by Jonny Meister, Host/Producer of The Blues Show on WXPN

January 1946 - 1980?? 2007??

Perhaps it is simplistic, but I think of the folk revival in terms of two kinds of people, source singers and revivalists. The revivalists became better known for the most part. They took the songs from the source singers, and they also wrote new songs in the traditional styles, and came up with a commercial entity called folk music. The source singer was typically someone who really lived the life that was sung about: the sailor who sang sea chanties, the hobo who sang about hopping freights. The revivalists, more likely from middle-class backgrounds in cities and suburbs than the source singers, became fascinated with the traditional music and the lives behind it.

Leadbelly was one of the first source singers of the folk revival in the United States. He had done serious time in prison, but his preference on the concert circuit was to wear nice suits, not the prison garb that folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who were his managers, forced him to wear on stage for a while. It was an early example of the manipulation of image that characterized the folk revival. The 50s and 60s were full of singers with vaguely southern accents that didn’t actually come from anywhere in the South, and concocted rural personae of wanderers and such, like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, son of a New York doctor– though he did run away from home to join a rodeo! There were a lot of white blues singers trying to sound black, usually offering a caricature of blues singing, sometimes with an amusing hokey-folky sound that really occurred nowhere in the tradition. True folk music, whatever it was, was elusive.

The folk revival in the UK gave us people like Ewan MacColl, who ran a club called The Singers Club, where the left-wing politics usually associated with the folk revival was de rigueur, as well as “authenticity” — if you are from Ireland, you should sing Irish songs, etc.– yet MacColl himself was somewhat of a fake Scotsman, born in England as James Miller. The leftist leanings of the folk revival were rarely found among the rural folk whose songs and lives intrigued the revivalists. Some songs were written to sound like traditional songs, including Steve Gillete’s beautiful “D’arcy Farrow.” A general rule of thumb: if a song is almost cloyingly sweet or a real tearjerker, it’s not a traditional song…

Now, don’t get me wrong! I loved the folk revival. I didn’t really “see through it” when I was a kid anyway — but I admired the early revivalists who stood up against McCarthyism, and I enthusiastically embraced the folk revival’s connection with the civil rights movement and later the antiwar movement. The period of protest songs was short, but some of the songs will live forever as things that need to be said again and again until we learn to get along in this world, like Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” is a window into the tragic, cyclic nature of war. The uncommon warmth of Doc Watson’s performances was always welcome.

The singer-songwriters who developed from the folk tradition, from Donovan shivering with his buddy in the cold to James Taylor driving down the highway from Stockbridge to Boston, have given us indelible images of coming-of-age. So too did Joni Mitchell on her carousel of time in “The Circle Game.” Stan Rogers made life on the high seas come alive in his songs. Barbara Keith’s beautiful exploration of the conflicting feelings of romantic love in “The Bramble and The Rose” flowered in the performance of that song by Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin in the 1970s.

Traditional songs were reborn in the hands of innovative bands like Pentangle and Steeleye Span. Steeleye really brought out the drama of the bizarre return of three dead sons to their mother in “The Wife Of Usher’s Well,” a ballad that had languished on page 25 of a big poetry anthology I had when I was in high school, full of Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. Irish bands like The Bothy Band never allowed their glowing virtuosity to outshine the power of the tradition they revived.

Another thing I loved about the folk revival were the coffee houses, the music places where alcohol didn’t rule. Club people will tell you that’s it’s about the music– but “we HAVE to have a liquor license.” It seems that it’s really about the alcohol. At least a good number of the folk clubs were not like that.

Under the scrutiny of folklorists, some traditional songs, like “Stagger Lee” and “Cotton-Eyed Joe” have yielded some of the secrets of their origins, but there is still a mystery surrounding most traditional songs, unlike anything found with more modern material. Depending on your definitions, the folk process is still going on today or it isn’t. Certainly it ain’t the same as it was. The folk revival may be over, but it gave us an extensive body of timeless, wonderful songs — as well as a bunch of bad blues albums.

Phil Ochs “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”