Introduction. Revivals and Movements in Non-Democracies

Reviewed by: Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 Jack Shortlidge Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970. By Ronald D. Cohen. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 364, notes, index.) Rainbow Quest places the folk music revival of the late 1950s and 1960s, or "the great folk scare" as it is frequently called by participants, in its historical context. Ronald D. Cohen, a professor of history at Indiana University Northwest, begins by summarizing the careers of record-company producers, folklorists, and other participants who helped spark a general interest in American folk music through their fieldwork and recordings, starting early in the twentieth century. The English ballad collector Cecil Sharp, the poet Carl Sandburg, and the folk-song collector John Lomax are all discussed as people whose ground-breaking work and interests helped set the stage for a larger folk music revival. The first section also provides an interesting discussion of 1920s recording artists, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Texas singer and guitarist, and Jimmie Rodgers, the first widely popular singing star to record country and western music. The first part of the book traces the connection that early rural recording artists had with what eventually became identified as American folk music. Cohen then presents a nationwide survey of folk revival artists, publications, concerts, and festivals, especially in urban centers such as New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, paying particular attention to the Newport Folk Festivals of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Cohen's book describes the social milieu of the urban folk music revival, particularly in New York City—the Sunday hootenannies at Washington Square, the nurturing atmosphere of Israel Young's Folklore Center store in Greenwich Village, the chronicling of the urban folk movement by Sing Out! magazine, and the influential recordings of key revivalists, as well as traditional musicians, by Moses Asch of Folkways Records. The musical career of Pete Seeger receives special attention, as does his connection with liberal and radical politics and social issues. What Cohen does not do is discuss the music itself in any detail. He repeatedly quotes or paraphrases the writings of newspaper columnists, academic folklorists, and editors and writers for folk music publications such as Broadside or The Little Sandy Review when they write about the blossoming popularity of revivalist performers and their young followers on college campuses during the late 1950s and 1960s. Cohen has gleaned stories from his interviews with key figures in the revival, or, as is more often the case, from publications, memoirs, and letters in folklore archives such as the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. A reliance on the words of others means that Rainbow Quest does not have a strong authorial presence or an overall vision to connect the myriad events and figures into a cohesive whole. Cohen clearly knows a great deal about the folk revival years, from both personal experience and intensive research. Some of his past activities underscore this interest—such as the "Wasn't That a Time" folk revival conference at Indiana University in 1991. At this meeting, speakers and panelists recounted stories about their own involvement with the music and at legendary events, such as the 1965 Newport festival that featured Bob Dylan's debut with a rock 'n roll backup band. Cohen also coproduced Songs for Political Action, a ten-CD anthology of music from the folk revival era, for Bear Family Records. These projects have the personal passion that is lacking in much of Rainbow Quest. Only intermittent stories give a real feeling for the people and the era that is being covered, such as a prologue in which three [End Page 129] young folkies from New York—Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Jack Elliott—take a summer trip in 1953 to the Blue Ridge Mountains and other points south in search of authentic American folk music, where they have a memorable meeting with an irascible and suspicious Bascom Lamar Lunsford at the Ashville Folk Festival. As a general survey, Rainbow Quest is a useful resource. The book covers many figures, recordings, important performances, and other...

Book Review| January 01 2006 Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, Ronald D. Cohen. Jack Shortlidge Jack Shortlidge Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2006) 119 (471): 129–130. https://doi.org/10.2307/4137787 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jack Shortlidge; Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2006; 119 (471): 129–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/4137787 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2006 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity by Rachel Clare Donaldson Denise Meringolo “I HEAR AMERICA SINGING”: Folk Music and National Identity. By Rachel Clare Donaldson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 2014. Many scholars and music enthusiasts alike use the term “folk music revival” to describe the popular ascendancy of performers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the early 1960s. Indeed, folk music experienced a brief period of commercial success in the United States after the rise of rock-and-roll in the 1950s and before the British invasion of the mid-1960s. By viewing the revival through a tight chronological lens and measuring its influence in terms of popularity, historians have convincingly argued that folk music—and folk musicians—played a critical role in popularizing and expanding a variety of social and political movements. Yet, narrowly associating the revival with the social and cultural movements of the early 1960s has truncated our understanding of the larger cultural significance of American folk music. Further, the over-emphasis on popularity as a measure of influence has made it difficult to recognize the way folk music has both shaped and reflected diversity as a consistent, if sometimes marginalized, aspect of American national identity. Rachel Clare Donaldson has written an intellectual history of the American folk revival, I Hear America Singing, that addresses both of these shortcomings. Donaldson has made at least three important and intelligent choices about how to examine her subject. Rather than focusing on commercial success or other measures of popularity, Donaldson approaches the folk revival from the top down. She analyzes the work of a variety of leaders who shaped the way folk music was defined, collected, and disseminated. In turn, Donaldson’s focus on folklorists, anthropologists, and other organized leaders in the field, allows her to expand the chronology of the folk revival. She identifies the roots of the revival in the first decades of the twentieth century and explores its full emergence in the 1930s. Finally, by taking seriously the motivations of a diverse—and often divergent—group of leaders, Donaldson can identify the core philosophy underneath their work. Taken together, these choices allow Donaldson to argue that the folk music revival is important as a window not only into American popular culture, but also into the formation of American national identity. Donaldson’s work provides a new context for understanding the significance of American folk music. I Hear America Singing makes clear that the folk music revival was not simply a brief and isolated phenomenon that emerged in tandem with 1960s social justice movements. Rather, the individuals who sought to collect, preserve, and disseminate folk music gradually gave form and content to pluralistic nationalism. At first, collectors were largely interested in identifying cultural continuities between the United States and Great Britain, a project that reflected the nativism and racism of the World War I era. But, Donaldson argues, it was the more systematic work undertaken by musicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists that shaped the revival. Franz Boas is at the center of this story. Boas insisted that culture should not be conflated with evolution, and he collected music from groups of people that his contemporaries were loath to recognize as influencing American culture. His efforts led to the creation of national, regional, and local folk music organizations dedicated to collecting a variety of musical forms. At the micro level, these groups disagreed fiercely. Some argued that the only true American folk music came from indigenous Indian peoples. Others recognized the cultural value of African American music. Still others gathered songs and music from various immigrant populations. Despite their disagreements over the precise content of the American folk music catalog, these organizations played a crucial role in shaping a particular set of beliefs about American national identity. Donaldson argues convincingly [End Page 156] that the folk music revival was an ongoing dialogue that articulated what we now recognize as multiculturalism. I Hear America Singing also fits well with current trends in public history. For decades, public history was misrepresented in the scholarly literature. At best, it appeared as a less legitimate branch of the larger discipline of history because it did not have...

Reviewed by: Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers & the Folk Music Revival Ned Quist Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers & the Folk Music Revival. By Ray Allen. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. [x, 309 p. ISBN 9780252035609 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9780252077470 (paperback), $50.] Illustrations, discographic and source notes, index. Ray Allen chose a particularly difficult story to tell in Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. While following a winding but clearly chronological telling of the New Lost City Ramblers' creation, flourishing and breakup, every turn in the story faces the thorny issues of authenticity in traditional music. The New Lost City Ramblers—Mike Seeger, John Cohen, Tom Paley and Tracy Schwartz, all from the suburbs of the Northeast—became for several decades the foremost interpreters of rural folk music from the southern Appalachians. They drew their material mostly from commercial recordings made by labels such as Okeh and Brunswick from the 1920s through the 1940s, but also from their own field recordings and relationships with traditional musicians in the rural South. During their prime, from 1958 to 1979, [End Page 385] they were the best-known of a small number of groups performing Appalachian string band music ("hillbilly" or old-time music if you will) in the traditional style. Their career continued with occasional reunion concerts until the death of Mike Seeger in 2009. Their insistence upon being both true to the style of their sources and largely apolitical left them operating in the shadows of the folk music revival—a revival in which they would never enjoy (or perhaps even wish to enjoy) the commercial success and fame of the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and many other of their contemporaries. The problem wasn't the accuracy or even sincerity of their work, but rather that through an "accident of birth" none of the members of the Ramblers was born and raised in the rural South. What Allen emphasizes about the New Lost City Ramblers is not their lack of commercial success, although this does cast a certain melancholy air over their personal stories, but rather their influence in preserving the tradition of the Appalachian string band. They carefully documented its sources and, through their fieldwork, discovered and promoted (and performed with) many of the surviving original artists from whom they took their songs and their sound. These artists included Elizabeth Cotton, Eck Robertson, Doc Watson (who at one point was asked to join the Ramblers), Roscoe Holcomb, Maybelle Carter, Dock Boggs, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred MacDowell, Bessie Jones, and others. Their style of playing in many ways copied the recordings and the style of playing and singing of their source materials. Yet Allen, as well as most of the critics who reviewed them, observed that they had developed a style that was, while true to the tradition, still distinctly their own. The Ramblers had absorbed the style to the point where they felt free to take liberties with it. For many northern and western audiences the sound of this southern rural music was both unfamiliar and raw. Ironically, the Ramblers rarely performed in the South, but performed and sold most of their recordings in the Northeast and on the West Coast. They stood apart from most of the other urban folk musicians of the "folk music revival" in both their refusal to bow to commercial concerns and their general unwillingness to perform either topical songs or songs with a overtly political or partisan message. They played and sang to the best of their abilities in the style of the musicians from whom they received the songs. Their recorded legacy includes over 20 albums, and numerous reissues. A recent reissue anthology, the splendid set 50 Years: Where Do You Come From? Where Do You Go? (Smith sonian Folkways SFW CD 40180 [2009], CD), makes an excellent aural companion to Gone to the County. It includes detailed liner notes along with some of the source recordings the Ramblers used and discographic details for all by Ray Allen. The original LPs, often described by Mike Seeger...

Reviewed by: Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen Rachel Adelstein Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. By Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. [320p. ISBN 9780190231026 (hardcover), $39.95; (e-book), various.] Illustrations, index. The companion volume to an exhibit of the same name, which ran at the Museum of the City of New York between 17 June and 29 November 2015, Folk City tells the story of the American folk revival of the mid-twentieth century as it happened in New York City. The book’s status as a companion volume is key to understanding its occasionally limited perspective as well as its approach to folk music as both a musical scene and a political movement. Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen maintain a tight focus on the folk music scene in New York. With the exception of the sixth chapter, “Political Activism and the Folk Music Revival,” the action of the book takes place in New York City. Performers, music publishers, and performance venues come and go, leaving the city, especially Washington Square Park, as the constant factor. It is the story of a particular musical scene at a particular moment in history. Its intended audience includes educated general readers who are interested either in this particularly musical aspect of New York’s cultural history or in the specific aspects of the American folk revival that centered on New York. After a foreword by Peter Yarrow (of the trio Peter, Paul, and Mary) and a brief preface by John Heller, Folk City’s eight chapters are arranged in an order that recalls its origins in a museum exhibit. The first chapter sets the scene, describing the rough, active, struggling city that greeted Oklahoma-born Woody Guthrie when he arrived in New York in 1940. It also lays out the fundamental paradox of the folk revival, especially as this book portrays it: “while folk songs evoked tradition and were largely rural in origin, New York stood above all for progress, growth, and efficiency, with seemingly barely a moment for the nostalgia, sentimentality, and romance associated with folk music” (p. 21). How did this self-consciously rural genre become so thoroughly associated with, and at home in, the largest city in the United States? Though Petrus and Cohen never answer the question directly, it informs the entire book. The subsequent chapters appear chronologically, recounting the story of folk music in New York City between the 1920s, when New York-based record label executives sent crews to the Deep South to record folk songs to be sold as “hillbilly” or “old-time music,” to the 1980s, showing the continuing life of the folk scene after the revival’s peak. Although each chapter title states a theme, such as “The Village Scene in the Early 1960s” or “Political Activism and the Folk Music Revival,” the narratives within those chapters tend to be weak. There are many illustrations, including photographs of performers and reproductions of record album covers and concert flyers. Petrus and Cohen seem to organize each chapter around its collection of images, devoting a few paragraphs to one illustrated topic related to the theme of the chapter before moving on to the next illustration and the next topic. The effect is much like wandering through an exhibit, looking at the artifacts on display and reading the information cards posted beside them, and then moving on. This museum-like approach to storytelling can be jarring to a reader who opens the book expecting a more traditional narrative structure that can be read [End Page 271] straight through. However, it may also reward a more casual reader who prefers to dip in and out of the book, exploring different segments and stories at leisure. Separate sidebars headed “Recollections” appear scattered throughout the book. These are short, first-person anecdotes about well-known folk performers or venues, usually told by a participant in the New York folk scene who is less well-known today. The authors include other folk singers, performers’ managers, actors, music publishers, and producers. The “Recollections” offer a more intimate look...

The aim of the article is to explore the historical preconditions, socio-cultural context, and internal and external factors that contributed to the emergence and development of the folk music revival in Ukraine from the late 1970s to 1991 -a period that coincides with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of an independent Ukraine.The introductory section outlines the methodological approaches and reviews the relevant state-of-the-art literature.It also provides the social context in which the Ukrainian folk music revival emerged and developed in the outlined period.The main section traces and describes the history of the founding and early activities of the first ensembles representing the Ukrainian revival movement.The historical, political, and social contexts of the phenomenon are also addressed.The final subsection summarizes the features, results, and achievements of the first period in the history of the Ukrainian folk music revival movement.The results of the study regarding the background of the emergence of the ensembles, their interaction, areas and methods of activity, and music repertoire are presented.The final subsection also offers a brief conclusion of the significance and impact of these early ensembles on the directions and characteristics of the Ukrainian folk music revival in the subsequent decades up to the present. KopsavilkumsRaksta mris ir analizt vsturiskos prieknosacjumus, socilo un kultras kontekstu, k ar faktorus, kas veicinja tautas mzikas atdzimanas kustbas raanos un attstbu Ukrain no 20.gs.70.gadu beigm ldz 1991.gadam -periodu, kas sakrt ar Padomju Savienbas sabrukumu un neatkargas Ukrainas nodibinanu.Ievadda ir izklsttas metodoloisks pieejas un sniegts jaunks literatras prskats.Raksta galvenaj da

The Country Gentlemen (perhaps the most nationally acclaimed of the bluegrass genre’s second-generation bands) are at the core of this chapter. During this period record labels across the United States took a greater interest in local bands and more of them appeared on 45 rpm discs and, secondarily, albums. The most important local label, Rebel Records, started the same year (1960) that weekend bluegrass festivals debuted in nearby Berryville, Virginia. An increasing number of local venues were booking live local and regional bluegrass bands as well as national acts. Spurred by the folk music revival, among other factors like increased radio airplay, the general interest in bluegrass was clearly on the rise.

Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival outlines the role played by New York City in precipitating the folk music revival that is such a noteworthy aspect of the history of the 1960...

British Folk Revival, 1944-2002. By Michael Brocken. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. [xii, 236 p. ISBN O7546-3282-2. $29.95 pbk.] Discography, bibliography, index. folk music revival following World War II has come under considerable scrutiny in the last few years. Monographs by Robert Cantwell ( When We Were Good: Folk Revival [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996]) and Ronald D. Cohen (Rainbow Quest: Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 [Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002] ) chronicle the American experience, but not until Michael Brocken's British Folk Revival, 1944-2002, has there been a similar broad view of the second British folk music revival. From the very beginning, Brocken makes his prejudices and point of view quite clear. As a youngster in the 1960s, he found himself drawn towards the music of Americans Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and the folk-rock band, the Byrds. But upon his increased involvement with the British scene of the time, he immediately found himself confronted in the 1960s British folk clubs by the dichotomy between the popularized and admittedly commercial folk style he had come to treasure, and the severe authentic approach which required that all folk music of value be strictly British, or political in nature, or from the past. This ultimately leads to Brocken's thesis, which simply stated is this: The needless polarisation that opposes the authentic to the commercial has stultified growth [in the British Folk Revival] in all but the most progressive areas of the folk commercial sector. Brocken's argument begins by discussing the early revivalists, Cecil Sharp in particular, noting that Sharp made a clear distinction between popular music and folk music while at the same time working to popularize traditional British folk music through published arrangements, or recontextualizing-suggesting that from the very beginning, the British folk music revival had perhaps done something dishonest. Brocken places Sharp's work along with efforts by Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and George Butterworth in a larger nationalist context where the interest in folk music played a role in both patriotic and anti-urban movements. After World War II, the revival, still based on the conservative view of folk music as an inherited tradition, turns more political. Here, Brocken introduces us to the holy trinity of British folk music, A. L. (Bert) Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, and the American Peggy seeger. It is probably Lloyd's publication of Singing Englishman in 1944 that Brocken regards as the beginning date for the second revival. Lloyd, through his work in British folk song, became perhaps its best-known expert by the late 1940s. To Lloyd, the growth of urbanized and industrialized communities had a tangible, erosive effect upon hundreds of years of oral traditions. He deemed the collection and preservation of those traditions, viewed by him as being close to irrevocable loss, of paramount importance. Ewan MacColl, inspired by the work of the American Alan Lomax, similarly took a hard position against the popular or commercial performance of traditional folk Brocken calls MacColl the epitome of the difference between communal and consumer music. Together with his third wife, Peggy seeger, MacColl, more than any other single figure, worked to maintain a critical traditionalist approach. This is the very approach that Brocken himself experienced in the British folk clubs. MacColl's Critics Group literally set policy governing the types of songs that could be sung, and how they should properly be sung to be authentically English. Turning towards the institutions that supported the revival, Brocken introduces three key institutions to the English folk revival: the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), the Worker's Music Association (WMA), and Topic Records. EFDSS, the bastion of the traditionalists, represented a view largely inherited from the earlier revival and heavily promoted folk dance, while the WMA, affiliated with the Communist Party, took more of an interest in song to utilize fully the stimulating power of music to inspire the people. …

Authenticity and Authentication:Mike Seeger, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Old-Time Music Revival Jeff Todd Titon (bio) Allen, Ray . 2010. Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Malone, Bill . 2011. Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger's Life and Musical Journey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. While interviewing a preacher as I conducted research on religious folklife in Virginia's Blue Ridge some thirty years ago, I was told the story of an evangelist who had held an emotional, week-long revival service in a local church. Under the evangelist's preaching a number of people had fallen under conviction for their sins, confessed at the altar, and felt that the Lord had lifted their burdens and saved them. Some time later, it came to light that the evangelist had not been living for the Lord even as he had been preaching revivals. In disgrace, he retired from his ministry. But then a question arose: were the conversions that had taken place real? That is, was it possible to be truly converted in response to the preaching of a false prophet? No one charged Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers with being false prophets when, from the late 1950s through the 1960s, they introduced Depression-era, old-time string band music to the folk music revival—but many of the entertainment critics who wrote about their performances and recordings raised the issue [End Page 227] of authenticity.2 Basing their concerts and recordings of old-time southern string band music on 78 rpm recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, the Ramblers usually were considered faithful interpreters of tradition, but not authentic tradition bearers themselves. They were regarded as actors or models, revivalists but not the 'real thing.'3 The authentic thing, in the minds of many folklorists of Mike Seeger's generation, was the Ramblers' source musicians—those 'old originals' who presumably had internalized their family and community musical traditions and expressed this cultural inheritance as inevitably and inescapably as their given names.4 The two books under discussion in this essay, Ray Allen's Gone to the Country (2010) and Bill Malone's biography of Mike Seeger, Music from the True Vine (2011), revisit this question of authenticity, one that was critically important to the folk revival generation—and to folklore studies. Historically, authenticity has had at least two meanings. They are related, but not the same. In one, the authentic is the original, not the copy. Sometimes the copy carries a negative value: false, rather than true. One speaks of the authentic painting as opposed to the forgery; the authentic currency as opposed to the counterfeit; the real, as opposed to the imitation tricked out to look like the real thing. At other times the copy does not carry such negative value: the historically informed performance of a piece of music, for example, is said to be true to the original composer's or score's intent. Or the copy proclaims itself as such, as when in a furniture store one may come upon 'authentic reproductions' of period pieces. The A-word's second historical meaning relates to people, not things. It means being true to oneself. An authentic utterance, gesture, or action comes from a person's deep and natural well of truth, what Emerson called the "aboriginal self," uncorrupted by artifice ([1841] 1944, 38). As such, it is powerful, exacting from an observer immediate recognition and assent. In American thought, this notion is synonymous with Emersonian self-reliance. Expanded, it is the idea of living an authentic life—Thoreau's central quest. In modern European thought, it is often related to existentialist philosophy. For Mike Seeger, the Ramblers, and the folk revival generation—roughly, those who came of age between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War—both meanings of authenticity were very much in play. The same could be said of the folklorists of that generation. One needs only to think of scholarly quests for the genuine [End Page 228] ('folklore' as opposed to 'fakelore') as an application of...

The post‐war folk and traditional music revival in the British Isles was a complex phenomenon which involved more than just the simple rediscovery and promotion of neglected music and song. The ideology of key individuals was important in determining the scope and subsequent direction of the revival including the sources of the revived repertory and how it should be re‐packaged. The selection and use of appropriate musical instruments was a major issue and, for a time at least, the concertina family was endorsed by the revivalists to the extent that it could act as a symbol of the revival itself. This paper identifies and discusses the processes involved.

This article explores the discourse of authenticity, which has become central to our understanding of twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States. The process of musical revival, that is, the self-conscious restoration of musical systems deemed in danger of decline or extinction, has been closely tied to perceptions of exactly what constitutes authentic, or genuine, folk tradition. The term tradition, like authenticity, is a slippery concept based on a self-conscious interpretation and selective editing of the past. The complex mechanism of cultural editing that undergirds the authentication process is fleshed out by focusing on the efforts of one band, the New Lost City Ramblers. During the 1960s the Ramblers introduced northern audiences to what they judged to be authentic southern string-band and bluegrass styles at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music. The Ramblers' struggles to render accurately southern rural instrumental and singing styles, while maintaining their own distinctive sound, offer insight into the challenges authenticity posed for mid-century folk musicians and their urban audiences, and continues to pose for scholars and cultural workers today.

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Side Are You On: An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America. By Dick Weissman. New York: Continuum, 2005. [296 p. ISBN 0-8264-1698-5. $24.95.] Bibliographical references, index, discography. Dick Weissman is known to many as the author of the Folk Music Sourcebook (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1989) and the guide, The Music Business: Career Opportunities and Self Defense (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979). His qualifications for writing those books, and indeed for the volume at hand, include his role in the folk-pop group the Journeymen, playing as a sideman on recordings by the Brothers Four, The New Christy Minstrels, and Peter, Paul and Mary, and as a record producer for ABC. With those credentials, one might expect a set of personal recollections telling an inside story of the folk music revival. Weissman, however, chooses a different path, attempting instead to write a history of the American folk music revival by exposing its conflicts, both in business relationships and personal ones. Hence his title comes from the coal miners' labor song, Which Side Are You On? Only briefly, at the end of each chapter, does he relate any personal experiences. Weissman adopts several approaches to support this history of conflict in the folk song revival. He identifies underdogs in the movement who have been unjustly ignored, while at the same time downplaying the importance of more iconic figures who he feels may have received more attention than they deserved (p. 277). He makes frequent references to the conflicts between the musicians and the music business, especially in matters of copyright, royalties, and the usual bad guys: the artists' agents, the record companies, and publishers. Underlying his narrative seems to be a certain amount of bitterness revealing his own conflicting sentiments about the revival. One underdog figure is Jack Thorp (whose name erroneously appears as Tharp). Thorp's collection, Songs of the Cowboys (Estancia, NM: News Print Shop, 1908) predated John Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis and Wallon Co., 1910) by two years. Citing D. K. Wilgus, Weissman justifiably vilifies Lomax for his claim that Thorp had cribbed from Cowboy Songs, rather than the other way around. Here, Weissman takes the opportunity to note Lomax's predatory approach to copyright, both in his claim to the cowboy songs (some of which were actually penned by Thorp), and also in his later claim to the copyright of songs by his discovery, Huddie Ledbetter (commonly known as Leadbelly). The use of copyright by various folk figures to make money on music that doesn't clearly belong to them is a continuing theme throughout the book. Weissman also raises the cases of Lawrence Gellert, the leftist collector of African American protest songs, and the early recording artist and repertoire man, Ralph Peer. Gellert, a liberal journalist transplanted from New York to Tryon, North Carolina, found himself immersed in African American culture in one of the few Southern towns where such interracial contact was possible. There, he collected several hundred songs, many of which were unusual in their rebellious and angry attitude toward whites. Gellert's early detractors discredited his work on the basis that few printed collections contained similar songs. While Weissman's championing of is interesting, it is by no means new. He has long been vindicated by the work of D. K. Wilgus (From the Record Review Editor: Afro-American Tradition, Journal of American Folklore 85, no. 335 [January-March 1972]: 99-107), Richard Reuss's American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics, 1927-1957 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000), and Bruce Conforth's M.A. thesis Laughing just to Keep from Crying: Afro-American Folksong and the Recordings of Lawrence Gellert (M.A., Indiana University, 1984; forthcoming from University of Illinois Press), among others. …

Chapter 5 concentrates on questions of national identity and nationalism, exploring music’s role in the (de)construction of English identity in Orlando, Between the Acts and The Years. It takes as its focal points the early music and folk music revivals, and philo- and anti-Semitic narratives about music. The chapter considers Woolf’s work in the context of nationalist writing about music by the ideologues of the English Musical Renaissance, suggests that Woolf was hostile to the national and ethnic ‘purity’ advocated in these accounts. Concluding with a close reading of the Siegfried scene in The Years, it also proposes that here and elsewhere in her work Woolf uses music to critique anti-Semitism and embed philo-Semitic sympathies.