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hard drug use]. While “weed” would become the most popular recreational
drug in America in the 1960s and the source of songs, humor, and social com-
mentary, it was already well-known in the jazz communities of the 1950s.
More than anywhere else, one could find Blacks and Whites listening to the
same music, sharing the same good feelings, and maybe even sharing a toke
in a jazz club.
Jazz was not the only musical political movement in the 1950s. That era
also saw a revival in one of America’s older and more traditional music forms,
folk–but with a sharper, political edge than before. There had been a long
tradition of political folk music, going back to the songs of Joe Hill of the
Wobblies at the turn of the century and Woody Guthrie during the depression
years. In fact, it would be difficult to find any kind of labor meeting or rally
without folk music being played up through World War II.
But the need for “patriotism” during the war, and the impact of McCarthyism
afterwards, made it impossible to have a good career singing such songs, so folk
musicians spent the better part of a decade playing in small coffee houses or
in some cases, as with Pete Seeger and his group “The Weavers,” trying to fight
allegations of being communist and avoiding government repression. While
Guthrie’s career tailed off in the 1950s due to serious health problems, other
folk artists emerged, and in some cases re- emerged, to present Americans with
a revival of “protest music.” Next to Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter, better known
as Leadbelly, and Seeger were the best-known. A folk collector named Alan
Lomax heard of Leadbelly, who had been jailed in Sugarland, Texas on murder
charges [and where he wrote the famous song “Midnight Special”].
Lomax became Leadbelly’s manager and turned him into a national celeb-
rity. Much of Leadbelly’s music was traditional folk, but he also wrote politi-
cal songs about World War II, the Scottsboro Boys [young blacks unjustly
accused of raping white women], and, perhaps his most biting tune, “Bourgeois
Blues,” which he composed after being denied a room at a hotel in Washington
D.C. because he was black [“Well, them white folks in Washington they know
how/to call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow/Lord, it’s a bourgeois
town”]. Seeger, whose career has spanned eight decades from the Roosevelt
era to the present–he performed at the concert for Barack Obama’s inaugu-
ral–was, like Guthrie, active in labor and civil rights issues and often accused
of being a Communist. For a brief time he and his group, The Weavers, were
very popular, and had a number one hit, “Goodnight Irene,” which had been