The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States that began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed,^[1]and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward musical styles that had, in earlier times, contributed to the development of country & western, jazz, and rock and roll music.

Overview[link]

Pete Seeger entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt, honored guest at a racially integrated Valentine's Day party marking the opening a Canteen of the United Federal Labor, CIO, in then-segregated Washington, D.C. Photographed by Joseph Horne for the Office of War Information, 1944.^[2]

The roots of the folk revival in New York City were in square dancing and folk dancing and musicians like Pete Seeger being involved providing the music and songs.^[3][4][5] The folk revival more generally as a popular and commercial phenomenon begins with the career of The Weavers, formed in November 1948 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert of People's Songs, of which Seeger had been president and Hays executive secretary. People's Songs, which disbanded in 1948–49, had been a clearing house for labor movement songs (and in particular, the CIO, which at the time was one of the few if not the only union that was racially integrated), and in 1948 had thrown all its resources to the failed presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, a folk music aficionado (his running mate was a country music singer-guitarist). Hays and Seeger had formerly sung together as the politically activist Almanac Singers, a group which they founded in 1941 and whose personnel often included Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, and Bess Lomax Hawes. The Weavers had a big hit in 1950 with the single of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene". This was number one on the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks.^[6] On its flip side was "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena", an Israeli dance song that concurrently reached number two on the charts. This was followed by a string of Weaver hit singles that sold millions, including ""So Long It's Been Good to Know You"("Dusty Old Dust") (by Woody Guthrie) and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine". The Weavers' career ended abruptly when they were dropped from Decca's catalog because Pete Seeger had been listed in the publication Red Channels as a probable subversive. Radio stations refused to play their records and concert venues canceled their engagements. A former employee of People's Songs, Harvey Matusow, himself a former Communist Party member, had informed the FBI that the Weavers were Communists, too, although Matusow later recanted and admitted he had lied. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Despite this, a Christmas Weaver reunion concert in 1955 was a smash success and the Vanguard LP album of that concert, issued in 1957, was one of the top sellers of that year, followed by other successful albums.

Folk music, which often carried the stigma of left-wing associations during the 1950s Red Scare, was driven underground and carried along by a handful of artists releasing records. Barred from mainstream outlets, artists like Seeger were restricted to performing in schools and summer camps, and the folk-music scene became a phenomenon associated with vaguely rebellious bohemianism in places like New York City (especially Greenwich Village), North Beach, and in the college and university districts of cities like Chicago, Boston, Denver, and elsewhere.

Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta speculate that:

[I]t is interesting to consider that had it not been for the explicit political sympathies of the Weavers and other folk singers or, another way of looking at it, the hysterical anti-communism of the Cold War, folk music would very likely have entered mainstream American culture in even greater force in the early 1950s, perhaps making the second wave of the revival nearly a decade later [i.e., in the 1960s] redundant.^[7]

The media blackout of performers with alleged communist sympathies or ties was so effective that Israel Young, a chronicler of the 60s Folk Revival, who himself was drawn into the movement through an interest in folk dancing, communicated to Ron Eyerman that he himself was unaware for many years of the movement's 1930s and early '40s antecedents in left-wing political activism.^[8]

In the early and mid-1950s, acoustic-guitar-accompanied folk songs were mostly heard in coffee houses, private parties, open-air concerts, and sing-alongs, hootenannies, and at college-campus concerts. Often associated with political dissent, folk music now blended, to some degree, with the so-called beatnik scene; and dedicated singers of folk songs (as well as folk-influenced original material) traveled through what was called "the coffee-house circuit" across the U.S. and Canada, home also to cool jazz and recitations of highly personal beatnik poetry. It was not long before the folk music category came to include less traditional material and more personal and poetic creations by individual performers, who called themselves "singer-songwriters". Two singers of the 1950s who sang folk material but crossed over into the mainstream were Odetta and Harry Belafonte, both of whom sang Lead Belly and Josh White material. Odetta, who had trained as an opera singer, performed traditional blues, spirituals, and songs by Lead Belly. Belafonte had hits with Jamaican calypso material as well as the folk song-like sentimental ballad "Scarlet Ribbons" (composed in 1949).

The Kingston Trio in 1958

The Kingston Trio, a group originating on the West Coast, were directly inspired by the Weavers in their style and presentation and covered some of the Weaver's material, which was predominantly traditional. The Kingston Trio avoided overtly political or protest songs and cultivated a clean-cut, collegiate persona. They were discovered while playing at a college club called the Cracked Pot by Frank Werber, who became their manager and secured them a deal with Capitol Records. Their first hit was a catchy rendition of an old-time folk murder ballad, "Tom Dooley", which had been sung at Lead Belly's funeral concert. This went gold in 1958 and sold more than three million copies. The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a Grammy award for Best Country & Western Performance at the awards' inaugural ceremony in 1959. At the time, no folk music category existed in the Grammy's scheme. The next year, largely as a result of The Kingston Trio album and "Tom Dooley",^[9] the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album At Large. At one point, The Kingston Trio had four records at the same time among the Top 10 selling albums for five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959 according to Billboard Magazine's "Top LPs" chart, a record unmatched for more than 50 years^{[10][11][12][13][14][15]} and noted at the time by a cover story in Life Magazine. The huge commercial success of the Kingston Trio, whose recordings between 1958 and 1961 earned more than $25 million for Capitol records^[16] or about $185 million in 2010 dollars^[17] spawned a host of groups that were similar in some respects like the Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels and more. As noted by critic Bruce Eder in the All Music Guide, the popularity of the commercialized version of folk music represented by these groups emboldened record companies to sign, record, and promote artists with more traditionalist and political sensibilities.^[18]

The Kingston Trio's popularity would be followed by that of Joan Baez, whose debut album Joan Baez, reached the top ten in late 1960 and remained on the Billboard charts for over two years. Baez's early albums contained mostly traditional material such as the Scottish ballad, "Mary Hamilton", as well as many covers of melancholy ballads that had appeared in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, such as "The Wagoner's Lad" and "The Butcher Boy". She did not try to imitate the singing style of her source material, however, but used a rich soprano with vibrato. Her popularity (and that of the folk revival itself) would place Baez on the cover of Time Magazine in November 1962. Baez, unlike the Kingston Trio, was openly political, and as the civil rights movement gathered steam, aligned herself with Pete Seeger, Guthrie and others. She was one of the singers, along with Seeger, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, who appeared at Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington and sang "We Shall Overcome", a song that had been introduced by People's Songs. Harry Belafonte was also present on that occasion, along with Odetta, whom Martin Luther King introduced as "the queen of folk music", when she sang "Oh, Freedom" (Odetta Sings Folk Songs was one of 1963's best-selling folk albums). Also on hand were the SNCC Freedom Singers, the personnel of which went on to form Sweet Honey in the Rock.

The critical role played by Freedom Songs in the voter registration drives, freedom rides, and lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early '60s in the South, gave folk music tremendous new visibility and prestige.^[19] The peace movement was likewise energized by the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK, protesting the British testing of the H-bomb in 1958, as well as by the ever-proliferating arms race and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Young singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, had been signed and recorded for Columbia by producer John Hammond in 1961. Dylan's record enjoyed some popularity among Greenwich Village folk-music enthusiasts, but he was "discovered" by an immensely larger audience when a pop-folk-music group, Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with a cover of his song "Blowing in the Wind". Peter, Paul & Mary's also brought the Weavers' "If I Had a Hammer" and Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson's anti-war "Where have all the Flowers Gone" to nationwide audiences, as well as covering songs by other artists such as Dylan and John Denver.

Dylan’s general popularity was soon so great that record companies began to sign up and distribute records by a new generation of folk revival and singer-songwriters—Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Eric von Schmidt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, Tom Rush, Fred Neil, Gordon Lightfoot, Billy Ed Wheeler, John Denver, Arlo Guthrie, John Hartford, and others, among them. Some of this wave had emerged from family singing and playing traditions, and some had not. These singers frequently prided themselves on performing traditional material in imitations of the style of the source singers whom they had discovered, frequently by listening to Harry Smith's celebrated LP compilation forgotten or obscure commercial 78rpm "race" and "hillbilly" recordings of the 1920s and 30s, the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (1951). A number of the artists who had made these old recordings were still very much alive and had been "rediscovered" and brought to the 1963 and 64 Newport Folk Festivals. One of these, Clarence Ashley, for example, introduced folk revivalists to the music of friends of his who still actively played traditional music, such as Doc Watson and the The Stanley Brothers.

Archivists, collectors, and re-issued recordings[link]

During the 1950s, the growing folk-music crowd that had developed in the United States began to buy records by older, traditional musicians from the Southeastern hill country and from urban inner-cities. New LP compilations of commercial 78-rpm race and hillbilly studio recordings stretching back to the 1920s and 1930s were published by major record labels. The expanding market in LP records increased the availability of folk-music field recordings originally made by John and Alan Lomax and other collectors during the New Deal era of the 1930s and 40s. Small record labels, such as Yazoo Records, grew up to distribute reissued older recordings and to make new recordings of the survivors among these artists. This was how many urban white American audiences of the 1950s and 60s first heard country blues and especially Delta blues that had been recorded by Mississippi folk artists 30 or 40 years before.

In 1952, Folkways Records released the Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by anthropologist and experimental film maker Harry Smith. The Anthology featured 84 songs by traditional country and blues artists, initially recorded between 1927 and 1932, and was credited with making a large amount of pre-War material accessible to younger musicians. (The Anthology was re-released on CD in 1997, and Smith was belatedly presented with a Grammy Award for his achievement in 1991.)^[20]

Artists like the Carter Family, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Uncle Dave Macon, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Stanley Brothers, as well as Jimmie Rodgers, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Bill Monroe came to have something more than a regional or ethnic reputation. The revival turned up a tremendous wealth and diversity of music and put it out through radio shows and record stores.

Living representatives of some of the varied regional and ethnic traditions, including younger performers like Southern-traditional singer Jean Ritchie, who had first begun recording in the 1940s, also enjoyed a resurgence of popularity through enthusiasts' widening discovery of this music and appeared regularly at folk festivals.

Rock subsumes folk[link]

After Bob Dylan began to record with a rocking rhythm section and electric instruments in 1965 (see Electric Dylan controversy), many other still-young folk artists followed suit. Meanwhile, bands like The Lovin' Spoonful and the Byrds, whose individual members often had a background in the folk-revival coffee-house scene, were getting recording contracts with folk-tinged music played with a rock-band line-up. Before long, the public appetite for the more acoustic music of the folk revival began to wane.

"Crossover" hits ("folk songs" that became rock-music-scene staples) happened now and again. One well-known example is the song "Hey Joe", copyrighted by folk artist Billy Roberts, and recorded by rock singer/guitarist Jimi Hendrix just as he was about to burst into stardom in 1967. The anthem "Woodstock" was written and first sung and accompanied on keyboard by Joni Mitchell – while her records were still nearly entirely acoustic, and while she was labeled a "folk singer" – receiving big airplay when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded a full-on rock version.

Legacy[link]

By the late 1960s, the scene had returned to being more of a lower-key, aficionado phenomenon, although sizable annual acoustic-music festivals were established in many parts of North America during this period. The acoustic music coffee-house scene survived at a reduced scale. Through the luminary young singer-songwriters of the 1960s, the American folk-music revival has influenced songwriting and musical styles throughout the world.

Major figures[link]

• Woody Guthrie is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land". Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.^[21] In the 1930s Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California while learning, rewriting, and performing traditional folk and blues songs along the way. Many the songs he composed were about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Balladeer".^[22] Throughout his life, Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was never formally joined the Party.^[23] Guthrie fathered American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. During his later years Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer and Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Guthrie as an influence.
• The Almanac Singers Almanac members Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie began playing together informally in 1940; the Almanac Singers were formed in December 1940.^[23] They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They evolved towards controversial topical music. Two of the regular members of the group, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, later became founding members of The Weavers.

Burl Ives

• Burl Ives – as a youth, Ives dropped out of college to travel around as an itinerant singer during the early 1930s, earning his way by doing odd jobs and playing his banjo. In 1930 he had a brief, local radio career on WBOW radio in Terre Haute, Indiana, and in the 1940s he had his own radio show, titled The Wayfaring Stranger, titled after one of the popular ballads he sang. The show was very popular, and in 1946 Ives was cast as a singing cowboy in the film Smoky. Ives went on to play parts in other popular films, as well. His first book, The Wayfaring Stranger, was published in 1948.

• Pete Seeger had met, and been influenced, by many important folk musicians (and singer-songwriters with folk roots), such as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Seeger had labor movement involvements, and he met Woody at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant workers’ concert on March 3, 1940, and the two thereafter began a musical collaboration (which included the Almanac Singers). In 1948 Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, an instructional book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument.

• The Weavers were formed in 1947 by Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman. After they debuted at the Village Vanguard in New York in 1948, they were then discovered by arranger Gordon Jenkins and signed with Decca Records, releasing a series of successful but heavily orchestrated single songs. The group's political associations in the era of the Red Scare forced them to break up in 1952; they re-formed in 1955 with a series of successful concerts and album recordings on Vanguard Records. A fifth member, Erik Darling, sometimes sat in with the group when Seeger was unavailable and ultimately replaced Seeger in The Weavers when the latter resigned from the quartet in a dispute about its commercialism in general and its specific agreement to record a cigarette commercial.^[24]

• Josh White was an authentic singer of rural blues and folk music, a man who had been born into abject conditions in South Carolina during the Jim Crow years. As a young black singer, he was initially dubbed “the Singing Christian” (he sang some Gospel songs, and was the son of a preacher), but also recorded blues songs under the name Pinewood Tom. Later discovered by John H. Hammond and groomed for both stage performance and a major-label recording career, his repertoire expanded to include urban blues, jazz, and gleanings from a broad folk repertoire, in addition to rural blues and gospel. Josh White gained a very wide following in the 1940s and had a huge influence on later blues artists and groups, as well as the general folk-music scene. His pro-justice and civil-rights stance provoked harsh treatment during the suspicious HUAC era, seriously harming his performing career in the ‘50s, and keeping him off TV until 1963. In folk-music circles, however, he retained respect and was admired both as a musical hero and a link with the Southern rural-blues and gospel traditions.

• Harry Belafonte, another influential performer, started his career as a club singer in New York to pay for his acting classes. In 1952, he signed a contract with RCA Victor and released his first record album, Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites. His breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first LP to sell over a million copies. The album spent 31 weeks at number one, 58 weeks in the top ten, and 99 weeks on the US charts. It introduced American audiences to Calypso music and Belafonte was dubbed the "King of Calypso." Belafonte went on to record in many genres, including blues, American folk, gospel, and nore. In 1959, he starred in Tonight With Belafonte a nationally televised special, that introduced Odetta in her debut to a prime time audience. She sang Water Boy and performed a duet with Belafonte of There's a Hole in My Bucket that hit the national charts in 1961.^[25]

• Odetta – Starting in 1953 singers Odetta and Larry Mohr recorded some songs, with the LP being released in 1954 as Odetta and Larry, an album that was partially recorded live at San Francisco's Tin Angel bar. Odetta enjoyed a long and respected career with a repertoire of traditional songs (e.g., spirituals) and blues until her death in 2009.^[25]

• The Kingston Trio was formed in 1957 in the Palo Alto, California area by Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard, who were just out of college. They were greatly influenced by the Weavers, the calypso sounds of Belafonte, and other semi-pop folk artists such as the Gateway Singers and The Tarriers. The unprecedented popularity and album sales of this group from 1957 to 1963 (including fourteen top ten and five number one LPs on the Billboard charts^[26]) was a significant factor in creating a commercial and mainstream audience for folk-styled music where little had existed prior to their emergence.^[27]The Kingston Trio's success was followed by other highly successful 60s pop-folk acts, such as The Limeliters and The Highwaymen.

• Dave Van Ronk was a mainstay of the scene, the so called "Mayor of Macdougal Street". He was a mentor and inspiration for Tom Paxton, Christine Lavin, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan (who described Van Ronk as "the king who reigned supreme" in the Village)^[28]

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963

• Joan Baez’s career got started in 1958 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where at 17 she gave her first coffee-house concert. She was invited to perform at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival in 1959 by pop folk star Bob Gibson, after which Baez was sometimes called “the barefoot Madonna", gaining renown for her clear voice and three-octave range. She recorded her first album for an established label the following year – a collection of laments and traditional folk ballads from the British Isles, accompanying the songs with guitar. Her second LP release went gold, as did her next (live) albums. One record featured her rendition of a song by the then-unknown Bob Dylan. In the early 1960s, Baez moved into the forefront of the American folk-music revival. Increasingly, her personal convictions – peace, social justice, anti-poverty – were reflected in the topical songs that made up a growing portion of her repertoire, to the point that Baez became a symbol for these particular concerns.

• Bob Dylan often performed, and sometimes toured, with Joan Baez, starting when she was a singer of mostly traditional songs. As Baez adopted some of Dylan's songs into her repertoire and even introduced Dylan to her avid audiences, a large following on the folk circuit, it helped the young songwriter to gain initial recognition. By the time Dylan recorded his first LP (1962) he had developed a style reminiscent of Woody Guthrie. He began to write songs that captured the "progressive" mood on the college campuses and in the coffee houses. Though by 1964 there were many new guitar-playing singer/songwriters, it is arguable that Dylan eventually became the most popular of these younger folk-music-revival performers.

• Peter, Paul and Mary debuted in the early 1960s and were a American trio who ultimately became one of the biggest musical acts of the 1960s. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. They were one of the main folk music torchbearers of social commentary music in the 1960s. As the decade passed, their music incorporated more elements of pop and rock.

• Judy Collins debuted in the early 1960s. At first, she sang traditional folk songs or songs written by others — in particular the protest poets of the time, such as Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan. She also recorded her own versions of important songs from the period, such as Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and Pete Seeger's "Turn, Turn, Turn."

Ethnicity[link]

Books such as the very popular best seller, the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (1947), which helped spark the folk song revival, featured a fair amount of material in languages other than English, including German, Spanish, Italian, French, Yiddish, and Russian. The repertoires of Theodore Bikel, Marais and Miranda, and Martha Schlamme also included Hebrew and Jewish material, as well as Afrikaans. The Weavers' first big hit, the flipside of Lead Belly's "Good Night Irene", and a top selling it its own right, was in Hebrew (Tzena, Tzena, Tzena) and they, and later Joan Baez, who was of Spanish descent, occasionally included Spanish-language material in their repertoires.

The more commercially oriented folk-music revival in North America however, (as it existed in coffee houses, concert halls, and radio and TV) was predominantly an English-language phenomenon. In that sense, it bypassed a lot of ethnic folk traditions to be found in North America (e.g., Italian, French, Portuguese, German, Polish, Russian and Finnish), except in a small proportion of instances where songs’ lyrics had been translated into English.

Other performers[link]

• Eric Andersen
• David Blue
• The Brothers Four
• The Chad Mitchell Trio
• The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem
• Paul Clayton
• Leonard Cohen
• Erik Darling
• Donovan
• Ramblin' Jack Elliott
• Mimi Fariña
• Richard Fariña
• Bob Gibson
• The Greenbriar Boys
• John P. Hammond
• Richie Havens
• John Herald
• Carolyn Hester
• The Highwaymen
• Lisa Kindred
• Peter La Farge
• Bruce Langhorne
• Ewan MacColl
• Ed McCurdy
• Bob Neuwirth
• Peter, Paul and Mary
• Malvina Reynolds
• Gil Robbins
• Peggy Seeger
• Rosalie Sorrels
• Artie Traum
• Happy Traum
• Ian and Sylvia Tyson

See also[link]

• Protest songs in the United States
• Almanac Singers
• Anthology of American Folk Music
• Newport Folk Festival
• New Weird America
• Gate of Horn
• The Bitter End
• Gerdes Folk City
• Hungry i
• The Gaslight Cafe
• Cafe Au Go Go
• Festival
• Lee Hays
• Joe Hickerson
• March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
• No Direction Home
• British folk revival
• Roots revival
• People's Songs
• Sing Out!
• Singer-songwriter
• Folk music

Notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-674-95132-8
• Cohen, Ronald D., Folk music: the basics, Routledge, 2006.
• Cohen, Ronald D., A history of folk music festivals in the United States, Scarecrow Press, 2008
• Cohen, Ronald D. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940–1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. ISBN 1-55849-348-4
• Cohen, Ronald D., ed. Wasn't That a Time? Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival. American Folk Music Series no. 4. Lanham, Maryland and Folkstone, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1995.
• Cohen, Ronald D., and Dave Samuelson. Songs for Political Action. Booklet to Bear Family Records BCD 15720 JL, 1996.
• Cray, Ed, and Studs Terkel. Ramblin Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
• Cunningham, Agnes "Sis", and Gordon Friesen. Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. ISBN 1-55849-210-0
• De Turk, David A.; Poulin, A., Jr., The American folk scene; dimensions of the folksong revival, New York : Dell Pub. Co., 1967
• Denisoff, R. Serge. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
• Denisoff, R. Serge. Sing Me a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. ISBN 0-87972-036-0
• Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996.
• Donaldson, Rachel Clare, Music for the People: the Folk Music Revival And American Identity, 1930–1970, PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, May, 2011, Nashville, Tennessee
• Dunaway, David. How Can I Keep From Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger. [1981, 1990] Villard, 2008. ISBN 0-306-80399-2
• Eyerman, Ron, and Scott Barretta. "From the 30s to the 60s: The folk Music Revival in the United States". Theory and Society: 25 (1996): 501–43.
• Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements. Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-62966-7
• Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8078-4862-X
• Goldsmith, Peter D. Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. ISBN 1-56098-812-6
• Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña. New York: North Point Press, 2001. ISBN 0-86547-642-X
• Hawes, Bess Lomax. Sing It Pretty. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008
• Jackson, Bruce, ed. Folklore and Society. Essay in Honor of Benjamin A. Botkin. Hatboro, Pa Folklore Associates, 1966
• Lieberman, Robbie. "My Song Is My Weapon:" People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–50. 1989; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ISBN 0-252-06525-5
• Lomax, Alan, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, eds. Hard Hit Songs for Hard Hit People. New York: Oak Publications, 1967. Reprint, Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
• Lynch, Timothy. Strike Song of the Depression (American Made Music Series). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
• Mitchell, Gillian, The North American folk music revival: nation and identity in the United States and Canada, 1945–1980, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007
• Reuss, Richard, with [finished posthumously by] Joanne C. Reuss. American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics. 1927–1957. American Folk Music Series no. 4. Lanham, Maryland and Folkstone, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2000.
• Rubeck, Jack; Shaw, Allan; Blake, Ben et al. The Kingston Trio On Record. Naperville, IL: KK, Inc, 1986. ISBN 978-0-9614594-0-6
• Scully, Michael F. The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.[1]
• Seeger, Pete. Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Singer's Stories. Bethlehem, Pa.: Sing Out Publications, 1993.
• Willens, Doris. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: Norton, 1988.
• Weissman, Dick. Which Side Are You On? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America. New York: Continuum, 2005. ISBN 0-8264-1698-5
• Wolfe, Charles, and Kip Lornell. The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. New York: Da Capo [1992] 1999.

External links[link]

• Folk Music Revival. American Folklife Center. Library of Congress.
• National Folklife Festival
• Field Recorders Collective – a collection of CDs of American traditional styles; Appalachian, fiddling, banjo, Cajun, Gospel from private collections now made available to the public
• "Blowin in the Wind: Pop discovers folk music" Part 1. Show 18 of John Gilliland's The Pop Chronicles, Digital Library of the University of North Texas. The story of the origins of the American Folk Revival is narrated by Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Nick Reynolds of The Kingston Trio, Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, with satirist Stan Freberg (as a bongo-playing 1950s beatnik). It features Lead Belly, The Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte, and The Kingston Trio. In it, Pete Seeger is heard repeatedly crediting Alan Lomax as the most important figure in initiating the American folk revival by taking folk music out of the archives and "giving it to singers". Nick Reynolds and Roger McGuinn credit The Weavers and the labor songs of the Almanac Singers as the inspiration for The Kingston Trio and The Byrds. The role of Time magazine in asserting distinctions between pop versus "purist" folk music is also discussed. See also the continuation of this show "Blowin in the Wind: Pop discovers folk music" Part 2 Show 19, featuring Odetta, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, Peter Paul and Mary, Glenn Yarbrough, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez.

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A roots revival (folk revival) is a trend which includes young performers popularizing the traditional musical styles of their ancestors. Often, roots revivals include an addition of newly-composed songs with socially and politically aware lyrics, as well as a general modernization of the folk sound.

After an American folk music revival in the 1950s, a wave of roots revival swept the world in the 1960s and 70s. In most cases, the folk music being revived was not quite extinct, though some hadn't been played for years or was moribund; such cases include the Celtic music of Cornwall and the Isle of Man, for example. In other cases, such as Cameroon and the Dominican Republic, no revival was necessary as the music remained common, and was merely popularized and adapted for mainstream audiences at home and abroad.

The term roots revival is vague, and may not always refer to identical events. Characteristics associated with a roots revival include:

• Popularization of previously non-mainstream folk music
• Adaptation of folk styles to pop (or rock) structures
• Invention of new formats like bands where only solo acts had existed before
• Introduction of new instruments
• Composition of works by those who perform them, as opposed to folk tunes mostly passed down orally (see singer-songwriter)
• Incorporation of politically aware lyrics, often critical of a government, religion or other authority, or society in general.
• Lyrics are the first from the nation to express more than simple desires and problems, and are often seen as the embodiment of a national character or literary tradition (in comparison to the legendary American songwriter, such composers are often said to be the "X Bob Dylan", as in Wannes Van de Velde is the Belgian Bob Dylan)
• Roots revival performers will often come from very different social and economic backgrounds compared to the people whose style of music they are popularizing.

With such a vague and variable definition, roots revival could be seen as referring to the creation of any kind of pop music industry, though there are countries with well-developed pop traditions that have not had a period referred to as a roots revival (such as Jamaica, India, Cuba and Kenya). For example, homogenized pop has long had its fans in most every country in the world, but many of these nations have created their own indigenous pop styles out of folk music; this process could be called a roots revival, though in some cases the folk musics in question were still widespread and did not need to be revived.

Roots revivals[link]

Algerian music: Beginning as early as 1964, gaining steam in the 70s and continuing through the 1980s, a mainstream raï revival occurred, and pop-raï stars like Khaled and Chaba Fadela gained worldwide audiences; the same period saw similar trends occur among Kabylian musicians like Idir, Ferhat and Lounis Ait Menguellet, who popularized the native sounds of their people

Argentinian music: In the 1960s, Andean nationalism was spreading across Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. Argentina's nativist scene includes landmark performers like Mercedes Sosa and Atahualpa Yupanqui, who helped spawn the nueva canción scene.

Belgian music: Starting early in the 1960s, a wave of popular folk-based performers emerged, led by Wannes Van de Velde, who drew primarily on Flemish traditions. By the 1980s, popular bands included Brabants Volksorkest and the folk rock band Kadril.

Beninese music: Artists like Tohon Stan have created a popular version of Benin's numerous styles of indigenous folk music, such as tchink-system, a derivative of the funeral genre of tchinkoumé

Bolivian music: The 1950s saw an increase in nationalist identity surrounding the Quechua and Aymara peoples, and a number of intellectuals began associating themselves with folk music, clothing, cuisine and other elements. By the mid-1960s, a folk revival was blossoming, led by Edgar Jofré.

Brazilian music: Beginning in the 1950s and continuing for several decades, a multitude of Brazilian styles (most importantly samba) and imported American jazz combined to create the wildly popular bossa nova scene. This soon evolved into the politically charged Tropicalia genre, which starred controversial and acclaimed singer-songwriters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

Cambodian music: The early 1960s saw a revival of classical music and dance, inspired by Princess Norodom Buppha Devi and led by Sinn Sisamouth, though the rise of the Khmer Rouge largely ended this trend.

Cameroonian music: Beginning with bikutsi in the 1950s and continuing with makossa into the end of the 20th century, Cameroon's popularized folk musics have become among the most prominent in Africa. Messi Me Nkonda Martin undoubtedly did the most to evolve bikutsi from its folk origins into a popular style using electric guitars and other importations, while Manu Dibango brought makossa to new audiences around the world.

Chinese music: Partially as a reaction against attempts by the Communist government to subvert traditional styles to drum up patriotism and loyalty, the 1970s saw the creation of Chinese rock and Cantopop (in Hong Kong), both of which made some use of native folk styles, especially in vocal techniques. The leader of Chinese rock is undoubtedly Cui Jian.

Chilean music: In the early to mid-1960s, the burgeoning nueva canción movement spread throughout Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, featuring a wave of singer-songwriters who incorporated folk elements and nationalist lyrics, often critical of governmental authorities, and achieved great acclaim. Violeta Parra is sometimes viewed as the founder of the scene, for she popularized Quechua and Aymara songs and provided an outlet for performances by future luminaries like Victor Jara.

Ivorian music: Ernesto Djédjé's ziglibithy style incorporates a number of folk genres from across Côte d'Ivoire, a diverse country with hundred of ethnic groups; Djédjé's most immediate influence was the folk rhythms of the Bété.

Croatian music: By the 1980s, Croatian pop-folk had seen some mainstream success, and a wave of bands appeared, inspired by Vještice, who combined Međimurje folk music with rock in an innovative fusion of sounds.

Cuban music: By the 1960s, Cuban music had seen international success in the form of pop-mambo, chachacha and other genres, and many artists were disillusioned with these styles, which were seen as watered-down. A vanguard of singer-songwriters like Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés arose, composing politically aware songs in a style that came to be called Nueva Trova.

Czech music: In 1966, the Porta Festival was held, and a wave of singer-songwriters inspired by the likes of American Pete Seeger arose.

Danish music: In contrast to its neighbors, Denmark did not see a roots revival until to the late 1990s, when performers like Morten Alfred Høirup gained a widespread following in the country.

Dominican music: Merengue had been popular in the Dominican Republic for decades since evolving out of confusing folk origins, but did not truly become a form of pop music until the early 1960s, when legends like Johnny Ventura brought the music to new audiences at home and abroad.

Egyptian music: The city of Cairo is the most important center for Egyptian music, which includes a variety of popularized folk styles, including northern sawahii and southern saiyidi.

Finnish music: Finland's folk styles include a variety of national genres and ballads, while the traditional rhyming sleigh songs rekilaulu have become an integral part of many pop singers. In 1967, the Savonlinna Opera Festival, the first of several similar festivals, contributed to a revival of Finnish opera and other more traditional styles.

French music: Though many of France's regional styles have seen popularization, the most vibrant scene is undoubtedly the traditional music of Brittany. The region boasts a uniquely Celtic heritage, which has been emphasized by the revival since its beginnings in the early 1970s, led by Alan Stivell. Corsican music has also seen a revival, though with little popular success, concurrent with the rise of Corsican nationalism in the 1970s. See also the Québécois under Canadian music.

Gambian music: By the 1970s, Gambian musicians were mostly playing popular merengue or other styles. A visit by pop band The Super Eagles to London to record saw a change, as they were encouraged to continue their practice of Gambian folk. The band became known as Ifang Bondi, and their music was called Afro-Manding blues.

Garifuna music: Starting in the 1970s and continuing into the following decades, the Garifunas, an Afro-Caribbean people found throughout Central America, began turning to their native punta sound and creating popular styles like punta rock, which found an audience across the area. Pen Cayetano was the most important figure in this scene.

German music: Following the 1968 student revolution in West Germany, singer-songwriters playing a kind of expressive, melancholy music with traditional influences became popular. Due to governmental interference, East Germany did not see much of this influence until the mid-1970s.

Ghanaian music: Ghana is best known for the highlife style of music, which has been popular throughout the 20th century. By the late 1960s, however, the pop scene was dominated by generic guitar bands that imitated Western acts. The 1971 Soul to Soul festival, however, featured a number of African American musicians (like Wilson Pickett and Tina Turner), which had the effect of legitimizing African culture, thus causing a major roots revival that brought highlife to international audiences.

Greek music: The late 1960s and early 70s coup repressed rembétika, a style which had developed earlier in the century. This oppression ironically created a major boom in popularity for the genre, which became associated with political resistance and rebellion. Singer-songwriters like Dhionysis Savvopoulos also became wildly popular, and were seen as voices of the Greek nation.

Music of Israel: Early Zionist settlers in Palestine, as far back as the 1880s, sought to create a new mode of Jewish folk music that was based on Biblical musical modes that had long since been abandoned. These composers, who included Matityahu Shelem, Yedidiah Admon, and many others, drew on Yemenite, Arabic and other antique sources to create a unique style that they considered a revival of ancient Jewish music. The songs that they and their followers composed constitute a canonical body of folk music called "Songs of the Land of Israel." These songs are still widely performed today by popular artists.

Another example of roots revival in Israel is the preservation of regional Jewish musical styles. The music of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities has morphed into an eclectic new style called "Muzika Mizrahit". Folksongs in Yiddish and Ladino have been revived and recorded by artists like Chava Alberstein and Yehoram Gaon. Yair Dalal incorporates stylistic elements of the music of his native Iraq in his synthetic musical style.

Italian music: The diverse regions of Italy are home to dozens of varieties of folk music. By the 1950s, their popularity was declining rapidly and a group of musicians and musicologists founded organizations like Istituto de Martino and Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano to help preserve folk cultures. The following decade saw a revival of a number of traditions, including Ciccio Busacca's fusions of Sicilian folk styles, central Italy's jazzy modern folk, pioneered by Canzoniere del Lazio, the re-appearance of the lira through the work of Re Niliu, the popularization of diverse genres of northern Italian music and some of the work of world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso, who revitalized Naples' canzone napoletana tradition. In contrast to many country's, Italy's roots revival has resulted in very little mainstream success.

Japanese music: Though elements of traditional Japanese music can be found in some rock and pop from the country, the only major roots revival was Okinawan, and began in the late 1980s. Popularized Okinawan folk music includes genres like kawachi ondo and goshu ondo.

Korean music: In the early 1970s, a genre called t'ong guitar developed, performed by singer-songwriters inspired by the likes of American Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Korean folk has seen little popular success, though there has been some for the pansori, nongak and sanjo styles.

Latvian music: Its traditional long suppressed or appropriated by the Soviet Union, Latvia's kokle (an instrument similar to a zither) was revived and popular in the 1970s, led by Jānis Porikis.

Lithuanian music: The Soviet Union had sponsored some music festivals, such as the Dainu Sventes, but did not allow for much lyrical or musical innovation, and kept all songwriters from experimenting with politically aware and dissident lyrics. An active cultural rebellion occurred in the 1960s, based around a series of national music festivals and concerts.

Malian music: Cuban music had become extremely popular in Mali by the 1960s, and little folk music could compete. The country's second president, however, Moussa Traoré, encouraged the growth of a Malian music industry, resulting in a revival of some kinds of folk music, and a popularization led by Salif Keita. Later Fanto Sacko's bajourou music and wassoulou music also became popularized. However, by the 1980s, Malian pop had lost most traces of its folk origins and was simply dance music, even topping the European charts; another roots revival occurred, led by Guinean acoustic singer and kora player Jali Musa Jawara.

Mozambiquan music: Music was used in the 1960s by the independence movement in Mozambique. Leaders in this movement encouraged the growth of a national music industry. By the 1970s, native forms of music, such as marrabenta, had been popularized.

Dutch music: The late 1960s saw a revival of Dutch folk music, led by performers like Gerard van Maasakkers; popularity was limited, and soon ended, though region of Friesland has maintained a strong traditional music scene.

Portuguese music: In the 1960s and 70s, José Afonso led a return to more traditionally styled fado music, which later evolved into a number of new song forms that incorporated socio-political lyrics and foreign influences.

Russian music: Starting in about 1966, a group of bards arose, most prominently including Vladimir Vysotsky, and Vyacheslav Shchurov organized a number of concerts for folk singers. This led to a revival and revitalization of Russian folk songs, a trend which continued in ensuing decades.

Sami music: The Sami, an indigenous people found in central and northern Scandinavia, northern Finland and northwestern Russia, have a tradition of folk songs called joiks, which have been popularized by the likes of Mari Boine, who remains a legend in the field.

Spanish music was incorporated into Spanish Baroque music in the harpsichord works of Soler. Later composers such as Albeniz, Falla, Rodrigo and Giuliani used the dance rhythms of Spain. The classical guitarists Andres Segovia, John Williams and Julian Bream popularised the music through their recordings. Current popular folk musicians include Susana Seivane, Hevia and Milladoiro. A roots revival Nueva canción, which also evolved into new form of socially committed music occurred in several Spanish speaking countries.

English-speaking countries[link]

Includes English and Celtic revivals

For additional Celtic music, see the French section above

Australian music: Beginning in the 1980s, Australian Aborigines began turning to their native styles of folk music, which were updated, creating popular bands and styles like Aboriginal rock

Canadian music: Though some artists, like The Band, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, had been integral parts of the 1960s American folk rock scene, Canada has seen its own distinctive revival of styles. This includes the late 1970s scene in Maritime Canada, which glorified the area's Celtic heritage and was led by regional legends Figgy Duff and Stan Rogers, as well as the mid-1960s Quebecois revival led by Gilles Vigneault. More limited revivals of Acadian, Inuit and other folk styles have also occurred.

English music: There were two folk music revivals in England. The first, led by Cecil Sharp was academic. It involved the collection of songs and tunes and publishing them in journals. It was at its peak about 1910. The second revival involved large-scale public performances of English music, beginning with the appearance of the Copper Family at the Royal Albert Hall in 1952. Starting in the late 60s the songs were performed in a contemporary style; this was the origin of the Electric folk style.

Irish music: There was a revival of Irish folk music that began in the early 20th century, based both in Dublin and Ireland, though the longer-lasting and more famous revival began in 1955 with the album "The Lark in the Morning," whose recording was supervised by Diane Hamilton and which featured Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem prior to their involvement with the influential but U.S.-based Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Later famous groups include The Dubliners (founded 1962), The Chieftains (1963), Ceoltóirí Chualann, and Clannad (1973). Later, singer-songwriters such as Christy Moore were inspired by American popular folk singers, and they took to modernizing and adapting Irish music for modern audiences. The result was a dramatic change from folk traditions, including the introduction of the bouzouki and influences including soul and rock.

Scottish music: The Scottish folk revival begin in 1951 when Hamish Henderson created the People's Festival. The Boys of the Lough were one of the first instrumental Celtic groups to tour the world.

US music: A traditional music revival started the American folk music revival that began in the 1940s and led to a new genre, contemporary folk music. A group of American archivists and researchers that included John A. Lomax, his son Alan Lomax, poet Carl Sandburg, musician and activist Pete Seeger and others collected, recorded, and published old ballads, prison songs, Appalachian folk music and black blues. A number of performers influenced by traditional music, like Josh White, Burl Ives, and The Weavers, enjoyed considerable commercial success in the 1940s, leading to a broader commercial revival in the late 1950s through the mid 1960s with performers like The Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary selling millions of record albums. The 21st century saw a smaller revival of Appalachian folk music with the release of the 2000 motion picture soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?". Singers such as Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss and the bluegrass performer Ralph Stanley were featured on the album.

Further reading[link]

• Scully, Michael F. (2008) The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance (University of Illinois Press)

• Broughton, Simon, Mark Ellingham and Jon Lusk (2006) The Rough Guide to World Music: Africa and the Middle East v. 1

• Ellingham, Mark, James McConnachie and Simon Broughton (Editor) (2000) The Rough Guide to World Music Vol 2 (Including Latin & North America, Caribbean, India, Asia and Pacific)

• Rosenberg, Neil V. and, W.V. Rosenberg (Editor (1993) Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined

• Bohlman, Philip V. (2002) World Music: A Very Short Introduction

• Fujie, Linda, David Locke and Jeff Titon (2004) Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples

• Czulinski, Winnie (2006) Drone On!: The High History of Celtic Music

• Racy, A. J. (2004) Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab

• Bakan, Michael B. (2007) World Music: Traditions and Transformations

• Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation (1997) International Folksongs

• Smith, C. C. (1998) Spanish Ballads

• Lyle, Emily B. (2001) Scottish Ballads

• Wilentz, Sean (2005) The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad

• Sawyers, June Skinner (2001) Celtic Music: A Complete Guide

• Bohlman, Philip V. (1988) The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World

• Rice, Timothy (1994) May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music

• Rosenberg, Neil V. (1993) Bluegrass: A History

• Hart, Mickey and Karen Kostyal (2003) Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music

• Morrish, John, English Folk Dance and Song Society, Martin Carthy et al. (2007) The Folk Handbook: Working with Songs from the English Tradition

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2010)

American folk music is a musical term that encompasses numerous genres, many of which are known as traditional music or roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz.

Roots music[link]

Many roots musicians do not consider themselves to be folk musicians; the main difference between the American folk music revival and American "roots music" is that roots music seems to cover a slightly broader range, including blues and country .

Roots music developed its most expressive and varied forms in the first three decades of the 20th century. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were extremely important in disseminating these musical styles to the rest of the country, as Delta blues masters, itinerant honky tonk singers, and Latino and Cajun musicians spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The growth of the recording industry in the same period was also important; higher potential profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters, and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that musical fads, such as Hawaiian slack-key guitar, never died out completely, since a broad range of rhythms, instruments, and vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate popular genres.

By the 1950s, all the forms of roots music had led to pop-oriented forms. Folk musicians like the Kingston Trio, pop-Tejano and Cuban-American fusions like boogaloo, chachacha and mambo, blues-derived rock and roll and rockabilly, pop-gospel, doo wop and R&B (later secularized further as soul music) and the Nashville sound in country music all modernized and expanded the musical palette of the country.

The roots approach to music emphasizes the diversity of American musical traditions, the genealogy of creative lineages and communities, and the innovative contributions of musicians working in these traditions today. In recent years roots music has been the focus of popular media programs such as Garrison Keillor's public radio program A Prairie Home Companion and the feature film by the same name.

Other American folk music[link]

	"Yellow Rose Of Texas" (1858) "Yellow Rose Of Texas" performed by the United States Coast Guard Band "Oh! Susanna" (1848) Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susanna" performed by the United States Navy Concert Band
Problems listening to these files? See media help.

Genres here range as widely as the definition of folk music itself; working definitions are based on the style and themes of the music regardless of its source. Many are a part of the American Folk Music Revival, including works by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Burl Ives and others. Others evolved in the 1960s including storytelling type performers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The New Christie Minstrels, The Limelighters, The Kingston Trio and Judy Collins and counterculture and folk rock performers such as Peter Paul and Mary and The Byrds.

Books[link]

In 2004 NPR published the book titled The NPR Curious Listener's Guide To American folk music,^[1] Linda Ronstadt wrote the foreword.

• The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance by Michael F. Scully (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Artists and musicians[link]

Notable roots musicians have included Jelly Roll Morton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Bessie Smith, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Son House, Leadbelly, Hazel Dickens, Jimmie Rodgers (The Singing Brakeman), Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, Merle Travis, Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash, Maggie Simpson, Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Washington Phillips, Fiddlin' John Carson (1868–1949), Johnny Richardson (1908–present; children's folk music), Willie Nelson, and Jean Ritchie. More recent musicians who occasionally or consistently play roots music include Keb' Mo', Ralph Stanley, Jewel, John Denver, Chris Castle, Ricky Skaggs, and Jeremy Fisher, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary.

Film and TV[link]

Hootenanny, a 1963 musical variety show broadcast on the ABC network in the U.S., primarily featured folk musicians.

The soundtrack of the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is exclusively roots music, performed by Alison Krauss, The Fairfield Four, Emmylou Harris, Norman Blake and others.

In 2001, PBS broadcast a 4-part documentary series, American Roots Music, that explored the historical roots of American roots music through footage and performances by the creators of the movement.

The 2003 film A Mighty Wind is a tribute to (and parody of) the folk-pop musicians of the early 1960s.

A six-hour public television series, The Music of America: History Through Musical Traditions, appeared in 2010.

See also[link]

• Americana
• American fiddle
• Anthology of American Folk Music
• Blues
• Country music
• Folk music
• List of North American folk music traditions
• Traditional music

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2012)

Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie after a performance on April 26, 2008.
Background information
Born	(1922-12-08) December 8, 1922 (age 89). Viper, Kentucky.
Genres	Folk
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	Appalachian dulcimer, Vocals
Years active	1948–present
Labels	Folkways, Elektra, Sire, Greenhays, Flying Fish, Riverside, Tradition, Argo, Collector, June Appal Recordings, Pacific Cascade Records, Warner Brothers
Website	http://www.jeanritchiehome.com/

Jean Ritchie (born December 8, 1922) is an American folk music singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player.

Out of Kentucky[link]

Abigail and Balis Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky had 14 children, and Jean was the youngest. Ten girls slept in one room of the farming family's house in the Cumberland Mountains.

Jean Ritchie quickly memorized songs and performed at local dances and the country fair in Hazard. In the late 1940s the family acquired a radio and discovered that what they were singing was hillbilly music, a word they had never heard before. In the mid-thirties Alan Lomax recorded in Kentucky for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. Among the people he recorded were The Singing Ritchies.^{[dubious – discuss]}

Ritchie attended Cumberland College (Now the University of the Cumberlands) in Williamsburg, Kentucky and later the University of Kentucky in Lexington. At college she joined the glee club and choir and learned to play piano. In 1946 she graduated with a BA in social work.^[1] During the war, she taught in elementary school.

In the summer of 1946, she moved to work in the Henry Street Settlement in New York. There she met Oscar Brand, Leadbelly, and Pete Seeger and started singing her family songs again. In 1948 she shared the stage with The Weavers, Woody Guthrie and Betty Sanders at the Spring Fever Hootenanny. Oscar Brand's Folksong Festival on WNYC radio adopted her as a regular by October 1949.

George Pickow[link]

In the early 1940s George Pickow was at Camp Unity in New York. There he heard Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie jamming every night in a tiny cabin. He took up a career as a photographer, but still went to square dances. He met Ritchie and put her on the front cover of a trucker's magazine. They married in 1950. In 1953 Alan Lomax, George Pickow, and Peter Kennedy directed a film Oss Oss Wee Oss (Colour, 16 minutes) showing the May Eve and May Day Festivals at Padstow, Cornwall. George visited the UK again in 1960. In 1961 Alan Lomax and George Pickow directed Ballads, Blues, Bluegrass. Pickow, who had been in declining health for a long time, died December 10, 2010, two days after Ritchie's 88th birthday.^[2] He is also survived by their two children, Peter and Jon, who is also a musician.

The dulcimer revival[link]

Ritchie sang unaccompanied folk songs mostly, but occasionally accompanied herself on guitar or lap dulcimer (not a hammer dulcimer). Balis Ritchie played dulcimer but forbade his children to touch it. At the age of 4 or 5 Jean Ritchie defied the ruling to pick out "Go Tell Aunt Rhody". By 1949 it was an instrument that distinguished Ritchie from all other singers. Ritchie and her husband George Pickow became convinced there was a potential boom. Pickow's uncle, Morris Pickow, set up a workshop under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. George Pickow did the finishing and Jean did the tuning. Soon they had sold 300 dulcimers. Today most folk festivals have several people selling dulcimers. Elektra records signed her up and released three albums: Jean Ritchie Sings (1952), Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family (1957) and A Time for Singing (1962). She had a charming voice rather than a powerful or dramatic one, but it was authentic. Her fans would ask her "Which album has the most dulcimer?" She finally gave in, recording an album called The Most Dulcimer in 1992.

The Fulbright expedition[link]

Jean Ritchie was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to trace the links between American ballads and the songs of the British Isles. As a song-collector, she began by setting down the 300 songs that she already knew from her mother's knee. Jean Ritchie spent 18 months tape recording and interviewing singers. Pickow accompanied her, photographing Seamus Ennis, the McPeakes, Leo Rowsome, Sarah Makem and others. One of Jean's own songs was Child Ballad 76, "The Lass of Lochroyan". She was delighted to discover that Elizabeth Cronin, an elderly Irish woman, knew a version of the same song. In 1955 Ritchie wrote a book about her family called Singing Family of the Cumberlands.

"The Mother of Folk"[link]

Ritchie became known as "The Mother of Folk". As well as work songs and ballads, Ritchie knew hymns from the "Old Regular Baptist" church she attended in Jeff, Kentucky. These were sung as "lining out" songs, in a lingering soulful way. One of the songs they sang was "Amazing Grace". She wrote some songs, including one on the effects of strip mining in Kentucky. (Some of Ritchie's late 1950s/early 1960s songs on mining she published under the pseudonym "'Than Hall" to avoid troubling her non-political mother, and believing they might be better received if attributed to a man.)^[3] "My Dear Companion" appeared on the album Trio recorded by Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris. Judy Collins not only recorded some of Ritchie's traditional songs, "Tender Ladies" and "Pretty Saro", but used a photograph by George Pickow on the front of her album Golden Apples of the Sun (1962). Ritchie's 50th anniversary album was Mountain Born (1995), which features her two sons, Peter and Jonathan Pickow. In 1954 Ritchie and George Pickow released some of their UK recordings under the name Field Trip. It was re-issued in 2001 on the Greenhays label. It has recordings by Elizabeth Cronin, Seamus Ennis, and others, side by side with Ritchie family versions of the same songs.

In 1996 the Ritchie Pickow Photographic Archive was acquired by the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway, along with tapes of Irish recordings.

Ritchie has performed at Carnegie Hall and at the Royal Albert Hall. Her album, None But One, was awarded the Rolling Stone Critics award in 1977.

In 2002, Ritchie received a National Endowment For The Arts National Heritage Fellowship, the Nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Ritchie currently lives in Port Washington, New York and was recently inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.^[4]

In early December 2009, Ritchie was hospitalized after suffering a stroke which impaired her ability to communicate.^[5] At first she was expected to require institutional care.^[6] However, on June 8, 2010, Ritchie's son Jon Pickow reported: "Great news! Mom is coming home tomorrow. She has surpassed all expectations and is talking, laughing and in general being herself."^[7]

Discography[link]

• Traditional Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family (1952)
• Kentucky Mountains Songs (1954)
• Field Trip (1954)
• Courting Songs (1954)
• Shivaree (1955)
• The Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955)
• Children's Songs & Games from the Southern Mountains (1956)
• Songs from Kentucky (1956)
• American Folk Tales and Songs (1956)
• Saturday Night and Sunday Too (1956)
• The Ritchie Family of Kentucky (1958)
• Riddle Me This (1959) (with Oscar Brand)
• Carols for All Seasons (1959)
• British Traditional Ballads, Vol 1 (1961)
• British Traditional Ballads, Vol 2 (1961)
• Ballads (2003; vol 1 and 2 above, issued on a single CD)
• Ballads from Her Appalachian Family Tradition (1961)
• Precious Memories (1962)
• The Appalachian Dulcimer: An Instructional Record (1963)
• Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson Live at Folk City (1963)
• Time For Singing (1966)
• Marching Across the Green Grass & Other American Children's Game Songs (1968)
• Clear Waters Remembered (1974)
• Jean Ritchie At Home (1974)
• None But One (1977)
• Christmas Revels. Wassail! Wassail! (1982)
• O Love Is Teasin' (1985)
• Kentucky Christmas, Old and New (1987)
• The Most Dulcimer (1992)
• Mountain Born (1995)
• High Hills and Mountains (1996)
• Childhood Songs (1997)
• Legends of Old time Music (2002, DVD)