| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ronald D. Cohen. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2002. Pp.xiii, 364. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95.
Many of us who came of age in the era of rock and roll have looked skeptically on the folk music revival that crested in the early 1960s. Like the proverbial environmentalist who loves trees but hates people, some suspect folkies celebrated the idea of the working class but were a good deal less enamored of an actual working-class person—like, say, the young Elvis Presley. Ronald D. Cohen's mild-mannered book does not attempt to resolve this or other tensions in the folk revival (he cites, for example, Mad magazine parodies like "Ballads of a New England Accountant" and "Authentic Old Syndicate Songs" [p. 158]). Yet such expansiveness is a signal quality of the book and is its greatest strength.	1
Cohen begins his account in the wake of the documentarian, historically conscious impulses of the New Deal with such standard figures as ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax, performers like Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and entrepreneurs like Moses Asch. Yet one of the surprises—and pleasures—of this account are some of the other figures who show up: Earl Robinson, Paul Robeson, and Nicholas Ray, who directed a radio show on folk music for CBS. While noting the sectarian infighting that characterized the scene, as it did the political Left with which most folk musicians identified, Cohen takes a pluralistic approach that includes people who straddled other genres and media, like Hank Williams and Carl Sandburg. With the mid-century advent of groups like the Almanac Singers and (especially) the Weavers, folk music took on more specific contours and was recognized as a discrete cultural movement.	. . .

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