The Cultural Politics of the North American Folk Music Revival in Washington, D.C
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Cosmopolitan Folk: The Cultural Politics of the North American Folk Music Revival in Washington, D.C. by Stephen Fox Lorenz B.A. in English, May 1990, Washington College M.A. in American Studies, May 2003, The George Washington University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 18th, 2014 Dissertation directed by Joseph Kip Kosek Associate Professor of American Studies and John Vlach Professor Emeritus of American Studies and of Anthropology The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Stephen Fox Lorenz has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 20th, 2014. This is the final approved form of the dissertation. Cosmopolitan Folk: The Cultural Politics of the North American Folk Music Revival in Washington, D.C. Stephen Fox Lorenz Dissertation Research Committee: Joseph Kip Kosek, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Co-Director John Vlach, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and of Anthropology, Dissertation Co-Director Michael Taft, Head of the Archive of Folk Culture at The American Folklife Center (Retired), Committee Member Suleiman Osman, Associate Professor of American Studies, Department Reader ii © Copyright 2014 by Stephen Fox Lorenz All rights reserved iii Dedication The author wishes to dedicate this work to his father Jack Lorenz. Who knew all those trips as a kid to hear bluegrass at the Birchmere would lead here? iv Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge and thank the individuals who gave interviews, special advice, and support for this dissertation. I'd like to thank Dick Cerri, Richard Spottswood, Mary Cliff, David Dunaway, Dick Weissman, Ray Allen, Sheila Cogan, Nancy Greisman, Andy Wallace, Ronnie Lankford, Dick Churchill, Alice Gerrard, Barry Lee Pearson, Joe Hickerson, Karl Straub, Dick Churchill, Richard Harrington, Jeff Place, Mike Rivers, Todd Harvey, and Gene Rosenthal for their invaluable insight and patience talking about the folk revival in Washington, D.C. Special credit is due Virginia McGovern for helping with the final editing process. Final and utmost thanks go to Myra McGovern, who supported and encouraged me on every step of my doctoral program, through comprehensive exams and late night chapter revisions, I couldn't have done it without you. v Abstract of Dissertation Cosmopolitan Folk: The Cultural Politics of the North American Folk Music Revival in Washington, D.C. This dissertation looks at the popular American folksong revival in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region during the Cold War and Civil Rights era. Examination of folk revival scholarship, local media reports and cultural geography, and the collected interviews and oral histories of Washington area participants, reveals the folk and blues revival was a mass mediated phenomenon with contentious factions. The D.C. revival shows how restorative cultural projects and issues of authenticity are central to modernity, and how the function of folksong transformed from the populist, labor oriented Old Left to the personalized politics of the New Left. This study also significantly disrupts often romantic scholarship and political narratives about the folk revival and redirects the intellectual attention on New York, Chicago, and San Francisco towards the nation's capital as an overlooked site of cultural production. Washington's "folk world" of music clubs, coffeehouses, record collectors, disc jockeys, performers, folklorists, and folk music aficionados drove folk music studies towards context and cultural democracy, but the local insistence on apolitical, traditional, and rural forms of folksong as the most genuine reinscribed racial and class hierarchies even as they vi enhanced Washington's status. Washington, D.C., shifted the loose folk revival "movement" into permanent cultural institutions and organizations, and the city gained a cosmopolitan reputation for authentic folk music that intermingled with its regional culture and identity as the nation's capital and site of public protest. vii Table of Contents Dedication...........................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................v Abstract of Dissertation......................................................................................................vi Chapter 1: Introduction - Examining the History and Cultural Politics of the American Folk Revival in the Nation's Capital....................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Roots of the Folk Revival in Washington, D.C. .............................................41 Chapter 3: Authenticity and the Highs and Lows of Washington’s Cultural Geography 90 Chapter 4: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and the D.C. Blues Mafia......................190 Chapter 5: Conclusion - The Cosmopolitan Folk............................................................319 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................383 viii Chapter 1: Introduction - Exploring the History and Cultural Politics of the Folk Music Revival in Washington D.C. “I guess all songs is folk songs, 'cause I never heard no horse sing ‘em.” –Big Bill Broonzy (Kelley, "Notes" 1403) “I tell all the colored folks to listen to me Don't try to find you no home in Washington, DC `Cause it's a bourgeois town, the bourgeois town I got the bourgeois blues Gonna spread the news all around.” – “Bourgeois Blues,” by Huddie Ledbetter “The revival really began under the New Deal in Washington. Everybody in Washington from the Roosevelts down were interested in folk music.” --Alan Lomax (Botkin, "Folksong" 121) In the late 1950s and early 1960s a large section of suburban Americans, mostly white, liberal, young, and rebellious, became deeply enamored with rural folk music and 1 culture. This mass-mediated phenomenon resulted in a sudden, widespread commercial revival of traditional American folksong so nationally popular that some called it “The Great Folk Scare,”1 while many others considered it a genuine social movement. It was also a performance of the folk process experienced across national and grassroots levels, a re-creation and resulting transformation of American traditional and popular culture. A semi-organized band of "rediscovered" rural hillbilly, bluegrass, and blues recording artists from the1920s and 30s and their urban emulators, as well as amateur and professional folklorists and folksingers, along with commercial and scholarly promoters, backed by an audience of idealistic college students carrying banjos and guitars, roamed the city club circuits and back roads of America in a sustained national encounter with its musical and political heritage. Supported by a network of folk music magazines and record stores, nightclubs and coffee houses, large and small independent record labels, talent scouts and folklorists, national and local folklore societies, recreation departments, television and radio programs, workshops and festivals, the folk revival became such a pervasive cultural presence that it formed what sociologist Howard Becker termed an “art world” (Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues 81). Folklorists John Vlach and Simon Bronner find that such "folk-art" worlds can either include or compete against more formal, official art worlds (Vlach and Bronner). Liberal progressives' postwar agenda to acquire new kinds of agency and identity endowed cultural legitimacy on folk music, emphasizing it as a powerful and sophisticated, yet neglected, quintessentially American art form. Grounded in the perception of inherent authenticity and moral authority of traditional rural lifeways, the 1 The description is attributed to both folksinger Dave van Ronk and comedian Martin Mull ("The Great Folk Scare"). 2 revival acquired the weight of a political movement. It was a collective effort to redirect the course of American society by embracing the music of the socially and culturally marginalized, often with unforeseen consequences for everyone involved in such projects of revival. Folk music is often construed as a restorative connection to America’s collective wisdom, a tradition-based resource that serves as a corrective for the social ills and upheavals brought by modernity. Folklorist Robert Cantwell characterizes the entire folk revival as “a complex response . to the ongoing adjustment of newcomer groups, whether racial, ethnic, or generational, to the conditions of life under an industrial and post-industrial social and economic system” (Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival 53). Comparing folk revivalism to nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, Cantwell argues that the “invention of the folk” provides a sense of security in a changing world, allowing the dominant culture to define itself contrastively (54–55). Beyond its cathartic and entertainment function, folksong was recognized by Popular Front figures like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger for its capacity to inspire, agitate, impart solidarity, and convey powerful direct and indirect political, often populist messages. Beneath this public view subtler effects took place, that the Left somehow “owns” folk music, but