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Israel G. "Izzy" Young was the proprietor of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The literal center of the New York folk music scene, the Center not only sold records, books, and guitar strings but served as a concert hall, meeting spot, and information kiosk for all folk scene events. Among Young's first customers was Harry Belafonte; among his regular visitors were Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Shortly after his arrival in New York City in 1961, an unknown Bob Dyan banged away at songs on Young's typewriter. Young would also stage Dylan's first concert, as well as shows by Joni Mitchell, the Fugs, Emmylou Harris, and Tim Buckley, Doc Watson, Son House, and Mississippi John Hurt. The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel "Izzy" Young collects Young's writing, from his regular column "Frets and Frails" for Sing Out Magazine (1959-1969) to his commentaries on such contentious issues as copyright and commercialism. Also including his personal recollections of seminal figures, from Bob Dylan and Alan Lomax to Harry Smith and Woody Guthrie, this collection removes the rose tinting of past memoirs by offering Young's detailed, day-by-day accounts. A key collection of primary sources on the American countercultural scene in New York City, this work will interest not only folk music fans, but students and scholars of American social and cultural history.
In Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s, Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson present a transatlantic history of folk's midcentury resurgence that juxtaposes the related but distinct revivals that took place in the United States and Great Britain. After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the authors explore the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. Cohen and Donaldson place the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over "authenticity" in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream. From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, Roots of the Revival offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.
Bob Dylan’s contribution to popular music is immeasurable. Venerated as rock’s one true genius, Dylan is considered responsible for introducing a new range of topics and new lyrical complexity into popular music. Without Bob Dylan, rock critic Dave Marsh once claimed, there would be no popular music as we understand it today. As such an exalted figure, Dylan has been the subject of countless books and intricate scholarship considering various dimensions of both the man and his music. This book places new emphasis on Dylan as a rock star. Whatever else Dylan is, he is a star – iconic, charismatic, legendary, enigmatic. No one else in popular music has maintained such star status for so long a period of time. Showing how theories of stardom can help us understand both Bob Dylan and the history of rock music, Lee Marshall provides new insight into how Dylan’s songs acquire meaning and affects his relationship with his fans, his critics and the recording industry. Marshall discusses Dylan’s emergence as a star in the folk revival (the “spokesman for a generation”) and the formative role that Dylan plays in creating a new type of music – rock – and a new type of star. Bringing the book right up to date, he also sheds new light on how Dylan’s later career has been shaped by his earlier star image and how Dylan repeatedly tried to throw off the limitations and responsibilities of his stardom. The book concludes by considering the revival of Dylan over the past ten years and how Dylan’s stardom has developed in a way that contains, but is not overshadowed by, his achievements in the 1960s.
On a snowy winter morning in 1961, Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota for New York City with a suitcase, guitar, harmonica and a few bucks in his pocket. Wasting no time upon arrival, he performed at the Cafe Wha? in his first day in the city, under the name Bob Dylan. Over the next decade the cultural milieu of Greenwich Village would foster the emergence of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. From the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street to Andy Warhol's Factory, Dylan honed his craft by drifting in and out of New York's thriving arts scenes of the 1960s and early ,70s. In this revised edition, originally published in 2011, author June Skinner Sawyers captures the thrill of how a city shaped an American icon and the people and places that were the touchstones of a legendary journey.
This book features 27 integrated essays that offer access to the art, life, and legacy of one of the world's most influential artists.
How the radical music of the 1960s was birthed amid unprecedented upheaval and systemic repression. Seventy years since the radical music of the 1960s first hit the airwaves, the anthems of the era continue to resonate with our current times. Through studying these musicians and the political contexts in which their pioneering songs were birthed; amidst paranoia, psychedelic delusions, desire and civil unrest; Aaron Leonard’s Whole World in an Uproar is an important new critical history of countercultural music from the Summer of Love to the unwelcome arrival of Bob Dylan.
Folk dancer, forester, poet and visionary, Rolf Gardiner (1902-71) is both a compelling and troubling figure in the history of twentieth-century Britain. While he is celebrated as a pioneer of organic farming and co-founder of the Soil Association, Gardiner's organicist outlook was not confined to agriculture alone. Convinced that a healthy culture and society could only flourish when it was rooted in the soil, Gardiner sought national regeneration too. One of the most colourful and controversial figures of the interwar period, Gardiner believed Britain's future lay not with its doomed empire, but in ever closer union with its 'kin folk, kin tongued' neighbours in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Fascinated by the Weimar Republic's myriad youth leagues and life reform movements, Gardiner became an important conduit between North Sea and Baltic. Yet while an enthusiasm for hiking, nudism, folk dancing and voluntary labour camps must have appeared harmlessly eccentric to many in 1920s Britain, by the late-1930s Gardiner's continued engagement with Germany was to have altogether darker connotations. This volume, which brings together seven scholars currently working on different aspects of Gardiner's life and work, eschews a straightforwardly biographical approach and instead focuses on the decades when he was at his most dynamic and radical. Situating Gardiner within the wider political and cultural contexts of the interwar years and exploring youth culture, the origins of the organic movement, Anglo-German relations and British cultural history, it is an essential addition to modern history libraries.
"Chicago is recognized around the world for its place in the history of jazz, gospel, and the blues. Far less known is the surprisingly important role Chicago played in country music and the folk revival. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Mark Guarino tells a forgotten story of music in Chicago and reveals how the city's institutions and personalities influenced sounds we today associate with regions further south. It is a story of migration and of the ways that rural communities became tied to growing urban centers through radio, the automobile, and the railroad. As the biggest city in the agricultural Midwest, Chicago became a place where rural folk could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, Chicago was the most active city for the genre's musicians and record labels. In the mid-1920s, the stars of WLS radio's Barn Dance modernized the sounds of country fiddlers and polished the mountain tunes of Appalachia for contemporary ears. By the 1940s, Chicago had the greatest concentration of country musicians in the US. Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry all recorded some of their most legendary music in Chicago. When the larger recording industry drifted to the coasts after World War II, Chicago became known for working folk musicians who could freely experiment, collaborate, and perform at a distance from the sometimes stifling star structure of Nashville's Music Row. Guarino tells the stories of the Chicago hustlers who evolved new strains of country music in the city's bars, punk clubs, classrooms, and auditoriums. The College of Complexes, The Gate of Horn, the Earl of Old Town, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Club Lower Links, and Lounge Ax served as creative incubators for different generations of music. Country and Midwestern is a story as vital as the city itself, a celebration of the colorful characters who kept country and folk moving forward, and of the music itself, which even today is still kicking down doors"--
In African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story, scholar and musician Bruce Conforth tells the story of one of the most unusual collections of African American folk music ever amassed—and the remarkable story of the man who produced it: Lawrence Gellert. Compiled between the World Wars, Gellert's recordings were immediately adopted by the American Left as the voice of the true American proletariat, with the songs—largely variants of traditional work songs or blues—dubbed by the Left as "songs of protest." As both the songs and Gellert’s standing itself turned into propaganda weapons of left-wing agitators, Gellert experienced a meteoric rise within the circles of left-wing organizations and the American Communist party. But such success proved ephemeral, with Gellert contributing to his own neglect by steadfastly refusing to release information about where and from whom he had collected his recordings. Later scholars, as a result, would skip over his closely held, largely inaccessible research, with some asserting Gellert’s work had been doctored for political purposes. And to a certain extent they were correct. Conforth reveals how Gellert at least "assisted" in the creation of some of his more political material. But hidden behind the few protest songs that Gellert allowed to become public was a vast body of legitimate African America folksongs—enough to rival the work of any of his contemporary collectors. Had Gellert granted access to all his material, scholars would have quickly seen that it comprised an incredibly complete and diverse collection of all African American song genres: work songs, blues, chants, spirituals, as well as the largest body of African American folktales about Irish Americans (what were referred to as "One Time I'shman" tales). It also included vast swaths of African American oral literature collected by Gellert as part of the Federal Writers' Project. In African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics, Conforth brings to light for the first time the entire body of work collected by Lawrence Gellert, establishing his place, and the place for the material he collected, within the pages of American folk song scholarship. In addition to shedding new light on the concept of "protest music" within African American folk music, Conforth discusses the unique relationship of the American Left to this music and how personal psychology and the demands of the American Communist party would come to ruin Gellert’s life. African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of American social and political history, African American studies, the history of American folk music, and ethnomusicology.
From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Café to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s. Folk City explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. It involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters, festival organizers, musicologists, agents and managers, editors and writers - and, of course, musicians and audiences. In Folk City, authors Stephen Petrus and Ron Cohen capture the exuberance of the times and introduce readers to a host of characters who brought a new style to the biggest audience in the history of popular music. Among the savvy New York entrepreneurs committed to promoting folk music were Izzy Young of the Folklore Center, Mike Porco of Gerde's Folk City, and John Hammond of Columbia Records. While these and other businessmen developed commercial networks for musicians, the performance venues provided the artists space to test their mettle. The authors portray Village coffee houses not simply as lively venues but as incubators of a burgeoning counterculture, where artists from diverse backgrounds honed their performance techniques and challenged social conventions. Accessible and engaging, fresh and provocative, rich in anecdotes and primary sources, Folk City is lavishly illustrated with images collected for the accompanying major exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 2015.