I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
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and Willie B. Thomas, who had recently been discovered by the traveling folklorist Harry Oster. The field also included the Weavers (who had replaced Seeger with Erik Darling in 1958) and Joan Baez (or Boez, as the Providence Journal continued to err52).
And on Sunday afternoon, Freebody Park hosted a hootenanny—an opportunity for amateur musicians among the attendees to strut their stuff for one song each. Shelton, of the Times, wrote that the amateurs’ songs ranged in subject matter from the recently downed U-2 spy plane to the discipline of psychoanalysis, and while he danced around the question of how good any of them were, he called the hoot “a welcome idea…. Folk music is more than an art for spectators. It is a participation sport.”53
In 2009, Seeger remembered the performance of the eighty-eight-year-old retired Canadian lumberjack, O. J. Abbott:
He came down with his daughter, and sang a song she didn’t approve of:
An old man come a courtin’ me
Fa la la loodle
An old man come a courtin’ me
Hi-diree-down
An old man come a courtin’ me
Offered to marry me
Maids, when you’re young, never wed an old man
He has no fa loodle
Fa la la loodle
He has no fa loodle
The divil a-one
He has no fa loodle
He’s lost his ding-doodle
So maids, when you’re young, never wed an old man.
Oh, the audience loved it! But his middle-aged daughter was a little embarrassed.”54
The festival drew about 10,000 people, down from the previous year’s 12,000 to 14,000, Shelton estimated in the Times. But already the festival was serving as a focal point for the youth culture that drove, and took sustenance from, folk music’s commercial revival. Susan Montgomery, in Mademoiselle, described the scene in terms befitting the transmission of sacred texts:
Each night the music continued long after the regular performances were over, when it became the property not of professionals but of small groups of students who carried their sleeping bags and instruments down to the beach.
There, around fires built in holes scooped out of the sand to keep off the fog … [they] sang and clapped to songs like “It Takes a Worried Man”…. Before the morning was over students would be playing and singing again—on the beaches, on the narrow strip of grass dividing the main boulevard. Inevitably students sat huddled in little groups as if drawing warmth from one another. Their faces were solemn, almost expressionless, while they were singing, and they moved quickly from song to song without talking very much.55
While the attendance had slid, the organizers had said that it was good enough to keep the festival going. But they didn’t get the chance. The 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, held the next weekend, started off strongly, with performers including Eubie Blake, Willie “the Lion” Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and their bands and an estimated 8,500 people at the evening show. The next night, however, was nearly the end of music in Newport.
About 16,000 people packed Freebody Park the night of Saturday, July 2, for the bill, which included the Oscar Peterson Trio, the Horace Silver Quintet, the Ray Charles Orchestra, and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. But outside, thousands of young people roaming around the periphery of the park tried to break down the gates of the park and climb its stone wall. After they were repelled by the police, they roamed through downtown Newport, throwing bottles and beer cans at police officers and vandalizing shops. City Manager George A. Bisson was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “We simply don’t have the manpower to cope with the situation.”56 The state police and the Rhode Island National Guard were called out; tear gas and fire hoses were used to clear youths from the gates of the park, while the Newport police shuttled arrestees into holding cells.
Inside the park, the festival continued relatively normally. Indeed, the police asked Wein to keep the music going—and concertgoers inside the park—while the security forces tried to clear things up. The show lasted until 2:15 a.m., after which, Wein writes, “the musicians left in a phalanx of cars, with a police escort, the fans streaming out onto streets littered with broken glass, beer cans, overturned cars, smashed windows, and the lingering, diffuse odor of tear gas.”57 In all, 182 people were arrested, plus another 27 the next day on the city’s beaches, which were then closed.
Later that day, the Newport City Council voted to cancel the rest of the festival, save a blues show scheduled for that afternoon featuring Jimmy Rushing, Otis Spann, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and more. The city’s taverns were also shut down for two days. Afterward, Louis Lorillard announced his intention to sue: “The audience was well behaved and enjoying the performances. It was only the unruly element outside of the jazz festival park that created the disturbances…. City officials publicly claimed they could handle any situation arising which proved to be completely untrue and they took the unnecessary step of canceling our remaining performances even though the jazz festival itself was entirely blameless.”58
Not everyone in Newport agreed with the council’s decision. Leonard Scalzi, board president of the Newport Chamber of Commerce and manager of the Viking Hotel, was opposed to the action, as were at least several concertgoers, who told the Times that the police had at least as much to do with the violence as anyone else.
As befitting the era, Harold Boxer, music director of the Voice of America, called the decision “food for the Communists.”59 His colleague Willis Conover added, “The Russians are going to pick up on this incident. They will say that this proves that jazz bands are hoodlums.”60 But it didn’t matter.
While the council didn’t explicitly rule out future jazz or folk festivals, Bisson was adamant: “As far as I am concerned that’s the last jazz festival of a similar nature that will ever come to Newport.”61 When Lorillard tried to get a license for a 1961 festival, the council voted down his request.
It only took a few months to prove Bisson’s words wrong: A new group, called Music at Newport and comprising city businessmen and fans, acquired a license to put on a festival in Freebody Park. They hired concert promoter Sid Bernstein (who later brought the Beatles to America for the first time) to produce the festival, to be held June 30 through July 3, 1961, and the bill included Bob Hope, Judy Garland, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing and Julie Wilson. Crowds were decent, and the festival passed peacefully: “as sedately as a Tanglewood concert,” the Times reported.62 Newport police chief Joseph A. Radice agreed that “Newport has regained its good name and can produce a successful jazz festival without riots.”
But the festival lost a reported $70,000. (Hope canceling probably didn’t help.)
Wein says he was driving with Joyce one day and heard Bernstein being interviewed on the radio. Asked whether he’d be returning to Newport, Wein remembers Bernstein saying, “No. I can’t make any money there. No one can make any money there except George Wein.” Wein turned to his wife and said, “He’s right.”63
Wein applied for a license for a 1962 Newport Jazz Festival. Louis Lorillard had been the liaison with the city, but Wein says that the Lorillards were in the process of splitting up—“she sued him for divorce three separate times,” Wein says. Louis was out of the country, not to be found; all the other investors dropped out, convinced that Newport had gone cold as a music venue. The license was granted with a few conditions: the festival was limited to three days; capacity was set at ten thousand; the shows had to be over by 12:15 a.m. Wein, speaking today, is fairly certain that he had to put up some money for possible security expenses