The Origins of the Sixties Folk Revival

The Origins of the Sixties Folk Revival Movement

In the wake of the Second World War, a great musical renaissance occurred in the west. It would be uncontroversial to state that music had never been so good, before or since. This libidinous, Dionysian procession of creativity is embodied in a canonic corpus beginning with Elvis and ending with Nirvana. The musical renaissance of the twentieth century reached its zenith in the sixties and early seventies. The fifties laid the foundation for decades of creativity to come. Classic rock ’n’ roll helped forge the first true youth culture. Despite the temporary wane in the popularity of rock ’n’ roll, this first liberating spasm gave shape to music of all genres in the sixties. 

However, the sixties was more than simply rock ’n’ roll. A pantheon of musical genres emerged as a result of progressively diversifying styles and sounds. Never before had such a variety existed. One particular movement that broke onto the mainstream in the sixties was folk. The revivalist scene was centred around Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York, and from amongst its ranks emerged a young Bob Dylan, alongside others such as Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Dave van Ronk and Judy Collins. A tension existed within the folk community between orthodox traditionalists or folklorists who stressed the authenticity of their sources of genuine folk music, and those who, due to commercial success, more loosely adhered to the rules. 

Woody Guthrie in 1941

The revivalists nostalgically reminisced the halcyon days of their forerunners in the thirties. Against the background of economic depression, this original generation of folksingers and musicians forged a politically rebellious sound, as “the artistic movements that grew out of this attempt to represent the general effects of the economic depression . . . belonged to a broad-based, left-wing culture, which came to be dominated by . . . the American Communist Party.”[1] The nucleus of this movement were a few folk artists, loosely grouping themselves as the Almanac Singers, also based in Manhattan, who saw their musical craft as a vessel for dissent and political activism. The most prominent of the Almanacs were Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Leadbelly. Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, and There’s a Better World That’s a-Comin’ are laden with communist ideology and inadvertently call for revolution. Guthrie’s most profound work as a radical folksinger however comes from his depictions of economic hardship among the working class, on records such as Dustbowl Ballads (1940). Guthrie and fellow folksingers strove to document the lives of the working class, and also to glean scraps of folk songs passed down through generations, so as to preserve them. This was an aspect they shared with the revivalists of the sixties generation, for “America’s most prominent folk musicians were middle class leftists who felt intense solidarity with the poor and oppressed, from immigrant factory workers to poor whites living in Appalachia to Negroes living in the segregated south.”[2] This documentary motive is best summed up in Guthrie’s own words: “I get my words and tunes from the hungry folks and they get the credit for all I pause to scribble down”, and “a folk song is about what’s wrong and how to fix it”.[3]

An aged Woody Guthrie standing in Washington Square Park, a cultural epicentre of the revival, in 1956.

The Almanacs were almost all party members (CPUSA) and voluntarily attended union rallies. Van Ronk himself admitted that the party was “nothing less than the American arm of Soviet foreign policy”[4], and thus making folk was the soundtrack of dissent. They were opposed to war, collectively recording an anti-war album called The Death of John Doe, until the USA joined the war on the side of the USSR. Both Guthrie and Seeger were drafted. Seeger’s band, The Weavers, became popular in the mainstream after the war, but were eventually blacklisted during the McCarthy era. The revivalists of the sixties perhaps did not all identify as communists or socialists, but the movement undeniably had a direction towards social justice and leftist politics, informed and shaped by the political beliefs of Guthrie’s generation.

Bibliography

Eyerman, Ron and Barretta, Scott, ‘From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States’, Theory and Society, 1996, Vol. 25(4), pp. 501-517. 

Radosh, Ronald, ‘The Communist Party’s Role in the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan’, American Communist History, 2015, Vol. 14(1), pp. 3-19.

 [1] Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, ‘From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States’, Theory and Society, 1996, Vol. 25(4), p. 508.

 [2]  Ronald Radosh, ‘The Communist Party’s Role in the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan’, American Communist History, 2015, Vol. 14(1), p. 5. 

 [3] Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, ‘From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States’, Theory and Society, 1996, Vol. 25(4), p. 501.

 [4]  Ronald Radosh, ‘The Communist Party’s Role in the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan’, American Communist History, 2015, Vol. 14(1), p. 6.