I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
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says that “not everybody was on board” with making such a direct political statement, “but for me, that was where we were. To the degree possible, we were walking the walk on stage.”18 He adds that an assessment of the performance and the era has to take into account the continued legacy of the blacklist, most notably in its treatment of Seeger, who was in the middle of his long ban from the nation’s airwaves—including from the Hootenanny TV show, which kept him off even though virtually every performer it showcased was a disciple of Seeger’s and was profiting off the boom he did so much to create:
We were living a perspective that would have been abhorrent to those people who had blacklisted Pete. Remember that Pete was a huge enemieslist guy, and … here we were, jubilantly celebrating this amazing legacy, and saying that we are doing exactly what the blacklist would have abominated. And at that very time, he was under surveillance, and we knew that. We’re talking about not just music here; we’re talking about really living something that was in the avant-garde of building a better nation. And that’s what we felt…. We felt we were speaking to the aspirations of our country to be a moral nation. And for that reason, it was a very precious experience.19
The ethic of the folk festival—imagined by Seeger, championed by the board, and exemplified by the volunteers, the underpaid musicians and the stunning musicological finds—didn’t stop when the concerts were over. Many of the performers lived together for the duration of the festival, put up in dormitories at Mount Vernon Junior College, sleeping on navy surplus sheets and blankets, eating food cooked by local chefs—all arranged for by Joyce Wein, with an army of helpers.
In 1982, Joyce Wein, speaking with historian Carol Brauner, remembered the logistical challenges behind the scenes as an integral part of what the folk festival was all about. While the jazz festival largely featured professional musicians, she said, “Under the structure of the folk festival, the folk foundation, we agreed to put the people up, to pay their transportation, whether it was by car, or bus or airplane. And we were dealing with people who, in many cases, were not professionals. So it became a horrendous thing, because we had these mimeographed contracts that we sent out—sometimes we got answers, sometimes we didn’t; we tried to track them down.”20
Thanks to the complexity of the logistics and the fact that the Weins had just moved to New York and Joyce Wein hadn’t found a job in her field yet, she said, “I started taking over…. We used to put up, oh, anywhere from three to five hundred people, I think, and then I used to put up a big tent behind one of the houses and there was a cook that was very nice to work with…. And we used to feed everybody three times a day…. And then in addition, we ran a party every night, at one of the houses.”21
Betsy Siggins was the doyenne of the Cambridge folk venue Club 47, where for eight years in the 1960s she handled the bookings and offered her couch to any musicians who needed a place to stay—and in the Boston area in the early and mid-1960s, most of the black players did. She volunteered at the Newport Folk Festival during those years and often booked the touring musicians who played the festival at Club 47 a few days after Newport was over. She recalls the festival as “one of the most startlingly important things that ever happened to any of us who cared about the music. Because right then and there we could be exposed to about fifteen kinds of American music.”22
And as a volunteer, she got up close with many of the legends. Ralph Rinzler introduced her to Louisiana bluesman Robert Pete Williams, who when he was discovered had been serving a life sentence for a murder he said was in self-defense and was released into “servitude parole,” an arrangement which saw him work eighty hours a week without pay. Siggins recalls, “I remember taking his hand and breaking into tears. I could cry now. [It was] that immediate connection I got with (a) people who are being oppressed, and (b) the way we had treated people in this country for way too long—and that he had a kind of music I had never experienced before.”23
And when the nighttime shows were over, the artists got together at the dorms or the houses Wein had rented in town for the festival and played yet more. Wein, in his memoirs, recalls a night when Hurt was playing in the backyard to a group of enthralled kids, Odetta was singing in the living room, a bluegrass band was picking on the front lawn, and Dylan and Baez were in a room by themselves, trading songs.
Bob Jones, who began as a festival volunteer in 1963 and rose to become producer in 1985, recalls a night in 1964 talking with Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters on the steps of the Blues House (a house in the center of town where the blues musicians would be quartered together).24 “Monroe asked Muddy, ‘Do you even play in the South?’ And Muddy said, ‘Not really.’”25
“When it came down to it,” Jones says, “everybody sang with everybody else. Everybody played with everybody else. The blues players were very happy to hear Bill play.”26
“Moments like these,” Wein writes, “were what the Folk Festival was really all about.”27
Jim Kweskin played at Newport with his seminal jug band (including Geoff and the future Maria Muldaur) and solo for five years in a row. While playing Newport carried with it a certain degree of validation, he says, “I would have gone to Newport whether I was on the bill or not…. I went to Newport because I wanted to see those great musicians,” such as Hurt, Skip James, Son House and Bukka White, as well as exotic fare such as the fife-and-drum of Ed Young and the penny whistling of Spokes Mashiyane. “And not just the older guys; I got to see these musicians I didn’t get to see that much, like Spider John Koerner, or Mavis Staples, Dick and Mimi Fariña, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—much as they were my contemporaries, we didn’t get to see each other that often. So it’s an opportunity to hang out with all these great musicians who were my age.”28
Judy Collins, the singer-songwriter and activist best known for Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now,” whose Newport career has ranged from 1963 to 2009 and who served on the board of directors, remembers the festival similarly as “a gathering place. An old boys—and young girls—convention, where you could get together and hang out and sing songs and stay up late.” Her favorite Newport moments don’t involve her own performances or her years on the board—they all involve seeing and meeting other performers. To her, Newport meant hearing Pops Staples and his Singers, the Charles River Valley Boys, the Chambers Brothers and more. “I did my part,” she says—“I certainly sang and performed. But it was so important to be at midnight around a campfire listening to Son House and Mississippi John Hurt—I mean, those were the days.”29
The 1964 festival was the most successful one yet and the first to outdraw the jazz festival, with a total of seventy thousand people streaming into Newport over three days and four nights (July 23–26). With 4,500 in attendance, acts ranged from Bikel, Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, Baez and Dylan to Seamus Ennis, Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Kentucky’s Dewey Shepherd and a Jean Ritchie–led demonstration of a “Play-Party,” a mix of a cappella singing and children’s game-style movements that early settlers used to get around prohibitions on music and dancing.
It was also the year Skip James, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, Muddy Waters and others made appearances at Newport, which the blues writer and photographer Dick Waterman later called “the greatest collection of country blues singers” assembled to that point.30 There was also a performance of Cajun music by a band including Dewey Balfa, and while it went largely unremarked at the time, it had a seismic effect, in both Rhode Island and the Cajun homeland of Louisiana. These performances were the first fruit of the Newport Folk Foundation’s efforts to promote and foster the development of folk music not just one weekend per year at Newport but year-round and across the country.
4
Ralph and I would say,“OK; we’ll find them.”
BOB JONES
TEXAS WAS THE WORST
When Mississippi John Hurt,