Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals

314 Pages·2010·1.6 MB·English

by  David King Dunaway

SINGING OUT
SINGING OUT
An Oral History of America’s
Folk Music Revivals
DAVID KING DUNAWAY
MOLLY BEER
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunaway, David King.
Singing out: an oral history of America’s folk music revivals
/David King Dunaway, Molly Beer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19537834-4
1. Folk music—United States—History and criticism.
2. Folk songs, English—United States—History and criticism.
3. Oral tradition—United States. I. Beer, Molly. II. Title.
3. Oral tradition—United States. I. Beer, Molly. II. Title.
ML3551.D83 2010
781.62′13009—dc22
2009034127
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Frontispiece: Collector Anne Warner records Frank Proffitt, source of the
Kingston Trio’s first hit song, “Tom Dooley,” in Pick Britches Valley, North
Carolina, 1941.
Photo by Frank Warner, courtesy of the Frank and Anne Warner Collection
This book is dedicated to all those who have heard a good old song,
found its lyrics, and sung it to themselves or anyone else.
Contents
Foreword by Pete Seeger
Introduction by David King Dunaway
1 I NEVER HEARD A HORSE SING IT! Defining Folk Music
2 EARLY COLLECTORS
3 MUSIC FOR THE MASSES
4 GREENWICH VILLAGE: 1940s
5 AM I IN AMERICA? The Red Scare
6 FOLK BOOM
7 MOVEMENT MUSIC
8 FOLK-ROCK
9 NU FOLK: The Music Changes, but the Beat Goes On
10 THE POWER OF MUSIC
Notes on the Interviews
Biographies of Interviewees
Notes
Bibliography
Discography
Index
Foreword
Pete Seeger
Singing Out is a story of the links in what I think of as one of the world’s most
important chains, namely the chain of people’s singers. I’m proud to be one of
these links; I hope there are many more links to come. I’m glad there’s a book
about such links.
People give me too much credit because they’ve heard me. They don’t know
about people like Alan Lomax, or Woody Guthrie, and a whole lot of other
people. Not to speak of Francis Child, or Cecil Sharp, and so on. And my father.
I just happen to be the link that they’ve heard of, so they think I’m the daddy of
it all. Of course this is not true. I look upon Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, and
Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan, and countless lesser known people as more links in
this chain. I look upon poet Taras Shevchenko of the Ukraine, and that fellow in
Paris back in the thirteenth century—the Romantic poet, who lived with the
lowlifes of Paris, with the cutthroats, and thieves—François Villon. We’re all
part of this chain. People who use poems and songs to help turn people’s heads
around. In one way or another. I’m still working on it in a thousand ways, and I
hope this book can be a contribution to it. I think that songwriting and singing as
an art form have generally been looked down on more than they should be.
People think, well the symphony’s on a high plane; the novel’s on a high
plane; but I quote Béla Bartók, who said, “A song is just a short form that’s on
just as high a plane of art as anything else.” And I’d like to encourage more
people to be songwriters. I’d like it if everybody in the world thought of singing
and songwriting as part of their life, just as much as cooking or eating, or tossing
a baseball, or swimming. It’s something creative you do with words and tunes
and friends.
I decided I would be a musician in 1940, when I came back from that summer
having supported myself singing in saloons. I’d spent the whole summer. I’d
hitchhiked around, came back in good health. I hadn’t had to write home for
money, or to telephone home from jail. (Slept in a couple of jails.) I decided
Alan Lomax was right: maybe I’d better stick with music. I was really enjoying
it. I knew I’d never starve as long as I could pick a banjo. It was quite a victory.
Music became a device for me to get to meet people. I couldn’t have gone
into a saloon and ordered a glass of beer and started talking to people; I was too
shy. But if I went into a saloon with a banjo in front of me, and they asked me to
play, and I got started talking that way, that was fine.
I remember I got Woody Guthrie to teach me five or six of the songs which
would get me by.
I said, “Woody, what kind of songs will get me some coins if I sing them?”
“Well,” he says, “Try ‘Makes No Difference Now,’ and ‘Be Nobody’s
Darling but Mine’; and a few Jimmie Rodgers’s blues can’t go wrong.”
So I learned half a dozen songs from him, Gene Autry songs, and other ones,
and armed with these, I walked into my first saloon, just like he told me.
He said: “Now don’t start singing right away. Just keep that banjo slung on
your back. Nurse a nickel beer as long as you can. Sooner or later someone’s
gonna say, ‘Kid, can you play that thing?’
“And don’t be too eager. Say, ‘Well, just a bit.’
“Keep on sipping your beer.
“Sooner or later someone will say, ‘Kid, I got a quarter for you if you’ll pick
us a tune.’
“Now you play your best piece.”
When it comes to folk music revivals, I have had my doubts. Take a revival
song like “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.” Here was a song I sang only half
well. When you think of how truly magnificent it must have been when done by
a bunch of sweating black people rowing ashore from Sullivan’s Island, from
those islands to the mainland, 150 years ago. It must have been an absolutely
magnificent thing. The raw voices in the formal sense—but superbly trained
voices in the sense that they’d been singing all their lives. Making up new verses
and laughing as they think of a new verse to it. Who is Michael? Is it the
Archangel Michael? The Michael at the oar? It’s full of fluid ambiguity. The
sunlight beating down, and the original situation probably would be something
unforgettable.
In 1867, Charles Pickard Ware grabbed his pencil and paper and said, “I must
get this down.” And he wrote down as much as he could and then afterward he
went around to the singers and said, “What verse was that you were singing?”
They said, “You mean you’re writing this down? Wow, well here’s what I
was singing.”
So then his book Slave Songs of the United States comes out and sits on that
shelf. Ninety years later Tony Saletan goes through the book page by page. He
shrewdly selects three verses out of fifteen or twenty. He teaches the song to me,
and I teach it to the Weavers. We went to Carnegie Hall singing it.
Now it comes back to me from numerous schools and summer camps, such a
pale wishy-washy piece of music compared to what it was once. And I realize
that my own singing of it is kind of pale and wishy-washy, compared to what it
was once. It makes me wonder, is it possible to revive folk music? Well, I finally
came to the conclusion: yes, it is possible. We can try. All you can do in this
world is try. And a good attempt at trying is sure better than never having tried.
Do you remember the man, Edward FitzGerald, who did the translation of
Omar Khayyám saying “Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle?” They said,
“Your translation is nowhere near as good as the original.” He said, “But the
original is sitting there on a piece of paper, with no one to read it. It’s dead.”
So, better a live sparrow.
I believe songs have a purpose, obviously, or else I wouldn’t be doing what
I’m doing. And occasionally I’ve come across well-known people who say
something similar. John L. Lewis talked about the union songs, and Martin
Luther King, Jr., talked about the civil rights songs. Historians have talked about
the Irish song “Lillibullero” having cost King James his throne, and Anatole
France has said songs have overthrown kings and emperors. I think you can
overstate the case, because quite often songs try to, but they don’t. But, if there’s
a human race still here a hundred years from now, I believe historians will agree
that songs are one of the reasons.
Songs have proved a wonderful, flexible art form, going from one person to
the other. It doesn’t have to be written down; it can be memorized. And whereas
mural painters need walls, dancers need floors, sculptors need warehouses,
novelists need printers, and composers need symphonies—songwriters are lucky.