Little Sandy Review
March-April 1964
Pete's Children: The American Folk Song Revival, Pro and Con by Jon Pankake
Alan Lomax has said that he feels the most important thing he and his father ever did in their work in American folk music was to discover and bring to the city the inspired Okie balladmaker, Woody Guthrie, and the Negro musical genius known as Lead Belly (Huddle Ledbetter). In retrospect, it can be seen that in giving these two eager Gargantuans access to the publications, the radio broadcasts, and the recordings that would otherwise have been denied them lie the roots of America’s city-based folk song revival of the past two decades.
Neither Guthrie nor Lead Belly were typical traditional American music-makers: the gifted individuality of each man had led him to create a personal body of song derived from his immediate tradition, but generally surpassing it in scope and topical relevance. Both men were flamboyant personalities who, in a manner completely the opposite of the more typically passive and introspective purveyor or guardian of a given tradition, dominated their music and made it serve them, shaped and formed it to their personal and public needs. Their songs, being essentially artfully crafted mirrors of deep and powerful personal needs, tended— and still tend—to sound meaningless in the mouths of less virile singers; unlike typical folk songs, they do not speak for a wide range of members of a culture or subculture, but resolutely serve only their masters. Nothing sounds so hollow today as the songs of Guthrie and Lead Belly coming from the lips of the generally sincere but lackluster city singers of the late ‘40s who first tried to wrest the songs from the personalities of their creators. Important as they were and are, the songs of Woody and Leadbelly required a vigorous and truthful interpretive voice, and none was available.
Despite the magnificence of Guthrie’s and Lead Belly’s talents, neither man was successful in making himself understood by America’s urban population. They were country men, and they Spoke and sang in a language that was largely incomprehensible to city audiences that were as yet reluctant to accept the refined offerings of Burl Ives and Dyer-Bennet. It remained for a performer who could adequately wear the seven-league boots of the Guthrie and Lead Belly personalities and yet who would not sound alien to urban listeners to gain the ear of the public and to thus carry songs like GOODNIGHT IRENE and THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND to the far corners of the nation that were inaccessible to the Okie and the hard-bitten Negro murderer. The role became Pete Seeger’s—he wore it to the hilt, and it fitted him like a glove.
All of us who participate in the folk music revival are) in varying degrees of kinship, Pete’s children. It was Pete who first convinced us we could sing, that it didn’t matter how good or bad our efforts were as long as we make a joyful noise unto ourselves. It was Pete who first put a banjo in our lap and told us, "Here, this thing is simple—just go ahead and play it. You’ll sound great!" And such was his conviction, we did as we were told; and his conviction became our own by God, we did sound good! Or so we thought at the flush of our discovery of ourselves.
We have all seen or heard Pete at one time or another. We have come to expect miracles of his performances, to have the hall light up and the audience take fire from his enthusiasm and indomitable optimism, and Pete has served us well. We have also, unfortunately, come to expect a certain amount of blithely slipshod musicianship, occasional tastelessness in presentation of topical material, and a kind of eager-beaver naivety that has prompted Peter Clayton to comment in JAZZ NEWS: "It was when he turned to attack that log that I began to feel uneasy. He had flung off his jacket by this time and, picking up an ax not quite as long as his banjo, he sang a work song to the rhythmic accompaniment of his own chopping. The chips, significantly, flew everywhere. This ought to have been authentic, but somehow it had the embarrassing tameness of a Zula warrior exhibited at a fairground."
The fact that Pete can inevitably triumph over his own shortcomings is the ultimate testament to the illusion his stage presence creates before us. Seeger in action is one of the phenomenal spectacles of our time, the last, perhaps, of the great platform personalities in the American tradition of Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan. Shameless rhetorical devices become as magic in his hands: before an audience that has never seen him before he will offhandedly say, "I think I’ve told you many times about...," or, of a strange song, "You all know this one...," and one is immediately enrolled in his corner, a friend and intimate. His inevitable "Sing it with me..." becomes not a command, but an invitation to share his joy; the songs of Woody and Lead Belly live again, thrilling us even at one remove as they never seemed to from the lips of the masters. In the spell of his personality, we tend not to notice that his musicianship is seldom true to his inspirations, that he is, in the apt words of Nat Hentoff, more a "nimble cheerleader than an excavator of the marrow of folk feeling." When Pete’s up there before the microphone, we just don’t care.
It is to Pete’s everlasting credit that he has never overtly encouraged young singers to emulate him in any respect save sources. "Don’t learn from me; learn from those who taught me." It is excellent advice. But Pete has always picked and chosen in America’s great fund of folklore with an eye more attuned to using material for his own idealistic purposes than to honor the art of tradition. He has never bothered to learn the subtleties of traditional performing style, that creative magic that causes often mundane poetry and commonplace melody to seek out and thrill the secret places of our hearts. It is not the true folksinger’s understanding of our hidden desires and tears that we hear in Pete’s performances, but rather the legerdemain of a master platform personality. As a result, it is Pete’s example that has been followed by his starry-eyed disciples rather than his advice.
Like Pete, but lacking his peculiar genius for presentation, the young revivalists have piled haphazardly into America’s great traditions like so many grubby urchins grabbing at pennies thrown into the street. Flushed with Pete’s encouragement, equipped with a week of perfunctory study in his banjo course, their heads still reverberating with the insane ring of the mass communications airwaves, young men and women have snatched up the life-works of centuries of dedicated country geniuses and debased the integrity and dignity of these works by performing them as though they were so many Tin Pan Alley throwaways, not cognizant of their meaning and ignorantly robbing them of their uniqueness and honor. The body of America’s folk music has largely become like the proverbial Flemish description of life itself: "It is a haywain, and everybody snatches from it what he can."
The bizarre output of the phony trios, the long-haired Greenwich Village madonnas, and the drugstore cowboys did have a unique enough sound to be swallowed up by the omnivorous appetite of the record and TV money boys, and this half-baked, unpalatable mess has been whipped into a national frenzy never visualized by the Lomaxes or Pete. It is, unfortunately, the basis of the American revival—and its faults are those of Pete himself.
There are critics of the current folk song craze that totally condemn Pete’s leadership and example as much as there are mainline academic folklorists who despise the work of John and Alan Lomax in the field of folk music scholarship and publication. The comparison here between Pete and the Lomaxes seems a valid one, and worth examination.
The Lomaxes were the first to attempt to popularize the songs they bagged "along the folk song trail," to present them as living music to be used and enjoyed by those who would otherwise not have known of them — not as grist solely for the benefit of the mills located in the scholarly closets of university literature departments, as is all too often the orthodox folklorist’s opinion. They collected widely and indiscriminately and, leaving the scholarly busy work of classification and comparative study to lesser talents, moved on to new projects, depositing behind them a vast fund of song collections in the Library of Congress, the University of Texas, and in private files—and incurring the enmity and scorn of academics who deplored their lack of systematic cataloging and thorough documentation as well as their predilection for the creations of the lower classes.
In like manner, Seeger has continued to tour the country (indeed, the world) inspiring countless audiences of young people to turn to folk music for creative recreation but without remaining behind to see to it that the new converts are directed in constructive aid legitimate channels of musicianship. He comes and is immediately gone again in search of new conquests, and his neophyte disciples, left to their own devices, happily begin to bastardize the scanty legacy he has left them. The dishearteningly influential and equally atrocious production of the Kingston Trio gestated between the pages of Pete’s HOW TO PLAY THE FIVE-STRING BANJO manual, nourished by his "Gee, it’s fun to doodle with folk songs" philosophy.
The last three years of the revival, however, have proven the Jeremiahs who were decrying the Lomaxes and Seeger as the destroyers of American folk music a bit hasty in their judgments. About five per cent of Seeger’s converts have become the core of the sort of revival within a revival that will prove constructive and beneficial to the perpetuation of America’s folk music in its actual form. Scores of extremely talented and serious young people (among them Pete’s kid brother and sister, Mike and Peggy Seeger) have come forward to demonstrate their respect for and interest in authentic material and its methods of performance. Some of them, groups like the New Lost City Ramblers and the Greenbriar Boys and individuals like John Hammond, Dave Ray, John Koerner, Tom Paley, Hedy West, and, yes, even Jack Elliott, have immersed themselves in the musical styles of the masters, have lived with the material and met it on its own terms, aid have made it their own. In a few more years, these young talents will have nearly attained the stature of genuine traditional performers, and will in turn pass on their knowledge via example to yet a younger generation in the manner of true folk music. It is an extremely small percentage at present, yet it is a precious one—its dedication will last throughout the lives of its practitioners and its influence will be felt long after the superficial faddists have become bored with folk music and have moved on to some other temporary kick.
And it will come as a surprise to no one that the material studied and utilized by the serious generation of city performers of country music is, to a large extent, that collected for Just such purposes by the Lomaxes, and made available by them through the Library of Congress and commercial field—recordings. In their turn, the dedicated youngsters have themselves gone into the field as part of their education, aid a good many of the documentary folk music recordings pouring off the presses at present bear the names of Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Ralph Rinzler.
Pete has listened politely for years to the worst and most commercialized of his "offspring," too good-natured and perhaps too uncritical to inform them of the error of their ways, but he endorses with genuine delight and pride the accomplishments of the serious young singers, hovering over some (like Bob Dylan) as would an actual father. Perhaps all along he has known, as does the farmer who toils on barren soil, that most of his seeds will die, but that the ones that grow to maturity will seem the sweeter for their hard-won victory. And perhaps he has been waiting not for his children but for his grandchildren before evaluating the fruit of his labors.
It is a certainty that when the history of the folk song revival of the mid-20th century is written, the name of Pete Seeger will appear not only on the table of contents, but on the initial page. Whether for better or for worse yet remains to be seen — but when Pete himself is so confident, can we seriously doubt?