“PURITY” and FOLK MUSIC

When Bob Dylan’s first album came out I remember how different it was and how unusual it was. I couldn’t put my finger on why I found it so exciting, except that his voice was different; his approach to the songs was his own. Just as I liked what he was doing because it was “different”, there were others who didn’t like it for the same reason. There was a conservative streak in some people involved in folk music which said that “this is the way it’s supposed to be.” In the end that is what caught up with Bob, because he kept going down his own road. At first there was the “new Woody Guthrie” image, which he helped to create himself with the little dungaree jacket, the living on the street attitude, the social protest songs. That was very popular with the elders of the folk movement. I saw him early on performing on Pete Seeger’s annual “hootenanny” show at Carnegie Hall. Bob sang the “Bear Mountain Massacre”– a total homage to Woody Guthrie.

However, in early 1965 Bob went over to England where The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were in full flight. He came back wearing polka dot shirts, high heeled rock and roll boots, and shades. He had some new songs as well. He had made a big shift. At the Newport Folk Festival he connected with Mike Bloomfield and some of Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band and asked them to back him up on four of these new songs. The plan was to do those four songs first with the band before he played the rest of his set solo, and that’s just what he did. But in the audience there was a total uproar–a combination of people cheering and people booing. I was cheering myself. I thought the band suited the songs–especially “Like A Rolling Stone.” After Bob finished the four songs, he left the stage. His acoustic guitar hadn’t been put on the stage for him, so he had to go get it. So when Peter Yarrow, who was the emcee, said. “He’s gone to get his acoustic guitar,” a great cheer went up as if he’d given in to the crowd. It was wild.

Every night at Newport after the show there was a party, and these parties were usually great musical events and gatherings of all sort of wonderful musicians jamming away. At this particular party the Chambers Brothers started playing. They had started out in Mississippi as a gospel quartet and had branched out into secular music. They were electric, but it wasn’t loud rock and roll by any stretch of the imagination, but in the aftermath of Dylan’s performance, any electric music seemed to be too much for some to take. Jean Ritchie put her hands over her ears. Everyone was in a state. It was one of those defining nights.

I had been asked by Ralph Rinzler if I would be interested in coming on the Newport Board of Directors. At the time people on the Board included Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Ralph Rinzler, Mike Seeger, Theo Bikel, Oscar Brand, and Judy Collins. They picked the talent and programmed the festival. George Wein’s staff produced the festival. I told Ralph that I would be interested, so he said, “Why don’t you come to the festival and write a critique for the board?” So I did, and there was plenty to talk about:

 

Mertz sums up his feelings: “It is not unusual to be enjoying dinner out and notice couples or groups with a cool, india cheap cialis bluish glow on their faces. This is especially made for the young generation who wants results quickly. viagra for sale mastercard devensec.com These herbal ingredients are Ashwagandha, Shilajit, Kesar, Pipal, Kankaj, Shatavari, Kavach Beej, Safed Musli, Haritaki, Long, Purushratan, Atimukyak, Dridranga, Behdani, Brahmdandi and Lauh Bhasma are the key ingredients of this herbal oil are Ashwagandha, Tulsi, Jaiphal, Samudra Phal, Jaipatri, Kapur, Dalchini, Sona Patha, cialis generic 10mg Jawadi Kasturi, Kapur, Jaiphal, Tulsi, Buleylu oil, Dalchini, and Nirgundi. Studies were conducted in which 500 couples from five different countries and cheap cialis http://www.devensec.com/news/Infill_and_Brownfield_Brochure.pdf regions participated.            “Nothing else in the festival caused such controversy. Dylan’s appearance was the only one that was genuinely disturbing. It was disturbing to the old guard, I think, for several reasons. Bob is no longer a neo-Woody Guthrie with whom they could identify. He has thrown away his dungarees and shaggy jacket. He has stopped singing talking blues and songs about ‘causes’–peace or civil rights. The highway he travels now is unfamiliar to those who bummed around in the thirties during the Depression. He travels by plane. He wears high-heel shoes and high-style clothes from Europe. The mountains and valleys he knows are those of the mind–a mind extremely aware of the violence of the inner and outer world. ‘The people’ so loved by Pete Seeger are ‘the mob’ so hated by Dylan. In the face of violence he has chosen to preserve himself alone. No one else. And he defies everyone else to have the courage to be as alone, as unconnected as he. He screams through organ and drums and electric guitar, “How does it feel to be on your own?” And there is no mistaking the hostility, the defiance, the contempt for all those thousands sitting before him who aren’t on their own. Who can’t make it. And they seemed to understand that night for the first time what Dylan had been trying to say for over a year–that he was not theirs or anyone else’s–and they didn’t like what they heard and booed. They wanted to throw him out. He had fooled them before when they thought he was theirs.

           Pete Seeger had begun the night with the sound of a newborn baby crying and asked that everyone sing to that baby and tell it what kind of a world it would be growing up into. But Pete already knew what he wanted others to sing. They were going to sing that it was a world of pollution, bombs, hunger and injustice, but that PEOPLE would OVERCOME. But can there be no songs as violent as the age? Must a folk song be of mountains, valleys and love between my brother and my sister all over this land? Do we allow for despair only in the blues? That’s all very comfortable and safe. But is that what we should be saying to that baby? Maybe, maybe not. But we should ask the question. And the only one in the entire festival who questioned our position was Bob Dylan. Maybe he didn’t put it in the best way. Maybe he was rude. But he shook us. And that is why we have poets and artists.”

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There was a group of us who had been performing folk music rooted in tradition. Now there were young people coming in and writing their own songs and taking things beyond the tradition. Dylan was leading that group, which by now included Tom Paxton, Tim Hardin, Peter LaFarge, Phil Ochs and others. I had never thought of myself as a songwriter, yet over the years I had taken lyrics from Carl Sandburg’s “American Songbag” that my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday and made up melodies that sounded “folky” and seemed to suit the lyrics. “One Morning in May,” “Kentucky Moonshiner,” and “Pretty Polly” were all the result of this process, but it wasn’t until Dylan came along that the thought entered my head that I was at least partly a songwriter. He was the person who made people aware that you could write new material. When he started, he wrote in the talking blues tradition or the ballad tradition. However, like me, he hadn’t come into music through folk music. He came in through rock and roll. I came in through hillbilly music. We hadn’t taken any vows of purity regarding folk music. We had all grown up listening to whatever we found on the radio. Purity is my idea of a myth in any walk of life. Nothing is pure. Talk to any musician and they’ll tell of songs and styles that came from all sorts of places–a music hall song, a dance band song, a blues, a western song. They hear something they like and just start playing it. I find musicians to be quite open to different influences. It’s critics or other gate keepers who want to put someone or some music in a box and keep it there.

As I came onto the Newport Board, I was finding myself right at the center of these issues. I was definitely coming at things from a different perspective from Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and some of the older members. I had enormous respect for what they had achieved, but had some difficulty with some of their attitudes. One time the great guitarist Merle Travis came to play at the Club 47 when I was running it. He very sheepishly asked, “Would it be alright if I played my electric guitar?” I said, “Sure, you’re Merle Travis, you can play anything you want!” It turned out that he’d been told by Alan Lomax at some concert or other that he should play acoustic rather than electric, presumably because the electric guitar wasn’t really “folk.” Once Doc Watson was staying with Bill Keith and myself in Cambridge when he was playing at the Club 47. He was sitting on the couch playing a great tune. I asked him what it was. He said it was “You Can’t Keep Me From Dreaming,” an old Ozzie Nelson song. (Ozzie of “Ozzie & Harriet” who had been a big band singer) I asked him if he’d play it that night. He laughed and said, “Son, that’s not folk music.” I guess Doc had gotten the message too. Happily, he eventually got to the place where he could play whatever he wanted. When Elvis Presley had his first hit with a revved up version of Bill Monroe’s Blue Moon of Kentucky, someone asked Monroe what he thought of it, thinking that Monroe might be upset at Elvis’s treatment. His comment was, “Them was some powerful checks!” So much for purity!

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