American Song
American Song
1960’s Folk Music: How the Fire Spread
The 1960’s were a period of massive social change and tension all over the country – all over North America in fact - because we have to include Canada, too. The conditions were just right for a whole group of passionate, inspired, and gifted young singers and songwriters to lift their voices. They came from many different American communities; Jewish immigrants, First Nations people, Americans, Canadians, African Americans, Hispanics, Caucasians, from the cities and from the heartland. All of them had a message to share with their generation, and a desire to build a better world.
This episode is about a number of these artists, and the legacies they’ve left behind. Many of them are still with us today, and a few of them still create new music. Welcome to today’s episode, 1960’s Folk Music: How the Fire Spread.
Artists Featured in this Episode
Fred Neil
Dave Van Ronk
Karem Dalton
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Leonard Cohen
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
Brothers & Curry
Bob Dylan
Simon & Garfunkel
Paul Simon
Joni Mitchell
In the last episode, I talked about how the first folk generation paved the way for the second, and how the beat generation provided the location and the energy that made Greenwich Village the original epicenter for the second revival. But the 1960’s themselves were a period of massive social change and tension all over the country – all over North America in fact - because we have to include Canada, too. The conditions were just right for a whole group of passionate, inspired, and gifted young singers and songwriters to lift their voices. This episode is about a number of these artists, and the legacies they’ve left behind. Many of them are still with us today, and a few of them still create new music. Welcome to today’s episode, 1960’s Folk Music: How the Fire Spread.
IFred Neil Everybody’s Talkin’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBAOjKBLpqo
Fred Neil was one of the luminary folk musicians in the Village. It’s likely you’ve never heard of him. Neil started his music career at the Brill Building – Tin Pan Alley. He wrote some pretty well known songs there, including Candy Man, for Roy Orbison, Come Back Baby, one of the few songs Buddy Holly recorded that he did not also write, and Fred also wrote this song, “Everybody’s Talkin’”, from the film Midnight Cowboy – although most people know Harry Nilsson’s version. I loved this quote from an article music critic, Toni Ruiz, wrote where he said, “it was not a song that Fred Neil really "wrote"; it was a song that he lived. When he sang the lines "I'm going where the sun keeps shining through the pouring rain," Neil really was narrating his own getaway from the outside world that endured until his death on July 7th, 2001.”
Fred Neil also did studio sessions for Paul Anka and Bobby Darin, where he played guitar for the teenage heart-throbs. By the early ‘60s though, Neil had settled into the Village and was working as the emcee at the Café Wha? There, he introduced a number of memorable greats like Jose Feliciano, Hoyt Axton, and comedians like Bill Cosby – everyone’s favorite Jello Pudding slurping, Rufi dropping date rapist.
Fred Neil at “The Elephant” (Woodstock, 1969)
If anyone could give Dylan some competition in the Village it was Fred Neil. Charlie Brown was the owner of the Gaslight in Coconut Grove and he remembered Dylan as the harmonica playing supporting musician to Fred Neil. In one interview, Brown said, “Dylan wasn't a very friendly person and I don't think him and Fred really got along. I think they had a bit of a rivalry going up there. They were the two masters. They saw each other as the competition.”
Fred never got the recognition he might have if he’d been more commercially minded.
In an interview about Neil, David Crosby explained it like this, “he just didn't fit in this commercial world". But that doesn’t mean his presence wasn’t felt, he cast his shadow the farthest in the careers of the people he inspired.
Here's Fred performing a song called Linin Track at a Hootenanny, at a Village club called The Bitter End. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxpCgshMsa0
These include Crosby, John Sebastian, Gram Parsons, Stephen Stills, Paul Kantner, Cass Elliott, Jesse Colin Young, Peter Tork, and others. In other words, some of the best known musicians from the 1960’s. Bands like The Lovin' Spoonful, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Monkees, Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills And Nash have all referenced Fred Neil as an important influence.
Dave Van Ronk was another important artist in the Greenwich Village folk scene. We have Dave to thank for that recording of Dylan performing He Was a Friend of Mine at a club called the Gaslight, in 1961 – a year before Dylan released his first album.
Dave Van Ronk – Both Sides Nowhttps://youtu.be/KMhBdIu8gaI
A native New Yorker, from Brooklyn, Van Ronk was born in 1936. He moved into the Village as a teen, during the early days of the folk revival, and he lived pretty much hand-to-mouth while he taught himself guitar, and tinkered with communist politics. For a few years, he worked as a merchant marine. His music was an eclectic blend – which pretty much assured that he’d never be a commercial success – his sound, a blend of dixieland jazz, ragtime, blues, vaudeville and other styles, made him utterly unique. Joni Mitchell said his version of "Both Sides Now" – he referred to it as “Clouds” was the finest ever done.
Van Ronk was somebody who was in music for all the right reasons. About himself, he once said, "I've always been inconsistent. The only rule I follow is that anything that I like and that I think I can find a handle to, I'll take a whack at. And as it has been, so shall it be."
Joan Baez was a few years younger than Van Ronk, but early in her career had already heard stories and rumors about him. She remembered, “He was already a myth. He had terrible teeth, but he had the most astonishing pitch, sweet little notes amidst the growly ones. I knew thousands of people who sang the blues, but there weren’t many who did it well. He was the closest living offshoot of Leadbelly that I could get to see.”
Coming out of the merchant marine, Van Ronk gigged endlessly, in most every cabaret in the city, Van Ronk had a profound blackish voice, which played over a finger-picking guitar.
About Van Ronk, Dylan wrote that he’d first heard Van Ronk’s records while growing up in the Midwest. “He was passionate and stinging. He sang like a soldier of fortune and sounded like he paid the price. . . I loved his style.”
The music critic, Peter Fornatale, called Van Ronk ““the great, grizzled, guitarist”. Dave’s seminal albums include Dave Van Ronk: Sings Ballads, Blues And A Spiritual (Folkways, 1959) and Inside Dave Van Ronk (Prestige, 1963). He did continue making albums through the end of the 1990’s. Dylan remembered Van Ronk as "Greenwich Village’s king of the street" where "he reigned supreme." Other singer-songwriters, like Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs and Suzanne Vega have all sung his praises as a mentor, teacher and friend. Tom Waits, paid homage when stating, "In the engine room of the New York Folk Scene shoveling coal into the furnace, one Big Man rules; Dog-faced roustabout songster, bluesman Dave Van Ronk. Long may he howl." Van Ronk was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Composers in 1997,
Karen Dalton
This is the story of American music, so we WILL recognize and respect the contributions of our country’s Native Americans. Karen Dalton is a nearly forgotten voice from the early days in Greenwich Village. She was a blues-singing, guitar and banjo playing, Cherokee-Irish chanteuse, with a voice that’s been compared with Billie Holiday. More modern artists like artists like Nick Cave,[2] Devendra Banhart,[3] and Joanna Newsom[4] have called her an influence on their music. Nick Cave called her ‘his favorite female blues musician’. Dalton's bluesy, world-weary voice is often compared to jazz singer Billie Holiday, but Dalton hated the comparison and said Bessie Smith more important to her. Dalton sang blues, folk, country, pop, and even Motown—and gave every song her own, unique interpretation.
Dalton gigged a lot with Dylan (who occasionally backed her up on harmonica), Fred Neil, and Tim Hardin, who wrote Reason to Believe, an early hit for Rod Stewart. Her shows were studded with their songs. Once again, Dylan later wrote that "Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.” Fred Neil once said, "She sure can sing the shit out of the blues." Here’s Karen’s version of Hardin’s song, which predates Rod the Mod’s by several years.
Reason to Believe – Karen Dalton
Karen was reclusive, and it took a lot to coax recorded performances out of her. When she recorded her second album, In My Own Time, at Bearsville City studios in New York, she brought her support group with her, including her two teenage children, her dog, and her horse – all the way from Oklahoma - to feel more at ease with recording. Her ideal concert setting, she said would be playing “… in her living room with friends and playing music. And then somehow the living room would be put on a huge stage, which would be surrounded by a massive audience who would be watching in rapt attention while she ignored them totally and just did whatever she wanted to do.” She was indifferent to fame, so obviously her career sputtered and flickered out - a combination of hard luck and self-sabotage. Some people seem to have been placed in the wrong spot on this world’s timeline. Karen was one of those; if she’d been born in time for the day of the indie artist, she might have been a happier, more successful person. Instead, like Fred Neil, she wasn’t made from the right fabric for, as Joni Mitchell termed it, the ‘star-maker machinery’ to package and sell. Her spirit was too independent, too unruly.
From Saskatchewan, Canada, Buffy Sainte Marie is a Native American and a member of the Cree Indian tribe. She first debuted in 1969 and has spent her entire career pursuing her singular, artistic vision – to honor her heritage, and raise awareness for Native American social issues. The trajectory her life has taken is a reflection of her amazing will, drive and talent.
Born on a Cree Indian reserve in Saskatchewan, Sainte-Marie, now 80, was removed from her family at a young age, grew up with her adoptive family in Massachusetts, earned double degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and by her early 20s she was playing her songs at Native American reservations, before starting her performance career in the coffeehouses of Toronto and Greenwich Village. Eventually, she would fill concert halls all over the world. She’s shared stages with the greatest folk artists of her time: Leonard Cohen. Neil Young. Joni Mitchell.
In 1982, Sainte-Marie became the only Native American to ever win an Oscar, with her song “Up Where We Belong” – a major hit for Joe Cocker and Elizabeth Warren - and was the first woman to breastfeed on national TV. Her songs have been played and recorded by artists including Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, Donovan, Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, Barbara Streisand, Courtney Love, and Gram Parsons. Her other big song was “Universal Soldier,” one of the best known anti-war songs of the 20th century. Her songs were point blank incendiary.
Take this one, “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”
And yet, with all this, It’s’ not surprising that American audiences probably don’t know her. She was blacklisted by our U.S. government. In a 2018 interview with Vogue magazine, she told the story like this, “In the ’60s, I had no idea I was being suppressed. No one tells you when you’re blacklisted. Lyndon Johnson’s administration—not the U.S. government, but his handful of cronies making nasty phone calls from a back room—had files on me that I didn’t find out about for more than 20 years. I had never broken a law in my life. All the files proved was that I was innocent of any wrongdoing. But I had no idea what they had done to my career—there were letters in the file from people asking if I was some kind of bad guy, and they’d answer the letters—they’d say, ‘Yes, we have 31 pages on her, but we can’t tell you what’s in them.’ They put out the idea to some very influential people—record companies, radio people—that I may be suspect. At the time, I was performing all over the world—but my career in the U.S. was very quiet.”
Another reason you probably don’t know about Buffy is that, like Fred Neil, she never wanted the kind of career that ends in fame, and mega-wealth. Buffy always identified herself as an educator first. Her biographer, Andrea Warner said, "She had different dreams. She had this goal of bringing truth to her music [and] talking about indigenous realities. It really stuck with me that her dreams weren't coming true and that's how she's continued to advocate and resist and write these songs that have so much power, so much meaning and so much capacity to change the world."
Besides folk artists and Native Americans, another group that helped to build the ‘60s folk movement came out of the Jewish community. The artists from this community were carving out a separate, unique identity. They were more radical - different from American culture - at the same time, they embraced American identity. Folk music was their pathway. But even as this was essential to the Jewish community, America’s Right Wing felt threatened by it. In an earlier episode, we had a hard look at HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy, and we know about the hearings, and the witch hunt that these artists were put through. It seems that in America, you can hold any political opinion you want, just as long as you don’t share your thoughts too loudly.
So Long Maryanne – Leonard Cohen
By the 1960s, folk’s fan base was much younger, more urban, more social justice oriented, and much more Jewish. And there were different characters involved in the folk movement. Jewish Americans held an essential role at the center of the movement. Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, as everybody knows, and his manager Albert Grossman, Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary was a secular Jew. So was the Canadian singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen. Paul Simon was also from a middle-class Jewish American home. So was Phil Ochs. Though he later converted to Catholicism, Arlo Guthrie celebrated his bar mitzvah and his maternal grandmother was a Yiddish songwriter.
And the roots of this generation’s love for folk music went back to the Folkways Anthology of Folk Music.. Even Greenwich Village; in the 50s and 60s the Village was deeply tied to an emerging culture that was Bohemian with a Jewish accent. The clubs and shops that gave the artists a place to perform were Jewish owned or managed by Jewish merchants, and filled with Jewish audiences.
Folkways was founded by a guy named Moe Asch, a Polish Jew, born in 1905, who immigrated to the U.S. So here, we’ve got Jews involved throughout the folk music industry manager, singer, and record producer.
Diamond Joe” by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
The folk musicians in the first folk movment used the music to educate people on knowing themselves, but the second generation musicians came to folk to become themselves. And this often involved playing with identity. So here’s an example of a young Jewish musician named Elliott Adnopoz, who ran around with Woody Guthrie in the ’50s and changed his name to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. (“Diamond Joe” by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) There is a man you hear about Most every place you go His holdings are in Texas And his name is Diamond Joe And he carries all his money – The thing is, Adnopoz was from Flatbush. Adnopoz is a great example of a folk revivalist who allowed the music to shape his identity, not the other way around. You’re not going to hear a lot of Yiddish songs, or Jewish songs coming from these artists, and it’s because Jewish singer came to folk as a way to escape their cultural, historic roots. They wanted to do something new.
I’ve mentioned how the Folkways Folk Anthology was the match that sparked renewed interest in folk music, and it was how the Antholoogy was structured, as much as the music contained in it, that had such a profound impact on the new generation of folkies. It took all those field recordings, captured by ethnomusicologists like Alan Lomax and others, out of their historical contexts. For the first time, a new audience could hear the music free of the filters that are applied as soon as things start getting categorized in ways that carry any historical baggage. So, these recordings were “just songs”, and not part of the legacy of former black slaves, or the Appalachian descendants of Irish and Scotch immigrants.
Gonna Die with my Hammer in My Hand – Brothers & Curry
Harry Smith the guy who curated all the music that went into that six disk anthology was a bit of a kook. He literally believed he could turn any metal into gold – and he arranged the songs, not by some reasonable plan like chronology or theme, or origin, but by each artists “cosmic number”. Llistening to the Anthology, people had no idea what race each artist came from. The result was a great release from the divisions that had previously kept white musicians out of the blues, for instance. The great black bluesman, Lightning Hopkins, put it like this: “Blues dwells in everyone, it’s all in the soul.” But then he had to agree that some white performers did have a hard time playing it. Their problem was not talent, their problem was authenticity. He said, ““They’re afraid to let go of themselves.” We saw that in the episode on early rock and roll, remember how lame Pat Boone’s version of Aint That a Shame was? The only thing lamer was when he came back in the 1980’s with – of all things – a heavy metal album…
(Blowing – into Many Thousands Gone – back into Blowing)
So, a great example of a jewish folk artist, creating an entirely new identity by working with the materials from another community is this song “Blowing in the Wind” Dylan borrowed from a black spiritual called “Many Thousands Gone”. In 1963, Dylan was presented at a concert by the manager of both Pete Seeger and Joan Baez; Harold Leventhal, who ALSO was the son of Jewish immigrants. In his introduction, he referred to Bob “The very best of the newest generation of citybillies.” And a citybilly is a hillbilly, someone from the country. In the next breath, he described Dylan as “One of the most compelling blues singers ever recorded.” But a blues singer is usually someone who’s black. So who is Dylan? Is he from the city, or from the country? Is he white, is he black? One thing we know about Bob, and one thing he has always been is a shape-shifter. Even in one of his latest incarnation, where he presents himself as a singer of American Standards. Through the years, he’s been the voice of his generation, the reclusive rock and roller, a born again crusader for Jesus, a Traveling Wilbury, endlessly shifting. And even though Dylan moved away from the folk movement almost sixty years ago, his life and his career demonstrate one of the most important themes from the ‘60s folk movement - that players and fans in the 1960s were liberated individuals, because they understood that their own identity could be constructed and could change with new contexts.
Simon & Garfunkel – The Only Living Boy in New York
While we’re on the subject, another brilliant talent who rose out of the ‘60s folk movement is Paul Simon. He also just happened to be another New York jew from Queens. It’s incredible, isn’t it? The tip of the spear that is Paul Simon’s career was in junior high when he had a role in a production of Alice in Wonderland, and he met Art Garfunkel. Paul played the White Rabbit and Arty played the Cheshire Cat. Thinking they might have something together, they formed a folk duo called Tom & Jerry. They played Everly Bros. covers. During the ‘50’s, Paul and Arty formed a five-piece doo-wop group called the Peptones, but as the ‘60s rolled around, and they saw the rising interest in folk, they switched directions. Gerde’s Folk City, one of the Greenwich Village clubs had open mic nights on Monday evenings. They used it as a way to slowly break into the scene.
During that time, Paul wrote Sounds of Silence, He was 21 at the time, and the song was on S&B’s debut album, “Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m.” But the song, and the album, generated nothing but crickets. <chirp chirp SFX>, so, dejected about it, Simon left New York for England where he fell in with Britain’s folk movement.
The former rock critic for the LA Times, Robert Hilburn, wrote about that period of Simon’s life and about the English folk scene Simon found himself in. He wrote, “Most of those musicians there were guitar players and played old folk music, Most of them played covers, and if they wrote, few wrote as well as Simon could. And as good as his songs were, Paul realized that what truly set him apart was his poetry. Again, few could match him.” At the time, the English folk. Movement was mostly about celebrating centuries old ballads from the British Isles. But Paul wasn’t a fan. When he first heard Dylan, he said, ‘That’s what I want to do, write about the world today, not just “I went down to the river and killed my baby.”’ Paul discussed the period himself, and said this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdxrUHIKMtA
Some of the songs Simon had in his 1965 playlist, during the period that he was gigging in the English folk circuit, included:
He was my brother
Kathy’s song
A most peculiar man
The sound of silence
April came she will
Patterns
…. All songs that could be found on S&G’s albums at the time.
I’ve always been in love with Kathy’s song, and I’ll play a bit of it for you now.
Tom Wilson was a hot record producer in the ‘60s who did a lot of work with Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa and the Mother’s of Invention, and the Velvet Underground, and, while Paul Simon was folking around in the UK, he turned is attention to the Sound of Silence and added electric guitars and drums to the original track that Paul and Art had made. Suddenly it was the right song at the right time. You couldn’t have found a better complement to the Beatles Rubber Soul if you tried Beatles, or the chimey sound of the Byrds version of Tamborine Man, or even Dylan’s electric Highway 61. It became the title track of Simon & Garfunkel’s second album, and kicked off their amazing career, with recordings that have lasted through the decades.
Think about songs like The Boxer, Mrs. Robinson, America, Homeward Bound and, of course, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Paul Simon completed his final tour just before the pandemic began. For almost 60 years, he has filled the world with amazing songs of beauty and inspiration but the ‘60s folk revival is where it all began for Paul Simon and the beautifully-voiced Art Garfunkel.
Although folk’s flame had re-kindled in Greenwich Village, the winds of change blew its embers in many directions, bringing singers and song-writers from all over North America (as well as other parts of the world) into the scene. We’ve already talked about Buffy St. Marie from Saskatchewan, so let’s talk about another – Joni Mitchell.
Joni was born in Alberta, Canada in 1943, and had to overcome childhood polio, a disease that required her to develop a unique playing style because she could not play as other guitarists did. But this song, “All I Want”, from her 1971 album, Blue shows just how unique her playing was. Rolling Stone ranks the album number 30 I their list of the top 500 albums of all time.
She’s influenced a long list of artists who, in their own right, have also been influential in their own right. The list includes Prince, Bjork, Taylor Swift, Herbie Hancock, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Diamond, Chaka Kahn, Annie Lennox, and Donna Summer, Jewel, Sara Bareilles and others. With a voice that sweetly and smoothly jumped back and forth through high and low notes and a knack for blending other popular styles of music with the folky strumming of her acoustic guitar, Mitchell also brought the freedom of crossing genres to other folk pickers. For over sixty years, Joni has shared her considerable gifts, drawing from folk, pop, rock, classical, and jazz, Her songs often reflect on social and philosophical ideals as well as her feelings about romance, womanhood, disillusionment and joy.
Pete Seeger was an early influence, but so were jazz musicians, like Charles Mingus, for instance. Captured by her muse, she dropped out of school in favor of playing folk gigs as a solo artist, where she met Buffy. Her early songs, in those folk years, included Among her composing credits were “Both Sides Now”, “Blue”, “ “Big Yellow Taxi”, “Chelsea Morning”, “Carey”. “Free Man in Paris” and “You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio” are all among her earliest, and still best known compositions. I think this one, “Court and Spark”, is quintessential Joni. The sincerity in her delivery, the poetry in her lyrics, the musicality in her delivery, the way she exposes her bare emotions in the song. I’ve always loved it. Like Paul Simon, and the other ‘60s icons, Joni’s deep discography extends for decades, besides her live albums and compilations, she produced 19 albums of original material. Mitchell is the sole producer credited on most of her albums, including all her work in the 1970s. Her artistic control runs clear through to the personally designed covers on her albums.
In 2016, she suffered an aneurysm. It’s been a hard journey for her since then, but she is facing it in the same brave way she faced other setbacks in her life. In a recent interview with the Guardian, she said, “Polio didn't grab me like this, but the aneurysm took away a lot more, really. It took away my speech and my ability to walk. And, you know, I got my speech back quickly, but the walking I'm still struggling with.”
That’s grit. That’s strength. That’s the spirit that folk music has breathed into our culture since the earliest days of American music.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode in the American Song podcast series. If you’d like to dig deeper into the people and stories and history of American music, why not visit the American Song facebook page at AmericanSongpodcast.facebook.com. I’m Joe Hines, and I’ll see you later!