the music had traveled a long way back home to the South.88
Bob Dylan wears jeans and a plaid shirt and holds an acoustic guitar in this photo taken in early 1965 at the height of his fame as a folksinger. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
