434 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
were still living, such as Clarence Ashley, whose “Cuckoo Bird” (1929) became a
favorite record among postwar folk revivalists.
One infl uential LP anthology from this period testifi es to the revivalists’
willingness to accept early race and hillbilly records not as commercial prod-
ucts but as documents of disappearing folk traditions. In 1952 Folkways released
the six-LP Antholog y of American Folk Music, compiled by the eccentric avant-garde
fi lmmaker Harry Smith from his personal collection of race and hillbilly 78s.
Augmented by Smith’s liner notes, a bizarre mixture of the scholarly, the mysti-
cal, and the humorous, the anthology came to have an almost talismanic power
among young folk enthusiasts, for whom these obscure records, nearly forgot-
ten though recorded only two or three decades earlier, seemed to speak from an
American past both remote and exotic—what the rock critic Griel Marcus would
later call “the old, weird America.”
Ironically, the music in the Harry Smith anthology, though drawn from old
commercial recordings, came to represent for many young people an alterna-
tive to what they viewed as the crass commercialism of postwar America. They
fancied it a link to a more honest, direct, and authentic past. In that respect, the
folk revivalists resembled another postwar countercultural movement, that of
the Beat poets such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. Although the Beats were
taken more with modern jazz than folk music, their denunciation of conformity
and materialism resonated with the leftist sympathies of many folk musicians.
That nonconformist spirit linked the folk politicizers with the folk preser-
vationists; and even the popularizers often shared similar antiestablishment
values. In fact, although it can be helpful to see the postwar urban folk revival
as a blend of three countervailing tendencies, in practice many musicians par-
ticipated in two or more of these trends, especially after 1960. Joan Baez, for
example, one of the most successful folk artists of the early 1960s, combined
a traditionalist song repertory and considerable guitar skills with a strikingly
beautiful soprano voice that had little to do with traditional vocal styles but had
wide popular appeal. When she began to augment her repertory with topical
songs such as Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday,” about the 1963 bomb-
ing of an Alabama church where civil rights activists had met to organize, Baez
became a leading proponent of all three trends in the folk revival. In the 1960s, at
least partially owing to her infl uence, a new generation of folk musicians rose to
prominence by mixing traditional folk songs and performance styles with newly
composed topical songs—soon to be called protest songs—presented with a care-
fully packaged stage deportment that refl ected popular sensibilities.BOB DYLAN AND THE GREENWICH VILLAGE
FOLK SCENEOne musician who combined old and new forms to comment on current issues
was Bob Dylan. Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, Dylan
played rock and roll piano and guitar in high school and got to know folk music
mainly from records while briefl y attending the University of Minnesota. In
1960 he made a New York pilgrimage to the bedside of an ailing Woody Guthrie,
whose records and autobiography, Bound for Glory, had made a profound impres-
sion on him. Donning the mantle of Guthrie, who a generation earlier had writ-
ten topical songs with political messages, Dylan began performing in Greenwich
Village folk clubs, modeling his singing and guitar playing on Guthrie’s stylethe Harry Smith
anthologythe folk countercultureprotest songs172028_17_412-439_r3_sd.indd 434 23/01/13 10:58 AM