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The New Frontier ◆ 81

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The New Frontier ◆ 81 The New 5 Frontier Early on a Saturday night in April 1961, a twenty-year-old singer carrying an over- sized guitar case walked into a dimly lit folk club, Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, New York City. He was dressed casually: worn brown shoes, blue jeans, and a black wool jacket covering a plain yellow turtleneck sweater. A jumble of rumpled hair crowned his head, which was topped by a black corduroy Huck Finn cap. He pressed his lips together tightly and glanced at the tables of patrons, who sipped espresso and seemed to be arguing feverishly about current events. The singer looked serious and exhibited a nervousness that a friend had earlier tried to calm with four jiggers of Jim Beam bourbon. He slowly mounted the stage, opened his guitar case, and care- fully took out an old, nicked, six-string acoustic guitar, which he treated like an old friend. He fixed a wire harmonica holder around his neck and pushed a harmonica into place. As the singer stood alone on stage, motionless, a hush descended upon the coffeehouse. The audience, mostly white middle-class college students, many of them attending nearby New York University, politely applauded the singer. For a moment, the scene appeared to epitomize Eisenhower gentility and McCarthy repression: boys with closely cropped hair, button-down shirts, corduroy slacks, Hush Puppy shoes, and cardigans; and rosy-cheeked girls dressed in long skirts, bulky knit sweaters, and low-heeled shoes, who favoured long, straight, well-groomed hair. The singer shattered the genteel atmosphere when he began to strum a chord and sing. He was young Bob Dylan, who had just recently arrived in New York City to sing songs of social protest. As civil rights marchers protested in Birmingham and as President John F. Kennedy announced plans for a new frontier, many college-age youths heard the stirring message of Bob Dylan, who levelled his guitar at racism and the hypocrisy of corporate America. Growing older, the first baby boomers were start- ing to become aware of the world around them. MM05_SZAT5427_01_SE_C05.indd05_SZAT5427_01_SE_C05.indd 8080 111/19/131/19/13 22:06:06 PPMM Songs of Protest The foundation for 1960s’ protest music was laid at the turn of the century by the International Workers of the World (IWW). Members of the group, known as Wobblies, first penned protest songs in the United States as part of their drive to achieve equality for American workers. While marching in demonstrations, the radical unionists sang from the Little Red Songbook , first published in 1909 and compiled by organizers Ralph Chaplin and the legendary Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant who later was executed in Utah for his political beliefs. The Wobblies adopted as their anthem Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever,” a protest song set to the music of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/ But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn/ We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn/ That the Union makes us strong/ Solidarity forever!” However, the union was crippled when federal and state authorities raided and closed IWW offices during the Red Scare that followed World War I. Woody Guthrie continued the IWW’s legacy of the protest song. Born on July 14, 1912, to a poor family in Okemah, Oklahoma, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie left home at age sixteen and drifted through the Southwest during his teens, working as a news- boy, sign painter, and farm labourer. While visiting his uncle, Jeff Guthrie, in Pampa, Texas, in 1929, the young Woody learned to play guitar. The youth performed on street corners and continued to work odd jobs until 1937, when he became a per- former and the host for a program on Los Angeles radio station KFVD, on which he read radical newspapers over the air. Within two more years, he moved to New York City and began writing a daily column for the Communist Party’s newspaper People’s Daily World and the Daily Worker . In 1940, Guthrie recorded for folklorist Alan Lomax, who taped the singer for the Library of Congress. After a two-year stint in the merchant marine and the army during World War II, Guthrie returned to New York City, where he penned many of his 1000 songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Tom Joad,” “Billy the Kid,” and “Pastures of Plenty.” He later explained, “I don’t sing any songs about the nine divorces of some millionaire play gal or the ten wives of some screwball. I wouldn’t sing them if they paid me $10 000 a week. I sing the songs of the people that do all of the little jobs and the mean and dirty hard work in the world and of their wants and their hopes and their plans for a decent life.” The motto emblazoned on his guitar summed up his message: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Pete Seeger joined Woody Guthrie, roaming the countryside to sing songs to and about the American worker. Born on May 3, 1919, in New York City to a musi- cal family, Seeger quit Harvard University during the late 1930s and worked with folklorist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress. In 1940, he founded the Almanac Singers with Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell. After serving in World War II, Seeger established a musician’s union and booking agency, People’s Songs, Inc., which attracted 3000 members. Seeger formed the Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gil- bert, and Fred Hellerman, who found work by late 1948 at the Village Vanguard and popularized folk songs such as “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Good Night Irene,” Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” and “The Hammer Song” The New Frontier ◆ 81 MM05_SZAT5427_01_SE_C05.indd05_SZAT5427_01_SE_C05.indd 8181 111/19/131/19/13 22:06:06 PPMM Pete Seeger at a union event, 1944. Photo by Joseph Horne. Permission by Horne, Joseph A/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USW3-040956]. written by Seeger and Hays. “Like the Almanac Singers,” recalled Seeger, “the Weav- ers also hoped to sing for peace and civil rights.” Gilbert added about the Weavers, “We were four very politically motivated people interested in doing what we could for the music we loved and for social action.” Protest singers like Woody Guthrie and Seeger and the Weavers fell into disre- pute during the McCarthyite witch hunt. During the 1950s, until his Senate censure in late 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin doggedly pursued the shad- ows of Communist sympathizers. He progressively accused more and more public figures of Communist tendencies, eventually creating a hysterical crisis atmosphere throughout the nation. The Wisconsin senator criticized politically minded entertain- ers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who were blackballed by the networks and the recording industry. “In the summer of 1950,” remembered Seeger, “‘Goodnight Irene’ [by the Weavers] was selling two million copies. It was the biggest hit record since the end of World War II. We were offered a coast-to-coast network TV program sponsored by Van Camp’s Pork and Beans, half an hour a week. The contract came in, we signed it. The next day, when they were supposed to sign, an outfit called the Red Channels came out with an attack on us. Called us ‘commie fellow-travelers,’ and Van Camp’s never signed the contract. The jobs started vanishing, and pretty soon we were down to singing at Daffy’s Bar and Grill on the outskirts of Cleveland.” Though the destructive effects of McCarthyism abated for the Weavers by December 1955, 82 ◆ Chapter 5 MM05_SZAT5427_01_SE_C05.indd05_SZAT5427_01_SE_C05.indd 8282 111/19/131/19/13 22:06:06 PPMM when they triumphantly performed at Carnegie Hall, the group never regained its pre–Red Scare popularity until the early 1960s on the college campuses. Messages of political and social action were also key in the music of Canada’s first professional folk group, the Travellers. They met at Camp Naivelt, where attendees were immersed in leftist ideology. Because of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of left- leaning political songs in the United States, some of the prominent American folk artists made their way to Camp Naivelt, near Brampton, Ontario. One such person was Pete Seeger and his group the Weavers. Having been inspired by and encouraged to form a group by Seeger, the Travellers came together during the summer of 1953. The Travel- lers singer and founding member Helen Gray concedes that “the Weavers was [sic] our model and Pete Seeger was our patron saint.”1 The band went on to appear on such tele- vision shows as the CBC’s Haunted House and Pick the Stars , perform at such festivals as the Mariposa Folk Festival, tour nationally and internationally, and release a number of records. The Travellers are perhaps most famous for Canadianizing the words to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which was something that they were urged to do by Pete Seeger since Guthrie’s music was blacklisted in the United States. The Folk Revival Folk music reappeared around 1960, when the number of college students increased. In 1954, three million students attended college across the country; six years later, almost four million studied within the ivy halls. These college-age youths searched for an alternative to the popular, romanti- cized hit singles of Don Kirshner’s songwriters who composed for the young teen market. “Today,” observed Look in early 1961, “the fifteen- to twenty-year-olds, espe- cially those in college, are showing their musical curiosity in ways that don’t appear on single-record popularity charts.” A few issues later, the magazine reported that college students were “weary of the more and more juvenile level of ‘pop’ music, frustrated by the dearth of good Broadway show tunes, and slightly befuddled by the growing complexity of jazz, [and were] ready to turn solidly folknik.” The Kingston Trio started the folk revival.
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