To one whose emotional life and interests were intimately bound up with the folk music revival of the 1950s, the article reviewing its history by Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff (JAF, 84 [1971), 394-405) is delightful and exasperating. I am grateful for the delights. My exasperation comes from both a sense of something amiss and a frustration in identifying it. As far as I can judge, it is a foreshortening of time, accompanied by some reversals in chronology. These may be observed in one small section, the sixth paragraph. Saying that York's Greenwich Village was the East Coast's version of San Francisco's North implies priority of the latter. In fact, of course, Greenwich Village was the prototype of America's other bohemian communities, and North Beach attracted artists and intellectuals who had left the East. Rent party song fests and similar fund-raising events began in New York before Joseph McCarthy was elected to the United States Senate, before the People's Songs Bulletin became Sing Out!, and long before Pete Seeger was cited for contempt of Congress. Weekly folksinging began in Washington Square soon after World War II, led by the now forgotten George Margolin. As the holder of a permit from New York's Parks Department for singing with instruments, I was nominally responsible for these in the spring, summer, and fall of 952. They were well established by that time. Finally, it is incorrect, or worse, to suggest, as the authors elsewhere do, that Ralph Rinzler, who actively initiated and ran the important Swarthmore College Folk Festivals in the early 950s, was a product of the campus bluegrass explosion, which did not occur until years later. Although I sense similar problems with time elsewhere in the article, I cannot specify them. It would be too bad if discussion of the important value conflicts that the authors demonstrate were marred by factual errors. I hope to have rectified the record a bit.
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Dec 1, 1989
