I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
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let so-and-so do it.’ And that’s what he did with the folk festival, I think brilliantly.”29
Throughout the history of the Newport Folk Festival, Wein has employed four men to act as native guides to the world of folk music. Each of these guides has stamped the festival with his ideas of what folk is and should be and in so doing has helped define the genre each step of the way.
Wein’s first native guide showed up on his doorstep when he booked Odetta at Storyville. Albert Grossman was born in Chicago in 1927 and had a degree in economics from Roosevelt University. In 1956, he too opened a nightclub—a Chicago folk spot called the Gate of Horn (“the inside place for inside people”)—in the basement of the Rice Hotel on Chicago Avenue and Dearborn Street. He hosted performers such as Odetta, Bob Gibson and a then-unknown Joan Baez, all of whom would figure prominently in the first Newport festival, and soon began managing some of the acts who played there.
Grossman would go on to become one of the most important and bestknown managers in musical history, spanning the folk and rock worlds and with a client list that included Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band and Janis Joplin. He was a big man with a big, deep voice, and he was considered a businessman in a world where business wasn’t supposed to matter. A lot of people in the folk world considered him an anomaly. In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Michael Gray wrote of Grossman, “In a milieu of New Left reformers and folkie idealists campaigning for a better world, Albert Grossman was a breadhead, seen to move serenely and with deadly purpose like a barracuda circling shoals of fish.” David Braun, a lawyer who worked for both Dylan and Grossman, said, “He was the first person to realize that there was real money to be made in the music business.”30 Grossman was no stranger to lawsuits, including from Dylan, who would eventually call him, in the documentary No Direction Home, a “Colonel Tom Parker figure … you could smell him coming.”
But not everyone felt that way. Indeed, Grossman carried with him many of the conflicts and contradictions of the folk revival itself. Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, calls Grossman “a person who was misunderstood and resented by some people, because of his bellicose nature. But frankly, I think he made as great a contribution to folk music as any of we artists, with the exception of Pete Seeger.” Yarrow also claimed that Grossman
believed in Bob Dylan, and he protected Bob, so Bob could be what he was. Bobby was allowed to make those decisions for himself, as were Peter, Paul and Mary, because Albert protected him. And made contracts that allowed him to sing the songs he wanted, rather than having an A&R person tell him what to do. And record them the way he wanted, with the producers and the engineers he wanted; to decide what the record album would look like, and entirely be free to be an artist. Albert was a genius in that, and he changed the field to make that happen. And he made that happen for all his artists.”31
After Grossman’s death in 1986, Yarrow told Musician magazine’s Rory O’Conner that Grossman “was concerned first and foremost with authenticity,” but that he “realized that it wasn’t enough just to write and perform songs, that there was a multitude of ways to be successful and to happen, to become important, to be wanted by that public. It was necessary to couple artistic success with enormous economic success in order for that to take place.”
Wein recalls sitting up with Grossman until 3 a.m. every night of Odetta’s Storyville engagement. “I found out that he knew the entire world of folk music, and he was a brilliant guy, and we became very close friends.”32 They also became partners, forming Production Artists and Management Associates. Their first project was the Newport Folk Festival. Wein remembers that the idea of a separate festival was an easy sell to the board of directors of the Newport Jazz Festival and the city. “We were riding high at that time. The festival was doing well, and we didn’t have any problems.… Everybody wasn’t excited about folk music per se, but the concept of doing a second festival met with unanimous approval.”
The first festival was held Saturday and Sunday afternoon and night, July 11 and 12, 1959, in Freebody Park. Studs Terkel was the MC for the first day, Oscar Brand for the second. Billy Faier, editor of the folk music magazine Caravan, welcomed festivalgoers in the program by writing, “The Scholars, the city-bred folksingers, and the ‘authentic’ singers are here to give you what is probably the very first representative picture of American Folk Music ever held on the concert stage.”
John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, a group of young players reviving old-time American music, recalls that they “were odd birds there.… Everybody else was a pretty smooth, professional act, so to speak, and we were just musicians dressed in our everyday clothes. And there was nothing like us there. And somehow we were well received.”33
Frederic Ramsey Jr., writing in the Saturday Review of July 25, said that there was no “consistent mood that was established early and maintained … there were slumps, swells, wallows and heights.”34 Still, he found plenty of heights, including John Jacob Niles and Cohen’s Ramblers. In the New York Times of July 19, Robert Shelton called the festival “perhaps the most ambitious attempt ever made at delineating a cross-section of the nation’s folk music…. The range of the programs … stressed the American idiom, and within that framework it was far-reaching, if not encyclopedic.” He added that Odetta’s performance was “the crowning performance of the week-end…. Here was folk music identification married to theatrical vocal artistry at its very best.”35
Shelton was a little more conflicted about the festival in private. In a letter to folklorist Archie Green, he wrote that “I rather consciously held back on negative criticism at Newport in both my Times piece and Nation piece. I may be wrong, but I think a new venture like this needs public support now. There’ll be time enough to tear into it after it is old enough to stand on its own feet.”36
On Sunday morning, a panel discussion was held at Rogers High School on the topic “What Is American Folk Music?” The panel, moderated by critic and musicologist Marshall Stearns, took on some of the questions that had been swirling around the folk revival, debating whether indigenous regional folk music would survive in an increasingly commercialized musical world. Folklorist Alan Lomax argued, according to the Providence Journal’s account, that “the very essence of folk music and style is rooted in particular localities and warned that the destruction of local traditions and cultures in a mass-communication age would make a ‘gray world.’”37
After an afternoon program including Seeger and the duo of Tom Makem and Paddy Clancy that drew 2,500 people, 5,500 turned out for an evening bill that included Jimmie Driftwood (including his hit, “The Battle of New Orleans”); Leon Bibb, whose volcanic voice set spirituals ablaze; the country blues of Barbara Dane; the bluegrass of the Stanley Brothers and more.
John Cohen remembers the Stanley Brothers, which of course featured the seemingly immortal bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, for two reasons. He says the rest of the band was a sight to behold as well: “One guy, Bill Napier, the mandolin player—he was dressed up like Grandpa Jones, with a big old funky mustache. And then Chubby Anthony, the fiddler, was in overalls. And the bass player was this crazy Cousin Mort, who … did these crazy imitations of sounds, like a hog eating garbage, and he made you aware of a tomato going down his throat. Or starting an old Ford. Weird stuff!”38
Second, Cohen saw the Stanley Brothers with a young girl who had seen the Ramblers rehearsing on the back of a truck: she was “barefoot, looking at us with a rose in her hair. I was immediately attracted to her, and she started asking about us, and she and I walked around, this and that, and when the Stanley Brothers played … she and I were right next to the stage, and she’d never heard this kind of music…. And the next evening, she and I were standing around, and suddenly she says, ‘I’ve got to go on the stage; this guy’s inviting me up.’”39
The guy was Bob Gibson, a frequent performer at Grossman’s Gate of Horn and a lower-tier star through the early 1960s. The girl who had attracted Cohen’s attention was Joan Baez (or, as the Providence Journal mangled her name, “Joan Byers”), whose spectral soprano rose out of “Virgin Mary Had a Son” like a revelation. Gibson