The Mayor of MacDougal Street (6 page)

Thus began my shift from jazz to folk music, a change that defied the general rule that things evolve from the simple to the more complex. In this case I made a move that was technically retrogressive, but it was about the only thing I could do to survive. I was a high school dropout, so there was no chance that I was going to become a professor of comparative philology or a nuclear physicist who played the guitar on the side. And much as I loved traditional jazz, I was sick to death of performing the music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for drunken undergraduates who wanted us to put on funny hats and sing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” Even if I had been able to stomach it, that scene was all but dead, and there was no GI bill for veterans of the mouldy fig wars. It was clear that my career plans were due for an agonizing reappraisal, and unless I wanted to get out of music entirely, folk music was the only way I could jump. So I cast off my carefully cultivated jazz snobbery and set out to reinvent myself as a fingerpicking guitarist and singer. Like the man said, “Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.”

B
efore embarking on the saga of the Greenwich Village scene in the formative years of the Great Folk Scare, I should probably provide a little background. First of all, the whole concept of what is meant by the word “folksinger” has changed dramatically since I came on the set. With the success of the singer-songwriters of the sixties (Dylan and Paxton and Ochs, oh my!), the scene became dominated by music that we would not even have considered part of the genre.

In the 1950s, as for at least the previous two hundred years, we used the word “folk” to describe a process rather than a style. By this definition—to which I still subscribe—folk songs are the musical expression of preliterate or illiterate communities and necessarily pass directly from singer to singer. Flamenco is folk music; Bulgarian vocal ensembles are folk music; African drumming is folk music; and “Barbara Allen” is folk music. Clearly, there is little stylistic similarity here, but all these musics developed through a process of oral repetition that is akin to the game we used to call “whisper.” In whisper, one person writes down a sentence, then whispers it to another, who whispers it to a third, and so on around the room until the last person hears it and again writes it down; and then the two messages are compared,
and often turn out to be wildly disparate. In the same way, if one follows songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, one finds that lines like “Savory, sage, rosemary, and thyme” become “Miss Mary says come marry in time,” and “Jordan is a hard road to travel” becomes “Yearning in your heart for trouble.” The cumulative effect is a sort of Darwinian evolution that first produces different versions of the same song, and eventually leads to entirely new songs. It follows that the original authors of folk songs are usually unknown, and even when we do know something about them, the information is not necessarily relevant.

To an overwhelming extent, this folk process has been short-circuited in the developed world over the last hundred years or so, first by widespread literacy and later by the phonograph, radio, and TV. As a result, with the exception of a few holdouts—some rap and street poetry, kids’ game rhymes, bawdy songs, and so forth—there is very little folk music in modern-day America. (Please don’t hit me with that banjo.) It follows that the concept of a “folk revival” is oxymoronic. And yet, self-announced folk revivals keep surfacing, just as they have at least since the days of Sir Walter Scott. The impulse behind them is generally romantic and anti-industrial—and, a bit surprisingly, among Anglophones in recent times it has almost always come from politically left of center. (Elsewhere, interest in folkloric traditions has often been found in combination with extreme nationalism of the most right-wing and fascist variety.)

One of the first things that must be understood about these revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always, there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk—whoever that might be—is the operative thing. The particular risorgimento in which I took part had begun some fifteen years prior to my arrival and grew out of the leftist movements of the Depression era. Desperate strikes, unemployment, and vast hordes of dispossessed small farmers engaged the sympathy and support of the middle class, which was pretty hard-hit itself. Enter the Communist Party. Communist organizers assisted tenant farmers in setting up unions in the South and Southwest, and supported rent strikes and anti-eviction campaigns in black ghettos in the Northeast, which, along with an anti-lynching campaign, established links with the black community. In spite of their small numbers, the Communists seemed to be everywhere, and they were damned good organizers.

In the course of their work among coal miners and textile workers in Appalachia, and with rural and ghetto blacks, some of the Communist field workers became aware of the music of the southern mountains and black singing traditions (especially gospel music). They saw these folk songs as social documents—I have heard people go to great lengths to prove that the most apolitical ditty was in fact a coded assault on the oppression of the workers—and also as potential organizing tools. At first, their enthusiasm met with little support among their urban counterparts. While they were celebrating eccentric hill-country balladeers like Aunt Molly Jackson, the cultural commissars were off on a crazed search for Communist art, encouraging sympathetic composers to write workers’ oratorios. Before long, though, these progressive masterpieces fell into well-deserved oblivion, and picket lines and rallies began to feature that now-familiar fixture, the “folksinger.”

The urban intelligentsia had always been susceptible to nostalgic longings for “simpler” times and lifestyles, but it had tended to present its rural gleanings as an adjunct to the “art song.” Classical composers had produced settings of peasant airs and dances, which would be tossed in to lighten up programs of “serious music.” Medieval lyrics were presented as educational artifacts, and dreaded accordingly. The new wave of politically progressive folksingers was something different. The tuxedos and evening gowns of the concert hall were replaced by work clothes, in a spirit of proletarian unity.

There was something else going on as well: a lot of both the middle-class left-wingers and the workers back in the 1930s were first- or second-generation immigrants, and the folk revival served as a way for them to establish American roots. This was especially true for the Jews. The folk revivalists were at least 50 percent Jewish, and they adopted the music as part of a process of assimilation to the Anglo-American tradition—which itself was largely an artificial construct but nonetheless provided some common ground. (Of course, that rush to assimilate was not limited to Jews, but I think they were more conscious of what they were doing than a lot of other people were.) The more nativist “folk” were often embarrassingly aware of this fact. When Roger Sprung, one of the original Washington Square bluegrassers, showed up with a couple of his buddies at the Asheville Folk Festival in the early 1950s, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the festival organizer
and a hard-shell North Carolinian, grilled them thoroughly before letting them perform.

“You boys from New York?” he asked, with obvious suspicion.

Roger said yes.

“You Jews?”

Roger said, “Uh, yeah.”

“You know Pete Seeger?”

“Well, we’ve met him . . . ”

“You Communists?”

No, they were not.

Lunsford himself was a racist, anti-Semitic white supremacist who in later years would steadfastly refuse to come to the Newport Folk Festivals because of Seeger’s involvement. Nonetheless, he finally decided that Sprung and his cohorts were not Communists, and allowed them to appear. However, he was master of ceremonies, and when they were due to come on, he got up and announced, “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to present the three Jews from New York.”

The New York branch of the folk revival was strongly influenced by the Communist outlook, and one of the effects of this was that, along with performing traditional material, a lot of singers began composing topical songs based on folk models. Such urban, folk-styled creations were essentially a new music, consciously and often carefully crafted, politically motivated, and in many ways a quite different animal from anything that had come before. (The Industrial Workers of the World—IWW, or “Wobblies”—had done something similar back in the teens, but with the difference that singers like Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim were of the folk and generally set their lyrics to pop melodies or church hymns rather than to anything self-consciously rural or working-class.) It was part of the birth of “proletarian chic”—think about that the next time you slip into your designer jeans.

The urban folksingers acquired their repertoires from books, records, collecting trips, and one another, and unlike the traditional singers, they made their commitment to folk music consciously, for political and aesthetic reasons. As a result, they generally had to adopt personae not their own, singing and writing about experiences they knew only secondhand. This made for a very unstable synthesis, full of internal contradictions, but in the late 1930s such complications were ignored in the heat of political
battle and the joy of musical discovery. (Besides, introspection was a petit bourgeois luxury.) Those were urgent times, and the song for tomorrow night’s rally had to be written now, at once, immediately.

By 1939 this movement had its nexus in a sort of commune on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village called Almanac House. The residents included at one time or another, Pete Seeger, Alan and Bess Lomax, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell . . . the list is long and impressive. All were songwriters to one degree or another (many collaborations and collective efforts here), but Guthrie was by far the most talented and influential of the lot. Taking pains to conceal his considerable erudition behind a folksy facade, he became a kind of proletarian oracle in the eyes of his singer-songwriter associates, who were, of course, incurable romantics. With Guthrie exercising a very loose artistic hegemony (Seeger and Lampell seem to have done most of the actual work), Almanac House became a kind of song factory, churning out topical, occasional, and protest songs at an unbelievable clip, as well as hosting regular “hootenannies.”

While the Communist Party played a notable role in midwifing this musical movement—Guthrie even had a regular column for a while in the
Daily Worker—
it also presented a few problems. For one thing, there were the political shifts that found the Almanacs singing things like “Plow Under Every Fourth American Boy” and the other songs they recorded opposing U.S. entry into World War II during the Hitler-Stalin pact, then having to throw those songs out the window and replace them with “It’s that UAW-CIO that makes the army roll and go,” once Germany invaded the Soviet Union. However, I do not want to overstate the old bugaboo about “singing the ‘party line.’” While the folksingers were certainly responsive to party positions, the Central Committee not only failed to exercise tight control over them but showed a discouraging lack of interest in the whole business. The main obstacle to musical growth presented by the CP was not a matter of committee directives or party discipline but a matter of attitude. Among Progressives of the time, personal expression in music was discouraged. Art was considered to be a tool. (Or a weapon: the famous sign on Woody’s guitar, “This machine kills fascists,” is a perfect example.) As odd as it may seem to us now, many of these people were embarrassed to write a love song, because the Spanish Civil War was going on, or the steelworkers were on strike, or Mussolini was invading
Ethiopia. Thus, while the songwriters around the CP had some magnificent moments, they were unable to exploit the full range of their experience, and their compositions ended up being as obsessively focused on one subject (politics) as the commercial music they despised was on another (romantic love).

My purpose is not to chart the fortunes of the Almanacs and their various heirs and assigns through the 1940s, but only to note that their influence was fundamental and continued to grow. People’s Songs was formed as a sort of central clearinghouse for progressive folksingers, and it published a regular bulletin that was the direct ancestor of
Sing Out!
magazine. Then, in 1948, the Weavers reached the top ten on the Hit Parade, putting the folk revival squarely into the mainstream of American music. By this time, a good deal of ideological mellowing had been going on, and the group was—dare one say it—fun.

It is impossible to determine what further evolutions the Weavers’ success might have sparked if the Cold War and its attendant anti-Communist hysteria had not intervened. The Red Scare that began in the late 1940s involved this country in one of the most disgracefully psychotic episodes in its history, and the blacklist damn near killed the folk revival in its tracks. The full extent of the witch hunt is rarely acknowledged even today. Most people believe it affected only public figures—people in government and the entertainment world—but that is completely wrong. Trade unions and the professions in the private sector were all profoundly affected, and for a while no one to the left of Genghis Khan could feel entirely safe. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were harassed by the FBI and threatened by vigilante anti-Communist crusaders. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get a job as a
messenger
, for chrissake, and I have already mentioned Lenny Glaser being fired from his job as a waiter after the FBI came around and asked the restaurant manager some pointed questions about his political affiliations. The right-wing press—which is to say, almost all of it—was running stories like “How the Reds Control Our Schools,” and the whole country was in a paranoid panic that lasted almost two decades. Leftists and intellectuals were terrorized, many essentially unemployable, not a few in prison, and a couple (the Rosenbergs) executed
pour encourager les autres
. Thus the cheery atmosphere of the Golden Fifties.