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Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, by Ronald D. Cohen
Free PDF Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, by Ronald D. Cohen
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For a brief period from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, folk music captured a mass audience in the United States, as college students and others swarmed to concerts by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In this comprehensive study, Ronald D. Cohen reconstructs the history of this singular cultural moment, tracing its origins to the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on scores of interviews and numerous manuscript collections, as well as his own extensive files, Cohen shows how a broad range of traditions--from hillbilly, gospel, blues, and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic, and political protest music--all contributed to the genre known as folk. He documents the crucial work of John Lomax and other collectors who, with the assistance of recording companies, preserved and distributed folk music in the 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of left-wing politics and the rise of the commercial music marketplace helped to stimulate wider interest in folk music. Stars emerged, such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Josh White. With the success of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio in the 1950s, the stage was set for the full-blown "folk revival" of the early 1960s. Centered in New York's Greenwich Village and sustained by a flourishing record industry, the revival spread to college campuses and communities across the country. It included a wide array of performers and a supporting cast of journalists, club owners, record company executives, political activists, managers, and organizers. By 1965 the boom had passed its peak, as rock and roll came to dominate the marketplace, but the folk revival left an enduring musical legacy in American culture.
- Sales Rank: #4824920 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of Massachusetts Press
- Published on: 2002-11-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.30" h x 6.84" w x 9.00" l, 1.60 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 380 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Thorough, engaging, and informative, this book makes a significant contribution to the field and will be valuable to those teaching or taking courses in American music of the twentieth century.
(Paul F. Wells, director, Center for Popular Music,Middle Tennessee State University)
There is an enormous amount of historical information here. It is wonderful to have it all available in one place.
(Norm Cohen, author of Folksong America: A Twentieth-Century Revival)
Cohen's book goes far toward documenting the cultural phenomenon of the mid-20th-century folk music revival, particularly telling the story of the scene's political and musical roots in and around New York City. This book will become a central piece of the whole story as it continues to be told in cities and venues around the country.
(Betsy Siggins and Millie Rahn, Club Passim/ New England Folk Music Archive Project)
From the Publisher
A well-informed chronicle of the folk music boom in mid-twentieth-century America.
About the Author
Ronald D. Cohen is professor of history at Indiana University Northwest and editor of Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen's Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Uneven, difficult, but worth the time
By Diane Hunt
Rainbow Quest struck me as less than it purports to be; an examination of the folk music revival, which many would agree was a commercial event which began with The Kingston Trio, circa 1958, and continued into the mid-1960's until the diversification of rock music siphoned away it's popular base. Cohen's interest clearly lie in an earlier period, and most of this book covers the period from the father and son team of John and Alan Lomax, the emergence of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, to their immediate succesors, The Weavers.
Stylistically, the early chapters, covering the John Lomax period, covers broad themes; the intersection of North and South, the discovery of various cultural forms and artists, and the association between the Depression era and the songs which it produced. With the advent of Guthrie and Seeger, the book shifts its tone and becomes more of an examination of the functioning of the folk music scene, primarily in New York. The final chapters, dealing with Dylan, Baez and all of those names we know so well, is presented largely in the negative. The actual Folk Revival is presented as a series of failures with little attention given to the legacy of that period.
That said, there is a great deal to be learned from Cohen's work. All the great names of the early period are here and the major turning points are discussed. There are some oddities; Burl Ives falls in for heavy criticism for "selling out", despite the fact that one of the primary themes of Rainbow Quest is the constant tension in the folk world between "authenticity" and public success. It can be difficult at times to read through accounts of meetings of various folk publishing endeavors. There are glimpses, only, of the labor turmoil which set the backdrop for much of the music of the Thirties, Forties and early Fifties, and no little examination of why folk music might be regarded as a threat to society. Nor is the economic upswing of the late Fifties through the mid-Sixties, much discussed. Economic security removed much of the threat from folk music, which made the music more appealing to the middle classes. When rock music became about the personal experience, something Dylan pioneered, folk became too safe for the emerging generation. Folk rock is mentioned as having happened, but there is little more than that.
If what your are looking for is a discussion of popular folk music of the 1960's, Cohen's book is likely to disappoint. If you accept the book on its own terms, however, you can come away with a better understanding of a particular set of threads in the story of the early development of the national folk music scene.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Rainbow Quest
By Arkansas Red
Great stories about the rise of folk music in the United States.
28 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
troubled roots, vexing ambiguities, lasting legacy
By Jerome Clark
In this, the first serious, comprehensive, and scholarly booklength history of the American folk revival (or at least one of them; one can argue that a kind of folk revival is occurring right now), Ronald D. Cohen draws on years of research to document a fascinating cultural moment. If you're interested in the subject, you will definitely want this book, and you will be grateful for its wealth of information. Even those of us who have followed the folk revival for a long time will learn a great deal. I expect to return to the book again and again in search of facts not readily, or at all, available elsewhere.
This, however, is not the sort of revisionist history that one day somebody will write. That becomes apparent on the dedication page, where Cohen honors "Pete Seeger, who has sustained me over the last five decades." If, like me and the counter-hagiographical historians certain to write the next draft of revival history, you consider Seeger something of a sanctimonious hypocrite, you may find Cohen a trifle irksome. On the other hand, you'll find validation in Seeger quotes that Cohen innocently drops, such as an astounding statement about Josef Stalin on page 30. Made in 1993 -- 40 years after the death of a tyrant who killed more people, including Communists, than any other figure in history (between 20 and 40 million, according to best estimates) -- Seeger, a lifelong, self-identified Communist, finally manages what at first looks like a critical assessment, even an apology for his years of service to a spectacularly unworthy cause. On second and further readings, however, Seeger's meaning grows ever murkier and finally takes on positively Orwellian dimensions. For all his public persona as a radical liberal, whatever personal virtues he undoubtedly possesses notwithstanding, Seeger is in his ideological heart radically illiberal. Nothing in this book will convince any attentive reader otherwise.
Cohen himself has nothing unfavorable to say about the Old Left/Popular Front culture that saw traditional music as a useful agitprop tool and proceeded to purge it of all "unprogressive" elements, fashioning a crude caricature of the real stuff. To Cohen the enemies are the anti-Communists -- he appears to make no distinction between liberal anti-Stalinists and demagogic reactionaries like Joe McCarthy and his ilk -- and phrases such as "dark clouds of anticommunism" hover over the text.
He rightly condemns the abominable, anti-democratic practice of blacklisting, which sidelined, for a time, the careers of Seeger and the Weavers. Such victimization, however, does not make them heroes, only victims; in Stalin's Soviet Union dissident balladeers and writers went to the gulag, often never to be seen again. In America in the meantime, after the unpleasantness had passed, Seeger et al. went back to well-paying careers. All the while, they managed to compose not a single protest song about the fate of their counterparts in the unfree nations of the Soviet empire. The Seegerites, after all, were members of that generation of ideologues who, in George Orwell's wry observation, were opposed to fascism but not to totalitarianism. Even their opposition to fascism, however, was conditional. When Stalin and Hitler formed the alliance that started World War II and ended only when Hitler later turned on the USSR, Seeger and his fellow Almanac Singers were unrestrained in their opposition to American intervention against German/Soviet aggression. The conflict in Europe, their songs informed us, came about because of the sinister machinations of greedy British capitalists (the theme of the Almanacs' jaw-dropping rewrite of the traditional "Liza Jane") and therefore Britain's fate was of no concern to decent people. After Hitler attacked Stalin, of course, nobody supported intervention more fervently than these putative pacifists.
The early folk revival was at its core a political movement, and Cohen's is in good part a political book. That affects his treatment of the music, about which he utters scarcely a discouraging word. But it needs to be said that, with the exception of the magnificently gifted Woody Guthrie, the Stalinists produced a vast body of very bad music. Seeger and the Weavers trafficked in a preposterously sentimentalized portrayal not only of Soviet dictators but of ordinary Americans, prominently including union members. As a liberal Democrat who grew up in a union family, I used to entertain fantasies about banjo-smashing whenever I'd hear Seeger burbling another patronizing ditty about the workers' struggle. Seeger, the Weavers, and their comrades seemed to infantilize everything they touched. And yet....
For all their moral and musical failings, they alerted their fellow citizens to our country's (and others') rich heritage of traditional song. They played a large and honorable role in the discovery (in some cases rediscovery) of authentic rural folk artists -- no one more so than folklorist and Marxist Alan Lomax, who alone or, in his youth, with his father John Lomax found Lead Belly and Mississippi Fred McDowell, among many others, and gave them stages and careers. They started folk-music recording labels (most prominently Folkways) which afforded both rural and urban performers a voice and a new audience. Most of the urban music from those days is forgettable, some of it downright cringe-inducing, but the best of it endures. Besides such talented performers as Dave Van Ronk, the Kossoy Sisters, Fred Neil, the Dillards, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott (all, with the exception of the anti-Stalinist socialist Van Ronk, at least artistically apolitical), the second stage of the revival produced one of the towering figures in American music, Bob Dylan -- about whom, oddly, Cohen has relatively little to say. Yet, in going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan both revitalized folk music and freed the revival from the suffocating effects of the Stalinist culture that made it possible. Today's folk musicians are better for it, and so is their music.
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