1. A Revival of Interest in Folk Music?

IN THE EARLY 1960s the guitar became the favorite instrument of many a college campus: books and LPs of "folk songs" gathered on every shelf. Why should these songs catch on in many a school and summer camp, not to speak of coffee houses, and Washington Square Park of a summer Sunday?

Five possible reasons:

One: Since World War II there has been evidence on many sides that Americans were curious to rediscover their roots, to learn about their own country's heritage. I'm thinking of the numerous historical re-creations dotted around the United States, of the magazines such as American Heritage, the movies and novels of American life.

Two: A general increase in a great variety of do-it-yourself activities during these same years. Skiers, bowlers, boaters, Sunday painters, potters, weavers, furniture builders, gardeners, camera bugs, hot rodders— all these and many more wanted to be more than passive spectators. And the millions of guitar pickers are one more sign that not all Americans are satisfied to simply sit and watch TV.

Three: We were handed on a silver platter some of the world's best songs, by the folklorists who dug the gold out of the hills and presented it to us. Our country is rich in many different traditions, with variety to suit almost any taste, from the old classic ballads to rough work songs and raucous fun songs. LP records made it possible to hear this music performed by people who knew it well.

Four: It takes a certain sophistication to sing an old hillbilly song without being worried that someone will call you an old hillbilly. Or to sing an old spiritual without wondering if someone will call you an Uncle Tom. Maybe we had to wait a few years till we were far enough away from our past to be able to pick and choose the good from the bad.

Five: Young people found that here was a way to make social comments about events in present-day America—comments they had been unable to make any other way.

Every industrialized country in the world has seen some sort of revival of interest in music of the countrysides or traditional music played by ear in the cities. The revival of interest in folk music which mushroomed in the 60s actually started in the nineteenth century. Collectors such as John Lomax of Texas, and England's Cecil Sharp, spent years going from one section of the country to another, painstakingly locating songs and singers. Of course, their efforts were scoffed at, especially in the regions richest in music. Lomax went to a cattlemen's convention, trying to trace some of the old cowboy ballads. A rancher stood up and said: "There's a man named Lomax here who wants to know if anyone knows some of the old cowboy songs. Why everybody knows those damn-fool songs, and only a bigger damn fool would try to collect them. I vote we adjourn to the bar." And they did. But thanks to the persistence of Lomax we know songs like "Whoopee-ty-yi-yo, Get Along Little Dogies" and "Streets of Laredo," not to mention "Home on the Range."

Lomax's Texas professors also scoffed at his efforts. He did get encouragement from Professor Kittredge of Harvard; Kittredge was interested in carrying on the work of Francis James Child, who had made the classic compilation of British ballads.

The problem was, as another Texan, J. Frank Dobie, once observed, that many collectors "dug up dead bones from one graveyard only to bury them in another." The songs, having been dug up in the hills, were now buried in libraries.

In the 1930s came a younger breed of folklorist, who said, in effect, "Let's give folk music back to the folks." They started taking the folk songs out of their collections and giving them to the popularizers. (Carl Sandburg's 1927 collection. The American Songbag, had made an impression; and Sandburg used to end his poetry recitations with some songs.) In particular, one man should get credit: Alan Lomax, son of John. In 1938 Alan persuaded a young actor named Burl Ives that he should sing folk songs professionally; he taught Burl some of his most successful songs, like "Blue Tailed Fly." Alan showed Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White that there were new audiences up north for their southern songs.

And he got me started. I was just one of the first Yankee college students who discovered there were more different kinds of native American music than what Tin Pan Alley gave out over the radio. By the 1960s there were millions of us.

Perhaps a few personal recollections can illustrate what these successive generations of young people were looking for.
In 1935 I was sixteen years old, playing tenor banjo in the school jazz band. I was less interested in studying the classical music that my parents taught at Juilliard. But my father is a musicologist, and it was through him that I first got interested in American folk music and became conscious of the immensity of the field. In 1935 a good deal of song collecting was being done under the auspices of different government agencies such as the Resettlement Administration. Such work was called boondoggling (An enormously popular word among 1935 anti-New Dealers. My dictionary says a boondoggle is "any unnecessary and wasteful project," or—of all things—a leathercraft project popular among Boy Scouts.) at the time, but through the work of these agencies, the famous Library of Congress collection was first built up.

My father, as an expert in several branches of musical scholarship, was involved in these projects. And I accompanied him on one field trip to North Carolina. We wound down through the narrow valleys with so many turns in the road that I got seasick. We passed wretched little cabins with half-naked children peering out the door; we passed exhibits of patchwork quilts and other handicrafts which often were the main source of income. I first became acquainted with a side of America that I had never known before.

At the Asheville square dance and ballad festival I fell in love with the old-fashioned five-string banjo, rippling out a rhythm to one fascinating song after another. I liked the rhythms. I liked the melodies, time-tested by generations of singers. I liked the words.

Compared to the trivialities of the popular songs my brothers and I formerly harmonized, the words of these songs had all the meat of human life in them. They sang of heroes, outlaws, murderers, fools. They weren't afraid of being tragic instead of just sentimental. They weren't afraid of being scandalous instead of giggly or cute. Above all, they seemed frank, straightforward, honest. By comparison, it seemed to me that too many art songs were concerned with being elegant and too many pop songs were concerned with being clever.

In 1935 I tried learning some of this style of music. Thirty-seven years later I'm still learning. I've found out that some of the simplest music is some of the most difficult to do.

Wisht I had a nickel, Wisht I had a dime. Wisht I had a pretty girl, I'd kiss her all the time.
'Round and 'round, old Joe Clarke 'Round and 'round, I say 'Round and 'round, old Joe Clarke I'm a-going away.
* 
At that time I still didn't know much about America; I really had a rather snobbish attitude. I thought there wasn't anything west of the Hudson River worth seeing. Woody Guthrie taught me different. "Pete, you ought to see what a big country it is."
"How do you do it if you don't have money to travel?"

"Well," he said, "use the rule of the thumb—if you can't hitchhike, ride a freight train."

In 1940 he took me with him for a ways. I kept on going by myself— as far north as the copper mines of Butte, Montana, and as far south as the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama.

The first train I ever hitched a ride on was in St. Joe, Missouri. Up until that time I'd only thumbed along the highways. Some professional hoboes assured me, however, that the only sensible way to travel was by freight. After lurking around the yards all night, I finally jumped on what I thought was the right train. After an hour of switching back and forth, I found I had been shunted onto a siding.

Later on I got the right train, but I was warned that I'd have to jump off before the yard bulls came around to check the cars. When we finally pulled into Lincoln, Nebraska, I broke my banjo when jumping off. Inexperience. This put me in a spot. It was the only way I had to make a living.

I hocked a small camera I had for a five-dollar guitar and started playing in saloons. In three days I was able to get the camera out of hock and continued west exploring one new city after another.

I was singing in a bar in Montana when an old fellow came up and asked, "Shay, do you know all the verses to 'Shtrawberry Roan'?" When I admitted I didn't he sat right down then and there and insisted upon dictating them to me—some twenty-three verses; it took us nearly as many bottles of beer to complete the job.

In Butte, Montana, I told members of the local miners' union that I knew some miners' songs, and they asked me to sing at the next union meeting. I had planned to catch a freight train east at nine o'clock, and as the agenda grew long I became afraid I wouldn't be able to make it. I heard the train whistle down at the foot of a hill and told the chairman that I would have to go on then or not at all, so he put me on. I sang a few songs, and he then gave me a check for five dollars.

I looked at it in dismay; it was of absolutely no use to me, since I didn't know where I could cash it. "Oh," says he, "the bar downstairs will take care of this for you." Down I run. What did they give me but five silver dollars. I started running downhill and the damn things kept falling out of my jeans pockets, rolling down the sidewalk, and me trying to find them in the grass—and all the time that train whistling down at the bottom of the hill, just like it's ready to start.

Finally, I never did find one of the silver dollars and ran on without it. It was 20 percent of my total capital, but I really wanted to catch that train.

One bunch of boys I stayed with in Alabama, a coal-mining family, were so broke I would have felt embarrassed to be their guest if I hadn't been just as broke myself. We had cornbread and beans three times a day, with what they called "bulldog gravy" to force it down. The three sons in this family made up a crackerjack fiddle band, and the only time we got good meals was when we visited some neighbors, who would feed us up in return for an evening's music.

Back in New York, in 1941, I met Lee Hays. He, Mill Lampell, and myself started singing together, calling ourselves the Almanac Singers. ("In the country," said Lee, "a farmhouse would have two books in the house, a Bible and an Almanac. One helped us to the next world, the other helped us make it through this one.")

We recorded some peace songs and some union songs (See Talking Union, Folkways FH 5285. Now combined as The Soil and the Sea, Mainstream 56005.) with the help of friends.

Woody Guthrie arrived in June, having just ridden freights and hitchhiked from the Pacific Northwest, where he'd recently completed writing a batch of songs for the Bonneville Power Administration. He no sooner set foot in our apartment when we said, "Woody, how would you like to go west?" He scratched his head. "I just came from the West, but I don't guess I mind if I join up with you." We had bought a nine-year-old Buick for $125, a terrible eater of gas and oil.

Within the next few days, we made a few extra dollars recording some records. Sod Buster Ballads and Deep Sea Shanties.  Then, with a little gasoline money in our pockets, we took off. We sang for automobile workers in Detroit, half a dozen varieties of CIO union people in Chicago, Milwaukee and Denver, and then we got to San Francisco.

When we walked down the aisle of a room where one thousand local members of the longshoremen's union were meeting, we could see some of them turning around in surprise and even disapproval. "What the hell is a bunch of hillbilly singers coming in here for? We got work to do."

But when we finished singing for them "Union Maid," "Talking Union," "Which Side Are You On?," and especially "The Ballad of Harry Bridges," their applause was deafening. We walked down that same aisle on our way out and they slapped Woody on the back so hard they nearly knocked him over.

The Almanac Singers went down to Los Angeles , temporarily lost a couple members, then zigzagged back up to the San Joaquin Valley . Woody and I went up the coast to Oregon and Washington , then zig­zagged east, stopping at Butte , Montana , and then Dulu th , Minnesota . An organizer for the lumberjacks' union asked us if we would be willing to go around and sing in some of the camps, and we said sure.

He was on a routine inspection tour to make sure that the union con­tract was being obeyed by the bosses. In the old days lumberjacks used to get lousy food (beans, beans and more beans), and their bedding was often dirty and the bunkhouse full of bugs. Now these matters were all attended to in the union contract. The workers still lived in one big bunkhouse, but it was roomy, clean and warm. And as for food, I never saw such a groaning board. For breakfast they had on the table (no fooling!) ham, sausage, bacon, chops, they had scrambled eggs, fried eggs, boiled eggs. They had applesauce, prunes, figs, oranges, grapefruit, tomato juice, grape juice, milk, coffee, tea, fried potatoes, pancakes, biscuits, toast.

When the cook rang the bell fifty husky men clumped into the cook shack, and sat down and started shoveling in the food. There was no conversation, no talking whatsoever, except maybe "pass the butter, please." This was an old country custom, an inflexible rule: no conversation at mealtimes. If anybody had tried to start talking about the weather or anything else, he would have been looked upon as a boor.

The men were mostly of Scandinavian background. The nineteenth-century logging camps had been full of Irish and French Canadians. The twentieth-century camps were full of Finns and Swedes. They were a taciturn lot. The organizer had told us the previous day, "Don't expect these workers to make a big fuss over your songs, they are Scanda-hoovians. But I know they will be glad to hear you."

In the evening, around the big stove in the center of the bunkhouse, the organizer spoke briefly to the men and answered a few questions, and then he introduced Woody and me. We walked up to the center, sang a song. There was dead silence. We sang another song; there was still dead silence. We looked at each other and said, "Suppose we ought to sing another?" Well, we sang one more. There was still dead silence. We thanked the men for listening to us, and walked over to the side. One of the men said quietly, "Aren't you going to sing any more, boys?" A little reluctantly we went back and sang a couple more songs, again to com­plete dead silence, and then we figured we better not push our luck any more and said good night.

The next morning one of the men said to us, "Boy, that music sure was wonderful. Wish you had sang a lot more; we could have listened to it all night."

In the fall of '41, we settled in Greenwich Village , in a cooperative apartment known as Almanac House. People came and went all the time. The cuisine was erratic but interesting, the furniture and decorations almost nonexistent, the sleeping done at odd hours. The output of songs was phenomenal.

We got bookings on the subway circuit: five dollars here and ten dollars there. By working hard we just managed to keep body and soul together. On Sunday afternoons we'd hold open house. Thirty-five cents was charged at the door, and we and friends would sing all afternoon. We called 'em "Hootenannies."

In early '42 our beat-Hitler songs ("Reuben James," "Round and Round Hitler's Grave," etc.) actually got us a radio job or two. An agent working for the William Morris Agency got interested in us.

He took us around to the Rainbow Room, which was at that time a top New York nightclub at Rockefeller Center . We sang a few songs over the mike that afternoon while the bored manager sat in the empty nightclub. He said he might have us work there, but we had to "make the act look better." The men should all wear one-suspender overalls and the women members of the Almanacs wear sunbonnets and gunny-sack dresses.

We didn't take too kindly to that suggestion and started improvising verses, which Woody mentioned in Bound for Glory:

At the Rainbow Room the soup's on to boil, They're stirring the salad with Standard Oil.
The Rainbow Room it's mighty high;
You can see John D. a-flyin' by.
It's sixty stories high, they say,
A long way back to the U.S.A.

We walked out of there not expecting that he'd want to hire us, and not really wanting to work there on his terms. Furthermore, right after that we were red-baited in one of the New York papers, and the agent quit trying to get us any work.

The first day I was in the Army (in 1942), I won an amateur contest with "Round and Round Hitler's Grave." I was inducted in Alabama , and the nickname they immediately gave me was " New York ." They were amazed that anyone coming from north of the Mason-Dixon line could know how to play a five-string banjo. I got used to singing every imagin­able kind of song, from barbershop harmony and hillbilly, to jazz, sweet and hot.

Some of the best singing I ever heard in the Army was in the latrines, In 1943 I was studying aircraft mechanics in Keesler Field , Mississippi . One warm evening I was sitting with a banjo on the steps of the barracks picking a few tunes to myself, when a small group gathered. One man steps forward and asks, "Could you bring that thing over to my barracks for a spell? I got a mandolin, and there's a buddy of mine plays a good fiddle."                                                           J

Over at his quarters we found also a couple guitar players, and we sat on the beds and started playing up a storm. Just about that time the sergeant hollers that it's time for the lights to go out. "Hell, we're just gitting warmed up." So we adjourned to the latrine, at the end of the building, and started going again.

The latrine was about twelve by eighteen in size, as I remember. A dozen or more soldiers followed us into it. The echoing walls made us  sound so great, we didn't want it to ever stop. From neighboring barracks they heard us and drifted in to join the party. The latrine soon had twenty, then thirty, and finally almost forty people in it, standing in the shower stalls, seated on sinks and toilet seats.

The four or five stringed instruments were going it hot and strong, and then we hit some songs that everyone wanted to sing. Some New York fellow had a good bass, and a couple southerners knew how to hit that high harmony. The fiddle screeched and soared. The mandolin twanged, the guitars whomped all around those bass strings.

After half an hour a noncom came back and said we were supposed to quiet down, but, as I remember, we didn't pay him any mind. Half an hour later, after several attempts to halt us, a lieutenant squeezes into the room.

"Okay, men, break it up. You sound pretty good, but it's eleven-thirty. Everybody back to their own outfits."

And that was that. I never met the mandolin player again. I can't remember exactly what tunes we played outside "Wabash Cannonball" and "Steel Guitar Rag." It wasn't a very lengthy music session, as sessions go. But if anyone ever asks me where it was I made some of the best music I ever made in my life, I'm liable to reply: "In a latrine."

On the boat going overseas, we held a half-hour song session almost every evening. Just for the hell of it, I decided to try and not repeat a single song until we absolutely had to. I had never realized that I knew so many different songs. One night I sat down and wrote down titles, and before I finished I'd found about 300 songs that I knew all the way through and about an equal number that I knew enough to start off and then let the other people carry the main burden of singing.

On Saipan I became acquainted with four different groups of people — the Chamorros, Japanese, Koreans and Kanakas (natives of other islands to the south). They all had their own distinctive music, and we organized troupes of them to travel through hospital wards. From the Koreans I got school children who sang their own folk songs and also Protestant hymns and hillbilly songs which they had picked up from missionaries or soldiers. "You Are My Sunshine" was a hit song among all the islanders, and they all had versions written in their own languages.

At this time I played with a string band called the Rainbow Boys over the local GI radio station WXLD on their daily program, "Calico Jambo­ree." I still keep running into people who heard us at that time. The band would get invited out to ships in the harbor to put on a personal-appearance show. On shore most of us were privates and treated as such; aboard ship we were guests and ate steak and ice cream with the officers.

The Rainbow Boys also played for tips down at a big Navy beer barn called the Chief's Club — nothing but a big Quonset hut with a couple hundred drunken chiefs guzzling away. The afternoon would consist of the following, several hundred times over: a big drunken chief staggering out and saying, "Shay, will ya play 'My Wild Irish Rose,' and dedicate it to all the chiefs on the U.S.S. ____?" So we played "My Wild Irish Rose," "San Antonio Rose," "Last Rose of Summer," "Rose of Tralee," "The One Rose" — I didn't know so many songs could be written about one flower. Then, of course, some rebel would come up and ask us to play " Dixie " and then demand that everybody stand at attention.

In 1945 Americans came home from the war. We dived enthusiastically into long-deferred projects. A number of us who loved to sing folk songs and union songs thought it the most natural thing in the world to start an organization that could keep us all in touch with one another, that could promote new and old songs and singers, and in general bring closer the broad revival of interest in folk music and topical songs that we felt sure would sooner or later take place. We called our organization People's Songs, to distinguish it from the scholarly folklore societies, and started a bulletin. I wanted it to be a weekly; others persuaded me to be more conservative and make it a monthly.

The People's Songs Bulletin started off in 1946, a new kind of magazine. Each issue carried old songs, new songs, plus articles and reviews about singers, books and records.

It was strictly a shoestring operation. The first issue was mimeo­graphed. When we had to start paying a salary to at least one person ($25 a week ) we felt we were being wildly extravagant. Monthly hootenannies paid the office rent.

We held normal commercial musical endeavors in contempt. We were convinced that the revival of interest in folk music would come through the trade unions. Union educational departments had already put out many fine songbooks. There was the singing tradition of the old IWW to build on. We envisioned a singing labor movement spearheading a na­tionwide folk song revival, just as the Scottish progressives sparked a folk song revival at the time of Robert Burns, and the Czech progressives sparked another at the time of Dvorak.

How our theories went astray! Most union leaders could not see any connection between music and pork chops. As the cold war deepened in '47 and '48 the split in the labor movement deepened. "Which Side Are You On?" was known in Greenwich Village but not in a single miner's union local.

We worked our way up to a huge circulation of 2,000 before the shoe­string ran out and we still hadn't learned how to tie on another.

The organization People's Songs closed its doors for lack of funds in early 1949. We couldn't raise the (for us) huge sum of $3,000 to pay printers and landlords.

But the singers and songs carried on. The revival of interest in folk music and topical songs did come about, and the existence of People's Songs helped to do it. The very banishment of singers such as myself from labor-union work forced us to make a living in commercial ways, such as nightclub appearances, or giving concerts for schools and colleges. Basically ours were good songs, as any fool could plainly hear. And our theory about singing them in an informal way was correct.

When I look over the pages of the little mimeographed bulletin (See Reprints from the People's Songs Bulletin (Oak Publications, New York, 1961)) of 1946 I am at times appalled by its amateurishness, and at other times filled with a flush of pride for bravery and honesty. Maybe fools walk in where angels fear to tread, but here's to the young and foolish, and may the world have more of them.

In 1950 we started publishing again, in the form of Sing Out magazine. For a few years, it barely stayed alive, but with the hope and faith of a few, and the sweat of one or two, it staggered to its feet, and now has a worldwide circulation of 15,000. Magazines like it started up in England and on the Continent, in Australia , New Zealand and Japan , and several North American cities. The basic idea is sound: to combine songs and criticism. The printed page is a handy device, and there is value in being able to count on a certain number of pages appearing regularly with up-to-date information on a certain subject.

The basic idea would be better if we could afford to include a phonograph record with every issue. Or a roll of video tape you could play through your TV set. But this will come in time. The scientists will come to our aid if they don't blow us up first.

The 1941-42 Almanac Singers had been undisciplined ("the only group that rehearses on the stage," said Woody). In November 1948 Lee Hays and I discussed the possibility of forming a more organized singing group, to see if we could get a solid sound on such songs as "The Saints Go Marching In." Originally we had thought of three men plus three women, but it simmered down to a quartet.

I had met Fred Hellerman right after World War II. He and Ronnie Gilbert had both started singing folk songs before the war, as counselors at the same summer camp. (In 1951, when "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" was in the jukeboxes, an interviewer asked whether Ronnie and I were really married. "Yes," says I, "she is married to her husband and I am married to my wife.")

So now Ronnie, with her exciting contralto, and Fred, a gifted guitarist who could sing either high or low, ( In recent years he has been a composer, producing "Healing River" and other fine songs.  Whatever we recorded became Decca property, of course. Eleven years later several "takes" which had been rejected during those 1951 sessions made a sudden appearance in the record shops. Somebody had decided that in 1962 any commodity that could be labeled FOLK MUSIC could be turned into cash.)  joined their voices with my split tenor and Lee's big gospel bass. To our delight we found we could give a big solid warmth to the songs of Leadbelly and to many songs which had seemed ineffectual with one voice. After long discussions we finally named ourselves: the Weavers.

We helped put on some of the world's best little hootenannies, but in late '49 we were ready to break up. We had never intended to be a commercial group. We were dead broke and about to go our separate ways. As a last desperate gasp we decided to do the unthinkable: get a job in a nightclub.

Six months later we had a manager, a recording contract with Decca, and a record selling almost two million copies ("Goodnight Irene" with "Tzena Tzena" on the flip side). The Weavers sang on vaudeville stages and in some high-priced saloons. "So Long," "On Top of Old Smoky," and "Wimoweh" made the top of the Hit Parade. People coming up to me in the street said, "Pete, isn't it wonderful finally to be a success?"

I thought to myself, we were just as successful in 1941 when we sang "Union Maid" for 10,000 striking transport workers. But those months of early 1950 were an interesting experience. And at that time millions of teen-agers first heard the words "folk song."

In midsummer of 1950 we were offered a weekly network TV show, but a couple of days later the red-baiting publication Red Channels came out with a blast against us. The TV contract was torn up.

We kept on with personal appearances, but it got to be more and more of a drag. Our then manager would not let me sing for the hootenannies and workers' groups. Decca—hungry for more hits—insisted on teaming us with a big band; predictably, the result was almost the opposite of how we wanted to sound.

One night Lee and I found ourselves in a Reno nightclub discussing the theory of our poet friend Walter Lowenfels that everything in the world is grist for the writer's mill.

"Grist," says I, looking about me.

"Yeah, but where do you start shoveling when it's up to your neck?" says Lee.

In '53 we took a "sabbatical." As Lee says, it turned into a Mondical and a Tuesdical. Ronnie took time to raise a baby. Lee started to concentrate on being a writer. Fred became the arranger-accompanist of several successful singers.

Moe Asch's new Folkways company made some records of me. (Moe had already lost a shirt or two in the record business but was still obstinately determined to get more folk music into the hands of more people.) I gradually found audiences at colleges and camps for my solo programs. And I sang gratis whenever I felt like it. Toshi organized my bookings and benefits; at first, the job didn't keep her very busy. I had time to work on our unfinished log cabin and watch the kids grow— and was thankful that there wasn't any rent to pay.

Then in 1955 the Weavers got a new manager and producer, Harold Leventhal. Although that was the year the House Un-American Activities Committee turned its beady eye in my direction, the overall climate had brightened a little.

In our present uneasy times it may be interesting to recall a few examples of what, during the Weavers' (and Sing Out's) early years, could fairly be called encouraging developments :

1953: The Korean war ended with a compromise.

1954: President Eisenhower decided not to send American bombers against the Communist-led independence fighters who were crushing France 's elite army in Vietnam . . . . The Supreme Court finally outlawed Jim Crow education; the movement to challenge all racist institutions was slowly beginning to gather strength. . . . And Senator Joseph McCarthy—whose "lists" of alleged subversives had demoralized a series of civilian agencies—took on the U.S. Army and lost.

1955: In Geneva , the American and Russian heads of state talked "at the summit" for the first time since World War II.

We decided to hold a reunion at Carnegie Hall just before Christmas.

This concert was received so well that the Weavers were in business again. With Harold's cooperation we now made freer choices about where and how we wanted to sing; and audiences responded to the informal give-and-take which we ourselves enjoyed. (Lee's vein of satire, which had been a highlight of the People's Songs Bulletin, spiced every performance.) Our Vanguard LPs were for the most part recorded at live concerts—the first one by Harold himself—and controlled by our own concepts.

The TV industry wasn't noticing us; but we seldom looked at them either.

By this time, though, I was singing pretty regularly on my own; all sorts of people were getting excited about homemade music. To coordinate my schedule with that of the Weavers, and still leave time to see my family, proved impossible. I asked if Eric Darling (already well known to banjo enthusiasts) couldn't become a Weaver in my place. Later, Eric was succeeded as banjo picker by Frank Hamilton (of Chicago 's Old Town School of Folk Music), and Frank in turn by Bernie Krause of Boston . The Weavers continued to tour for another half dozen years.

Meanwhile, their example encouraged first the Kingston Trio, and then hundreds of young strummers, to become professional folk music interpreters. Some saw fit to parody and belittle the country people whose lifework they were looting for the sake of a fast buck. At their best, though, some of the groups introduced a commercial public to music which ignored worn-out formulas and said something about people's real lives. The commercial folk boom died down before long, but many of these performers—and new ones every year—still search out treasures of tradition to introduce to a wider audience. (In a number of instances they have also smoothed the path to worthwhile bookings for authentic country musicians.) Other alumni of the folk groups have moved into rock music and helped to widen its horizons.

The Weavers proved that a good singing group needn't have the conventional soprano-alto-tenor-bass lineup. Our work was a little like what Benny Goodman did for jazz: well-rehearsed arrangements but still folk-rooted, and allowing room for improvisation. In 1968 I noticed that groups of singers on rock records also made better music than soloists merely accompanied by some sidemen.

Just one disadvantage to singing with a group: one loses flexibility and can't as easily adapt on stage to the needs of various audiences. So nowadays I do the next best thing: I try and get an audience singing with me. If we have a good echoing auditorium, and a gang of young people with strong lungs, and we can really raise the roof—then I don't mind if I sing myself hoarse and drip with sweat. It's great.

In the thirties many of us thought the folk music revival would come through the trade-union movement. We couldn't have been more wrong. It came through the camps and colleges. But it came anyway. It was a logical development of pop music.

Look at it historically. In ancient times, when people lived in tribes, there was only one kind of music. All the men knew the same hunting songs and the same war dances. All the women knew the same lullabies.

Then man became smarter, learned how to herd sheep and store grain. An aristocracy developed that could afford to hire musicians to perform for them. Thus started the first art music. In Europe it eventually led to symphony orchestras in the castles. The first pop music came about when cities developed and some musicians found they could make a good living playing for tips in the marketplace.

American popular music, like popular music in Europe for several hundred years since the rise of the cities in the Middle Ages, always maintained a position midway between country music and the music of the aristocracy, or "classical" music. It has borrowed ideas and techniques from both of them. Thus a composer like W. C. Handy leaned more to the folk, and a composer like Victor Herbert more to the other side.

In America there have always been many idioms to borrow from. In the early nineteenth century most dance music was based on ancient traditions of fiddle playing in Ireland and Scotland . Then, during the 1840s, the country was swept by a wave of minstrel music and "plantation" songs.

In the twentieth century the waves of enthusiasm for this or that idiom have come and gone more suddenly, perhaps because of quicker trans­continental communication. Thus one year it was the tango, another year the rhumba, another year the mambo or the calypso song. The weakness of all these fads was that Tin Pan Alley was only interested in exploiting the superficial or sensational characteristics. The subtleties were ignored.

Carmen Miranda came from Brazil in the thirties, bringing her favorite guitarists with her. They knew some magnificent Brazilian music. But after a few years the guitarists went home because Hollywood was only interested in having Carmen Miranda swing her hips and roll her eyes.

The calypso boom of 1956 ignored the real meat of calypso music, which is its powerful sense of social satire.

The "folk revival" was different in some interesting ways. For one thing, Tin Pan Alley was in a weaker position than ever before in its career, and the folk music revival came about not so much because of it as in spite of it. The Hit Parades dropped from 80 percent of the music business to less than 30 percent of all recordings. The LP changed the whole picture in the recording industry, allowing hundreds of minority tastes to be satisfied as never before.

Another difference was that the folk revival involved not simply a lot of people listening to music but also an army of amateurs playing in schools and camps, at beach parties and beer parties, and often on lonesome evenings all by themselves.

Finally, the term "folk music" became so broad that it now covers an indigestible variety. Among the thousands who attend Newport Folk Festivals are devotees of Elizabethan ballads, honky-tonk blues, southern mountain banjo and fiddle playing, and songs in many different languages. The range of subject matter covers nearly all walks of life and aspects of human experience.

Today—just as before the 1963 "folk boom"—one seldom hears folk music on the "top forty" stations, but nearly every major city has FM stations with one or more folk programs playing to a devoted band of listeners. The wide range of folk music played indicates that here is a new kind of cosmopolitan citizen: one who can listen to an Israeli hora one minute, and the next minute an unaccompanied English sea chanty or a gutty Deep South blues.

Everyone is more free than ever to decide what they like best, what they think is most meaningful and honest. Perhaps we no longer need to think in terms of Folk Music, Pop Music, or Classical Music. The same person might like to dance to a good band, listen to a symphony, hum an old lullaby to put his kid to sleep, or sing almost any song in the world on a Saturday night with his friends.