This is what White folks are doing during the Soul music movement and up rise and civil rights movement etc.
Origins
Folk Music Origins
- Rooted in immigrant folk traditions
- Largely oral tradition, passed from performer to performer
- Every performer will modify the song slightly for their style
- The songs are always changing
- British & Irish tradition especially important
- Goes back to 16th century ballads, fiddle tunes, and dance melodies
- “Scarborough Fair” good example
- Done by Simon & Garfunkel in the 60’s but goes way back
- Mid Atlantic states, the Ozarks
- Folk music helped form country and hillbilly music etc.
- Folk music gets its own audience in the 1930s separate from country & hillbilly music
Folk Revival
- Begins in 1930s & 1940s
- Rooted in conditions of the Great Depression
- Social, economic, cultural, and political upheavals of those years foster interest
- Nostalgia for an idealized, pastoral, and “honest” past in midst f crisis in modern industrial capitalism
- “Real” alternative to mass produced forms of cultural expression
- Folk songs reflect left leaning politics, reflect the plight of the poor, downtrodden, opressed, hungry, unemployed etc.
- “I ain’t got no home in this world anymore” by Woody Guthrie
- Folk songs are reminding people of the times before the depression (even if it was fantasizing that time a bit)
- Folk music speaks to the left side politics of the time
Woody Guthrie
- One of the most important figures of the folk revival of the 1930s-40s
- An Okie, who left Texas for California to escape the dust bowl
- Steeped in folk and blues traditions as he traveled
- Helped foster connection between folk music and leftist politics
- A “fellow traveler”
- “This is land is your land, this land is my land, from California…this land was made for you and me”
- He was a leftist more communist/socialist leaning ideology
- Very against the fascism on the other side
- “I ain’t a Communist necessarily, but I have been in the red all my life”
Pete Seeger
- College-educated New Yorker
- Influenced by hillbilly music and folk traditions
- Saw music as a way to mobilize mass movements and mass politics
- Shared Guthrie’s left-wing politics and anti-fascism When the Cold War starts to ramp up, the fear of communism rises. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin is one person who claims that their are communist socialist spies hiding in the US. This starts The Red Scare. Pete Seeger in particular finds himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1955.
Bob Dylan
Folk Origins
- Robert Zimmerman grew up in Duluth, MN
- He eventually changed his name to Bob Dylan in the 1960s, named after his favorite poet Dylan Thomas
- Joan Baez
- He played at the “I have a dream” speech march in support of Civil Rights movement
- His first record was him reworking and making his own spin on old folk songs
- His second record still had some acoustic reworking of old folk songs but a few originals as well. He started writing his own music, similar to other people in the development of Rock n Roll, doing it before The Beatles etc.
- Still very much in the folk protest singer mode
Dylan Goes Electric
- March 1965, “Bringing It All Back Home”
- First half electric
- Second half acoustic
- Less protest oriented
- Backed by an electric band
- More experimental lyrically
- “Subterranean Homesick Blues” one of the first music videos!
- “Like a Rolling Stone”, July 20, 1965
- Set a new standard in what’s possible in popular music
- Was 6 minutes long, which was new for the time where most songs were 2-3 minutes long for radio/jukebox
- Newport Folk Festival
- A lot of Dylan’s fans were angry with him for leaving his folk roots behind and turning more rock
- UK Tour, May 1966 - more people still mad at him
- Created Folk Rock
- Changed what’s commercially viable
- “Like a Rolling Stone” hits #2 on the BB charts, despite being 6 minutes and 13 seconds long
- Creates rock’s first double album
- Blonde on Blonde, June 20, 1966
- Puts lyrical - and social and political - content at the forefront of rock and roll
- Motorcycle accident, July 1966
- Moves to Woodstock, NY, and largely disappears for a year
- Bob Dylan’s way of writing songs largely influenced groups like The Beatles and other Rock n Rollers to become more independent and write their own songs that focused more on the lyrics and content rather than just “songs about sex” Bob Dylan kind of created a whole new genre of music in Folk Rock. Dylan was the first real “Singer Songwriter”
The Byrds
Simon & Garfunkel
- Started as “Tom & Jerry” doing doo wop stuff
- Broke up, Simon did songwriting, Garfunekl was artist
- They released an album “Wednesday Monring, 3 AM”
- It didn’t do commercially well as a straight folk album
- This was BEFORE Dylan went electric, it was in 1964
- Their album company rereleased the album after Dylan went electric when folk rock was a thing
- Simon & Garfunkel became a huge success after the rerelease
The Singer Songwriter
- Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel were the start of the singer songwriter type of person
- Phil Ochs was another important one, albeit not as famous
- Wrote some political songs about the war in Vietnam after 1965
- A lot of songs about war/soldiers
- Donovan, 1965
- The British Bob Dylan
- “Catch the Wind”
- People like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, their niche of singer songwriter is born out of folk rock