Beginning as a group in 1958, The New Lost City Ramblers string band was a pioneer in historically-informed performance of folk music. In addition, through establishing personal relationships with their source musicians, they helped develop the reciprocity that has characterized both public and academic folklore since the 1960s. The original group consisted of Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley. (Paley, unwilling to make a commitment to a full-time touring and recording career with the others, left in 1962; he was replaced by Tracy Schwarz.) Their defining characteristic was their re-interpretation (some thought it was re-creation) of vocal and instrumental folk music that had appeared on early commercial country recordings from the 1920s and 1930s. In their concerts and their own recordings they were attentive to original detail and respectful of the performers’ original musical accomplishment, sometimes to the point of imitation. Notably, they acquired period instruments and also visited with those singers and musicians who had performed on the early recordings, learning repertoire and technique. In addition, they re-recorded many of them, chiefly on LPs for Folkways Recordings, and presented their source musicians in concerts and festivals, honoring them and attempting to give folksingers like Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Dock Boggs, and others supplemental incomes in their old age. Their work helped establish a new relationship between middle-class, urban Americans and the traditional side of folk music, which, for many, represented a vision of an alternative way of life, soon to be termed countercultural. Writers at the time called it the folk music revival, and it is both to that revival and the Ramblers’ lives and career that Ray Allen addresses himself in this important new book.
In 1958, when the Ramblers began touring and recording, academic folklorists in the United States were still hooked on ballads, though a few notable exceptions could be found in George Pullen Jackson’s studies of hymn tunes in the 1930s and Samuel Bayard’s study of fiddle tunes (1944), along with comparative musicologist George Herzog’s broader vision of American folksong. Commercially recorded music, and popular music in general, was thought to be debased; it was not until the mid-1960s that academics turned to the rich legacy of folksong on early commercial country music recordings (as in the Journal of American Folklore, 1965). In the 1930s public culture outside the academic world, the folksong entrepreneurs, often folksingers themselves, such as John Lomax, Carl Sandburg, John Jacob Niles, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Jean Thomas, collected folksongs, concertized, compiled song books, organized and directed festivals, and promoted various kinds of American folk music. Among this group the next generation, especially Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and The Weavers, turned the emphasis, in the 1940s and 1950s, away from the prevailing conservatism and ballad Anglophilia, and toward songs of the frontier, songs of immigrants and African Americans, and songs of working-class occupations such as cowboys and miners. Call them regionalists, call them nationalists; call them musical conservatives, call them political radicals; call them folksingers, call them interpreters; call them folklore democrats with a small d. Their project was to constitute a collective memory of a made-in-America folk music, and they succeeded in ushering in a folk revival that the Ramblers both encouraged and, at the same time, helped to transform.
The Ramblers might be viewed as heirs to the folklore democrats, as Mike Seeger was Pete’s much younger half-brother, and John Cohen married Mike’s sister Penny. Yet their ideas of authenticity embraced more than faithful reconstruction of an earlier repertoire. In visiting with older source musicians, learning from them, documenting their music, recording them, and promoting them at concerts and festivals, the Ramblers set a 1960s example of “giving back” to the tradition bearers, a practice that came to fuller fruition in the public folklore programs that were established in the US government and directed by these folklore democrats and their heirs in the following decade. This giving back was the person-to-person reciprocity that, in the generation that came of age during the folk revival, supplanted the idea that the folklorist collected folkloric items borne by a passive informant. In the 1960s this reciprocity was evident in such venues as the Friends of Old Time Music, in New York, where the Ramblers presented and promoted many of their source musicians; and in events like the annual Newport Folk Festival, with its mix of traditional and revivalist folk musicians, all performing on the same stage, supported by the Newport Folk Foundation after 1963.
This visiting with and giving back to source musicians also changed some revivalists’ ideas of what folk music could be: a living cultural tradition, something that one might learn from the source and make an integral part of one’s life. During the prime years of the revival, from roughly 1957 to 1965, the folklore democrats’ ethos that folk music was an American egalitarian legacy prevailed. Iconic here were Pete Seeger’s concerts in which everyone sang along with him, the enormous popularity of folksingers Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Freedom Singers joining with everyone on stage and the audience at Newport all to lift their voices in “We Shall Overcome.”
But gradually, and after about 1963, the folk revival split in two. In one faction of the revival, emphasis on tradition-bearers such as those the Ramblers had promoted led to named-genre revivals of Cajun music, old-time and bluegrass music, blues, and, eventually, other ethnic or what came to be called roots musics in the United States. A distinction arose between tradition-bearers who had grown up in the folk cultures whose expressive culture they carried, and revivalists such as the Ramblers who, not native to those folk cultures, nonetheless chose to participate, learn, and perpetuate their traditions. As the egalitarian folk ethos—“we are all one”—gave ground to a roots view of America as a diverse, multicultural nation, questions arose as to whether revivalists were true heirs or usurpers. Even if they had become competent performers and had learned the traditional repertoires, as the Ramblers had done, did a culture barrier stand in the way of their authenticity? Did they have the ethical right, in other words, to present themselves as representatives of these musical traditions? And what if the natives had adopted them, had even accepted them into their own musical ensembles—did they thus become authenticated?
These questions were, of course, resolved not by philosophy but by power and authority. Native to these folk groups, tradition-bearing musicians such as Dewey Balfa, Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, B. B. King, and Tommy Jarrell became leaders as well as cultural heroes while revivalists played supporting roles. These tradition-bearers were the folk artists that the folklore democrats (and not a few revivalists) who became official culture bureaucrats supported, in terms of funding, festivals, and tours, sponsored by government agencies such as the Smithsonian’s folklife office, the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, all established in the 1970s.
The other faction of the ongoing revival was led by an urban middle-class, some of whom had “gone to the country” during the Vietnam War era to forge a new alternative rural culture (the counterculture, as it was called then). This group accepted a different idea of folk music as living tradition, one represented by the early Bob Dylan, with roots in Woody Guthrie: singer-songwriters accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars. These democratic voices were strong in the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests; the egalitarian ethos prevailed. Instead of becoming multicultural, their concerns turned inward, with singers such as James Taylor and Nanci Griffith and others carrying the torch. Bob Dylan remained an important, if enigmatic figure, carrying the singer-songwriter tradition from public protest music toward a more personal vision. Journalists at the time made much of the spectacular failures of the countercultural movement, the dissolution of communes, the laughable efforts of young middle-class suburbanites to live off the land, the misguided attempts to find happiness in drugs. What the journalists missed was the steady stream of rural in-migrant families, as well as the urban and suburban professionals, who forged lives more consistent with their alternative political and social ideals. They strummed their guitars, listened to folk music, put down roots in their communities, and never forgot the heady days of the 1960s when young people sang folksongs and thought they just might change the world.
Meanwhile the Ramblers continued on their path, individually and collectively, though after about 1971 their audience diminished. Increasingly each pursued individual careers while the group periodically dissolved and then re-formed for special reunion concerts. Part of the reason their audience grew smaller was that in the 1970s most within the counterculture were interested in the singer-songwriters, whose contemporary lyrics spoke to their own personal and cultural concerns. The minority of the folk music audience that was interested in tradition-bearers preferred to get their music from those source musicians, and increasingly not from revivalists like the Ramblers. Within that minority, the musicians (some even were aspiring folklorists) followed in the Ramblers’ footsteps, both in emphasizing musical skill and with a desire to carry forward the musical if not the cultural traditions of the source musicians. Some, like fiddler Alan Jabbour, had formed their own musical groups and based their styles and repertoires on what they had learned from the tradition bearers. Jabbour visited with Henry Reed in the mid-1960s, recorded his repertoire, studied the way he fiddled, and tried to learn as much as he could. Reed’s tunes were featured on recordings by Jabbour’s Hollow Rock String Band in the late 1960s and became important source material for tradition-oriented revivalist fiddlers. Forty years later Jabbour (2009), still under the spell of this music, published musical transcriptions of several with directions for playing them, and after retiring as director of the American Folklife Center took up a new career as a fiddle instructor. Others joined source musicians—as I did when I began playing in Lazy Bill Lucas’ blues band while a graduate student in the late 1960s. In the 1970s among this tradition-oriented wing of the folk revival, visiting and learning directly from source musicians became the new normal, while many embraced their own ethnic roots and learned klezmer, polka, blues, Cajun, and other roots musics.
The Ramblers played a role in re-shaping ideas about authenticity in folk music. For them, sincerity of purpose or genuineness of feeling was insufficient; rather, authentic music arose from craftsmanship and culture. The culture that attracted them was a culture of survival, which they found in the rural working classes of Appalachia, particularly during the Depression. The craft was the high level of musicianship in vernacular styles and techniques which, while far away from classical ones, arose from a culture of tradition and were far more musically accomplished than the typical singer-songwriter products. In occupying this position, the Ramblers had, and still have, a lot to say about this changing construction of folk music in the United States. Mike Seeger developed a career as a musician both with the Ramblers and increasingly apart from them, one in which he continued visiting with and promoting source musicians while he took their music into himself. Before his untimely death in 2009 he had become a master musician, an example of the musical history he espoused. John Cohen, who also has had an important career as a documentary photographer and filmmaker, carried on the “bearing witness” part of the Ramblers’ program with great aplomb, and remains an articulate spokesperson about the Ramblers’ formative period, what they were doing, what they thought they were doing, and what it all meant—and means.
Ray Allen’s book takes up many of these issues, concentrating on the meanings of folk music revivalism and the career of the Ramblers as a group and individually. It is a sensitive portrait of the sometimes fractious relationships among the strong personalities who came together to form this influential group and who each left their individual marks on the folk music revival. Allen interviewed each member extensively and in addition did his archival, biographical, and historical homework quite thoroughly. He gives each of them plenty of opportunity to speak in their own words, while his own interpretive voice is very good at putting the reader back into the music and the issues of those days as they appeared to those who lived through it. Allen’s portrait is not uncritical, but it is also profoundly sympathetic. Anyone who cares about these people and the folk music revival will find it fascinating and informative.
This was an era when folk music impacted the public culture as never before, or since. Its earliest histories, such as Serge Denisoff’s Great Day Coming (1971), concentrated on folk music and radical politics; biographies of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie followed suit. The essays in Transforming Tradition (1993) went in a new direction, showing how the folk revival constructed the traditions it thought it had discovered. Some contemporary writers, such as Mary Beth Hamilton (2008) and Ulrich Adelt (2010), discount the sincerity of the revivalists’ quest for authenticity, while taking pleasure in exposing the revival’s contradictions and hypocrisies. Allen’s gracefully written, well-researched, and rewarding work stands as an important corrective to the contemporary revisionism of Hamilton and Adelt. There is still more to be written about these revivals, not least on the curious role they played in the reconstruction of the academic discipline of folklore among the same generation that came of age in the 1960s; but that is another story, as is the story of what happened to the 1970s counterculture and its important ongoing engagement with music, folk and otherwise.
WORKS CITED
Adelt, Ulrich. 2010. Blues Music in the 1960s: A Story in Black and White. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Bayard, Samuel. 1944. Hill Country Tunes. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society.
Denisoff, R. Serge. 1971. Great Day Coming. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Hamilton, Mary Beth. 2008. In Search of the Blues. New York: Basic Books.
Jabbour, Alan. 2009. Fiddle Tunes Illuminated. Washington, DC: Self-published.
Rosenberg, Neil, ed. Transforming Tradition. Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993.
Wilgus, D.K. and John Greenway, editors. 1965. Hillbilly Issue. Journal of American Folklore 78 (309).
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[Review length: 2372 words • Review posted on October 26, 2011]