Book review: How New York’s Washington Square Park became the epicentre of folk music’s renaissance
Book review: How New Yorks Washington Square Park became the epicentre of folk musics renaissance
By Christopher Loudon, Macleans Magazine, August 1, 2015
Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliott in the early 1960s
FOLK CITY: NEW YORK AND THE AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC REVIVAL
Stephen Petrus & Ronald D. Cohen (authors)
Fourteen years ago, author David Hajdu crafted a superb, perhaps definitive, portrait of Greenwich Village at the height of the folk-music revival of the 1950s and 60s. But Hajdus Positively 4th Street focused on just four artists: seminal figures Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, along with supporting players Mimi Faria (Baezs sister) and her husband, Richard. Folk City, the companion to a multimedia exhibit now on display at the Museum of the City of New York, lacks Hajdus poetic legerdemain, yet, in its winningly plain-spoken way, provides a far more comprehensive appreciation of one of the most colourful chapters in American music.
The story begins in the 1930s, when the radical likes of Josh White, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie converged in New York. It was the height of the Great Depression, a fertile time for such influential artists to [redefine] the genre of folk music from a quaint musical form associated with rural life to the peoples musica weapon of ideological battle to mobilize workers to develop a class consciousness. With the advent of the Second World War, the appetite for folk musics politicized messages abated, yet, as early as 1947, seeds of a revival started to blossom, taking root in and around Washington Square Park. Sunday-afternoon folk singalongs attracted a cross-section of amateurs and pros armed with guitars, banjos and bongos. By the mid-50s, the Square had become the epicentre of folks renaissance, with more than 20 clubs and coffee houses, including the Gaslight Caf, the Village Gate and the Bitter End within a five-block radius.
Musicians blended with Beat poets, abstract expressionists, off-Broadway actors and experimental filmmakers to forge a heady countercultural melting pot. A new breed of stars emerged: the Seeger-helmed Weavers (until Seeger fell afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee), Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Baez and Dylan. Their songs carried antiwar, pro-civil-rights messages across the land, achieving mainstream popularity. Hard-core folkiesPhil Ochs, Ramblin Jack Elliottdecried the musics steady commercialization, as the Village devolved from cultural hub to overrun tourist attraction. By 1965, folk had made way for folk-rock and, led by the Lovin Spoonful and the Mamas & the Papas, decamped for California. Musically, New York moved on, though it never entirely abandoned the idiom-cum-social-phenomenon that only its perfect storm of liberalism, intellectualism and artistic freedom could have facilitated. To this day, each fall, theres a Washington Square Park Folk Festival.
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This is close to my heart. I spent the mid 60s to the mid 70s very involved in the Folk Music scene.
Do you think if I were to tie this into Trump or Coulter someone would have given a shit?