The Politics of the Folk Music Revival

from the
THE HARVARD COLLEGE
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROGRAMS NEWSLETTER
December 1997

Before rock'n'roll and social protest became entwined in the mid-1960s, folk music provided the soundtrack for the American counterculture. For over a decade, this simple music brought college students, "beatniks," and activists together in song and spirit.

On college campuses and in coffeehouses, musicians joined poets at "hootenannies." In the South, black and white civil rights protesters marched to the strains of traditional African-American songs. And in Newport, RI, tens of thousands flocked each year to the city's Folk Festival in a display of the music's mass appeal.

It was that appeal that activists hoped would galvanize listeners and help bring about social change. For a while, it worked. Folk music contributed significantly to both the civil rights movement and the early protests against the Vietnam War. By 1965, though, its influence had begun to wane. Rock overtook folk as the protest music du jour, and the counterculture was soon rallying around the sounds of the Beatles, Haight-Ashbury, and Woodstock. Folk music was deemed "naive" and relegated to the place it remains today in the margins of popular culture.

The importance of folk has not been lost on Emily Hobson '97-98, however. She has long been drawn to the music, and is investigating its boom during the 1950s and 1960s for a senior thesis in History & Literature.

"I realized that I wanted to work with folk music in my thesis this past summer, on a long car trip down the Pacific Coast with my family," Emily explains. "My family's listening interests range from jazz to trucker songs, but on this trip we listened to a lot of folk. I loved it; it's the music I grew up with."

"I know it helped shape my politics," Emily continues. "It gave me a sense of hope, with its message that if we all came together and sang, we'd build a community."

Emily has decided to use the folk revival as a means to look at larger issues involving race and class in grass roots movements. "My interest in those issues stems from my own political involvement," she says, "and my questions about the relationships of people working side-by-side with varying levels of privilege."

According to Emily, the first traces of a folk music "revival" can be found in the 1930s and 1940s, when American socialist and communist groups championed the music as the true art of the proletariat. Folk music is pure and noble, they claimed, and offers us a way to get back in touch with the roots of America. This was essentially the same claim that the more mainstream revivalists of the Fifties and Sixties offered.

Implicit in the folk revivalists' message was a dissatisfaction with American society. "In the research I've done so far," Emily says, "I've found that the revivalists talked a lot about a general despair in the country. They point to a cultural void, brought about perhaps by McCarthyism and the nuclear and communist threats."

"The revivalists seemed to feel that society was running on empty," continues Emily. "They saw the nation's political and cultural leaders as soulless, and moving the country away from its truer heritage of a grass-roots culture."

Folk music, the revivalists hoped, would help redirect the country. It would replace the music of Top 40 radio and Tin Pan Alley with simple, authentic songs that would connect with something essential in all Americans. The idea, says Emily, was to create "a singing country." At the concerts of Pete Seeger and other popular folk singers, thousands of fans joined together in song.

Yet Emily finds a central contradiction within the revivalist message. "Their critique of mass culture and of America was envisioned as a grass-roots critique," she says. "In fact, it was an elite one. The revivalists claimed that folk had a political and moral authority from 'the people,' but in fact the leaders of the movement were for the most part white, middle-class, and college-educated. They romanticized the 'folk' in folk music, and thought that by reviving a folk history, they would join that tradition themselves."

For her thesis, Emily will look closely at the role of the folk revival in the civil rights movement. "Civil rights became the political context for the revival," she says. "The relationship between the two movements was quite complicated because they gave each other power."

The civil rights movement also provides a chart to trace the rise and fall of the folk revival, according to Emily. "At the beginning, the leaders of the movement went back to the church songs of their grandparents," she says, "and consciously revived them as freedom songs. I don't think that the usefulness of those songs to the movement can be overestimated."

By the mid-Sixties, however, the civil rights movement changed, growing more radical and less inclusive. Folk music was left behind. "This change happened across the country," says Emily. "Youth music became angrier."

The Harvard College Research Program helped Emily travel to Washington, DC, where she conducted research at the Library of Congress Folklife Center. She also attended a symposium at the Smithsonian about Harry Smith, one of the nation's first folk music archivists. "The trip was invaluable," she says.

Emily is working with Dr. Tom Augst, a lecturer in History and Literature. "He's been very encouraging," Emily says, "because he pretty much tells me to trust my gut. Of course, he also tells me when my gut is wrong!"

It was Emily's "gut" that led her to write about folk music in the first place. "As I grew older," she says, "I understood why people make fun of folk music. It is naive. But that doesn't bother me. It is that naive, hopeful folk revival music of the Sixties gave me my heritage."