I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
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daylit social space the hidden underground life of an emergent youth culture.”9 Murray Lerner’s film Festival!—a documentary about the 1963–1966 Newport Folk Festivals—shows the continuation and the growth of the youth scene Susan Montgomery had described in 1960: Crowds of young people dash into the fields of Newport for afternoon and evening workshops and concerts;10 young people on motorcycles roar past the staid mansions before bunkering down in parks, beaches and sidewalks; “fresh” from such rough accommodations, they gather anew in and around the festival site to hear the music again.
Lerner says his original intention in shooting was merely to provide footage for the Foundation’s archive. He was inspired to turn his material into a film after seeing that do-it-yourself attitude among youthful folk devotees—not just in regards to music: “I thought, ‘Wait a minute; there’s something going on here that’s beyond entertainment.’ … It was growing in popularity … and it was being used to create a philosophy and a cultural movement. I thought I could make a very broad film about the meaning of that movement.”11
“Why are we doing this?” Pete Seeger asks and answers in the film. “Because we believe in the idea that the average man and woman can make his own music in this machine age. It doesn’t all have to come out of a loudspeaker. You can make it yourself…. And it can be your own music.”
At the main venue, as well as at St. Michael’s School and Touro Field, there was room for workshops and small concerts in various styles: “You have 1,000 people over here, listening to fiddlers,” Seeger said in 2009, “and 500 people over there listening to some blues singers, and another 500 over there listening to Irish ballads.”12
In Jim Rooney and Eric Von Schmidt’s Baby Let Me Follow You Down: An Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years, Everett Alan Lilly, bassist of the young bluegrass hotshots, the Charles River Valley Boys, described the mosaic of workshop stages as “like taking an alcoholic to a picnic”:
Over in one field you had genuine Southern Comfort; over here you had Ballantine Ale; over there you had Seagram’s; then you had very fine, old wine somewhere else—maybe too many people wouldn’t go over there, but the ones who did really understood it.
I was tireless. I didn’t want to miss anything. Whenever we weren’t playing, I was out in the field going to hear Maybelle Carter or Doc Watson or Bill Monroe or Bob Dylan or Joan Baez. As young as I was, I was impressed by the range of music and styles and also the quality of the music. And then there were the parties in those mansions! Where else could you go and walk among so many truly great musicians?13
A lot of what Seeger envisioned for the nonprofit festival came to pass. The 1963 festival, held July 26–28, included recent rediscoveries such as Appalachian singers and songwriters Dock Boggs, Jim Garland and Dorsey Dixon, a North Carolinian who had spent more of his life as a millworker than as a musician; country bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee; Maybelle Carter; and Tony Saletan, a former Shaker-camp folksong leader who adapted the modern version of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”
Festivalgoers could learn from a workshop on music of the Kiowa tribe or pick up on the fine points of autoharp technique from Mother Maybelle Carter and Mike Seeger (including a Carter version of “Never On a Sunday”). Bob Davenport performed the unexpurgated version of the ballad “Seven Nights Drunk” (“Bollocks upon a rolling pin I never saw before”). John Lee Hooker told the crowd, “We are here to pay our dues to the natural facts,” while seagulls cawed around his introduction to the haunting “Freight Train Be My Friend.”
The Georgia Sea Island Singers contributed by chanting story-songs, overcoming a condescending introduction from Alan Lomax (“You probably won’t understand all the words”), who also saw fit to introduce each song. And the Freedom Singers brought raw, righteous power with “Fighting for My Rights” (to the tune of “Lonely Avenue”) and “I Love Your Dog,” a gospel-based chant of racial harmony.
The discovery of the festival, however, was bluesman Mississippi John Hurt. His distinctively honeyed voice made him a connoisseur’s favorite; his scarce recorded output—twelve sides for Okeh Records—made him a collector’s prize; and his mysterious whereabouts—no one knew where he lived, and many presumed he had died—made him a larger-than-life figure. So when he came to perform at Newport, rediscovered by blues historian and collector Tom Hoskins, it was more than a musical moment.
Jim Rooney later wrote of that appearance, “It was unreal. John Hurt was dead. Had to be. All those guys on that Harry Smith Anthology were dead. They’d all recorded back in the twenties and thirties. They’d never been seen or heard from since. But there was no denying that the man singing so sweet and playing so beautifully was the John Hurt. He had a face—and what a face. He had a hat that he wore like a halo. In another place, in another time, Eric might well have got on his knees, but he didn’t.”14
But people weren’t sleeping on Second Beach to hear Tony Saletan. The bill also included Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary (a Grossman creation who had already had hits with Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”); Baez; and Del McCoury and Bill Monroe. Baez was her usual incandescent, powerful self, including her by-then-routine Bob Dylan cover (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”), while Dylan himself slew the audience with the unapologetic “Masters of War” and joined Seeger in an afternoon-workshop version of “You Playboys and Playgirls Ain’t Gonna Run My World.”
More than 46,000 people attended the three-day festival, and the foundation cleared more than $70,000. Shelton exulted that “integrity in folk music had a field day at the box office.”15 To an extent it was true, but as Wein notes, it was always the case that the best-known artists, working for union scale, paid the way for the Dorsey Dixons. “When you look over the list of people we brought here, it’s amazing. And it was all paid for by the fact that the Peter, Paul and Marys and the Joan Baezes were popular. It was an idealistic situation, and it really worked. And it was great to be part of it.”16
In keeping with the activist tradition, some saw the musical alternatives presented at Newport and were inspired to provide alternatives to other aspects of mainstream American life. The civil rights movement was always a part of the Newport festival in the 1960s. Before the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, respectively, the presence of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had literature and information tables at the festival site, as well as performances by the SNCC–aligned Freedom Singers, lent an extra sense of purpose to the proceedings.
The cultural highlight of that year’s festival came at the finale, when Dylan led Baez, the Freedom Singers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Seeger and Bikel in his “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Seeger’s reworking of the spiritual “We Shall Overcome,” an anthem for the civil rights movement.
Great songs or great politically charged anthems can’t be written on command; indeed, it takes more than a songwriter and a performer to create them. The original “We Shall Overcome” had been around for years. The 1963 festival finale wasn’t even the first time that someone had sung it at Newport—Guy Carawan did the honors in 1960. But in July 1963—the year that Governor George Wallace tried to block the integration of the University of Alabama; the year that Dr. Martin Luther King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; a month before the March on Washington and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (an event at which Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez, and Dylan performed); and the summer that four girls in Birmingham, Alabama, were killed when the Ku Klux Klan bombed their church—the song rang out far past Newport.
Bikel later called it “the apogee of the folk movement. There was no point more suffused with hope for the future.” Robert Cantwell called it
the supreme moment in this national seance, in which the summons of folksong to the cultural dead populated the stage with a reunited family of heroes and heroines of the past…. It was a moment in which, like a celestial syzygy, many independent forces of tradition and culture, wandering at large in time, some of them in historical deep space and others only transient displays in