Pure folk music
by Bob on January 29, 2008
I was watching a brilliant documentary on Bob Dylan and his performances at the Newport Folk Festival in the years 1963-1965. It was called "Bob Dylan Live in Newport 1963-1965". It was by the award-winning director Murray Lerner.
I was impressed very much by this film. It was even more interesting because I had around the NYC folk scene back in the late 1950s and 1960s and played 5-string banjo bluegrass style, and folk guitar, traditional and blues. But I was very young at the time. I heard some of the great folk musicians play in NYC's Greenwich Village and picked up some riffs and also heard them sing, play and speak up close and personal.
That was a different time and place. The Beat Generation and its aftermath. Poetry readings in cafes in the Village. There was a residual amount of protest from the Woody Guthrie times, about working conditions and political unrest and seeming wrong-doings. Many folk singers had been "blacklisted" in the McCarthy Congressional witchhunt for political dissidents before that. I knew a musician and musicologist who was my folk music mentor and who had been part of that scene in the 1940s and 1950s and on. She was a personal friend of Pete Seeger and the entourage of folk singers in his milieu. I learned a lot about "pure" folk music from her and her musician friends, and from Pete's recordings and writings, especially on the 5-string banjo.
Folk music in that time was not produced in the sense of today's modern production of musical sound on a record or live performance. A folksinger might just as easily been on a porch in the Appalachian Mountains or in a gaslight cafe in Greenwich Village in NYC. It was just simply the same. Hardly any amplification of the instrument, and just maybe a microphone. Singers then had to belt out a song so that people would hear them and not depend on microphones. After all, electrical equipment could fail and the songs still had to be heard.
Folk songs were usually traditional pieces, decades or even centuries old, and passed down from musician to musician, or town to town, or from grandfather to son to grandson. They were songs of pain, suffering, joy, love or protest. They were topical if they were songs of protest and had a very serious message in the lyrics. The lyrics usually were very matter-of-fact mundane and were like a story to be passed down to the next town or part of the country or to sons and daughters for them to pass on. The words to a folk song were the important message and the musical accompanying them was considered somewhat incidental.
The great folksinger and balladeer Woody Guthrie traveled around the USA writing about what he saw in the 1930s and later and wrote songs about the hardships and cynical songs about the politics. Some of his songs were national panoramas, at a time when people didn't jump on a plane or bus to visit and tour halfway across the country. So "This Land is your Land" is a kind of paean to the USA and tells much about things in different parts in his travels. How many city people in the East knew what the Redwood Forest was as sung in Woody's song ? Maybe not too many. But when they heard the song, they would find out. And it was also, if we examine all the verses, a very subtle protest song, too. Guthrie was saying that this land is your land, not the land of companies and corporations and millionaires and governments. This came through in the variations of his playing the song.
So, instead of travel shows on TV we had folksingers telling us about countries and cities and monuments in musical verse.
Folksingers were the modern troubadours of the High Middle Ages.
In fact many many pundits and just plain people called Woody Guthrie "The Dust Bowl Troubadour". And Pete Seeger's ensemble was called appropriately "The Weavers".
Woody Guthrie was an important bridge from one generation to another. In his left hand was a reach to the old traditional folk music, whereas in his right was a new outreach to modern conditions of life which gave birth to Bob Dylan and his style and lyrical content.
When Dylan came on the scene, almost everything changed. Again after many years of playing folk music and being in a traditional role as such, Dylan would break with tradition and go "electric" in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival. I remember it well. There were boos and cheers from differing audience segments but the folk purists just wouldn't tolerate it philosophically. The music might have been drowning out the all-so-important words of the folk song. Mike Bloomfield was on guitar, Al Kooper on Hammond organ, and others. These were brilliant musicians in their own right, but not exactly traditional folk musicians.
When you saw Dylan and other musicians at Newport is was almost primordial early Greek theatre in the sense that it was simple, and rustic, with no fancy set decorations, and the audience was part of the event, even participating in the songs.
A great example of this kind of social message is Dylan's brilliant song "Who Killed Davey Moore". Bob Dylan sang it brilliantly about the prize fighter, Davey Moore, who was killed in a boxing ring in 1963 by injuries dealt by his opponent Sugar Ramos. Dylan asked who would take responsibility for the loss of Davey Moore's life. And he came up with no one who would be responsible. The song says that. The tragedy of Davey Moore's death in the boxing ring would go unrepented. And Dylan got that message across. This is in the mold of very traditional folk music but in the mold of Dylan's brilliance and balladeering.
So what was to become of the oral tradition of folk music if the words could not be heard well if at all ? Good question. It changed.
"Like A Rolling Stone" by Dylan was the keystone. Al was on organ and Mike on guitar, and there were drums, and the like. But it redefined folk music in a new casting which would propel it into a new generation of rock-music-savvy listeners. In fact, Al Kooper's electric Hammond organ playing on the piece was also considered a landmark in folk/rock/folk-rock.
Dylan's new style was a tremendous influence on many new musical artists.
Especially I remember Jimi Hendrix and his saying that he had to buy all Dylan's records and listen to them and get them down musically. That, to a large extent, took Jimi away from his R&B guitar playing and into a new dimension which wasn't quite folk or even rock, or even Dylan-esque, but all Jimi Hendrix. When he played "Hey Joe" or "Like a Rolling Stone" it was from a differnet point in the universe. He invented something we hadn't heard before and he knew it. Jimi then went even further and took his brand of rock into yet higher dimensions and stage performances. Jimi re-defined rock and roll guitar in his own fashion to be imitated for decades after and to this day.
But he was inspired by Dylan's new dimension of electric folk music and challenging it to a new genre.
The Byrds were also brought on the scene to absolutely take some classic Dylan songs, like "Mr. Tambourine Man" and make it rock in a 12-string Rickenbacker electric guitar lead fashion as never before. The Byrds defined another genre and took old classics and made them new again in a whole new way we never heard before. Songs such as "Turn! Turn! Turn!" written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s and based on the passages of Ecclesiates in the bible.
Looking at Dylan performing on the documentary, you can see just how much in Woody Guthrie's stead he was. Just like Woody wore shirts with rolled up sleeves and nothing fancy, so did Dylan and so did Pete Seeger who introduced Dylan at the Newport Festival and sat behind him whilst he performed, and Pete tapped his boots to the music. I'm not sure that Pete was an admirer of the new electric Dylan, but he highly respected Dylan's songwriting capability, his ability as a poet of a new generation, and as an innovator.
The British bands did to blues folk music what Dylan had done to pure folk music.The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Animals all took American traditional Mississippi Delta blues songs and adapted them, fashioning them into a whole new electrical mold with full complement of instruments and rock music twists.
One of the oldest traditional folk songs, "The House of the Rising Sun" was adapted into a twangy guitar riff piece and a brilliant electric organ solo and given new meaning to a new generation who had never even realised that it was a very old song and not written by The Animals as an original piece. But it was radically different than the original centuries old folk song which I myself had learned from folk musicians and played in traditional style. The Animals transformed it and it become their defnining pop-chart hit.
So we still wonder if anyone hears the words to a song anymore or if they say anything traditional and important and if the music is interfering with its message.
We've passed the point of no-return in this matter.
Most music today is very over-produced and hugely amplified and orchestrated.
Folk music was the common man's music and song.
The medium has become the message once again, as Marshall McLuhan predicted in mass media, and not the song content.
It is reality. Nostalgia can be a foerever steel trap with no moving forward.
That's true, of course, if there is such a metaphysical concept as moving forward. Maybe it's all just one big thing, a kind of super-thought.
It would seem now that image is all that matters, not content.
It will change back again. Eternity is a very long time. It waits patiently for mankind to stop its foolish trendiness.
And Bob Dylan knew this wisdom, as did David Bowie. As did Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. We thank them all.
Bob Dylan's "electric" moment at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
This was the soundcheck during the day whereas the performance was at night.
Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar, and Al Kooper on electic organ.