Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival

329 Pages·2010·5.456 MB·English

by  Ray Allen

GoNE To THe country
The New Lost City Ramblers
&
the folk music revival
ray a(cid:31) En
Gone to the Country
music in american life
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

frontispiece
Tom Paley (banjo), Mike Seeger (fiddle), John Cohen (guitar).
Photograph by Robert Frank, New York City, 1960.
© Robert Frank.
Publication of this book was supported by a grant from the
L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 6 5 4 3 2
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Ray.
Gone to the country : the New Lost City Ramblers
and the folk music revival / Ray Allen.
p. cm. — (Music in American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03560-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-07747-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. New Lost City Ramblers.
2. Folk musicians—United States.
I. Title.
ml421.n515a75 2010
781.62'1300922—dc22 [b] 2010015369
To
laurie, ruby, and rose,
and in memory of
mike seeger (1933–2009),
the best friend old-time music ever had

Contents
Acknowledgments / ix
Introduction: Reviving Tradition in Modern America / 1
1 The Seeger Family Discovers the Folk / 9
2 Yale Hoots and Washington Square Jams / 25
3 The Ramblers Take the Stage, 1958–1959 / 41
4 Seeger, Cohen, and Paley Perform the Folk, 1959–1961 / 67
5 Paley Departs and Schwarz Arrives, 1961–1962 / 104
6 Seeger, Cohen, and Schwarz Perform the Folk, 1962–1964 / 123
7 Gone to the Country, 1965–1968 / 156
8 A Second Decade, 1969–1979 / 192
9 Thinking Legacy and Moving On / 221
10 Passing for Traditional and Rethinking Folk Revivalism / 243
Discographic Notes / 251
Notes on Sources / 253
Notes / 255
Index / 287

Acknowledgments
Gone to the Country was made possible by the efforts of many. First
and foremost, my gratitude to the four Ramblers: Mike Seeger,
John Cohen, Tom Paley, and Tracy Schwarz. Without their patient
cooperation during hours of interviews and informal conversa-
tions this book could not have been written. My greatest disap-
pointment is that Mike Seeger did not live to see the completion
of this work. My deepest condolences to the entire Seeger family,
and special thanks to Mike’s wife, Alexia Smith, for helping me
sort through and copy portions of his personal archive.
Thanks to the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities
and the Office of the Provost at Brooklyn College, CUNY, for their
generosity in providing me with the released time from teach-
ing that made this project possible. I am grateful to Judith Tick
and Ellie Hisama for introducing me to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s
work during a conference we coordinated honoring the cen-
tennial of her birth in 2001. That event, where I first met Mike
Seeger, became the impetus for this project. Thanks also to my
colleagues in the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Mu-
sic at Brooklyn College—Jeff Taylor, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton,
Salim Washington, and David Grubbs—for constantly challeng-
ing me to think about American music in innovative new ways
and to ponder where folk music fits into the larger puzzle.
Steve Weiss and his staff at the Southern Folklife Collection
at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
and Dan Sheehy, Mary Monseur, Jeff Place, and Stephanie Smith
of Smithsonian Folkways gave graciously of their time to help me
secure many of the recordings, photographs, and written sources
that are the foundation of this book. Thanks to Bill Ferris and
Marcie Cohen Ferris at the University of North Carolina for their
encouragement and for putting me in touch with their research
assistant, Aaron Smithers. Elijah Wald generously shared record-
ings of early Ramblers concerts from his personal collection.
Laurie Matheson and her staff at the University of Illinois Press
skillfully guided the manuscript through the entire publication
process. Thanks also to Angela Gibson and to Mary Hill for their