CHAPTER 17 | THE URBAN FOLK REVIVAL 431
In the civil rights movement, black Southerners used the weapons of civil
disobedience and nonviolent confrontation to fi ght for civil liberties. They
also educated whites about the evils of segregation. In 1955 a boycott led by the
twenty-six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. succeeded in desegre-
gating public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. And in the early 1960s
“sit-ins” and “freedom marches” came to be standard nonviolent tactics. Black
citizens joined forces to secure the equality guaranteed in principle by federal
court decisions, and eventually by the landmark Civil Rights Act that Congress
passed in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It seems no coincidence that in 1954–55, when the laws supporting segrega-
tion in the South were being challenged, young white audiences in the South and
around the country were embracing black-derived musical styles as their own.
Teenagers who bought rock and roll records surely did so more as fans of the
music than as champions of racial equality. Yet by accepting rock and roll with
enthusiasm, white teenagers endorsed a sensibility shaped by black Americans.THE URBAN FOLK REVIVAL
Though rock and roll was not explicitly tied to political causes, the same could not
be said for folk music in the postwar era. Taking their cue from Woody Guthrie,
Alan Lomax, and other politically engaged fi gures of the prewar years, folk reviv-
alists saw their musical activities as extensions of their political beliefs, whether
or not that meant singing songs with overt social messages. The urban folk
revival—the postwar embrace of traditional music by people outside the commu-
nities in which it originated—met the goals of all three spheres of musical activity.
While upholding the continuity of the traditional, the revivalists also made an
argument for the music’s universality; like classical music, but without classical
music’s agents of notation, formal training, or aesthetic criticism, folk music tran-
scended its circumstances of origin to hold meaning for people of widely varying
backgrounds and conditions. And beginning in the postwar years, the revivalists
proved that folk music could meet the popular sphere’s demands for accessibility.
Nowhere was that accessibility more evident than in the music of the Weav-
ers, a vocal quartet formed in the late 1940s as a successor to the Almanac Sing-
ers (see chapter 14). Led by the strong voices and magnetic stage personalities of
Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert, the Weavers were singing American and inter-
national folk songs at union rallies and on college campuses when they were
“discovered” by Gordon Jenkins, a mainstream popular record producer and
arranger. Working with Jenkins, the Weavers had a number 1 pop hit in 1950
with “Goodnight Irene,” a song by Leadbelly. In the next three years the Weavers
had ten other Top 40 hits, but their label, Decca, dropped them summarily when
Seeger and quartet member Lee Hays were accused of being communists, a
career-busting charge at a time when Cold War tensions were at their height and
Senator Joseph McCarthy was fanning the fl ames of anticommunist sentiment.
Despite the taint of association with communism, folk music continued to be
commercially successful in the hands of performers and producers who pack-
aged it with pop trimmings. In 1958 “Tom Dooley,” a traditional Appalachian mur-
der ballad, reached number 1 on the pop charts in a version by the Kingston Trio,
a group of three clean-cut young men who avoided all but the mildest politicaldesegregationthe Weavers172028_17_412-439_r3_sd.indd 431 23/01/13 10:58 AM