The Cultural Politics of the North American Folk Music Revival in Washington, D.C

Home , Alice Gerrard, American folk music, Archive of Folk Culture, Ash Grove (music club), Aunt Molly Jackson, Bluegrass music

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

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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?

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.

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.

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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

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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

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 also that “without specific comment, folk music is assumed to

mean white music, hillbilly” (Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues 119). The 1950s folk music

revival is often described in scholarship as a reaction to apprehensions about postwar

disturbances in race, gender, and class hierarchies, and the existential fear of nuclear war,

a kind of escapism into an ideal American past. Revival historian and folk musician Dick

Weissman describes the resurgence of folksong as a kind of culture shock:

The sound of traditional music hit the campuses like a Chinook

wind coming down off the mountains; at best, it offered a fresh

enthusiasm as opposed to tired professionalism, an honest

expression of individual and social feelings as opposed to show-biz

theatrics, an elegant simplicity as opposed to gimmickry. Above

all, it was relatively easy to understand and to play, it carried with

it associations, often romanticized, of a more honest and more

personable culture. (Sandburg and Weissman, “Contemporary

Music” 109).

It was a conscious turn to a style and repertoire of music felt to embody the traditional values and aesthetics of an idealized and disappearing bucolic America, a conduit to a marginalized but honorable and vernacular way of life that offered to restore a sense of community and meaning that was being erased by popular urban culture and industrial capitalism.

Articulated as the music of the common man, folk music became an overt political tool of the labor-oriented Old Left during the Popular Front Era and New Deal of the 1930s. Epitomized by stars of the labor movement like Guthrie and the Almanac

Singers, its revival in the postwar period continued this association, but with new functions and audiences, as the Left shifted personnel and tactics due to postwar anticommunist pressures and the urgency of civil rights (Reuss 19). For these reasons, the folk revival is seen by sociologists, urban and movement scholars, as well as folklorists, as a revelatory period for the fields of American Urban, Movement, and Cultural Studies and deserves careful, localized exploration.

Examination of how ideas about "authenticity," the “folk,” and “tradition” are constructed, debated, and continually re-invented and put to new public uses by everyone, folklorists, folksingers, and government institutions alike, shows America’s musical roots as a contested resource. Revival serves political, social and cultural

functions of resistance, accommodation, or even redirection (Hobsbawm 8-9).2 “If folk

music does represent ‘a kind of ideal folklife that is not available any more in America,’

its popularity also suggests a kind of non-violent resistance against the quality of

contemporary life” (De Turk and Poulin 22). But how did this popular taste for “old-

timey” music develop and grow into such a powerful movement to re-imagine both

America’s and one's own identity? Looking at the folk revival as it took place in and

around the unique political and cultural atmosphere of postwar Washington, D.C., will perhaps provide some insights.

Most recent scholarship concludes that there has been a series of twentieth- century folk revivals when national interest in popular music of the past has crested.

These revivals are seen in the immense popularity of “race” and "hillbilly" records in the

1920s, in the pervasive twang of “country and western“ on radio stations, and during the

New Deal, when folk music was used by those like Guthrie and folklorist Alan Lomax as

a populist tool to build political solidarity. The Almanac Singers did their part for the war

effort with their folksong “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave,” and they tamed Huddie

Ledbetter’s risqué folksong “Irene, Goodnight” into a 1950 hit record, safe for popular

consumption. In doing so they whetted popular tastes for folksong (Dunaway, How Can I

2 Hobsbawm is echoed in major works on the revival by Neil Rosenberg in Transforming Tradition and Doug Rossinow in Politics of Authenticity. All three scholars recognize tradition as a fluid and contested concept. In this case folk music revival can be seen as an indirect political movement, an effort to find personalized alternatives to capitalism or communism.

Keep from Singing? 166).3 These revivals are cyclical cultural projects to reestablish connections to quintessential American traditions believed to be rapidly passing away during times of intense social restructuring, but in doing so, revivals selectively transform those traditions into new ones to suit new purposes and contexts (Rosenberg, ed.,

Transforming Tradition 17). Traditional gospel songs such as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s

1927 race record version of “See that My Grave is Kept Clean” take on new meaning and function when sung by June Carter before an audience of white bluegrass fans in the

1950s.

Revival historian and participant David De Turk found “it is the relevance of folk music to great social upheavals that literally define the limits of our existence today that captivate the imagination” (De Turk and Poulin 13). For De Turk and many others dissatisfied with the postwar status quo, it was not just a revival, but a renaissance, a reorientation in goals and tactics for a substantial segment of America in rejection of the homogeneity of post-industrial, suburban America. By virtue of their physical and social distance from corrosive pop culture of city life, the supposedly “unconscious” artistic and apolitical sensibilities of those living on the margins were reconfigured by urban elites, the “city-billies" (as coined by Charles Seeger), academic folklorists, and record collectors and makers "to respond to contexts far removed from their humble origins,”

(Hirsch). Urban audiences thought they had a channel to an ideologically clear, simpler

American past to counter the problems of modernity, or advance political movements by making an indirect or direct claim to the American spirit found in its musical heritage.

3 Like those in many traditional songs revived during this period, lyrics were often sanitized for popular consumption in a time of hypersexual vigilance. The Weavers changed Leadbelly’s lyrics from those of a jealous murder ballad to an expression of longing, and the Kingston Trio did the same with “Tom Dooley,” (Lankford 30). 6

The semi-sacred space of the nation’s capital shares a claim to that foundational

spirit, and these reoccurring cultural projects of revival appear to have had a special

relationship to Washington, D.C. In the local process of defining folksong as the cultural

product of “the people,” the city was imbued with ideals of democracy, but it was also

center to nationalistic, hierarchical relationships of knowledge, power, and ownership,

and a site of linkages and disjuncture between race, class, culture, and region, that

reaffirmed the folk as a culturally and politically valuable “other.” Often paradoxical in

its effects, the discourse, creativity, and introspection evoked during the late 1950s “Folk

Boom” over issues of authenticity, commercialism, and just who are the “folk” and who

speaks for them as the country reoriented itself after World War II often had its rhetorical

and organizational roots in Washington.

With the city’s unique juxtaposition of history, public activism, and cultural

geography, the postwar revival played out in ways distinct from those in other

metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco. Any physical object or place can become a “cluster point” for reviving and transforming tradition when infused with a particular association with the past. The story of the folk revival in Washington will both reveal some of the region’s musical history and complicate the often romantic, simplistic, left vs. right historical narrative often given to the 1960s “Great Folk Scare.”

Washington offers a fascinating “place” in the national imagination and performs in the spatial and political orientation of the American citizen on many levels. It is both concretely real and ideologically unreal, a mix of government, public and private buildings, a heavily symbol-laden place to visit and live, a literally representative space of power and culture, a semi-sacred and abstract focal point for all Americans to perhaps

visit one day (like Mecca.) But it is experienced as “home” for many others, a suburb

ensconced, racially bifurcated town with southern identity issues and cosmopolitan

desires (Spottswood, telephone interview 19 Feb. 2009). It is a city intentionally designed

to compete with other world capitals as a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, and

to confuse invading armies, a monumental place brought into existence by a shared

imagination of these United States, a physical lynchpin unifying all American citizens.

Strongly influenced by Antebellum legacies of an exceptional South with its attendant racial hierarchies, yet dominated by nationalistic monuments to liberty and equality, postwar Washington, D.C., was itself a deeply stratified place marked by divisions of race and class, and of the most and least powerful. The phenomenological presence of

Washington offers a shared, coherent vision of “nation,” allowing disparate populations to be collectively imagined as “we the people” or perhaps more aptly for the revivalists,

“we the folk.”

Folklorist Ben Botkin promoted the research and public redistribution of

American folklore and folksong from Washington, D.C., through the Federal Writer’s

Project (FWP), a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a government

program with an agenda to restore faith in America during and after the Depression by

reminding the country of its rich cultural heritage. Botkin was director of the folklore

section that prepared state guide books. The FWP constructed an accessible, populist

version of traditional American culture, publicized in the many state guidebooks it

produced, and the public acquired a taste for hillbilly music as it shed its pejorative qualities under such academic and government approval. The WPA also amassed vast numbers of field recording of traditional artists which became part of the Library of

Congress's Archive of American Folksong, a valuable and influential resource to local

collectors and performers.

Similarly, families legendary for their part in building the national folk-based “art

world,” song hunters such as the Lomaxes and the Seegers, made the Washington

suburbs their home. They practically devoted their lives to disseminating their own

progressive but purist visions of “the people’s music” by advocating a national encounter

with America’s authentic folksong heritage as a way to confront problems of injustice

and alienation (Filene, Romancing the Folk 57, and Lomax, “Bluegrass Background”

201).4 This culminated at the 1963 March on Washington, where folk celebrities linked

arms with icons of the Civil Rights Movement to sing "We Shall Overcome." From this

perspective Washington can be imagined as an egalitarian, publicly-owned space, tying disparate parts of a nation together through direct and indirect political representation, a performance stage of heavy federal buildings, marble museums, and somber memorials honoring American greatness and sacrifice (Anderson).5 But where are the living “folk”

here? Washington’s perceived link to the federal government and the bureaucratic state

would seem antithetical to all those things of unofficial culture, obscuring recognition of

America's “folk.” The local folk music revival aimed to illuminate conspicuously

Washington's refined "folk consciousness," an acquired aptitude for recognizing and

recreating the most verifiably genuine musical traditions to be found on America's

margins.

4Lomax notably rejects the idea of a “national music” that corresponded to a political entity of the “nation.” He felt that such a label is used to control “the people” and stifles creativity by denying the underlying pluralism of America and dilutes the sense of localism and local audiences with agency of their own.

5 Historian Benedict Anderson argues that the purpose of memorials to past sacrifice is to consolidate the shared imagination of the modern nation-state. Mass media also play a critical role in providing simultaneity in experiencing the “nation.” 9

For those who lived within a day’s travel of the capital, Washington had a localized culture and taste for folksong as distinct as that of any other major American city. In his critical work on the political economy of the folk revival, political historian

Richard Reuss found a distinct North-South dialectic, with northern elite radicals borrowing from and exchanging culture with the marginalized poor of the South, each with their own agendas and perspectives on aesthetics and politics (3). Washington, D.C., is a unique middle point on the Atlantic coast; it is a city with southern sensibilities for hierarchy and morality, but with a penchant (or jealousy) for northern concepts of sophisticated culture and civic order. Because of its unique setting with varying racial and class access, an amalgam of formal attitudes and folk practices, both bureaucratic organization and free-form meeting styles, and a local romance with folk music, the

“sound” of Washington, D.C., during the postwar revival reflects an acquired, sophisticated taste indicative of its own authoritative sense of place in the national and local political and cultural landscapes.

Historian Lucy Barber in Marching on Washington articulates a gradual shift in the perception of Washington. Once a city symbolic of displaced political representation, distant from demanding mobs of rancorous “folk,” it became a semi-sacred “national space,” open to public display of diverse forms protest often accompanied by folksong

(4). Working for the WPA and Library of Congress, left-leaning folklorists such as Ben

Botkin and Alan Lomax promoted an “official,” government-sponsored revival of

American folksong that helped empower and legitimize national social movements that used traditional art forms for inspiration and solidarity. However, they simultaneously embedded relationships of knowledge and power in mainstream culture that maintained a

marginalized version of the “folk,” readily available as a cultural resource for shifting political and social agendas. There is an overlooked history of how the local people and

spaces of Washington transformed the meaning and function of American folk music as it

rose in postwar popularity, the revival's peak occurring, coincidentally, in the months

surrounding the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice.

Breaking Patterns of Folk Revival Scholarship

The neglected role of the nation’s capital in the folk revival complicates the often simplistic left vs. right-driven scholarly narrative of the “Great Folk Scare.” Revival

historians such as Richard Reuss, Robert Cantwell, and R. Serge Denisoff focus on the

fractious intersection of regional cultures and academia, amidst the national politics

before and during the Cold War. Their histories expose the shift from the labor-centered

Old Left to the personalized, civil rights politics of the New Left, but focus on a top-

down view, highlighting the most politically active folk stars, typified by New York’s revival scene of Washington Square and by Cambridge near Boston. These historians’ focus on northern cities and direct political action by folk artists ignores other sites and acts of revival that do not always fit distinct ideologies or cultural agendas.

Washington and the people of the region made the sounds and meaning of “folk revival” dissimilar to those in other urban centers that receive most historical attention.

Washington focused on establishing the most "authentic" folk music as both aesthetically sophisticated and politically unconscious. Blacks and whites in the city had long been spatially and economically segregated, but it was one of the first cities to experiment with

postwar integration, with a long history of migration of federal workers and military

personnel from across the country and the globe, especially during the Depression and

New Deal. The city as a cultural and regional crossroads attracted traditional and popular country music performers looking for work, folklorists, and "city-billies," and it held the definitive, official repository of America's collected musical heritage at the Archive of

American Folksong at the Library of Congress. Due to its particular geographic, cultural, and historical place in the region and in the national imagination, local culture brokers, scholars, performers, and audiences strategically revived American folksong most easily

around the identity of the Appalachian "common man."

Paradoxically, this local fascination with “old-timey” music transformed it into a

powerful and penetrating marker of both cosmopolitan and affluent suburban life.

Revivalists driven by a consumerist impulse of “collecting” traditional music through

records and performers continually sought out the folk on America's social and regional

margins, a process of rediscovery that reconstructed "obsolete" folk music as a genre for

popular consumption, social revitalization, political inspiration, and personal

transformation. Prewar work done by “ballad hunters” like Alan Lomax, based at the

Library of Congress (LOC) Archives in Washington, set the pattern for later quests by

amateur folklorists in the 1950s “Folk Boom.” They went to find an essential America

believed to be under threat by modernity, emphasizing evidence for “authentic" folk song

unsullied by commercial popularity, confirmed by the seemingly objective methodology

of collecting through recorded field work. This ethnographic, context-based methodology

was radical for its time, not only because it demonstrated the mixed racial roots of

American folksong and African survivals, but because it shifted the determination of

authenticity onto the moment of performance, opening the way for political empowerment through the continual revival of living resources of traditional culture.

The work of the 1950s and 1960s revivalists implied that American folk music gave access to universal truths and valuable folk wisdom buried by mass culture. These often progressive amateur folklorists created an idealized folk-world of mountaineers and sharecroppers that was existentially more "real," functionally more “true” and substantial than modern urban life. Despite the anti-commercial, often leftist impulses behind this preservationist cultural project, it facilitated an appropriation of traditional materials and exploitation of artists for social and financial status for both record companies and liberal progressives that could have undermined their social agenda. But the revival's unique manifestation in Washington, D.C., brought to the surface new schisms over distinctions, values, and political implications between popular, protest, and traditional forms of folk music.

Washington’s folk music scene was built around relatively exclusive relationships of power and knowledge. With its physical and cultural proximity to Appalachia and lingering memories of the genteel Old South, the city consistently “revived” the folkways of white and black rural migrants who stayed and formed urban pockets of rural traditions. The city also offered the modern infrastructure, resources, and elite urban tastes of a global metropole. Washington, D.C., had easy regional access to a seemingly politically unconscious, culturally disconnected, living resource of diverse folk communities in its hinterland, as well as the government-sponsored academics and song- hunters to study them. Many were Harvard graduates, professionally trained musicians and former Popular Front activists, dedicated to a cultural project or “folk movement”

that would redirect consumerist, capitalist, and segregated America towards a more just,

egalitarian, and communal lifestyle. Local folksong-collecting families like the Seegers and the Lomaxes were able to study these communities in nearby Appalachia with varying degrees of intimacy, certify them according to their professional expertise, and export the version of the folk they were looking for into the broader national imagination.

The unique political economy and cultural and social geography of Washington shaped its "folk consciousness," a signifier of the city's sophisticated yet highly race- and class-oriented understanding and patronage of culture found on America's margins. The local perception of what constituted "authentic" folk songs or performers had two primary, but potentially contradictory, effects. First, by emphasizing the ethnographic

"purity" of race and class of original artists, viewed through close but audience/performer relationships established in "sincere" performance as the criteria for authentic folksong, the culture brokers of Washington made the folk movement one based on individualistic encounters with American tradition rooted in the distinction between performer and audience. This subjectivity fit well with the "radical pacifism" of the late 1950s, a turn towards an individualized ideology, becoming the "personality" or identity politics arising in the early 1960s that sought social transformation on the intimate, personal, everyday scale of the folk, as opposed to large scale, organized movements

(DeBenedetti).

The second effect of Washington’s urbane understanding of the folk and relative easy access to many living traditional artists was to delimit the potential political agency of folksong. Popular Front progressives working at the Archive and WPA revealed

American folk song to have roots deeply intertwined in both black and white traditional

culture, a radically inclusive notion for its time with potential to influence the growing

Civil Rights movement. However, to be seen as "authentic" traditional music, a

provincial, unselfconscious art form unsullied by commercialism, most Washingtonian

folk fans appreciated only oblique or outdated political messages in music, especially in

reference to current national politics that removed the city from its southern regional

contexts. Washington, D.C.’s enthusiasts of traditional culture found on America's margins tended to keep their politics separate from their folk music.

Media savvy topical artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were successful with college students more in tune with movement culture, especially around left-leaning cities such as New York. However, highly segregated Cold War Washingtonians had a strong penchant for typically apolitical forms of folksong, such as spirituals, ballads, and the blues, and a long familiarity with the talented rural artists who came from nearby

Appalachia to the city looking to work, such as the Stoneman and Carter families. This created a taste for folksong marked by a depoliticized artistry that highlighted the city’s own sophisticated, politically refined “folksense" of its own powerful cultural traditions and place in the region, the country, and the world. It is possible to conclude that this was distilled into Washington’s strong taste for bluegrass, or “folk music in overdrive,”

as Alan Lomax called it (“Bluegrass Background” 200). These types of cultural choices

about what counts as authentic folk reflect the political realities for liberals in the postwar

context, a strategy of subtle deflection from accusations of communist sympathies by

making claims to the fundamental, patriotic essence of America through its folksong.

However, this pursuit of authenticity can also reinscribe racial and class boundaries by

adoring the sounds of the blues or the “high lonesome” wail of mountain bluegrass as the

legitimate, existential art of the common man, without deeply questioning the social

inequalities that inspire them.

The history of Washington's role in the folk revival reveals an imperative to show that the city was not just a site of anonymous federal power devoid of deep cultural

connection, but rather that it had a strong sense of tradition attuned to America's rural,

agrarian roots. However, this involved a process of redefining folk song to function in the

context of modern Washington, and as historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, invention of

“tradition” is always a contested process (4). This can result in unanticipated configurations of popular and traditional culture as elements are reworked to meet disruptions in social conditions, what folklorists sometimes refer to as “putting old wine in new bottles or new wine in old bottles.” Washington seems to embody both of these impulses: record collectors and folk song hunters were discovering artists and amassing dusky jewels of field recordings from the American backwoods at the LOC Archive, while the city increasingly came to be seen as a performative space of direct democracy, the people reworking folksongs to express themselves directly on a national stage.

During the 1963 March on Washington, folk stars such as Odetta, Bob Dylan,

Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang both traditional Civil Rights anthems like “We

Shall Overcome” and new songs composed in the folk-idiom, like “If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan's “Blowin’ in the Wind,” alongside the movement’s leaders. Did the authenticity behind their performances and political and musical reputations as folksingers make singing those particular songs with hundreds of thousands a genuine folk moment? Like Hobsbawm, Lucy Barber sees the process of the “invention of tradition” by the 1963 march organizers, who consciously used folk music to tie the event

to memories of previous mass protests, as “a process critical to creating and shoring up

new political forms” (156). By virtue of these performances, Washington became part of

national “movement" folklore, a space where folksong was part of the political and public

experience of direct representation, functioning to build solidarity rather than merely to

entertain or instruct. In this context folksong does not rely on a pedigree of isolation;

rather its authenticity depends on its accessibility and its ability to inspire and empower.

Barber shows how mass protest and claims to its public space transformed the traditional view of Washington from a site of representational democracy to one of direct action

(222).

Folk music's overtly progressive and direct public messaging functioned well on the National Mall in the context of the Civil Rights movement. But this is a kind of political mythology about the city built by those who don’t live there. Those who made the city their home negotiated their own “revival” of American folksong. The story of

Washington’s part in definition of American folk music is largely overlooked in urban, social, and cultural history. However, it can be revealed by examining the traditional music popular in and around the city among its many black and white residents who migrated from rural areas, its affluent suburban youth enamored with folk culture, and its political and cultural elite, and the unique stories of "rediscovery" of American roots music.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Revival Scholarship

At the national level, the cultural, political, and social impacts of American folksong revival have received substantial attention by musical historians, though mostly

in the past two decades. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good, Ronald Cohen’s

Rainbow Quest and Neil Rosenberg Transforming Tradition are key histories of the

1950s and 60s revival by ethnomusicologists who lived through the period, and they concur that folksong played a significant role in the transformation of the left under the pressures of the Cold War and the intensity of the Civil Rights movement. Cantwell argues that the revival was always deceptively political beneath its romantic pastoralism, an adaptive structure of folk knowledge that is corrective, promotes values, critiques the current conditions, and offers prescriptions. This is why cities became the primary sites of the revival, sites of self re-invention and transformation where “difference” became a social, cultural, and commercial resource (Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk

Revival 55). Most revival historians seem to offer a narrative sympathetic to the left and imply that folksong has an innate, transformative goodness. They point out that public fascination with traditional music peaked along with social tensions. These scholars note the revival's postwar development into a self-aware “folk consciousness” amidst

American anticommunist fervor and the resulting schisms between the more "purist" traditional folk-music fans, the popular "folkie," and overtly political "topical" camps.

These works focus primarily on New York City, the Cambridge area near Boston, the Newport Folk Festivals, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. True, New York was perhaps the most active site for “city-billies” with key institutions like Izzy Young’s

Folklore Center, dozens of folk clubs and larger venues, and record companies like Moe

Asch's Folkways to solicit and promote traditional artists and singer/songwriters working in the folk idiom. San Francisco’s premier folk club The Purple Onion is known, perhaps dubiously, for launching the career of the Kingston Trio. Northern cities, especially New

York, with established leftist enclaves of folk music lovers like Almanac House, seem to

dominate the major scholarship. Legends about riots in New York’s Washington Square or the hootenannies in Greenwich Village sponsored by the People’s Artists, the folksingers political action group living in semi-communal Almanac House and nominally led by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie,6 receive their due attention, but give

the folk revival an aura of overt political action. This partially accounts for its perception

as a "movement." Washington, D.C., is dutifully mentioned for hosting the Archive of

American Folksong at the Library of Congress, but not in a substantial way that might

complicate the liberal rhetoric in the scholarship. It is not seen by these major scholars as

a segregated city that had its own particular constellation of institutions and artists to

facilitate a revival of American folksong for its own political agenda and according to

local cultural tastes.

Folklorists, sociologists and movement scholars have a strong interest in the folk

revival phenomenon because it reveals the interplay of culture and consumption, tradition

and creativity, across a shifting postwar political landscape. Revival historian Richard

Reuss is often cited for first showing that the popular return to folk music coincided with

significant transformations in liberal politics after World War II, and his work provides a

guide for understanding the strategic use of folk culture in political movements. As the

Popular Front was dismantled under postwar anti-communist fervor, the entire genre

acted as a “bridge between the old and new left” (Farrell 78, Cantwell, When We Were

Good: The Folk Revival 9). The anti-communist sentiment of the Cold War severely

marginalized labor activist folksingers Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, but this would

6 Membership in People’s Artists, named in the anticommunist publication on media figures Red Channels as a “communist front organization,” got many folk artists, including Alan Lomax and Theodore Bikel, blacklisted during the folk revival. 19

ironically only enhance their "authenticity" to the late fifties folk fans as legitimate social

“outsiders.” As these overtly leftist musicians were blacklisted for tangential links to the

American Communist Party (CP), even their albums of children’s folksongs took on an underground and taboo aspect that was attractive to the later revival as a safe way to partake of the artists’ hard-earned progressive attitudes.

But to what degree did folk fans in Cold War Washington embrace or stay away from the music of these radical folksingers, the de facto leaders of the folksong revival

movement? Reuss shows those involved in the revival of American folksong continually

stepped up to play key leadership roles in some of the most significant movements of the

twentieth century, but again, his work is focused on New York and cities with strong

liberal proclivities and union activity like Chicago. The often-overlooked dynamic

between art and politics that occurs in the strategic “revival” of American folksong that

Reuss articulates so well is worthy of examination in other locales like Washington, with

different cultural geographies and political sensibilities. A consideration of Washington’s

unique political and cultural context, a mixture of federal authority, Cold War tension,

segregation, political and cultural elitism, and Southern sensibilities, complicates the

local story of the left’s role in the revival, but adds important detail for a better

understanding of the complex era.

Like other revival scholars, Reuss notes that the political establishment in

Washington in the 1930s and 1940s loved folk music, just as the Kennedy and Johnson

Administrations later supported traditional music in the nation’s capital (17).

Nevertheless his scholarship on the revival largely remains centered on actions by

organized leftists and folk stars in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston, cities

that all have long histories of labor movements and urban leftism, with large college

student populations, unlike the nation’s capital, which was a conservative southern city,

seen mainly through its anonymous federal role. But for traditional artists and folksong

collectors familiar with the region below the Mason-Dixon Line from Appalachia to the

coast of the Carolinas, Washington was “the big city” with audiences attuned to

traditional music styles. As such, it deserves closer attention in revival scholarship.7

Names synonymous with American folksong, the Seegers and the Lomaxes, lived in the

Washington suburbs before and after the war, and from there they directly shaped the

folk revival movement, receiving their share of scholarly attention. But there were many

others not so politically oriented in Washington who also significantly transformed the

national revival phenomenon to fit the nation's capital understanding of American folk

music.

The populist cultural influence of the Popular Front diminished at all levels due to

Cold War pressures as unions, schools, and the entertainment industry were purged of

those suspected of communist sympathies. The blacklist silenced activist folksingers like

Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and forced folksingers like Josh White and Burl Ives to

denounce their fellow folksingers to maintain their careers. Gradually, racial justice

became a more pressing social issue and a more acceptable movement to support, since the overtly pro-labor protest folksongs of Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers rang as

“un-American” to many in the 1950s. There was a turn to more traditional subjects, folksongs of love and loss with a goal of pure entertainment and perhaps moral instruction to counter the sexual frenetics of rock n’ roll.

7Joe Hickerson, former head of the Archive of American Folksong, specifically notes the gap around Washington, D.C., in the record on the revival. (Hickerson, personal interview 10 Mar 2010.) 21

Forced to take a less direct course of political change by anticommunists in and

out of the government, many of those associated with folk music turned to pursuing the

roots of American music, rediscovering living rural folk singers. This shift that occurred

during the folk revival was also part of a larger social conversion experience, revealing

deep anxieties about suburbanization, consumerism, racial integration, and the atomic

bomb. Revival and blues scholar Jeff Todd Titon sums it up: "Singing folk songs--

meaningful lyrics set to simple melodies with simple accompaniment on acoustic

instruments--was one way of asserting humanity in an absurd universe" (Titon,

“Reconstructing the Blues” 221). Along with many other cultural historians, Eric

Hobsbawm finds that an individualistic, personalized quest for “authenticity” began to replace the defense of hard-line ideologies, rooted in the sense that modernity was itself

fundamentally artificial with only contingent meanings.8 Thus a folk-based world with a

genuine pedigree of tradition, full of venerable truths gained from experience, was re-

invented to provide a mechanism to cope with the rapid changes of the time, an

existential journey through the country’s musical heritage to find an eternal, essential

America (Hobsbawm 8). Cultural historian Robin Kelley argues that such claims of

authenticity are unavoidably political: a social critique by intellectuals like folklorists in a

bid for cultural power, seeking to justify their own fields when they make assertions that

expressive forms such as folk music and blues are more "real" than others (Kelley,

"Notes" 1404).

8 See Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. She argues that the notion of authenticity is at the heart of modernity as we try to justify the legitimacy of our own existence. She thinks that this is especially true for intellectuals for whom concepts of "loss" and "estrangement" have become central to nationalistic and elite ideologies around notions of the "folk" and "authenticity". 22

Under the pressures of the Red Scare, the folksong fans of the Washington area

invented an understanding of tradition to fit its unique cultural geography and political

economy. That history is more complex than it first appears to be. Washington has a

peculiar split identity as a sophisticated, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan national capital,

yet it is culturally still connected to a hierarchical, agrarian past. The city as regional magnet for poor migrant black and white folk musicians, combined with a local resistance to overtly political messages in folk music as a sign of worldly corruption, produced a depoliticized “folk consciousness” that centered on issues of ethnography and authenticity. Many of the revivalists in Washington rejected any of popular folk music that carried overt themes of protest or that had been morally diluted by commercial success. This may be why Washington eventually became a global capital for both the country blues and bluegrass music, a sophisticated blend of modern and traditional musical and lyrical forms that seems to resist direct political appropriation by social movements. Through the local revival of those genres, however, Washington folk fans did make their own moves across race and class lines.

While folksongs like “We Shall Overcome” gave coherence and credence to formal social movements by tapping into America’s musical traditions of solidarity and resistance, what is overlooked in revival scholarship is how Washington’s approach to artistic and political expression imposed a singular way of understanding the folk that limited its political potential. The genre was built on a set of relationships that showed genuine respect for the talent and spirit of traditional folksingers like Leadbelly (Huddie

Ledbetter), but that patronizingly re-inscribed them an “other” whose threatened lifeways and continued oppression and marginalization made their art a renewable natural resource

for mass society as it tried to come to terms with its own sense of alienation. Perhaps

more in Washington than in other cities one can see these paradoxes of inclusion and

exclusion during the revival as they played out during the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

For record collectors, folksong hunters, cultural interpreters, and performers in

Washington, an insistence on authentic folk music forms meant avoiding traditional or

topical material with political currency.

Tensions over the functions and meaning of American folksongs in the postwar

era are highlighted by the Washington, D.C., revival scene. There are subtle progressive,

democratic agendas and actions behind the rediscovery, preservation, and dissemination

of the city's understanding of folk music, as well as conservative agendas and actions that

resist social change, what movement historian Robin D.G. Kelley calls the often

indiscernible “infra-politics” of everyday life (Kelley, Race Rebels 8). The notion that folk music empowers people has its roots in the ideology and historical circumstances of the 1930s (Reuss 20). But unlike cities known as hotbeds of progressivism such as New

York or San Francisco, Cold War Washington was where activist folksingers like Pete

Seeger and Josh White were put on trial as communist sympathizers. In contrast to bohemian Greenwich Village or Boston’s Harvard Square, Washington was not the place to attempt to raise class consciousness through folksong. Nonetheless, the folk revival in an anti-communist city on the edge of the Old South determined to show its cultural sophistication could appear uniquely radical, in some respects more than it did in more liberal urban environments. Considering the WPA's legacy of a federally sponsored mandate to preserve and promote American folk song as the “people’s music,” which expanded the search for traditional culture across class and race lines, Washington, D.C.,

reoriented the function of folk music from the overtly political to one focused on the

context of daily life, allowing the folk themselves the opportunity to speak for themselves

in the public sphere. The participants in the postwar folk revival in Washington acted as

a brand of “radical pacifist,” rejecting a starring role in the liberal folk "movement,"

instead using rediscovered resources of traditional culture to turn the direction of postwar

America activism inward, away from direct politics. Washington promoted an

individualistic, apolitical, and ethnographic connection to folk music as a method for substantial social change, through acquiring personal agency and status within an affluent, avant-garde, sophisticated local folk world made by fans of America's

"obsolete" music.

Because of it openness to “amateur” folklorists and performers often connected to

leftist causes, the ideological and rhetorical battles over the definition of authentic folk

music and tradition during the revival played out in non-scholarly print media. Polemic,

progressive magazines like Sing Out, Caravan, the Little Sandy Review, and Broadside

arose specifically to debate these issues and disseminate folk song to mass audiences,

rather than in academic journals such as the Journal of American Folklore. These

publications were important dialectical spaces to flesh out the implications of cultural

revival, often criticizing commercial "pop-folk" artists like the Kingston Trio. Other

arguments raged over whether the "enfant terrible" Bob Dylan was a valid heir to Woody

Guthrie’s form of grassroots protest, an authentic hero of the urban folk movement, or

merely an opportunist using folk music to forge his own identity. But these were

publications out of New York, Boston, and Chicago, where the urban sounds of anti-

establishment protest were more acceptable.

In postwar Washington, the "official" boundaries of legitimate folk music were

construed along formal, scholarly lines at the Library of Congress folksong archives in

the hands of those such as Alan Lomax and folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon. More

informally, folk music was understood through sites like Dick Cerri’s popular weekly folk program on radio station WAVA, The Washington Post music critic John Pagones’s reports on the folk music scene, the folksinger lineup at the popular club The Shadows, or the many spontaneous “hootenannies” held at the George Washington University student folk club or in the suburban homes of affluent members of the Folklore Society of

Greater Washington. In this folk world of the Washington area there were hidden ideological debates over who could rightfully speak for the folk, or even what constituted genuine folk culture in these public, private, or media-created spaces. Choosing “which

side are you on?” between topical, popular and traditional forms was a subtle political

choice that conferred different types of agency and status for Washington's folk

revivalists.

Part of a family synonymous with American folk song and founder of the New

Lost City Ramblers that exactingly recreated string band music from the 1920s, Mike

Seeger grew up around the Washington and Baltimore music scene. As a Conscientious

Objector working at an isolated TB hospital in rural Maryland, Seeger was exposed to a rich world of mountain folksong forgotten by many. But coming from an affluent family of professionally trained musicians with conservative ideas of authentic folk song, Seeger was an exacting defender of the traditional music forms he brought out of Appalachia.

Such purists, who rejected any modern retuning of folksongs, were critiqued as “folk-

Nazis” by both Washington's Dick Cerri and Izzy Young of the Folklore Center in New

York who had more inclusive view of folk song. Locally, other figures like record collector Dick Spottswood and club manager Mary Cliff saw popular revival groups like the Kingston Trio and the Limeliters and similar contrived folk groups as a direct threat to America’s cultural heritage, commercially contaminating it (Spottswood, telephone interview 16 Feb. 2009; Cliff, personal interview 6 Mar. 2011). Folksong hunter Alan

Lomax has been well covered in revival histories, often receiving due criticism for

“borrowing” from the Archive and copyright of traditional folksongs for his own records,

for his selective memory on help with his own fieldwork, and for his exploitation of

“discoveries” like Huddie Ledbetter (Filene, “’Our Singing Country’”604). Ostensibly,

Lomax did this for the "greater good" of social change through promoting the cultural equity of those left on America's margins. There were many similar occasions of such infrapolitics at the local level of Washington's revival, where a simultaneous celebration and exploitation of traditional music and rediscovered performers impacted the national turn toward American traditional culture in the late 1950s.

The Methods of Revival in Washington

Some liberal revivalists in Washington, often students at local universities,

reinscribed racial and class inequality by not always directly questioning the roots of

angst in folksong, inequality standing as a marker of its authenticity, even as they

championed the reconnection of social activism and folksong. These "folkies"

transformed political traditions with memorable folk-based topical songs, anthems to fit the mode and content of new public venues for art and protest, from coffeehouses to the streets of Washington. These songs offered both solidarity in the face of oppression, like

Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome,” and individualistic challenges to the status quo, like

Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Distinct from other revivalist factions in

Washington, these young white liberals saw the grassroots protest about civil rights and

nuclear disarmament energized by folk song as a conjoined social and cultural

movement.

Between these activists and the purist traditionalists were the popular folk music

fans who had little concern for the ethnographic or political credentials of performers.

They watched sanitized folk groups in suits on ABC’s “Hootenanny,” hummed the latest

hit by the pop-folk group the Highwaymen, and learned to play “On Top of Old Smokey”

or “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore” on a Sears-bought acoustic guitar. Perhaps looking

for a vicarious thrill of civil disobedience, these "folkies" bought a Pete Seeger album or

attended a live performance by Odetta. Key individuals like Dick Cerri and record collector Dick Spottswood often moved between these local segments by virtue of their highly-developed, refined “folk consciousness,” attuned to the context of Washington that facilitated crossing race and class boundaries, both of them pursuing the revival of what they saw as authentic, meaningful folk song.

Record stores selling folk albums, disc jockeys with traditional music shows, and club managers aiming for Bob Dylan fans, along with those at the Smithsonian and

Library of Congress, revivalists rediscovering traditional rural artists and a myriad of

other “culture brokers” made up the folk world of Washington. Their stories are key to

understanding the music and politics of the revival as it shaped both the local and

national folk music scene. Folksong collectors, arrangers and distributors act as middle-

men, between the folk and the institutions, as well as between the music and the

audience, in theory helping all sides: the artists, the consumers, and themselves. Culture

brokers act to rarefy and make abstract the reality of the folk so it can be more easily

consumed and moved to influence culture elsewhere. Oral histories by often-overlooked local culture brokers, such as radio DJ Mary Cliff, who started out working the door and booking talent at the Cellar Door folk club, give new understanding to the revival in

Washington. These brokers helped articulate the folk within a postmodern condition where meaning is relative, bringing dialectical sides of the urban/rural divide into coherent synch by emphasizing or limiting cultural and social differences through manipulation of musical presentations and consumption. By interpreting, classifying, and transforming rural folk traditions for an urban audience, they garnered personal agency as they raised the cultural value of folksong to "art," adding to Washington's reputation for refined aesthetic appreciation. Other scholars have examined major brokers such as Izzy

Young at the Folklore Center and Moe Asch of Folkways Records in New York because they guided folksingers into a new status, a sense of place, and a modern folk” identity in tune with the structure of the revival. But it is important to look at those Washington culture brokers overlooked in scholarship such as Dick Cerri, Dick Spottswood, and Gene

Rosenthal, who helped in the local "blues revival" of Skip James and Mississippi John

Hurt.

Folklorists and revival participants such as Archie Green, Dave Samuelson, and

Joe Hickerson point to several gaps in the history of American revivals and their origins, as well as other rich sources of living folksong, that still need study. These include looking in modern settings for folklore, and looking for aspects of gender and race often overlooked in the usual retelling of revival history. This can help to account for

complications of class, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, blackness and whiteness in

the creation of American folksong (Hickerson, personal interview, 6 Mar. 2010). The

story of the revival in Washington, D.C., can help uncover some of those neglected

aspects and reveal clues about the complex relationships between social movements,

folklore, and urban life. For example, black folksinger Elizabeth Cotten, authentic not

only for her hard-earned repertoire of down-home blues and spirituals, but for her unique

technique of playing a right-handed guitar upside-down, was discovered only because she

met Peggy Seeger in a Washington department store and became the family maid

(Weissman, Which Side Are You On? 98). Archie Green decries the reluctance of

professional folklore to look at sexual or scatological material (22), and Hickerson

specifically mentions that issues of setting and context in the modern folk revival are not

given their due (Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest 18).

Folklorists such as Ben Botkin, Henry Glassie, Alan Lomax, Archie Green,

Richard Bauman, and Roger Abrahams who became leaders in the field, all played

significant parts in their own urban folk revivals, including that of Washington. During

the 1950s and early 1960s the American Folklore Society and new graduate folklore

programs shifted the direction of folklore studies itself to an emphasis on ethnography

and context, countering folklorist Jan Brunvand’s claim that “revivalists are largely

irrelevant to the study of folklore” (Rosenberg, ”Named System Revivals” 179). These avant-garde researchers spent a great deal of time on the road and challenged the text-

centric “hands off” orthodoxy of many academic folklorists by promoting applied public

folklore and forthrightly recognizing the potential social and cultural impact of folklore work.9

By investigating Washington’s love for folksong it is possible to show how the

new emphasis by a new generation of folklorists on fieldwork and ethnography, on the

social functions of folklore, and on the importance of context disrupted earlier

diffusionist and evolutionary/nationalistic folklore projects that had dominated the field

before WWII. For local revival projects, this permitted a degree of political detachment.

By seeing how folksong was perceived and performed in the nation’s capital when it

peaked as a national phenomenon, it becomes easier to understand why folk culture itself

came to be seen not as relics to be preserved in museums but as a living processes open to

analysis and re-creation. Eventually those such as local folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who

later organized many of the famous Newport Folk Festivals and promoted bluegrass

groups like the Greenbriar Boys, brought the idea of publicly celebrating the folk to a

national audience in the Smithsonian's annual American Folklife Festival held on the

National Mall, which began just as the revival wound down in the late 1960s.

Mapping the Cultural Geography of Washington's Folk Revival

Intensified by shifting rural and urban boundaries, postwar disruptions in race,

class, and gender relationships across the public and private sphere allowed for

reconceptualizing American folklife. The emphasis on structure, context, and function

opened folklore studies to look at non-rural, industrial, and occupation or class based

groups, from miners to college students. College students were a unique kind of folk

9 This was a period of intense professionalization of folklore by those such as Stith Thompson, who wanted to apply more rigorous and anthropological direction to the field. The establishment of the first PhD in Folklore at the University of Indiana occurred in 1953. 31

group, and campuses were sites of lingering youth leftism that kept a romantic view of

"old-timey" music alive during the Cold War (Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk

Revival 271).10 The first self-consciously designated “folk concert” was conducted by

folklorist Jacob Niles at Princeton in 1927, and universities themselves are key sites for honoring tradition (Reuss 35). The local college student newspapers and alumni oral histories from Washington show linkages between ethnographic folklore, urban studies, and social movement history, much of which took place at or near universities in

Washington.

Many different kinds of private and public spaces in and around Washington

shaped the meaning and function of traditional music, both as forms of popular protest

and as personal identity. The sites were diverse, from spontaneous hootenannies by the college folkies in bohemian Dupont Circle, or the small artsy folk clubs where Joan Baez

or Skip James might stop in, or the "hillbilly" music parks where Bill Monroe and the

Stonemans played, to the National Mall where 250,000 gathered in late summer of 1963

to hear the stars of folksong and Civil Rights movements sing an old reworked spiritual

together.

The folk revival articulated a new vision for a larger, more reflexive, diverse and

inclusive society based upon the contexts of daily life beyond the city and the experiences

of conflict and struggle on the social margins. The revival also provided role models to

emulate for their repertoires, artistic skill, and often iconoclastic identity grounded in

traditional culture. The revival did this by simultaneously embracing two meanings of

folk, as a whole, complete way of life, and as a special process of rediscovery and

10 Cantwell finds this impulse towards folk preservation to not be of the “patriotic” bent, but rather a “matriotic” concern, a love of mother culture and memory. 32

creativity (Williams 25). Looking at the Washington, D.C., folk revival exposes the

dynamic folk process of exchange between the old and new, but it also disrupts the

simplistic dichotomy in many romantic narratives of the folk revival as one of left vs.

right, as revivalist looked for alternative ideologies and identities in the postwar era.

The folk revival did not end with the second British invasion or when Dylan

plugged in at Newport. 11 Study of how revivals create the “usable past” reveals a great

deal about the construction of the American national identity, as well as who “the folk”

are, and who can legitimately speak for them. By looking at the structure of folk

musicians and groups in Washington, both popular and lesser known locals, clubs and

coffee houses, folk music collectors and societies, and media outlets, all within reach of

the accumulated national folksong archive and in a city at the edge of Appalachia, we can

see how the local project to revive America’s musical past was a specific re-invention of tradition, a vision of the folk with political and scholarly implications. The quest for

authenticity gave direction to Washington’s own folk music “movement” and legitimized the national infatuation with America’s musical roots as it re-constructed its “old-timey”

rural self, perhaps to better understand or escape from its own modern urban identity .

Following shifts in other scholarly fields for understanding how immediate

relationships shape the meaning and function of folklore, folklorists during the revival

began to concentrate their study on the context as well as the text of artistic performance.

The influential folklorist and Washington revival participant Henry Glassie found that for

“every day of text, there are six of context” (Sandwiess). The interplay of artist and text

and setting and audience reveals often hidden structures and agendas, subjectivities and

11 During the years that Alan Lomax spent in political exile in England during the McCarthy years, he did several popular BBC radio shows on American folk music that highlighted the black style of skiffle heard in both London and Liverpool. He had brought many Library of Congress recordings with him. 33

insight into the creative and political processes. Compared to other urban revival sites,

the folk consciousness around Washington was radical in its own way, pursuing a

depoliticized but highly sophisticated connection to rural lifeways and music, raising it

up to a "folk art" that gave the city regional, as well as cosmopolitan, distinction.

Perception of physical setting and imagination work together with memory to create a

distinct sense of “place,” informed by both hegemonic and local forces, and this sense of

place actively informs artistic tradition and innovation. There are textual, material, and ideological-political consequences of that dynamic. While the Weavers might be able to phonetically recreate the songs of southern blacks, the audience must bring its imagination of “the South” to complete the folk experience as "authentic." But just how did Washingtonians imagine their own sense of “place” during the folk revival?

A revival participant and historian from Philadelphia, folksinger Dick Weissman, along with two other young east coast suburbanites, John Phillips and Scott McKenzie

(from Arlington, Virginia), formed The Journeymen, a popular folk trio that played the

1960s "folkie" revival circuit, including clubs in Washington like the Cellar Door. In his work on the business aspects of performing folk music, Weissman points to the core requirements for a metropolitan area to viably sustain a revival of traditional music.

There must be a physical, aesthetic, communications, and institutional infrastructure of museums, music clubs, book and record stores, folk music societies, radio stations, instrument makers, recording companies, university folklore departments, government support, and a receptive audience to sustain them (Weissman, Which Side Are You On

130). These urban folk worlds each have a unique aesthetic sensibility of what is legitimate folk, rooted in the regional, cultural, and social differences produced by each

metropolitan area and the dynamic with its rural hinterland. As folklorists and song

collectors like Alan Lomax and Mike Seeger, along with a small army of amateur

folksingers, fanned out from Washington into the nearby Appalachian mountains, or

further, into the Mississippi Delta looking for songs and artists unspoiled by modern

politics or mass culture, they instilled a new set of spatial relationships between city and

country that showed Washington’s deep understanding of American folklife. They

partially conferred a wholesome sense of "down-home" back onto the federalized space

of Washington. Their actions, exchanging elements of folk and mass culture back and

forth, also reframed their rural destinations into a “contact zone” between cultures rather

than just isolated communities (Kurin 70).12 The revival in Washington changed the

local sense of place to one firmly rooted in American musical traditions of the common

man. Simultaneously it repositioned rural folk communities as culturally complex and

rich, but also as rapidly disappearing pastoral sites of a genuine, unspoiled, and

quintessentially American folk music with the potential for personal and social

transformation.

Even before the 1963 March on Washington, “We Shall Overcome” was an

unofficial anthem of those marching for racial equality, providing spontaneous solidarity

in the face of attacks by segregationist forces. The regulatory functions of folk music

helped pass along organizational skills and a sense of coherence to the Civil Rights

movement, a “structure of feeling” communicated through song about shared humanity

and perseverance. Cold War Washington, D.C., was often held up as an example of

failure of American rhetoric about racial equality under Western capitalism, and folk

12Alan Lomax often criticized modern arrangers of folk music albums and festivals for “over sophistication,” arbitrarily divorcing the folksong from its context (Lomax, Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 58). However, other scholars note Lomax’s tendency to over-romanticize the “innocent” folk. 35

musicians on the international stage of Washington perhaps had more power to project or

disrupt nationalist propaganda than is at first recognized. The local manifestation of the

folk revival had a radical pacifist, anti-imperialist, and integrationist agenda that could change how Washington itself was perceived, even as it helped cope with the problems of

modernity. Paradoxically, the local urbane, cosmopolitan, yet depoliticized approach to

determining true folk authenticity elevated the collection, categorization, and easy

consumption of folksong above complex analysis of the disenfranchisement and oppression that often gave it emotional and existential sincerity. This reinforced

"traditional" unequal race and class power relations, inherent in the differences between the affluent urban whites driving the revival and the poor rural “other,” the civilized city and untamed country.

Unlike other cities, Washington’s particular constellation of clubs, colleges, archives, and media outlets gave the folk music scene a unique, strongly traditionalist and politically muted edge. According to revival scholar Richard Reuss and most other writers on the folk revival "movement," including Washington figures such as Dick Cerri and Gene Rosenthal, the major fault line between the local and national phenomenon was

between culturally conservative purists (or even “folk Nazis”), who approached the music

from an exacting traditionalist stance and who disdained alterations to suit commercial or

modern tastes, and those who were more liberal with the form, finding the creation of

“new” and popular folk songs both possible and necessary (Cerri, telephone interview 19

Nov. 2008). To the latter, even commercial influences were all right if they spread a

transformative folk consciousness to the masses and were morally acceptable if used to

pay the bills. The mix of these elements apparent in repertoire and musical tastes of

groups and individual folk artists playing the area reveal the “structure of feeling” of

Washington as the country went through profound changes in class and race relations.

Despite having a long history of local folk artists, as well as generations of musicians from the capital’s hinterlands, Washington receives little attention in histories of the folk revival. In 1958 one of the first music magazines dedicated to the folk revival,

Caravan, reported in its survey of the national coffee house scene that “in Washington,

D.C., no success was encountered” (Sternlight 22). Admittedly, the first major venue dedicated to folk music of the collegiate citybilly variety, The Shadows, did not open in

Washington until 1961 (Gunnip 1). But Washington has always had spaces open for performances of traditional, popular, and topical folk material. Even under the pall of charges by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Pete Seeger played

Lisner Auditorium near George Washington University in 1958, (Washington Post, C9,

1958). Scholarship about the folk music revival in the nation’s capital usually covers without much detail figures at the LOC Archive of American Folksong and the

Smithsonian as abstract authenticators. Often covered is political drama of the blacklisting of folk artists, replayed in Pete Seeger’s defiant testimony before the House

Un-American Activities Committee, or the mass culture event, the 1963 March on

Washington, which has become part of our national folklore. These sites and events are indeed significant, but they obscure the local story of the folk revival.

Folk revival scholar Neil Rosenberg illuminates the special role the "folk royalty" of the Seeger and Lomax families played in building the LOC folksong archive in

Washington and developing the strong local taste for traditional folk music. He correctly points to how Alan and John Lomax shifted the criteria for authenticity to aural means

and live recordings over textual evidence (Rosenberg, Transforming Traditions 13). This

emphasis on context also brought "rediscovered" performers to the forefront of the

revival, first promoted by Alan Lomax through government and private channels as a

democratic project celebrating the common man in his own voice (Graham B8).

Rosenberg critically points to how Lomax coached the performers he sponsored, such as

Huddie Ledbetter, to conform their styles and repertoires to a rural, backwoods image

and his personal agenda to present unadulterated examples of American folksong. Both

the Lomax and the Seeger families lived and worked and played in and around

Washington, and along with many lesser-noted participants in the revival such as the

Carter and Stoneman families from Virginia, popular folksingers Carol Hedin and Bob

Grossman, and the rare female bluegrass artists Alice Gerrard and Hazel Dickens, they all

helped establish the local folk world. The local understanding of folk music was affirmed

by the very presence of the Lomaxes and the Seegers, and it reflected the city's regional influences, its unique political economy, and the complex symbolism Washington held in

the American imagination. However, though Pete Seeger had many admirers, many local

folksingers disdained his leftist ideology as incompatible with the mindset of rural

traditional culture and incorporated little of it into their music (Spottswood, telephone

interview 16 Feb. 2009).

Three primary areas of Washington's folk revival history perhaps best bring the city's specialized encounter with rural traditional into relief. An examination of overlooked early folklorists and other elites in Washington, of key figures behind the

Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, and of the National Folklife

Festival first held in Washington, D.C., in 1934 reveals the early cultural politics of

prewar Washington. As is true of other revival histories, mapping the actual cultural

geography of 1950s Washington at the height of the popular folk revival is a second area

that illuminates the active structure of feeling in Washington in its encounter with its own

regional folk as it turns "hillbilly" music into bluegrass for city folk. In the post Brown v.

Board era, and after the Kingston Trio's hit with "Tom Dooley," the first schisms over

issues of authenticity appear in Washington's folk scene. Lastly, the intriguing oral histories of the so-called "DC Blues Mafia," a small group of record collectors and country blues guitar aficionados who played a major role in the "rediscovery" of Delta blues artists Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, help complete the picture of 1960s cultural revival in early 1960s Washington. Their close relationships across racial lines created a local "blues world" during a critical, tense period for the Civil Rights

Movement marked by voter rights activity in the South, the March on Washington, and questions over tactics and white patronage, showing some of the complex, often paradoxical infrapolitics of revival in the nation's capital. The stories of players in the DC blues revival help explain why so few African Americans participated in the larger folk revival phenomenon.

The Beat Generation of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg resonated with the

"folkniks" of the civil rights-oriented New Left, far more than with remaining guards of the Old Left, labor-oriented prewar Popular Front progressives. They were often in tune with the folk revival's inward, existential focus on transformative, personal encounters with those on America's social and cultural margins, celebrating individualism and artistic identity. The Beats and the folk revivalists shared anti-pop music and anti-status

motifs during their searches for a seemingly lost, aesthetically and morally superior

America, exemplified in the esoteric Anthology of American Folk Music record set produced in 1952 by the eclectic Harry Smith. Period scholars such as Doug Rossinow find the late 1950s folk revival to be a new manifestation of a continuous existential project, that “the search for authenticity is at the heart of the new left,” (Rossinow 4).

But the culturally conservative population around Washington seems to have resisted or accommodated this shift in tactics by the left towards the individual in complex ways unlike those in other metropolitan areas. They sought to depoliticize folk artists and songs to make them an art form fit for sophisticated urban tastes, the local revival conferring agency and status on local culture brokers perhaps more than the folk they rediscovered.

The folk revival in Washington blurred the lines between city and country, playing its part in the national folk revival "movement," but in other ways it reinscribed the distinction between these spaces and their attendant social hierarchies. Still,

Washington's unique folk world reveals the dynamic and persistent process of folklore to recombine elements of the old and new to meet contemporary needs. Through this ethnographic look at Washington, D.C., the rules guiding how tradition and creativity interact are revealed in the sites and stories of the revival, in the context of Washington’s distinctive historical, geographic, and political presence. During the late 1950s and early

1960s the “folk” became a mass culture phenomenon through shows like ABC’s

Hootenanny, but it also became, paradoxically, an individualistic, internalized, yet

socially transformative movement to seek out, preserve, and disseminate traditional

music from geographically and culturally isolated communities across America. The

essential role of Washington, D.C., in this folk process is an overlooked dimension of

American Studies and the history of cultural revival.

Chapter 2: Roots of the Folk Revival in Washington, D.C.

“Now when it comes to folk music revivals, I have had my doubts.”

– Pete Seeger (Dunaway and Beer x)

During the Depression and through the end of World War II an infrastructure to gather and interpret American folk culture was built in Washington, D.C. It was an

organizational project by academics, government employees and researchers, activists, a

few genuine traditional artists, and their many imitators and promoters, assisted by the

patronage of American presidents. It began at a time when an unsure country looked to

Washington and its past for reassurance, solidarity, and inspiration. Folksong collectors

in the Library of Congress, the Works Project Administration, and the Farm Securities

Administration were key to this nationalistic cultural project, a government-sponsored

“folk revival” based on locating an authentic, homegrown, non-European national

identity legitimized by the culture of people living at America's margins.

Beginning in the 1920s, left-leaning archivists, culture brokers, folksong fans, and

performers in the District of Columbia enabled the “authenticity” found in folk music as

way to look beyond divisive issues of race and class. Local artists and ballad hunters had

access to rich collections of material built with new “objective” recording technology,

often working for powerful federal institutions and rubbing shoulders with the political

elite. Academic research and familiarity with the cultural geography of the nearby

Appalachian and Piedmont regions led to an urban, sophisticated, and sympathetic way of

understanding of the folk, which produced literacy in marginal cultures. The shift to

looking for the “good and beautiful” of folksong based on context of performance and its

ethnographic origin, rather than on cultural superiority, became a powerful mechanism

for celebrating diversity, or inscribing it as a marker of difference in order to elevate the

"other" (Lomax, Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 214).

Robert Winslow Gordon and the Archive of American Folksong

Since the Teddy Roosevelt administration, American folk music had been an

officially sanctioned element of the national character. The “outdoorsman” President was

enamored with folksong and wrote a letter to John Lomax that was published in Lomax’s

1910 popular collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, providing a major boost for Lomax’s career as a folksong collector and entrepreneur (Cantwell, When We

Were Good: The Folk Revival 7). Wrote Roosevelt, it was “a work of real importance to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier”

(John Lomax).1 The soft-spoken President’s nativist rhetoric insisted on the “strenuous

life” associated with the folk as a cure for the emasculating shackles of civilization,

1Roosevelt saw American folksong the natural result of our continental conquest, “There is something very curious in the reproduction here on this new continent of essentially the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained in ‘medieval’ England; including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood. Under modern conditions however, the native ballad is speedily killed by competition with the music hall songs; the cowboys becoming ashamed to sing the crude homespun ballads in view of what Owen Writes calls ‘the ill-smelling saloon cleverness’ of the far less interesting compositions of the music hall singers. It is therefore a work of real importance to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier” (John Lomax vii). 42

which resonated with the new upper and middle classes of early industrial twentieth-

century America. By including folksong as a way to revive America’s pioneering spirit,

he legitimized state sponsorship of other academic and social elites going into the

hinterlands to find lingering Anglo-Saxon ballads. They inspired new American-made songs like "Home on the Range" that have become authentic "folk" by speaking to our collective manifest destiny.

It was during this period that a small group of “men of letters” (almost all

Harvard-educated) such as John Lomax, folklorist Cecil Sharpe, “radical” composer

Charles Seeger, and poet Carl Sandburg all produced collections of folksongs for mass consumption. They outlined a shared cultural heritage of the American frontier spirit, tradition, and innovation. By reprinting the lyrics with only brief outline of the melody to songs like “Foggy Foggy Dew” and “The Buffalo Skinners,” they legitimized folk- literature as a poetic art form. They also generated a popular desire for more examples of

“old-timey” music through accessible, non-scholarly songbooks intended to be played at home. It was in this context that Robert Winslow Gordon, a relatively amateur folklorist known only for a hillbilly music column in Adventure!, a magazine for outdoor sports enthusiasts, started the Archive of American Folksong in the Jefferson Building at the

Library of Congress (LOC) with the goal of collecting and categorizing the totality of

American folksong from its living context. The collection of field recordings and commercial albums allowed for an "official" musicological verification of songs as genuine American folksong, preserved and disseminated near the seat of national representative government.

Gordon’s original ideological imprint on the collection started with his own personal accumulation of early hillbilly and race records, made possible through new recording technology. Gordon embodied many of the schisms in the broader field of folklore itself over rural authenticity, liberal patronage, black and white cultural legacies, and the political uses of folksong, shaping the cultural politics of later folk music revivals. Gordon's Americanism was a principal factor in his professional life. “Not content with tracing survivals of British traditions in the New World, he directed his energies toward gathering songs rooted in American soil. He wrote that their neglect was a "disgrace to our national scholarship" (Kodish 163). The fissures that dominated the folk revival over authenticity and over just who “owns the folk" originate in this initial impulse to capture an essential, yet dying American culture on the new "portable" aluminum recording discs that had been largely ignored by academic folklorists due to its

“low” vernacular and bodily material.

Gordon is fairly typical of folklore study in the first decades of the twentieth century as it aimed to professionalize itself and to distinguish itself from anthropology.

As folklore departments sprang up at Harvard and the University of California at

Berkeley, the dominant theoretical trend was one of “evolutionary diffusionism” or historic-geographic method, collecting and mapping the movements of folktales or folksongs across communities in search of an original “Ur-text,” (Kodish iv). Folksong study was still largely a gentleman’s pursuit, part of Teddy Roosevelt’s cult of manhood.

Searching out the rough, simple life of the common man in his natural element, Gordon intentionally sought out the marginal and masculine in folksong as a way to restore

“genuine Americanism” (Kodish 32).

Like many academically trained folklorists of the early twentieth century, Gordon attended Harvard University, home of the “literary” faction in the folklore field (in contrast to the more established anthropological wing represented by Franz Boaz at

Columbia University, which Gordon would later attend). Gordon studied at Harvard under George Lyman Kittredge and Francis Gummere, both protégés of Francis Child.

Child is best known for his definitive work, published in five volumes between 1882 and

1898, establishing a canon of exactly 305 distinct surviving English and Scottish folk ballads from which he claimed all other ballads descended. Child’s views of folk culture, gleaned from combing books rather than face-to-face contact, dominated the field and imparted a long-lasting political dimension to the study, collection, and revival of folksong. The ballads he claimed most genuine came from a more egalitarian, pre- capitalist age when society was not split into classes, and the "true voice" of the people came through their music.2 The folklorists who followed him, like Gordon, continued to portray folk music as a more “naturally” egalitarian and pure art form. The textual emphasis by giants like Child on archival collection and categorization of ballads rather than on contextual analysis (taken up by the Lomaxes) reinforced a literary view of

American folksong as individual, reproducible artifacts. The emphasis on text allowed comparative tracing of patterns of change across space and time to see how songs like

“The Bonny Lass of Anglesey” (#220) adhered to a version deemed to be the original, rather than seeing how folksongs function within communities. While Gordon was not an

“armchair” folklorist and went into the field to collect material, like Child he saw

2 But "the people" was not a Marxist proletariat for Child, rather comprising all the levels of society, poor, middle, and rich. Child is more in line with Richard Habermas’s understanding of an all inclusive “public” that exists in contrast to the State. Folksong collectors like “fellow traveler” Charles Seeger did see the “folk” as an oppressed underclass that could be inspired to revolution. 45

recorded folksongs as texts separable from their local function. He legitimized selective

appropriation and reordering of folksongs during the folk revival to meet an urban, elite

desire to tangentially connect with the common man. This emphasis on the textual clarity

of folksong lyrics made them especially attractive to mass movements for providing

seemingly stable and easily legible meaning to be found at the subaltern level of the folk.

Gordon was thrilled to discover that Child’s ballads were perhaps best preserved

in America's physically and socially isolated communities. He located "pure" forms

rediscovered in the “hollows” of Appalachia, but also lost sea-shanties and work songs sung by San Francisco longshoremen, and he began building a private collection of commercial and private recordings. Gordon sought to surpass Child with a complete compendium of American folksong, breaking method with his mentor by seeking out the living resources of folksong and the contextual events that could inspire transformation of old into “new” folksong. Already well known to Carl Engle, Chief of the Music Division, for the time he spent digging through manuscripts and the few records on hand at the

Library of Congress, Gordon was approached by Engle with the daunting project to compile the totality of American folksong. Engle had raised funds from private

Philadelphia philanthropists who agreed that there “is a need for formation of a great central collection of American folk songs… the logical place is at the national library of the United States” (Hardin 3), authenticated by folklorists trained in the literary tradition.

But Engle’s supposedly objective project to collect uncontaminated folksong already contained bias as to what he saw as culturally valuable. Like Child, he often discounted or ignored “bawdy” or prurient folk material, his own master’s thesis a defense against

adding any additional songs to Child's final, definitive list of 305 ballads he considered to

be at the root of all legitimate traditional material.

Though Gordon had a romantic notion of the natural purity of folk culture and

narrow moral criteria for what should be collected at the LOC, he redirected public

awareness towards America's own overlooked cultural heritage (Hickerson and Jenkins).3

Centralizing folk music study and providing the first usable index, Gordon put

Washington, D.C., in the national imagination as the official storehouse of our collective musical heritage. It was proof of a non-European, independent, traditional aesthetic culture. His insistence on scientific rigor, backed up by the faith in the objective accuracy of recordings, gave legitimacy to American folksong studies, spatially charting how musical traditions evolved in the same manner anthropologists charted human migration.

Gordon did not reach out directly to either the literary or anthropological camps in professional folklore studies, instead using a network of “mountain informants” like amateur folksong hunter like Bascom Lunsford. Setting up a collecting circuit that fed songs to and from state folklore organizations, he bypassed the input of the American

Folklore Society, which tended to ignore contemporary “hillbilly” music (Kodish 159).

Gordon brought issues of context into the debate over the processes of folksong creation, events that inspire innovation and cultural regulation of tradition, and reconciling arguments for individual versus group creation. His own intimate field work in remote communities of Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia set the example for future ethnomusicologists, and along with his organized network of field collectors, became the model for state-run folklore organizations (173).

3 Due to their bawdy and scatological nature, the "Inferno Collection,” 200 pages of material and letters, were separated from the main collection of the Archive of Folk Culture by Gordon and did not resurface until 1974. 47

Though Gordon in many ways carried on with an elitist and nationalist folklore

project, defining a genre of folk music as a culturally fascinating “other” to better

enhance the lives of sophisticated urbanites, its naturalized purity open for appropriation

as the spiritual bedrock of the nation, he did break in important ways with previous folksong scholarship, which had political implications for the later folk revivals. Unlike other folk music scholars such as Cecil Sharp, who, with an overtly racial agenda, insisted on the superiority of Anglo-Saxon-based folksongs, Gordon recognized and insisted upon the influence and validity of African-American culture, indelibly entwined

with the production of supposedly “white” American folk music. Through his study of

instrumentation, lyrics, and melody, he asserted the most distinctively American

folksongs came from slaves and ex-slaves who had synthesized African and European

musical forms into a new creolized culture. After becoming head of the Archive, he wrote

to the chief of the music division, “What the Negro has to-day is a combination of many

different things. He has adopted, and he has assimilated, and he has created. I grant him

all that is due” (Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues 69). This perspective was radical for its

day, and later Melville Herskovits and Alan Lomax would make this a centerpiece of

their research, demonstrating the common backgrounds of white and black folk music. It

is important to note the infrapolitics in making the radical claim that there was no true

color line dividing white and black musical culture, both sides sharing elements and

styles through popular music such as minstrelsy and local transmissions in racially mixed

communities (Kodish 184). This notion opened the door to looking at folklore as a

process in continual transformation and as a mechanism for social integration.

At the local YWCA in 1939, Gordon gave a folk recital to Washington’s chapter of the Twentieth Century Club. Between songs, he raised the folk consciousness of

Washington’s literati, saying, ”There is as much or more American folk song being created today as in any period of our history. Folk music thrives in most cities in groups racially or otherwise separated from others” (“Robert Gordon to Address” S6). Despite his sense that marginality is necessary for folksong authenticity, he saw it could be an urban phenomenon and that direct, contextualized experience is required to find its inner meaning. “It is necessary to understand the folk before it is possible to understand their songs. The scholar in his library cannot find this in books,” he said (S6). Despite a reputation for halitosis, Gordon fascinated Washington’s cultural elite with his knowledge of folksong, and gave them an expanded, performance-based view of what it meant. He concluded, “A song is never sung twice alike at any given time or place by any two persons, and it is impossible to understand any one type without understanding the others” (S6). Though there is little supporting evidence, it is interesting to speculate if

Gordon passed along similar ideas about marginality and context to students at George

Washington University when he later taught there for a brief period.

In keeping with his new status as a culture broker in the nation's capital, Gordon, when he moved to the city, often stayed with Louise Pound, first female president of the

American Folklore Society (1925-1927), and John G. White, two of America’s most respected folklorists and part of Washington’s social elite.4 But it was not long before

Gordon’s single-minded search for folksong uncontaminated by mass culture led to his

4 Pound was significant not only because as a woman she broke gender barriers in a field dominated by men, but also because she broke ranks with those who argued authenticity only for the anonymous, communal origins of folksong.

removal as head of the Archive in 1932 (Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues 105).5

Concentrating solely on fieldwork and developing ever more accurate recording

equipment, he rarely reported back to Engle and the board of directors. He lacked the

political acumen required for federal institution-building, preferring to spend time outside

Washington meeting his isolated informants, or doing copyright consultation for RCA

Victor (Kodish 180). This opened the door for noted folksong collector John Lomax to

replace Gordon as head of the Archive, facilitated by his political connections to FDR

and Senator Sam Rayburn (193). Gordon was an ardent anticommunist, but ironically the

men who came after him to run and work at the Archive, such as Alan Lomax, Charles

and Pete Seeger, and Ben Botkin, were all part of the leftist “Popular Front,” and they all used the folksong collection intentionally as part of a cultural strategy for social change

through the public application of folklore. Gordon, on the other hand, was possessive of

the material he had invested his life accumulating and resisted its public dissemination

lest its purity and meaning be lost in the maelstrom of modern mass culture.

Gordon “embodied the schisms in folklore” (Kodish 5) that seem to arise during each American folk song revival. The scholarly pursuit of traditional arts and lifeways often has subtle political implications, evoking issues of collection, authenticity, appropriation, contamination by mass culture, and patronage, who counts as genuinely

“folk” and who can legitimately speak for them.6 Gordon himself took the “communal”

side of folksong creation, unidentified authorship opening the door to profitable

copyrights by folk song hunters such as himself and the Lomaxes. This had not only

5It also appeared that John Lomax sought his job. Gordon had often limited Lomax’s access to recording equipment. 6 Issues over exploitation by copyright and who “owns” the folk would continue at the Archives under management by Alan Lomax. 50

commercial but political implications for the later folk revival. It defined folk music as

anonymously created by group effort, marginalizing people by implying that they always

act unconsciously in harmony to create folksongs, rather than as individual agents

capable of composing long-lasting, personally meaningful works. The lack of copyright

for most pre-war material was a bonanza for record companies and performer-collectors

like Alan Lomax, who often produced their own commercially viable variants of folksongs on anthology albums that slipped into popular culture in the 1950s. Rather than folksongs being treated as the intellectual property of individual artists, the certification by Gordon and other federal government workers of genuine American folksong as anonymously created gave political ownership to "the people," a shared cultural legacy of an idealized rural American now rapidly fading in the face of modernity. This also validated the professional folksong collector as the most qualified person to gather, distill, and re-present the essential qualities of American culture to be found in folksong (Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues 60).

When Robert Gordon left the LOC he retained all of the reproduction rights to the material he had “donated” to the Archive of American Folksong. This obscured who rightfully owned and could use collections of American folk music, even at the Library of

Congress (Kodish 35). But perhaps Gordon's more definitive impact on the study of folk music was a sense that cultural revival projects offer access to a music built on moral clarity and essential, stable meaning. In a pastoral world dominated by themes of love, loss, and death, the simple, dialectical distinctions of “good friends and bad enemies” heard in folk music resonated with later political movements looking for legitimacy and

moral authority, requiring distinct declarations of “Which side are you on?” In 1927,

Gordon replied to a letter in Adventure magazine, "I'm not throwing bouquets, but I'd

rather have the respect and esteem of mountain folk than that of any class of people I've

ever met or ever hope to. They're square-good friends and bad enemies--and they let you

know right out where they stand," (Kodish1).

In periods when meaning seems arbitrary and political conditions demanded

taking a stand, Gordon's feelings for his informants in Appalachia reflected an ideological need. Seeking out the emotive directness in folksong was a way to provide the public with distinct contrasts between urban and rural lifeways, war and peace, love and loss, justice and oppression, so by the mid-1950s revival we begin to see the impact of the sophisticated, literary, romantic, yet subtly political understanding of folksong resulting from the project of cultural revival started by those working at the Library of Congress such as Gordon (Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest 58). Song-hunters like Alan Lomax further entwined that pastoral vision of the folk with progressive movements, while retaining the notion that traditional music offers clear meanings and distinct values as a way to valid cultural and political understanding. Thus, people seem to revive folk music as an ontological tool, functioning to impart inherent meaning when modern, suburban

life makes it seem arbitrary and divorced from the rural lifeways of idealized folk who

intuitively distinguish the bad from the “good and beautiful” (Lomax, Alan Lomax,

Selected Writings 212). Paradoxically, this is by virtue of these folk both possessing the

wisdom of the common man and being the distant, rural outsider on the margins,

culturally and socially far removed from the taint of American mass culture.

The Lomaxes Come to Washington

In the late 1950s, as rediscovered folk songs like “Tom Dooley,” performed by

the Kingston Trio, hit the popular radio charts, music scholar D.K. Wilgus wrote his

seminal 1959 work on the study of traditional music, Anglo-American Folksong

Scholarship Since 1898, as response to the paucity of academic work on American folksong. Wilgus outlined the unique folk consciousness John Lomax brought to the

Archive of American Folksong in Washington, D.C.:

Three traditions guided the collecting [in the United States]: the

academic, which, following Child, sought accurate transcriptions

of text first and music later for scholarly study; the local

enthusiastic, which searched out and displayed the quaint, the

unusual, the exciting, the enjoyable in undisciplined and mercurial

fashion; and the musical aesthetic, which sought the

distinguishable art form of the folk tune for appreciation and

performance. The collectors themselves were academics, whether

somewhat detached leaders of regional activity or lone workers

aided by chance location, early upbringing, or special interest. Or

they were interested amateurs in that they began and pursued their

labors for a wide variety of reasons unrelated to the values of

disinterested scholarship. A union of both types of collector, in the

person of John A. Lomax, enriched the greatest collection of all,

the Archive of American Folk Song (Library of Congress).

(Wilgus, xv)

John Lomax grew up listening to the cowboy songs and border music of West Texas, but

like Gordon, he received graduate training at Harvard under Kittredge. When Lomax

returned to Texas from Harvard in 1907, he founded the Texas Folklore Society and

continued to do folksong scholarship at the University of Texas in Austin, eventually

being elected as president of the American Folklore Society in 1912. In 1932 during the

depths of the Depression, while looking for steady income, Lomax was offered the

chance to write a new anthology of folksong for MacMillan Publishing. He traveled to

the Archive in Washington to do the work, but found the field recordings left behind by

Gordon had large gaps across regions and periods. He therefore made an arrangement

with the LOC whereby it would provide "portable" recording equipment, and in exchange

he would travel the country making field recordings using new technology (largely

developed by Gordon) to be deposited in the Archive, then the major resource for printed

and recorded material in the United States (Hardin, Kodish).

This turned out to be one of the most far-reaching events in the annals of folk revival history, and it set John and Alan Lomax on the first of their famous expeditions into the deep South to find America’s musical roots. With recording equipment built into the trunk of their Ford rambler to document the most isolated folk artists across the South and West on aluminum discs, this trip resulted in the discovery of Huddie Ledbetter in

Angola prison, a living reservoir of hundreds of traditional songs. Later recollections by

John and Alan Lomax of their ethnomusicological adventures, the thrill of immersion into a hidden and exotic America heritage detailed in album liner notes and books, motivated the folk music aficionados of the 1950s to take their own “southern journeys” in search for authenticity and contact with those on the margins.

Unlike Robert Gordon, John Lomax was more astute about the financial and

political responsibilities involved in running the Archive. For all of his work, he

volunteered to be paid a salary of only one dollar, with the title of “Honorary Curator.”

The role included fundraising for the Library, and he was expected to support himself

entirely through writing books and giving lectures. Like Gordon, however, Lomax secured philanthropic grants from organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and

Carnegie Corporation to build a small army of field recording teams and supporting state folklore associations to make the Archive a truly representative collection of America's multi-regional roots music.

The work done at the Archive illuminates the process of canon formation, the way certain cultural figures gain dominance in the public memory over others (Filene, “’Our

Singing Country’” 605). The Lomaxes challenged Francis Child’s non-American canon,

which recognized only the remains of feudal British culture found moldering in its

backwoods. They paid attention to song sources he had ignored, the prison and the

lumberyard, and they insisted on its current cultural validity and social function.

However, they also had distinct ideas of what counted as authentic folksong, discounting

songs that did not fit a rural or racial identity, and studiously avoided songs that carried the commercial taint of Tin Pan Alley (605). By ignoring modern, popular songs that had significance to local folk communities, they constructed an artificial, exclusionary canon that hardened repertoires for later folk revivals, both for the traditional artist and their emulators. Songs like “Stagolee” and “Lady of Carlisle” made it into the Archive and

onto folk music anthology albums because the Lomaxes had gone through hundreds of

informants and versions to determine that these songs had survived within the oral

tradition of supposedly isolated communities, and thus could be deemed authentically folk. The Lomaxes two-sided mission of discovery of genuine rural folk song and dissemination through recorded media to the public created contradictions in their work, compounded by an apparent lack of self consciousness about their role as intermediaries between popular and folk culture. Robert Gordon may have sensed these complications when he originally resisted loaning out his precious recording equipment to the Lomaxes.

Relationships of race, power, and privilege played out as the Lomaxes traveled the country in search of their ideal folk resources. By the unspoken power of being upper class whites in Southern society, they could demand and gain access to many of their black informants, many of whom were sharecroppers and prisoners. Nonetheless, their work to expose and preserve the significance of hidden African-American culture and understand its interplay and influence on white and mass culture was radical for the time.

Through research throughout the South and the Caribbean, they traced the instrumental and melodic patterns from African slave descendants up through Appalachia, and their songbook American Ballads and Folksongs (1934) showed that the Lomaxes were far more inclusive about America’s musical roots than Carl Sandburg in his collection,

American Songbag, which avoided negative songs like gospel songs and the blues and did little to delve into the cross-racial origins of many folksongs. The Lomaxes gave praise to blacks for creating “the most distinctive of folk songs--the most interesting, the most appealing, and the greatest quantity” and explicitly located the power of these songs in the hardships they had endured (Filene, “’Our Singing Country’” 607).

The Civil Rights Movement benefited in many ways from the legitimization of black culture and revitalization of interest in gospel and spirituals the Lomaxes inspired.

However, Lawrence Gellert, who specialized in collecting black songs of protest, claimed

John Lomax embodied "the slave-master attitude intact" (Wolfe and Lornell 194). He

could command performances from informants, and then constrain representations of

black folksongs to the melodramatic and sorrowful, evoking pity rather than cultural

equality. The Lomaxes did not seem to be truly interested in songs, or even people, that offered incentives to change systems of oppression (194). Their attitude was a mixture of condescension and romantic glorification of black culture, which they approached with the unspoken authority of white, elite, Harvard-educated, folksong hunters from

Washington. “They respected black culture and lamented the injustice that helped shaped it, but they did not challenge the system of segregation that produced the injustice,”

(Filene, ‘”Our Singing Country’” 609). Their apolitical approach preserved their special access to these geographically and racially isolated sources of “pure" folk song, a kind of intentional disenfranchisement of their sources from a more integrated world of popular culture. It seems both John and Alan Lomax were more interested in transcending racial barriers than in tearing them down during their prewar song-hunting excursions. Through fieldwork to build the Archive of American Folksong, they showed the integrated roots of folksong as a romantic, but depoliticized, shared musical heritage, rather than promoting folk music and performers that could directly challenge the status quo.

Alan Lomax was far more politically active than his father. He became directly tied to the "cultural front" of liberal progressives during and after WWII , but he still took a more moderate approach to secure his own status as a culture broker to draw the widest popular appeal for his vision of the folk. Folklore, he pronounced, could “provide the thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my

brother’” (Filene, ‘”Our Singing Country’” 609). Admirable sentiment, but for the advancement of folk music and his own reputation, it did not prevent Lomax from continually, and profitably, describing their most famous discovery, Huddie Ledbetter, as a “swamp primitive, angry, freighted with great sorrow and joy” (Gottleib L7). Their relationship, marked by exploitation as well as celebration of Leadbelly's genius, still sparks scholarly debate.7

Like Gordon, the Lomaxes highlighted the populist spirit of folksong, but also maintained the folk as a racialized, exotic other. For example, Ledbetter’s “Bourgeois

Blues,” about discrimination in Washington, carries a deeper irony considering his relationship to the affluent Lomax family. Certainly John and Alan Lomax did much in bringing Mr. Ledbetter and his music out of the brutal prison system of Louisiana, but their patronage produced a constrained image of him and black culture that naturalized stereotypes of dependency and psychological immaturity. In a 1943 Washington Post interview on the pathos behind “Negro music,” Alan Lomax said he “believes the colored man’s music, both religious and ‘sinful’ (secular music –work songs, blues, hollers, ballads, jazz), is, at its roots, the outpourings of an unhappy race. Even in his more positive moods, it tells of the primitive, earthy pleasures that had been allowed the

Negro… say the musicologists – is a compensation response” (Gottleib L2). Even the

Lomaxes’ assistants at the Archive described a primitive, racialized, noble-savage view of “Leadbelly” to readers of the Washington Post: “Miss Rogers, secretary of the library’s music division, still shudders at the vision of Lead Belly’s giant frame stalking about the building’s gloomy halls. For Lead Belly was a killer. Yet each time he landed

7 A forthcoming (2014) album and book on Huddie Ledbetter written by archivist Jeff Place and produced by Smithsonian Folkways records reveals Leadbelly's unvarnished opinions of his patrons the Lomaxes. 58

in the chain gang, he unslung his seven-string guitar and sang himself to freedom”

(Gottleib L7).8 To preserve Ledbetter's image as an emotional savage, a culturally

unspoiled songster that was a living conduit to America’s vast folksong heritage, the

Lomaxes focused on Ledbetter’s convict past in press reports, depicting him as slow-

witted and driven by sex and violence.

A look at Huddie Ledbetter’s “Bourgeois Blues” reveals some of the Lomaxes’,

and Washington's, contradictory politics that seem to inform the later Washington, D.C.,

folk revival. The song is a biting commentary on the lingering signs of Jim Crow in the

nation's capital, which Leadbelly encountered after he was first brought there by Alan

Lomax to record as many songs as he could recall for the Library of Congress. In June of

1937, when the young Lomax, now "assistant in charge" at the Archive of American

Folksong, supervised the session in the LOC studios, it was an invitation for Ledbetter to

join the “Hall of Fame” of folksong, an invitation to be sanctified among America’s most

valuable cultural artifacts.9 During their visit to the capital Martha and Huddie Ledbetter

encountered racial discrimination in public spaces similar to what they and other blacks

had experienced in the North, often to their great surprise. Ledbetter composed from the experience one of his most enduring songs, "The Bourgeois Blues," its Marxist title

belying his exposure to the ideological folk in Alan Lomax's Popular Front circles. Exact

details over the embarrassing discrimination are unclear, but whether it was over being

8 The legend of Huddie Ledbetter's release from Angola prison being the result of the Lomaxes influence on the Governor of Louisiana and Leadbelly's skills as a songster belies the fact that John Lomax let Ledbetter languish at the prison for more than two years after his initial "rediscovery." 9 “Leadbelly” http://misterhuddie.blogspot.com/. Accessed 5 Dec 2010. Web. There are fourteen titles in these Washington sessions; these include the blues standard "Hello, Central" and two takes of a topical song, "The Hindenburg Disaster." The explosion of the zeppelin Hindenburg at its mooring, which caused the deaths of thirty-six people, took place on 6th May 1937 at Lakehurst, New Jersey. "New York City" was also recorded. 59

denied lodging or for interracial mixing in a bar, the significance of the song is to expose and publicly decry the supposedly cosmopolitan capital’s racial hypocrisy:

Me and my wife went all over town

And everywhere we went people turned us down

Lord, in a bourgeois town

It's a bourgeois town

I got the bourgeois blues