From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States

Theory and Society

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 501-543

  Eyerman, Ron ^a   Barretta, Scott ^a  

^a LUND UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21444445288     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF00160675     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Some folklorists and Americanists prefer to describe the folk revival as one rather long historical process, with emphasis on continuity rather than change, cf. Neil V. Rosenberg in his "Introduction" to Transforming Tradition. Folk Music Revivals Examined (Rosenberg, editor, 1993).
2. Others, such as Robert Cantwell, whose "When We Were Good. Class and Culture in the Folk Revival" directly follows Rosenburg's in that volume of essays, stress the differences between the American folk revivals in the 1930s and the 1960s. In this article, we follow a path between these extremes. We recommend caution in using the idea of "traditional American music." The notion that such a thing exists is a matter of controversy among folklorists and musicologists. For a recent discussion of this controvery by someone who makes a strong case for interpreting "traditional music" as an ongoing process of recreation and reinvention, rather than a fixed cannon, see Gene Bluestein, Poplore (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
3. As opposed to European variants, American populism has often found left-wing political expression. Especially in rural regions of the midwest and southwest, populist movements have given voice to the needs of small farmers against their two main enemies in the large cities "back east," such as New York and Washington, where the seat of political and economic power lay. American populism has spoken for the "little guy," the "common man," against the organized "power elite," as C. Wright Mills expressed it. Why this took left-wing and not right-wing expression has to do with particulars of the American political culture. This fascinating topic, which would have to include a discussion of the uses of folk-art as well as music for political use, cannot be addressed in any detail here. The notion of authenticity plays a key role in folk revivals, as well as in right-wing conservative movements. On the different categories of actors in folk revivals as related to "authenticity," see Ellen Stekert's "Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930-1966" in Transforming Tradition. Stekert lists four categories: (1) traditional singers, rooted in an oral tradition, (2) imitators, urban-based copiers of this tradition, (3) utilizers, who do not try to copy, but rather make use of some aspects of the tradition, (4) the "new aesthetic," which merge various genres and sounds in an urban context, including "folk" among them (96-100).
4. Quoted in Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie, A Life (New York: Knopf, 1980), 173.
5. Writers and poets in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s interpreted the role of the intellectual in just this way: to preserve a way of life, that of the rural, southern Negro, through the printed text. For a historical analysis of the concept "intellectual," see Ron Eyerman, Between Culture and Politics: Intellectuals in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
6. Quoted in Woody Guthrie, 174.
7. For a discussion of this approach, see Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991),
8. and for its application to music, Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, "Social Movements and cultural transformation: Popular music in the 1960s," Media, Culture & Society 17 (1995): 449-468.
9. On the production of culture approach, see Richard Peterson, editor, The Production of Culture (London: Sage, 1976),
10. and Diana Crane, The Production of Culture (London: Sage, 1992).