Rushmore.īrothers and sisters, that’s a date to conjure with, because that’s when the folk revival began. Except that this young folklorist had a father, and his name was John Avery Lomax, and 30 years earlier, one hundred years ago this November, he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, with a handwritten preface by President Theodore Roosevelt, dated August 28, 1910.
“Thus,” this argument goes, “the Folk Revival begins with Woody Guthrie-and no Alan Lomax, no Woody Guthrie.”Īnd it’s a fine argument, as far as it goes. And don’t forget Moses Asch, who earlier recorded Woody’s Dust Bowl ballads on the album Talking Dust Bowl, for his recently formed Folkways Records. No Library of Congress Recordings, this argument goes, and RCA Victor would never have heard of Woody.
#John lomax archive#
Now who discovered Woody Guthrie? A young folklorist named Alan Lomax, who dubbed him “the dust bowl balladeer” and recorded Guthrie for the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song earlier that year, when Guthrie was just 28 years old. “No Woody Guthrie,” they argue, “and no nothin’!” “No Almanac Singers, and no Weavers! 1941-that’s when the real folk revival began.”Īt this point the cultural historians kick in and argue that for all intents and purposes the folk revival actually began one year earlier, and not in Newport, Rhode Island or New York City, but in the Dust Bowl in 1940, at the end of the Great Depression, when Woody Guthrie released his landmark album Dust Bowl Ballads on RCA Victor. “Now just a damn minute!” chime in the Old Lefties, the Weavers were fine for a commercial folk group, but they grew out of the Almanac Singers, who were far more political and whose first recording was released way back in 1941, called Songs for John Doe, and whose Talking Union represented the kind of music the Weavers should have been performing but rarely did.
“No Weavers,” the purists argue, “no Kingston Trio.”Īren’t you forgetting something, claim their parents-what about the Weavers before they were blacklisted-in 1950, when their recording of Leadbelly’s theme song Goodnight Irene shot to the top of the Hit Parade and stayed there for 13 weeks, leading Life Magazine to vote it “the song of the ½ Century”? “Thus,” they conclude, “the folk revival really began in 1950.” Hold on, not so fast, say the purists, the Folk Revival per se began three years earlier, on Christmas Eve, 1955, to be precise, when the blacklisted Weavers came out of their forced retirement to reunite at Carnegie Hall, a concert which was also recorded by Vanguard Records and released as The Weavers Live at Carnegie Hall. No Kingston Trio, they argue, and no Peter, Paul and Mary. It went to number 1 on the Hit Parade and paved the way for the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary to bring folk music into the mainstream of American popular culture. Wait a minute, claim their frat and sorority house brothers and sisters, the folk revival really began five years earlier, in 1958, with the Kingston Trio’s recording of a song (originally collected by Frank Warner from fretless banjo maker Frank Proffit), the Ballad of Tom Dooley. When did the 20th Century folk revival begin? Baby Boomers argue that it began in 1963, at the Newport Folk Festival, when a young Bob Dylan (who turned 69 on May 24) performed Blowing in the Wind with Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and the Mississippi Freedom Singers on closing night, a moment captured by Vanguard Records and released in their Newport Folk Festival series. Without realizing it, she started me on a two-fold path as performer and writer.
She also produced my first concert here-at Bloomsbury. This essay is dedicated with love to Marjorie Meghrig, founder of Bloomsbury Book and Art Gallery in Los Angeles, who in 1980 gave me a rare book by John Lomax, thinking I might need it one day.