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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 2002)
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| IN CONTRAST TO THE DEARTH of good material on the English and Canadian folksong revivals, there is already a huge number of works on the post-war American revival: biographies, autobiographies, reminiscences, collections of essays, collections of primary documents, articles, and doctoral dissertations. One hardly knows where to begin in approaching such a splendid array of printed matter. A book such as Rainbow Quest, which attempts to make sense of it all by providing a synthesis of the literature and an overview of the roots and evolution of this significant cultural phenomenon, is therefore very welcome. It is not an easy task to accomplish well. Others before Cohen have tried and, in the main, failed. The most recent attempt was Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (1996). Cantwell chose to write a series of reflective essays on various aspects of the revival, but his book provided very little factual information, and seemed curiously selective in its emphases. While useful and sometimes insightful, it was hardly the definitive history for which we have so long been waiting. |
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Cohen's alternative survey is moderate in length (290 pages, plus preface, endnotes, and index). The book has many virtues, although, surprisingly, it lacks a bibliography. It is thorough, informative, well documented, and even-handed in its coverage of those aspects of the American revival on which its author chooses to focus. However, as an overview of the entire movement it has some weaknesses. Cohen does not go back far enough in his search for the roots of the revival. He is good on the work of such American pioneers as Carl Sandburg and John Lomax, but he needed to look further back than the 1920s and further afield than the US. The post-war American revival was one of several branches from a stem rooted in the British Isles. If you analyze Joan Baez's early material, for example, you will find that she mainly sang a mixture of traditional ballads and folk-lyrics. The ballads were mainly selected from those collected from English and Scottish sources during the Victorian era by Harvard professor Francis James Child. The folk-lyrics were often songs collected in the Southern Appalachians by English folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles, or by their successors working for the Library of Congress. Many of the topical folksongs written during the 1950s and 1960s (including several of Bob Dylan's) used melodies that derived from traditional song. And the resurgence of traditional music — unaccompanied ballad singing, fiddle playing, rebel songs, and Celtic stylings — was a major dimension of the revival; indeed, the foundation that underlay both protest song and the commercial folk boom. Equally important was the way in which a whole gamut of singer- songwriters developed traditional forms in their search for self-expression. Cohen minimizes and neglects these important dimensions of the movement. His version of its history is largely restricted to topical song and to the rise and fall of such big names as the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, Baez, Dylan, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. |
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The people most strikingly absent from Rainbow Quest are thus all the other singers. A considerable number of artists — country bluesmen, urban bluesmen, "old timey" musicians, bluegrass pickers, and a few singer-songwriters — do get brief mentions, but their work receives no concerted analysis. One looks in vain for recognition of the important roles played in the 1950s by such figures as Buell Kazee, Bascomb Lamar Lunsford, Susan Reed, and Cynthia Gooding, or in the 1960s by Eric Anderson, Judy Collins, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Ritchie, among others. Why is this? In part it is a matter of space. By choosing to give the floor to administrators and journalists, Cohen left too few pages available to do full justice to the many talented singers and instrumentalists. But the explanation goes beyond this. The truth is that Cohen is not very interested in the music. Only one song, "Tom Dooley," receives any substantive analysis, and none are quoted. There are no musical examples. Nor is there ever any discussion of musical styles, except for Dylan's return to his rock 'n' roll roots. In short, the music gets short shrift in Rainbow Quest, and so does the poetry in the lyrics. It is as if Woody Guthrie never composed "Deportees," Pete Seeger "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Dylan "Desolation Row," Joni Mitchell "Woodstock," and Baez never recorded "La Colombe (The Dove)" or Judy Collins "Marat/Sade." |
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Rainbow Quest is therefore not a survey of the entire American folk music revival. Notwithstanding the book's subtitle, it is essentially an institutional history, covering the years 1945 to 1967. The focus is on organizations and on the people who founded and ran them. The reader is treated to a great deal of fascinating data on clubs, coffee houses, stores, magazines, and festivals, much of it culled by Cohen from interviews conducted with participants or from the papers left behind by others. For example, we follow the troubled history of the People's Songs cooperative and its successor, the People's Artists booking agency. The changing editorial perspective of Sing Out, managed for most of its early life by Irwin Silber, is analyzed. The varying fortunes of several folk festivals, including Berkeley and Newport, are chronicled. The evolving viewpoint of Izzy Young, proprietor of the Folklore Center (a Greenwich Village music store) is traced over a ten-year period (1957-67), using Young's diary and his semi-regular "Frets and Frails" column in Sing Out. Cohen has amassed a large body of hitherto mainly unused primary source material, and he quotes from it extensively, thereby recreating a first-hand feel for the ongoing debates and controversies within the movement over such issues as authenticity, protest song, commercialism, and the very nature of "folk music" itself. There is a striving for racial equality in the coverage: one of Cohen's frequently quoted activists is Julius Lester, and, as might be expected, considerable space is given to the reciprocal interaction between the Civil Rights movement and the folk boom. Another striking virtue of the book is the fairly systematic attempt at geographical evenhandedness. This is not just a history of the New York scene. Cohen makes a concerted attempt to also follow events on the East Coast (Boston/Cambridge), the mid-West (Chicago, primarily), and the West Coast (LA/San Francisco). On the other hand, the focus is almost entirely on the big cities, and the Asheville festival, for example, receives only a few brief remarks. |
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Although this is in no sense a polemical work — indeed its accurate and balanced documenting of different opinions on divisive issues is one of its virtues — Cohen's preferences (and his politics) can be read between the lines. For example, he has little sympathy for Bascomb Lamar Lunsford's anti-communism or for Burl Ives' repudiation of his leftist connections. His heroes are Guy Carawan, Izzy Young, and Julius Lester, and he is willing to print without negative comment the latter's scathing and mean-spirited attack on Baez (a dedicated campaigner for racial equality and against the Vietnam war) as a good-looking white "bitch" whose only trials were "deciding whether she should fly first-class or tourist." (207) He judges the revival to be in decline after 1966 because the commercial boom began to wane and politically engaged singers turned away from civil rights to the anti-war movement. This view undervalues the wealth of contemporary folksong created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as neglecting the resurgence of traditional music that fueled the Celtic revival. So although Rainbow Quest comes fairly close to satisfying the need, we are still waiting for a comprehensive history of the American folk revival. |
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David Gregory
Athabasca University |
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