American folk music revival

Based on Wikipedia: American folk music revival

In 1950, a song about death became the biggest hit in America. "Goodnight, Irene" wasn't a new composition—it was a lullaby that Lead Belly, a former Louisiana State Penitentiary inmate, had been singing for decades. When the Weavers recorded it, the song sat at number one on the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks. Its flip side, an Israeli dance tune called "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena," simultaneously climbed to number two.

This was the American folk music revival at its commercial peak—and also, as it would turn out, the moment before everything fell apart.

The Politics of Singing Old Songs

To understand why folk music became dangerous in mid-century America, you need to understand what folk music actually was. It wasn't a genre in the way we think of genres today. Folk music was, quite literally, the music of the folk—songs passed down through generations of working people, songs about love and murder and labor and loss, songs that nobody owned because everybody owned them.

This made folk music inherently democratic. And in 1940s America, democracy had a complicated relationship with capitalism.

The revival's roots trace back to the late 1930s and early 1940s, when a loose collective of musicians began gathering around a shared conviction: that American workers' songs deserved preservation and celebration. Pete Seeger, a Harvard dropout from a musical family, helped found the Almanac Singers in 1941. Their rotating membership included Woody Guthrie—the Oklahoma dust bowl refugee who wrote "This Land Is Your Land"—as well as Lead Belly, Josh White, Cisco Houston, and Bess Lomax Hawes, whose father and brother had spent years recording folk songs for the Library of Congress.

These weren't just musicians playing old songs. They were activists who believed that music could change society. The Almanac Singers performed at union rallies, sang in support of striking workers, and aligned themselves explicitly with the left wing of American politics.

After World War Two, this loose movement crystallized into an organization called People's Songs, essentially a clearinghouse for labor movement music. Pete Seeger served as its president. In 1948, the organization threw all its resources behind the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate. Wallace lost badly. People's Songs disbanded.

But four of its members—Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert—decided to keep singing together. They called themselves the Weavers.

Thirteen Weeks at Number One, Then Silence

The Weavers didn't look like radicals. They dressed conservatively, performed with tight harmonies, and presented folk music in a way that mainstream audiences found accessible rather than threatening. Their manager booked them into respectable venues. Decca Records signed them.

And then "Goodnight, Irene" exploded.

The hit songs kept coming: "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," a Woody Guthrie song about the Dust Bowl. "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." "On Top of Old Smoky." The Weavers sold millions of records. They appeared on national television. For a brief moment, it seemed like folk music had become the American mainstream.

Then a publication called Red Channels listed Pete Seeger as a probable subversive.

Red Channels was a pamphlet published in 1950 that listed entertainment industry figures allegedly connected to communist causes. In the paranoid atmosphere of the early Cold War, appearing in Red Channels was career-destroying. Radio stations refused to play the Weavers' records. Concert venues canceled their engagements. Decca dropped them from their catalog.

A former People's Songs employee named Harvey Matusow had informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI) that the Weavers were Communists. Matusow later admitted he had lied, but by then the damage was done. In 1955, both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC, a congressional body that investigated alleged communist influence in American life.

The folk revival didn't die. But it went underground.

The Coffee House Circuit

Barred from mainstream radio and television, folk musicians retreated to the margins of American culture. Pete Seeger played in schools and summer camps—venues where booking agents didn't worry about congressional scrutiny. A circuit of coffee houses emerged in bohemian neighborhoods: Greenwich Village in New York, North Beach in San Francisco, college towns like Cambridge, Massachusetts and Boulder, Colorado.

These weren't large venues. They were intimate rooms where audiences sat at small tables, drank espresso or wine, and listened attentively to acoustic music. The same circuit hosted beat poetry readings and cool jazz performances. Folk music became associated with a vaguely rebellious counterculture, with turtleneck sweaters and beards and intellectual pretension.

This underground existence had an unexpected consequence. As scholars Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta later observed, the folk revival's forced retreat from the mainstream may have actually strengthened it. Had the Weavers' success continued uninterrupted through the 1950s, folk music might have been fully absorbed into commercial pop and lost its distinctive identity. Instead, the blacklist created a decade-long pressure cooker, building an audience of dedicated enthusiasts who would fuel the explosive revival of the 1960s.

Two performers managed to cross over from the folk underground into mainstream success during the 1950s. Odetta, a classically trained opera singer who had discovered folk music while performing in a San Francisco theater production of Finian's Rainbow, recorded albums of traditional blues and spirituals. Harry Belafonte, a Jamaican-American actor and singer, had hits with calypso music that shared folk's acoustic simplicity and working-class themes.

But the real resurgence was still waiting in the wings.

The Kingston Trio Changes Everything

In 1958, three clean-cut young men from the San Francisco Bay Area released a song about a murder that had occurred in North Carolina in 1866. "Tom Dooley" told the story of a man about to be hanged for killing his lover. The Kingston Trio sang it with tight harmonies, acoustic guitars, and an arrangement that owed more to the Weavers than to any Appalachian tradition.

The song sold three million copies.

The Kingston Trio represented something new in the folk revival: performers who embraced commercial success without apology, who avoided controversial political material, and who cultivated an image that college students could embrace without worrying about appearing radical. They had met as undergraduates. Their manager had discovered them playing at a San Francisco club called the Cracked Pot. They wore matching striped shirts and smiled broadly in publicity photos.

At the first Grammy Awards ceremony in 1959, "Tom Dooley" won Best Country and Western Performance—because no folk category existed yet. The next year, partly in response to the Kingston Trio's success, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences created a folk category. The Trio won that too.

In November and December of 1959, the Kingston Trio held a record that wouldn't be matched for more than fifty years: four albums simultaneously in the Billboard top ten, for five consecutive weeks. Life magazine put them on the cover. Between 1958 and 1961, their recordings earned Capitol Records more than twenty-five million dollars—equivalent to over two hundred sixty million dollars today.

This commercial explosion transformed the folk music industry. Suddenly record labels wanted folk acts. Groups with names like the Brothers Four, the Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Highwaymen, and the New Christy Minstrels appeared, all offering variations on the Kingston Trio formula. But the money flowing into folk music also opened doors for more traditional and politically engaged performers.

The most important of these was a young woman from Staten Island with an extraordinary soprano voice.

Joan Baez and the Return of Politics

Joan Baez's debut album reached the top ten in late 1960 and stayed on the Billboard charts for more than two years. Unlike the Kingston Trio, Baez didn't try to be accessible. Her early recordings featured Scottish murder ballads, Appalachian laments, and obscure selections from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music—a collection we'll return to shortly. She sang with operatic vibrato and made no attempt to imitate the plain singing style of her source material.

In November 1962, Time magazine put Baez on its cover. The headline called her "the queen of the folknik."

More importantly, Baez aligned herself explicitly with Pete Seeger and the political wing of the folk revival. As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the early 1960s, folk music became its soundtrack. The connection wasn't accidental. "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the movement, had roots in labor organizing that stretched back to the 1930s—People's Songs had helped popularize it.

On August 28, 1963, more than two hundred fifty thousand people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. But before King spoke, the crowd heard music.

Pete Seeger was there. So were Joan Baez, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary, and a young songwriter named Bob Dylan. Odetta sang "Oh, Freedom," and Martin Luther King introduced her as "the queen of folk music." Harry Belafonte performed. The SNCC Freedom Singers—SNCC stood for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—provided musical energy throughout the day. Several of those Freedom Singers would later form Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a cappella group that continues performing today.

The civil rights movement gave folk music a purpose beyond entertainment. Freedom songs accompanied lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives throughout the South. Young people who might have seen folk music as their parents' generation's music now understood it as the soundtrack of social change.

The Anthology That Changed Everything

Behind the scenes of the 1960s folk revival, an unlikely figure had done more than almost anyone to shape what young urban audiences understood as "folk music."

Harry Smith was an anthropologist, an experimental filmmaker, and a collector of old phonograph records. In 1952, he convinced Folkways Records to release a box set he had compiled from his collection: eighty-four songs, originally recorded between 1927 and 1932, by musicians most Americans had never heard of.

The Anthology of American Folk Music introduced the folk revival to its own past.

These weren't polished studio recordings. They were the raw commercial output of an earlier era, when record companies had sent portable equipment into the American South to capture regional music for sale to local audiences. The labels had called it "race music" when the performers were Black and "hillbilly music" when they were white. By 1952, most of these recordings had been forgotten—78 rpm records weren't compatible with newer turntables, and many of the artists had died or faded into obscurity.

Smith organized this material into three sections: ballads, social music, and songs. His eccentric liner notes treated the recordings as anthropological artifacts. Young musicians in Greenwich Village and Cambridge listened obsessively, learning to imitate the singing styles and instrumental techniques of performers who had recorded three decades earlier.

The Anthology made the Carter Family—a Virginia trio who had first recorded in 1927—essential listening for anyone interested in folk music. It introduced audiences to Robert Johnson, the Delta blues guitarist whose twenty-nine recordings had languished in obscurity. It rescued Blind Lemon Jefferson, Clarence Ashley, Uncle Dave Macon, and dozens of other artists from the dustbin of commercial music history.

Some of these artists were still alive. The folk revival found them.

Rediscovery

The 1963 and 1964 Newport Folk Festivals became showcases for living connections to folk music's past. Clarence Ashley, who had recorded for Columbia Records in the 1920s, appeared on stage and introduced audiences to younger traditional musicians from his North Carolina community—including a blind guitarist named Doc Watson, who would become one of the most influential acoustic guitarists in American history.

Mississippi John Hurt, a songster from Avalon, Mississippi who had recorded for Okeh Records in 1928, had been presumed dead for decades. Folk enthusiast Tom Hoskins used clues in Hurt's old recordings to track him down in 1963. Hurt was seventy-one years old, still living in the same community where he'd been born, still playing the same songs. Within months he was performing at the Newport Folk Festival and recording new albums.

This pattern repeated across the country. Small record labels like Yazoo grew up specifically to reissue old recordings and document surviving traditional musicians. The folk revival became, in part, a massive project of musical archaeology—unearthing, preserving, and celebrating American vernacular music that commercial forces had nearly allowed to vanish.

The revival also looked beyond American borders. The Clancy Brothers—three Irish immigrants and their friend Tommy Makem—became the eleventh best-selling folk act in America by singing English-language Irish ballads. Their success sparked a parallel folk revival in Ireland itself. Pete Seeger played banjo on their Grammy-nominated 1961 album. Bob Dylan, who would transform folk music more than anyone else in the 1960s, cited the Clancy Brothers as a major influence.

The Singer-Songwriters

By the early 1960s, the folk revival had become commercially viable enough that record companies were willing to take chances on new artists. A producer at Columbia Records named John Hammond—the same man who had produced records for Billie Holiday and would later sign Bruce Springsteen—spotted a young songwriter performing in Greenwich Village.

Bob Dylan released his first album in 1961. It sold modestly. But when Peter, Paul and Mary recorded a cover of his song "Blowin' in the Wind," it became a top-ten hit and introduced Dylan to an audience far beyond the Village coffee houses.

Dylan represented something new in folk music: the singer-songwriter, an artist who wrote original material in a folk style rather than primarily interpreting traditional songs. He wasn't alone. Phil Ochs wrote topical songs about civil rights and the Vietnam War. Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree songwriter, brought indigenous perspectives into the folk movement. Judy Collins began as an interpreter of traditional material but increasingly recorded songs by contemporary writers. Joni Mitchell would emerge later in the decade with poetry that transcended the folk genre entirely.

These artists didn't reject the traditional music that the revival had recovered. Many of them had learned to play by listening obsessively to the Anthology of American Folk Music. But they understood folk music as a living tradition that they could extend and transform, not merely a historical artifact to be preserved.

The peace movement gave them subject matter. The civil rights movement had demonstrated that music could be more than entertainment—it could be a tool for social change. As American involvement in Vietnam escalated throughout the mid-1960s, folk singers wrote songs of protest. Phil Ochs's "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and Pete Seeger's "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" became anthems of the antiwar movement.

The Revival's Long Shadow

The American folk music revival peaked in the mid-1960s and then seemed to fade. Bob Dylan's decision to perform with electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 has become a legendary moment of transition—folk purists allegedly booed, and rock and roll absorbed much of folk's young audience.

But the revival's influence extended far beyond its commercial peak. The music that folk revivalists had recovered and promoted would reshape American popular music for generations.

Country music reconnected with its pre-commercial roots through performers who had discovered old-time music through the revival. Bluegrass, which had existed since the 1940s but remained regional, found national audiences through folk festival appearances. The blues revival introduced young white audiences to African American musical traditions that would feed directly into rock music. The British Invasion bands that dominated the mid-1960s charts—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals—were themselves deeply influenced by American blues and folk that they had discovered through revival-era recordings.

The revival also established folk festivals as an American institution. The Newport Folk Festival, founded in 1959, continues today. Smaller festivals spread across the country, creating venues where traditional and contemporary acoustic music could reach dedicated audiences outside the commercial mainstream.

Perhaps most importantly, the revival preserved music that would otherwise have been lost. The field recordings that the Lomax family made for the Library of Congress, the commercial 78s that Harry Smith collected, the documentation of living traditional musicians that small labels undertook in the 1960s—all of this created an archive of American vernacular music that remains accessible today. The Anthology of American Folk Music was reissued on compact disc in 1997; Harry Smith, who had spent years in poverty, finally received a Grammy Award for his achievement in 1991.

The political associations that had nearly destroyed the revival in the 1950s became part of its legacy. Folk music retained its connection to progressive causes, providing soundtracks for the antiwar movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and every subsequent wave of American activism. Pete Seeger continued performing and organizing until his death in 2014, at age ninety-four.

The Weavers, who had been blacklisted into silence, reunited for a Christmas concert in 1955 that sold out Carnegie Hall. The Vanguard album of that concert became one of the best-selling records of 1957. They continued performing, intermittently, for the next decade.

What the revival ultimately accomplished was not just the rediscovery of old songs, but the establishment of folk music as a distinct and permanent category of American culture—separate from pop, resistant to commercial homogenization, connected to tradition while remaining open to innovation. The coffee houses are mostly gone, but their descendants survive in folk venues across the country. The blacklist is long forgotten, but the music it tried to suppress remains part of how Americans understand themselves.

As with so much in American cultural history, what seemed like a moment of commercial popularity was actually the visible portion of a much deeper transformation. The folk revival changed not just what Americans listened to, but how they thought about the relationship between music, tradition, and social change.