During the 1950s and 1960s, when Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds coaxed classrooms full of kids to join them in the singing of folk songs, no one paid much attention—not even those who, in the middle of the Cold War, saw America’s “singing left” as a threat to the republic. “They never thought there would be a problem with Pete Seeger singing to six-year-olds,” Seeger’s biographer, David King Dunaway, wrote. But considering the baby boom those six-year-olds turned out to be, Dunaway’s later observation made sense: What was in the offing was “an American folk music revival that I think we have to give the FBI credit for helping to establish.”
The law of unintended consequences gave a quirky twist to the relation between the Old and New Left and, in the process, lent peculiar accents to America’s musical and political culture that we can’t seem to get rid of even today. The folk revival—a fad sandwiched between the beatniks and the hippies—may have been brief, but it was also the baby boomers’ coming of age, and its echoes have been lasting. Bruce Springsteen made a splash in 2006 with his Seeger Sessions. Ry Cooder paid homage to Woody Guthrie in the 2007 release My Name Is Buddy. Sheryl Crow told Billboard magazine that her song, “Shine Over Babylon,” is “very environmentally conscious, in the tradition of Bob Dylan.”
It’s curious how much the postwar children of prosperity enjoyed hearkening back to hard times. Dylan’s early compositions were full of Dust Bowl references. Odetta was on television rendering the sounds of the chain gang while bathed in a glamorous cabaret spotlight. The Gordon Lightfoot song “Early Morning Rain” (1964) complained that “you can’t jump a jet plane” as easily as you hopped a freight train back in the good old, bad old days. “Green, Green,” Barry McGuire’s 1963 top ten hit, had the perky coeds of the New Christy Minstrels belting out the plea of the Great Depression: “Buddy, can you spare me a dime?”
The Appalachian murder ballads, convict songs, and Dust Bowl laments of the 1960s did prompt some debate about authenticity, but the rescuers of old-time music cheerfully exposed themselves to the charge of dilettantism. “Some of my favorite songs I’ve learned from camp counselors,” admitted Pete Seeger. Dave Van Ronk—whose disarming memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, was published posthumously in 2005—recounts that many years after he had helped popularize “House of the Rising Sun,” he actually went to New Orleans, only to learn that the original establishment was not a bordello, as he had supposed, but a women’s prison. Another staple of Van Ronk’s repertoire, “Candy Man,” had been taught to him by a master of ragtime guitar finger-picking, the Reverend Gary Davis. The straight-laced Davis was loath to join him on “Candy Man” before an audience—eventually Van Ronk caught on that the song he’d been performing was about a pimp.
Superficiality did not hinder the music. It sold like hotcakes (at least until the Beatles arrived and made rock ’n’ roll king), and the secondhand quality escaped those of us working up third-hand versions, strumming along with our phonograph records. From my own spot in the Great American Middle—a subdivision of ranch houses newly erected on flat farmland west of Chicago—I couldn’t see the pretense in “Tom Dooley,” as the preppy-looking Kingston Trio impersonated a poor Confederate soldier who hung down his head and cried. Struggling to play and sing—my elders on their Silvertone guitars from Sears, and I on my baritone ukulele to accommodate the small hands of an eight-year-old—we were disinclined to delve into questions of provenance.
These were borrowed tastes, but nobody seemed to mind. As Van Ronk observed, “One of the first things that must be understood about these revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always, there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk—whoever that might be—is the operative thing.” Capturing all of the contradictions, the historian Robert S. Cantwell wrote that this was a time “when the carriers of a superannuated ideological minority found themselves celebrated as the leaders of a mass movement; when an esoteric and anticommercial enthusiasm turned into a commercial bonanza; when an alienated, jazz-driven, literary bohemia turned to the simple songs of an old, rural America.”
That part about an “ideological minority” being “celebrated” by somebody had gone over our heads, too: We did not know that the folk boom was a reverberation of an earlier boomlet, a foray into American music roots, many of whose movers and shakers were as Red as a bowl of cherries. Who on our suburban street knew that Woody Guthrie, the hero of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, had been a columnist for the Daily Worker? Or that the man from whom we heard rollicking sea chanteys, a Briton named Ewan MacColl, was at one point kept from entering the United States as an undesirable alien? Then there was the cuddly-looking guy with the slightly pedantic six-record set and companion volume, Burl Ives Presents America’s Musical Heritage. If my parents or any of the neighbors were aware that Ives had been summoned, in 1952, to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had identified Pete Seeger as a communist, they kept the details to themselves.
Even today, this back story is not well known. But it should be, for it sharpens our view of several interconnected matters: the communist controversy in the United States, market capitalism’s ability to absorb and soften extreme ideas, and the decades-long domination of our cultural scene by the “forever-young” generation born during and shortly after the Second World War.
Many who inspired that generation to make folk music had been in the orbit of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). War and depression shook Americans’ faith in capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s, and in reaction, broad swaths of the intelligentsia were smitten by “Pan-Sovietism” (to borrow Murray Kempton’s phrase), either joining the party or becoming fellow travelers. Among those who saw trouble in this development was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who warned in Life magazine in 1946 that “the wildly enthusiastic communist claque for certain types of phony folk art has lowered the standards of many Americans not themselves party members or sympathizers.” In the Atlantic Monthly, the Harvard professor Carl Friederich called “strictly subversive and illegal” the repertoire of the Almanac Singers (the group formed in Greenwich Village by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and others, some of whose members later became the Weavers).
Were Schlesinger and Friederich crazy? Not really. From the nation’s founding, through the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Wobblies printed their pamphlet of Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent, political themes had made their way into popular music. Without question, however, the most concerted effort at politicization came from the CPUSA. Go out and make antifascist alliances with liberals, Georgi Dmitrov ordered in Moscow in 1935, and so the communists obediently fanned out into the American labor movement and civil-rights activities.
And a few headed for the hills, musically speaking.
The most important example is the Seegers. In the 1930s, Charles Seeger, a classically trained musicologist, was one of Manhattan’s leading cultural lights. He and quite a few of his fellow artists, including the composer Aaron Copland, saw in the Russian Revolution a harbinger of international peace and the abolition of class conflict. And so, in 1934, they formed a “Composers’ Collective” to urge their countrymen to join the revolutionary struggle. As Seeger wrote—in the Daily Worker, using an alias—music would be “one of the cultural forms through which the work of humanizing people and preparing the proletariat for its historic tasks operates.”
The collective first tried bringing high-brow modernism to the masses. This involved, among other things, holding a contest for best original May Day marching song. (Copland’s entry took the laurels; Seeger countered that his was more singable and, anyway, the workers weren’t likely to have a piano handy during their protest marches.) The effort was a bust. But it led Seeger, family in tow, to roam the rural southeastern United States, exploring the music played by the regular folk and groping for a way to turn these demotic musical expressions in a politically helpful direction.
By the time Charles’ son, Pete, came of age, the record laid down by the “people’s democracy” in the Soviet Union had lengthened to include show trials, the forced collectivization of agriculture, a well-developed police state, and the takeover of neighboring countries. Nonetheless Seeger fils, the next-generation wandering minstrel, stuck with his inherited “Pan-Sovietism” through a long and successful musical career. (The historian Ronald Radosh, in a public exchange with him in 2009, elicited a rueful comment about having stood by Josef Stalin despite everything.)
Pete first took up the banjo as a twenty-one-year-old, sitting on front porches across the South and learning from the old masters of the rural tradition. Sometimes those masters balked at city slickers glomming onto their music. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a North Carolinian who mounted what may have been the first “folk festival,” detested Seeger for his communism. (As the historian Ronald D. Cohen notes, Lunsford once introduced a folk act at his Asheville festival as “three Jews from New York.”)
Seeger and his friends were undeterred. Their duty, as they saw it, was to convert the middle class to their way of thinking. Besides, they genuinely loved the music. By Van Ronk’s casual estimate, half the folk revivalists were Jewish, and they “adopted the music as part of a process of assimilation into the Anglo-American tradition.”
By the 1940s, folk singers had become a ceremonial part of Communist Party meetings. And at nearly all of them, one would find Pete Seeger playing, under the revolutionary pseudonym “Pete Bowers,” with the likes of Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Burl Ives, Josh White, Saul Aarons, Bernie Asbel, Will Geer, and a new arrival on the East Coast musical scene, Woody Guthrie.
To achieve the effect they wanted—music that was “national in form and revolutionary in content” in Charles Seeger’s conception—they dipped into the past for their material. “Jesse James,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” and “On Top of Old Smokey” were brought to urban settings, in some cases for the first time. Topical songs—many written for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948—were political editorials often set to old hymns and folk tunes: “Capitalistic Boss,” “Join the Union Tonight,” “Oh, What Congress Done to Me,” “Defense Factory Blues,” and “Marcantonio for Mayor” (for the Stalinist Vito Marcantonio).
Use was made of old English ballads (“Jack Munro” became Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?”), together with slave songs (“My Darling Nellie Gray” became “The Commonwealth of Toil”). Children’s ditties got recycled: “Polly Wolly Doodle” turned into “The Picket Line Song,” for instance, and “The Farmer in the Dell” was no longer about the rat taking the cheese but a captain of industry whose spoiled son drove a Cadillac (merely a different kind of rat, come to think of it). It was all part of an effort to connect with factory-and-farm America while proffering “an answer to the misery that was clearly around us,” in the words of singer Ronnie Gilbert, the sole female member of the Weavers.
The best adapter of the bunch, and one of the better vocalists and guitarists, was Woody Guthrie. Several of Guthrie’s best-known offerings were built on borrowed melodies. “There once was a union maid,” sang Guthrie, “who never was afraid” of the “goons and ginks and company finks.” The melody was from Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer” by way of “Red Wing,” a popular 1907 song that began: “There once was an Indian maid, a shy little prairie maid.”
The most beloved Guthrie recasting is, of course, “This Land Is Your Land.” It was a response to “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin, which Guthrie found complacent and cliché-ridden. His original manuscript contains verses that denounce property rights, but the standard rendition cut that material, and the strong and simple melody goes back at least to “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine,” a Carter family song based on a Baptist hymn called “When the World’s on Fire.”
The critic Leslie Fiedler used to write about what he called “the Popular Front mind at bay,” and the phrase gives us an inkling of the strangely divided sensibility of people like Guthrie. It enraged this man, with his American ancestry, to be “accused of being a Russian red.” The Soviet Union was nonetheless the final arbiter of all that mattered to him, in politics and even aesthetics. The same person who scrawled indignantly in the margin of his scrapbook that “I ain’t out to spread no foreign ideas amongst the people over here” also enthused in a letter to Lee Hays, his fellow Almanac Singer, that: “the Soviet consul member was there, Nichi Somebody, and he listened to our songs. . . . He’s gonna send a big batch of them over to the Soviet Union. . . . If they take a sudden notion to produce these records over there, naturally, you know what that might lead to—hell, we might sell a whole flock of them. It’s damn good to hear that the Almanacs and Union Folks over here in the USA guessed so close to the Real Truth in selecting and choosing to back this kind of music.”
The style of these Bolshevik balladeers was heavily influenced by Alan Lomax, assistant director of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Like Pete Seeger, Lomax was a second-generation music man. His father was John Lomax, a southern folk-music hobbyist and pioneer in the techniques of sound-recording, who took his son with him on his journeys. Their travels had taught them that black people, some of whom they recorded in rural prisons, were making distinctive music that deserved to be brought forward.
And there was something else—something that irked even leftists, if they were noncommunist. “However loathsome and psychotic” J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was, according to Dave Van Ronk, they “got one thing right: The CP [USA] was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no more, no less.” Alan Lomax, broadcasting down-home American music over the radio, did his bit to promote Moscow’s interests, at least in small ways. A Lomax-produced radio show out of CBS in New York called Back Where I Come From, for example, was the stuff of Arthur Schlesinger’s nightmares. Guthrie was a regular, as was an ex-convict and twelve-string guitar wonder, Lead Belly (Huddy Ledbetter).
Premiering in August 1940, Back Where I Come From featured, according to historian Robbie Lieberman, “socially conscious songs and stories, even though not explicitly ‘left’ stuff. For example, someone would sing ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and Lomax would comment, ‘ There was a war that was worth fighting’”—implying, the American Civil War was good, but England’s fight against Stalin’s 1940 ally Hitler was bad. One could trace in Lomax’s comments “the CP line during the period of the Nazi–Soviet pact,” writes Lieberman. Lomax’s comrades were even louder on the point: While the pact was in force, Seeger and Guthrie wrote vitriolic anti-Roosevelt songs for the Almanacs to sing about the pointless sacrifice that lay ahead should the president send American boys against the Nazi war machine.
The party line changed when Panzer divisions rolled across Russia’s western border in June 1941. This had musical ramifications. Guthrie quickly began inserting anti-Hitler lyrics into his old songs. (He also joined the Merchant Marine, and Seeger was conscripted into the Army.) On the radio there was The Martins and the Coys, with music by Alan Lomax’s wife, Elizabeth, and Lomax as arranger. Folk historian Ronald D. Cohen describes this 1944 show as “drawing upon traditional stereotyping of southern culture,” with “two feuding families” resolving “their quarrelling to join the war against fascism.” Why join now? Because now it was the Red Army trying to fend off the Wehrmacht. Cohen stops short of calling The Martins and the Coys a patronizing piece of agitprop, contenting himself with this dry comment: “Although it was recorded in the Decca studios in New York, no domestic network would air the program, so Lomax shipped it to London for broadcast on the BBC.”
Here was proof of the counter-subversives’ clout. In fact, the American Legion and local groups, such as the Christian Anticommunism Crusade picketed the appearances of folk singers who had been named as communists in such publications as Red Channels and Counterattack. Lomax himself went eventually to England to escape the blacklist and a bad marriage. That, however, was after the summit of musical Marxism-Leninism was reached, with the creation of an organization by the name of People’s Songs.
Founded in New York in 1945, People’s Songs sprang from the publicity arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a part of the labor movement in which communists were heavily represented. Lomax and Seeger were the group’s leaders. They intended it to be a radical Tin Pan Alley—a factory of musical creativity that could draw workers into CIO unions (instead of unions affiliated with the reactionary American Federation of Labor) and citizens into the voting booths to pull the lever for party-preferred candidates. Their big electoral cause was the presidential bid of Henry Wallace in 1948. Wallace’s Progressive Party aimed to knock the Cold Warrior Truman out of the White House—and Alan Lomax, naturally, was the Wallace campaign’s musical director.
People’s Songs—which lasted from 1945 to 1949—ginned up a host of musico-political activities, sprouting fifteen chapters around the country. The labor movement was coming into its prime, and the People’s Songsters aimed to be the singin’ and strummin’ shock troops: trolling for new musical talent, making folk recordings, producing film strips for the sing-alongs—they called them hootenannies—that were part of union-membership drives. Seeger went on the campaign trail with Wallace to enliven the Progressive Party’s rallies. Surviving photographs show neatly dressed People’s Songsters posing with their instruments, their grins a mile wide, with Paul Robeson, elder statesman of Stalinism in the arts, looking on in approval.
An official newsletter—forerunner of the communist-run folk magazines Sing Out! and Broadside—dispensed tips to aspiring songwriters. “Parodies of favorite old songs are the easiest to write,” the editors advised, and by coming up with “new ‘socially significant’ words—[for] a satire on a political opponent or a treatment based on a legislative issue—you can create a potent weapon.” Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin’s brief membership in the Young Communist League overlapped with his stint as first tenor in the Carolinians, which featured People’s Songs star Josh White. The Chicago chapter of the organization boasted a young folkie by the name of Studs Terkel.
All this youthful energy, devotion—and, in some cases, talent—yielded a pretty dreary output. Even as sympathetic an observer as Robbie Lieberman—the daughter of People’s Songster Ernie Lieberman—points to lyrics that were “only likely to have meaning to the Communist Left.” When, for example, the People’s Songsters offered paeans to the Office of Price Administration (the Reds’ pet federal agency because it had charge of rationing, wages, prices, and rent-control), their weapon fired blanks, as it did with a song deploring the allegedly unjust provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. Even songs condemning racial prejudice threw in criticism of the effort to block Soviet domination of trade unions in western Europe. (“We don’t want no Marshall Plan. . . . Henry Wallace is our man!”)
A few of the catchier songs did reach a larger audience. That included counter-subversives, though, producing more skirmishes in the culture war that was the communist controversy in America. There was the Joint Committee Against Communism, led by Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, which went after Columbia and RCA Victor for releasing “Old Man Atom.” It was a musical warning by Vern Partlow, of the People’s Songs’ Los Angeles branch, of the danger of letting the United States maintain its monopoly on nuclear weapons. The rabbi’s campaign caused Partlow’s song to be withdrawn from distribution and apparently dissuaded Bing Crosby from recording his own version.
According to the historian David Everitt, a housewife named Edna Johnson Buchanan lugged her phonograph to community assemblies so her fellow citizens could hear “The Banks of Marble,” by the Weavers. It was a throwback to hard times, for by then (1950) the Depression was long gone. The song’s refrain was an invitation to the weary miner, the put-upon farmer, and the unemployed seaman to “make a stand” and then “we’d own those banks of marble, with a guard at every door. And we’d share those vaults of silver, that we have sweated for.” Mrs. Buchanan was outraged that her husband, a Marine who saw combat in Europe, was now off fighting the communists in Korea even as these domestic Reds racked up big earnings by attacking the system he was risking his life to defend. She and her father, Laurence Johnson, were part of the popular groundswell against the Weavers that sidelined their act by the early 1950s.
Nearly as disagreeable—for a different reason, of course—were party apparatchiks not of the musical persuasion. As Lieberman relates, many of them found the notion of a “hootenanny revolutionist” absurd. What could this cornpone do to bring down the system? Malvina Reynolds, a People’s Songster from northern California, quit the CPUSA out of anger that its leadership “had no concept of what I was doing or what effect it would have.”
As it turned out, People’s Songs didn’t have much immediate political effect. Henry Wallace received only two percent of the vote, and the movement as a whole had already crested. As the Soviet challenge to the Western democracies grew after the Second World War, the CPUSA’s bid for supremacy on the Left waned. The CIO unionists aligned themselves more firmly with Cold War foreign policy—helped along, after Truman’s reelection, by a purge of communists from the CIO leadership (under the hated Taft-Hartley Act). The Progressive Party’s collapse demoralized Seeger, who retreated to New York’s Hudson Valley to build, Thoreau-style, a home in the woods for his family.
Folk music did not go away with the political marginalization of Red folkies. A revival was now underway, nurtured by the increasingly profitable Sing Out! magazine (whose commercialism irked Pete Seeger, one of its editors) and the records being churned out by Moe Asch, the producer and former People’s Songs patron, on his well-regarded Folkways label.
Some kept singing—and wrote ditties about Red-hunters coming after them. Betty Sanders did a jaunty 1952 rendition of “Talking Un-American Blues” about the subpoena (eventually canceled) that she and her coauthor Irwin Silber received from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Alan Lomax and Michael Loring sang (to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”): “Re-pu-bli-cans they call us ‘Red,’ the Demmies call us ‘Commie.’ / No matter how they slice it, boys, it’s still the old salami.”
This was a new, coy art that was to grow in significance: ridiculing one’s adversaries for correctly discerning one’s politics. The demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy and other anticommunist excesses provided the opening. The 1962 song “The Birch Society” by Malvina Reynolds has the typical Pop Front blend of brazenness and coyness—with an extra dollop of sanctimony, a Reynolds specialty. “They’re afraid of nearly everything that’s for the general good,” she sang, “they holler ‘Red’ if something’s said for peace and brotherhood.” The fact that they also hollered Red if somebody actually was a Red got lost in the shuffle. For here, at last, was a rallying point—anti-anti-communism—with a potential for wide appeal. It became fundamental to the politics of nearly everyone who was left-of-center and was adopted by legions of middle-class young people unmoved by concepts such as worker ownership of the means of production.
Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” appeared in Broadside magazine’s inaugural issue in the same year Reynolds did her satire. A 1964 variant had Dylan singing a line in protest of Pete Seeger’s exclusion from the ABC television show Hootenanny on political grounds. Both that song and “Society’s Child,” a plea for interracial understanding written by a teenaged Janis Ian, came out of the musical salon that had formed around Broadside. And Broadside had formed around, or at least at the behest of, Malvina Reynolds. Concurring with Seeger that Sing Out! had lost its political edge, she had coaxed Popular Front friends into starting the rival publication. In their Red Dust and Broadsides (1990), Sis Cunningham and her husband Gordon Friesen describe vetting songs monthly in their New York apartment in sessions frequented by Dylan, Ian, Phil Ochs, and others.
Ochs in particular was a master of social observation. His topical songs courted instant obsolescence, being so closely trained on the news of the day. Yet there were times when his special talent—skewering liberals—shone. According to Dave Van Ronk, Ochs “had believed in the liberal tradition, and it had betrayed him.” From out of this disillusion came “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” and “I Ain’t a Marchin’ Anymore,” which rip mainstream Democrats for being materially selfish, lukewarm to desegregation, and, worst of all, Cold Warriors. “Now the labor leader’s screaming when they close the missile plants. / United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore”—a more concise indictment of the military-industrial complex was never penned (nor sung in as oddly compelling a tenor voice as Ochs’).
This generation thought of itself as wholly original—and it’s true that the New Left had little taste for pro-Soviet bandwagoning. But it did absorb the Old Left’s opposition to American foreign policy. Its real uniqueness lay in a self-absorption of the most open and frank kind. The baby boomers took up a welter of causes—ban the bomb, respect mother earth, civil rights, stop the war, feminism—but what stands out is how much they loved picturing themselves in the act of banning the bomb, praising mother earth, and the rest. In the eloquent non sequitur of folksinger Fred Neil: “I’ve been searching for the dolphins in the sea, and sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me?”
With his beatnik-inflected meanderings, Neil was one of the first in Greenwich Village, according to Van Ronk, to start doing the “personal, subjective stuff.” Bob Dylan, among others, quickly picked up on it. Dylan was not the first of this new breed—the “singer-songwriter”—but his self-confidence made him the trailblazer. While he retooled traditional songs in the Guthrie manner, and (according to his biographer, Joe Klein) even made his Village debut literally wearing an old suit of Guthrie’s clothes, Dylan was not resting with the Old Left model. Sis Cunningham’s and Woody Guthrie’s music contained not an iota of introspection—a well-known bourgeois pathology. That didn’t matter to Dylan. (His failure to adopt the Party line disappointed his mentors—a harbinger, perhaps, of his flouting of all of folkdom when he switched to an electric guitar with rock accompaniment.)
Filthy lucre may have been counter-revolutionary but few of the old folksingers declined opportunities to distribute their work. Seeger wanted folk music to compete with the products of a rapidly expanding and corporatizing music industry. To find his opportunities, Seeger had to be resourceful because he was blacklisted by the primetime television networks. He got himself on television, at least in a small way, by mounting a self-funded show on a local New York educational channel and landing a half-hour show that played on Canadian television. Moreover, the primetime ban did not stop him from signing a recording contract in the early 1960s with Columbia Records and “a prosperous musical marriage” it was, according to Ronald D. Cohen.
In 1962, Seeger’s conviction for contempt of Congress (he had refused to cooperate with HUAC) was overturned on appeal. The system—that hated thing—had vindicated his right to his views. But primetime producers did not relent. He made do, as his biographer, Dunaway, points out, by performing on college campuses. Seeger was not the first to go on the university circuit. Back in the World War I era, Carl Sandburg was adding folk-singing interludes to his lectures. Seeger began doing it, however, just as the music industry was being absorbed into a burgeoning youth culture. Cohen quotes a 1963 trade-publication article on the new “role of the nation’s colleges, universities, civic organizations, and other such basically non-show business institutions in shaping entertainment patterns.”
Even as Seeger was bringing old-time music to students, and making the campus concertizing that is common today look viable, television was taking notice. Hootenanny was ABC’s attempt to cash in on the folk craze. Segments were taped at colleges across the country featuring Theodore Bikel, Judy Collins, and other prominent acts. All except Seeger. An effort by performers led by Joan Baez, among others, to boycott the show in protest did not last long—nor, in fact, did the program—but the Seeger affair became a high point in the 1960s generation’s demonstration to itself that it took a stand for civil liberties. And, not incidentally, for anti-anticommunism.
Oldsters like Seeger also influenced the music. He and Malvina Reynolds, for example, pioneered the practice of asking ingenuous musical questions to prod the Establishment to change. His “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was followed by Reynolds’ “What Have They Done to the Rain?”—a song about nuclear fallout made popular by Joan Baez in 1962. Eight years later, John Fogerty wrote the Vietnam protest song “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”—a hit for Creedence Clearwater Revival—and Cat Stevens chipped in “Where Do the Children Play?” By then, the oh-so-simple interrogative that catches “the straights” flat-footed was compulsory for assorted flower children and countercultural types, hallucinogenic drugs only having reinforced this tic.
Reynolds’ achievement with her 1962 song “Little Boxes”—heard today in many versions, most prominently as the theme song of Weeds, the Showtime television series—was to bend the People’s Songs manner of editorializing into something more general: a critique of the bourgeois lifestyle. The earliest versions of fast food drew Reynolds’ ire, too, and while that send-up was less than tuneful, it represented, as well, the kind of approach that was taken up by the folk and folk-rock songwriters who came after.
Yet, as we know, many in the new generation, even politically active ones, aimed more for personal liberation than for liberation of the masses. The output of folk and folk-rock artists—the painterly romanticism of Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen’s driving dirges of existentialism, for example—mostly reflected a personal-liberation kind of Leftism, not a Marxist-Leninist kind. To be sure, the role assigned to these people by their large and now aging audience was a serious one. The likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Carole King were looked on as more than entertainers. Their work was imagined as “philosophy at 33 1/3 rpm” (the title of a book on the subject).
That means, of course, that, in investing so much meaning in their pop-culture favorites, the baby boomers have more than a little in common with their predecessors. Americans have not marched, singing, to the barricades. On the other hand, successions of young adults have for decades been singing and tapping their feet (and occasionally sustaining eardrum damage) in the auditoriums of academia—after paying good money to get in—following the practice that a Bolshevik balladeer helped establish. And when America kicks back, turns on the tube, and watches a “hip” show about an upper-middle-class widow selling pot out of her suburban home—proving the utter hollowness of the American dream—it hums along with another Bolshevik balladeer. It’s enough to make you think that one day soon they could replace the Francis Scott Key tune that is our national anthem with Guthrie’s song. The “Star-Spangled Banner” is way too hard to sing, as everyone knows, so to cling to the status quo is to stand in the way of progress. And that is downright un-American.
Lauren Weiner , a speechwriter for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has published articles on history and politics for the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and other publications.
Comments:
Also, why do you imagine that Paul Robeson might have been sympathetic to the Progressive Party candidate for President in 1948? Not all African American artists were socialists or communists during the pre Civil Rights era in the U. S. But it isn't hard to understand why at least some people of color responded to political platorms during that time that called for racial equality and open opportunities for all workers of whatever color.
But don't stop now. By all means write your own music to fit your personal political orthodoxy, and see if you can make it popular.
Not all folksingers were political activists -- a fringe is still a fringe.
Dave Van Ronk, most of whose work is blues; much of it rawer than the two examples she gives.
Some commenters here have attempted to make the point that Blues and Bluegrass don't fit into the picture of Folk Music presented by the author. They're right, too, but for the wrong reasons, since both of these genres are about experience and culture, not ideology. In this respect both Blues and Bluegrass are truly folk music, the music of real people made out of their own lives. It was always my impression that the capital "Folk Music" lovers (and players) were busily recycling the experience of other people, and not their own.
Singing about your own physical and emotional calluses produces a qualitatively more profound effect than preaching about the aches and pains of some imagined other, and you only have to listen to Bill Monroe to appreciate the difference.
The article was poorly written. What should have been an interesting historical piece turned out to merely an article of hysteria about them and what they might do. Was this analysis due to poor research, bias or both?
So if Seeger were to sing another tune like "It's something about the corporation dah,dah,dah...and so on, would there be masses in the streets singing their songs?
Corporation folk...try it and see the people listening to your song...ho!
And one could say lately, that we have fewer 'lefties' than 'leftovers' as this nation attempts to recyle its economy. Wall Street and the banking industry have been strumming their sad songs for some time now but no one has put a melody or a catchy lyric to them to inspire the nation. I suppose Madoff in his cell could try it but who'd be listening...
Au contraire -- Peggy Seeger, while recording many traditional songs both American and Scottish throughout her career (she is, after all, Ewan MacColl's widow), is well-known as a writer of feminist, anti-war, and other highly politicized songs. And she mixes all of them on recordings and in concert in a highly effective way.
Please share this link with those who might be interested.
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/mybook2.html
P.S. The book is waiting for a reviewer
My father came from abject poverty, so when he sang "The Banks of Marble," it was because he had sweated for his money. He sang "Beans, Bacon and Gravy" by the New Lost City Ramblers (oh, wait, wasn't Mike Seeger a member of that group?) and other songs of the Depression because he LIVED them. Vicariously, I experienced his hard times.
From the music to which I was exposed, I believe that I developed a SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. My mother and father were not liberals by any stretch of the imagination--they voted for Nixon in 1960 while living in Massachusetts when everyone else there voted for Kennedy--but they always said that even though we had very little, there were always others out there who had less than we did. They were always ready to share what little we had. This philosophy was solidified by the music we listened to. Is that communism? Is it communism to give someone a hand up instead of a hand out? Is it communism to teach a man to fish rather than to give him a fish?
The point is, the music I listened to in the 1960s and listen to today has a political message that stresses humanitarian concerns. Peace, justice, civil rights, equal protection under the law, quality education for our children, quality health care--it all seems to make sense to me.
Would the author of this piece prefer that we listen to rap music that promotes violence and control of women through its lyrics?
One final comment: The author says that Phil Ochs's music had "short shelf life." Again, as Susan says, au contraire! How about this: "We're the cops of the world, boys, we're the cops of the world..." "It's always the old to lead us to the war, always the young to fall, now look at what we've won with a saber and a gun, tell me, is it worth it all?"..."Show me a country where the bombs had to fall...Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall...and I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why...There but for fortune go you or I..."
Timeless, timeless...
When will we ever learn?
And I have never been a member of the communist party--just a member of the human race!
WITH A SIGNIFICANT BACKGROUND..... GREAT STUFF.. DO GOOGLE.. YOU WON'T REGRET IT..
Just look at all the leftist apologists jumping up to the defense of their fellow travelers...I suppose this piece must've "struck a chord"...
What interested me was their commitment to racial justice. I did not see any conservatives fighting against Jim Crow. You were not there and never have been. This was not brainwashing but an awakening that conservatives never had. Reagan, Bush, Buckley and all you people all supported racial separation. You were brainwashed by racial hatred.
When I see parents my age (50 ish) gleefully sharing their '60's / '70's music with their teenagers I squirm. I feel like such an idiot for having thought it was such rich philosphy back then. I wish someone would have taught me what good philosphy. My kids see it today - in their own words they call it "Hippie Music".
Music is all about beauty. Philosphy should teach us what is true. I think many of us have been bewitched.
If we are honest we will sing "Look what they've done to my....." Ethos.
I would also make another point. Dylan sang some rather shallowly left-wing songs early in his career, but in his greatest work (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde) his lyrics are much less overtly political, much more introspective, intricate, and poetic. The Beatles also had some shallowly left-wing songs (Piggies from the White album being one of the most obvious) but they also had some much more poetic, introspective lyrics (Eleanor Rigby or Strawberry Fields for example). Pete Townshend invented the rock opera, and while Tommy may have a few hippy dippy songs, it also has some absolutely brilliant music and some rather trenchant commentary on stardom. So even in 60s and 70s music it is sometimes possible to find truth or at least good poetry.
I want to assure Ms. Weiner that, at least here at UCLA, the complexities of this story are pretty well served when we teach about them to 19-year olds. I am one of a team of instructors in a Freshman cluster on "The Sixties," and one of my jobs is to give a lecture on the politics of folk music and protest in the 1950s and early 1960s. My story covers both Popular Front style folkies and the music of the Civil Rights movement, and Pete Seeger is a central (and complex) figure. I play them the infamous track from "Music for John Doe" with the refrain "Plow under, plow under, plow under every fourth American boy!"; I note that this followed precisely the CPUSA party line of the moment; I link this to the Weavers being blacklisted, years later. But the same lecture ends with a picture taken at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, a "reunion" of civil rights pioneers including Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and...Pete Seeger. The very same man can make both profoundly right and profoundly wrong political calculations, and if that man is a musician, there will be music history to support both the proposition that political music is a fool's game and the claim that the highest value of music is as a spur to justice and equality.
As for Bob Dylan...well, let's not get started. Just go put on his Christmas album; the the most powerful statement of Jewish identity I have ever heard. :)
For a curious fusion of Western and Folk protest music, see Don Edwards' "Hard Times" 2009 video on YouTube.
I think this essay's focus on communism neglected the populist elements in Folk Music's appeal.
Were the Lefty-folkies poseurs, only making shows of compassion? Maybe and maybe not. But even if their concern was genuine they still chose to serve the largest engine of misery and strife with full knowledge of what it was. U.S foreign policy is not to be admired, but the idea that the USSR could serve as a moral counterweight is and was ridiculous. That the Old Lefties persisted in this belief despite the Gulag and the invasion of Finland suggests either insanity or deep contempt for truth. Those who go to war with reality are always defeated.
on a related point the reason Woody Guthrie is great and people like Seegar and Phil Ochs are bores is that Guthrie could seperate his aesthetic and political selves at the same time as he related them....the denunciations of wordly injustice on an album like dust Bowl Ballads are as timelessly biblical in imagery and imagination as they are 'communist'....that is why they last as art however much they may have been self-consciously conceived as 'agit-prop'.
We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.
There are innocuous folk songs.
Yeah, but we regard 'em with scorn.
The folks who sing 'em have no social conscience.
Why they don't even care if Jimmy Crack Corn.
If you feel dissatisfaction,
Strum your frustrations away.
Some people may prefer action,
But give me a folk song any old day.
The tune don't have to be clever,
And it don't matter if you put a coupla extra syllables into a line.
It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English,
And it don't even gotta rhyme--excuse me--rhyne.
Remember the war against Franco?
That's the kind where each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs.
So join in the Folk Song Army,
Guitars are the weapons we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
Ready! Aim! Sing!
There once was a musical troupe
A pickin' singin' folk group
They sang the mountain ballads
And the folk songs of our land
They were long on musical ability
Folks thought they would go far
But political incompatibility led to their downfall
Well, the one on the right was on the left
And the one in the middle was on the right
And the one on the left was in the middle
And the guy in the rear was a Methodist
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnnycash/theoneontherightisontheleft.html
When the singers told their stories and American stoicism when facing hard times, they were talking about things that my family had actually experienced.
Many of the songs and singers did not resonate with me, and some of those are mentioned in the original blog. Songs that seemed to promote drug use or paint other destructive behavior left me without much loyalty to some performers. The light hearted tunes of the Kingston Trio and Christy's Minstrels that were coupled to such melancholic lyrics had something of the effect of a fingernail dragged across a blackboard.
Perhaps the songs that left me mostly conflicted were the anti-war songs. I enlisted in the Navy at the height of the draft era in '67 and not long before the Tet Offensive. I left to serve my country before the protests and destruction started on the college campuses of this country and those events didn't get much attention in the reporting to the Far East edition of the "Stars and Stripes." I returned to a country that I didn't recognize and was denied employment and fired from a few jobs simply for having served in the military. That was before the time when veterans rights to jobs was protected by law. Even when I was being separated from the Navy at the end of my enlistment I was ordered not to wear my uniform when entering or leaving the base because of the threats of protesters. In spite of that I had to drive through angry mobs twice each day and clean up a car covered with more rotten produce, raw eggs and assorted other garbage each day. Later I was to encounter a professor who started the semester with the announcement that she would not pass anyone that she discovered who had been or was currently in the military. No one wrote folk songs about the absolute hatred and very real discrimination veterans faced when coming home to the country they had served with pride. No parades, just official disgust greeted our return.
I now live in the heart of one of the Vietnamese areas of the U.S. They still fly the old yellow and red flag of South Vietnam. The older generation still talks of returning home when the communists are out of power, but the talk is fading with time. For some who have made that journey home prison has been the result so most only dream. They do feel that we let them down by not sticking with our promise to protect their freedom and keep communist rule out of South Vietnam. No one ever wrote folk songs about their either.
These days I occasionally still listen to the old songs or even get out my guitar and play a few, but it is painful. Since the days when I first fell in love with the music that told the stories of my parents and grand parents, I've felt betrayed by the writers and singers.
These days I mostly listen to the music and songs that I could hear in church. That is one institution that sings about the things that are true and most dear to my heart.
Michael
I'm one of those who grew up to the sounds of 60's folk songs. I still find many of them, especially the more traditional ones compelling in the stories they tell. Perhaps my point of view made a difference.
My mother grew up in West Virginia, in the deepest poverty of Appalachia and that only intensified when her mother died when she was 1o years old just, leaving her to be the mother of her six younger brothers and sisters. This only intensified a couple of years later when the great depression left the family living in a dirt-floor shack with water a half mile away and some of the children given up to orphanages.
My father was out on the streets of Cincinnati at the age of 14. Later he was to become a 100% disabled Navy veteran in World War II. I grew up in the aftermath of that poverty with a father who was loving but could not work. When the singers told their stories and American stoicism when facing hard times, they were talking about things that my family had actually experienced.
Many of the songs and singers did not resonate with me, and some of those are mentioned in the original blog. Songs that seemed to promote drug use or paint other destructive behavior in a positive light left me without much loyalty to some performers. The light hearted tunes of the Kingston Trio and Christy's Minstrels that were coupled to such melancholic lyrics had something of the effect of a fingernail dragged across a blackboard.
Perhaps the songs that left me mostly conflicted were the anti-war songs. I enlisted in the Navy at the height of the draft era in '67 and not long before the Tet Offensive. I left to serve my country before the protests and destruction started on the college campuses of this country and those events didn't get much attention in the reporting to the Far East edition of the "Stars and Stripes."
I returned to a country that I didn't recognize and was denied employment and fired from a few jobs simply for having served in the military. That was before the time when veteran’s rights to jobs was protected by law. Even when I was being separated from the Navy at the end of my enlistment I was ordered not to wear my uniform when entering or leaving the base because of the threats of protesters. In spite of that I had to drive through angry mobs twice each day and clean up a car covered with more rotten produce, raw eggs and assorted other garbage each day.
Later I was to encounter a professor who started the semester with the announcement that she would not pass anyone that she discovered who had been or was currently in the military. No one wrote folk songs about the absolute hatred and very real discrimination veterans faced when coming home to the country they had served with pride. No parades, just official disgust greeted our return.
I now live in the heart of one of the Vietnamese communities in the U.S. They still fly the old yellow and red flag of South Vietnam. The older generation still talks of returning home when the communists are out of power, but the talk is fading with time. For some who have made that journey home prison has been the result, so most only dream of home. Many do feel that we let them down by not sticking with our promise to protect their freedom and keep communist rule out of South Vietnam. No one ever wrote folk songs about their plight either.
These days I occasionally still listen to the old songs or even get out my guitar and play a few, but it is painful. Since the days when I first fell in love with the music that told the stories of my parents and grand parents, I've felt betrayed by the writers and singers. These days I mostly listen to the music and songs that I could hear in church. That is one institution that sings about the things that are true and most dear to my heart.
Michael
Why would a prof say aloud something stupid that could get him or her placed on probation, at the least, and probable denial of tenure, if they didn't have it or be fired? Why would peaceniks who were trying to befriend active duty soldiers to convince them to go to defect to Canada spit on them or throw garbage on a military vehicle? Would they think that would make them immune from arrest by the military police who guarded entrances? It never made sense. It makes so little sense. I have not found one instance of one person being arrested for spitting on a vet in an airport terminal, as has been repeated for 40 plus years.
80,000 Viet Nam vets committed suicide in the aftermath of that debacle. Many more died from addictions in institutions like prisons and mental hospitals. This is the atrocity of American values visited upon returning Vets. This was the responsibility of an entire nation who reneged on the implicit & explicit promises given to vets for their service upon returning. The canard about protestors spitting on guys (not exactly steeped in non-violence) shows just how absurd is the charge in face of the real ingratitude, the endemic hostility of U.S governmental policy.
I found the article simplistic, as it was tenuous and disconnected. The Osmund Family or Wayne Newton might have warmed the hearts of lovers of pro-South Vietnamese mercenaries, collaborators and foreign armies., but you now can buy their records on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City or Hue. (Say, why what were we there for anyway?) How utterly wasteful of resources and human life to try to maintain the edifice of French colonialism! The vainglory & vanity of our military fueled a patriotic self-deception of anti-communism; a vicious, murderous war upon the Vietnamese that was bound to fail.
I hope our fearless columnist does not write a similar ideological/cultural history of Irish folk music, starting from the 19th C Land Leagues to the unionist organizing of the early part of the 20th C to the nationalist aspirations of a rebellious people ruled by 800 years by a power establishment maintained and enforced by Irishmen for the established, legitimate authority of the English Crown. Music reflects the hopes of equality.
If the Irish project doesn’t quite appeal to the writer, why not instead do a cultural history of Black American music as a self-deceptive jeremiad against the sanctity of private property from the Spirituals to inevitably giving way to the anarchistic and hedonistic impulses and sympathies of Jazz.
Music reflects the hopes for equality
The most memorable song lyric I ever heard goes something like, "It's not about getting what you want but wanting what you've got." That's not an original idea, just one captured in a buzz phrase set to a catchy tune. Neither the buzz phrase nor the tune, however, lent the idea any more weight or force than has on its own.
One time I asked my parents, Baby Boomers both, what the heck they were thinking back in the 60s and 70s. Why did you go nuts and rebel against what your parents taught you?, I asked. They both got that deer in the headlights look in their eyes and answered, "I don't know". I was amazed. I thought for certain they must have thought about it since there's never been a generation more inclined to navel-gazing than the Baby Boomers.
Tying all this together, the power of folk music must have been in its ability to take socialist ideas and set them to catchy tunes usually enjoyed in the throws of uninhibited hedonism. Put differently, folk music was a vehicle for socialism that delivered it directly to the emotion and pleasure centers of the brain, where it felt best while remaining hidden from the light of reason. I got my dose of socialism in a university poli sci course, which is why my approach to it was rational rejection rather than emotional acceptance. Just the opposite must have been true for most of the Baby Boomers thanks to folk music.
In western Culture today one must make a distinction between the culture of life and the culture of death. In the minds of most people science has become synonymous with destructive weapons, i.e, with death...Where is the culture of life? The culture of life resides in all those people who, inarticulate, frightened, and confused, are wondering "where it will all end." Thus the forces of death are confident and organized (via the military industrial complex) while the forces of life--the people who long for peace--are, for the most part, scattered, inarticulate, and woolly-minded, overwhelmed by their own impotence.
Death struts about the house while Life cowers in the corner.
Of course "Sin" is the problem and the problem with communism is their remedy. But how does one equitably distribute economic assets?
Music is a powerful tool of persuasion be it for love or politics and while many patriots may still cling to brass bands, the left keeps up with the times, fashion ala' mode.
Accusing conservatives of racial "insensitivity" for their lack of vigor during the civil rights movement is a red herring. The country is still " de facto" segreation, just not "de jure". This is not due to racism, but more with personal ease and comfort. The races will naturally blend to the degree as individuals decide and not by the fiat of the race aggravation industry.
Peace out.
Bob's rejection of the sinister politics of the Left was perhaps his greatest creative act.
In the European Parliament there are two large groups: the Christian Democrats (ie conservatives) and the Socialists. The remaing 1/3 or so seats are shared by three groups: the Greens, the 'Communists and Allies' and the Liberals (inc other such moderate right-wingers). This is how the people of Europe VOTE!
Here in Ireland I have always voted Green... and continued my voting references to the 'Left' parties. On one occasion the resulted in the election of a 'Euro-Communist' canditate to Dail Eireann. One of three Workers Party TDs at the time... out of 166 TDs in the Dail.
Now that the Greens have disgraced themselves in government what is left for a 52 year old?
I have 230 Beatles albums.
The question is "Do we throw the baby away with the bath water?" Or is the other factor that also contributed the covert reduction of the basics of faith that have grown from the early years of the cnetury? When persons are not grounded in their beliefs, it becomes extremely simple to throw them away.
And you might be amused by the Tom Lehrer song about those who fight for the Revolution with their guitars; if you develop this column any further, it would add a nice touch to quote the Lehrer song. I can't think of the song title, but it will cause you no pain to listen to all of them to find the right one.