The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions Author(s): Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 334 (Oct. - Dec., 1971), pp. 394-405 Published by: American Folklore Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/539633 . Accessed: 22/09/2011 16:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Folklore Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American Folklore. http://www.jstor.org JENS LUND and R. SERGE DENISOFF The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributionsand Contradictions' OBSERVERS OF THE SO-CALLED "COUNTER CULTURE" have tended to portray this phenomenonas a new and isolated event. TheodoreRoszak, as well as nu- merousmusic and art historians,have cometo view the "counterculture" as a new reactionto technicalexpertise and the embourgeoismentof growing segmentsof the Americanpeople.2 This position,it would appear,is basicallyindicative of the intellectual"blind men and the elephant"couplet, where a social fact or event is examinedapart from otherstructural phenomena. Instead, it is our contentionthat the "counterculture" or Abbie Hoffman's"Woodstock Nation" is an emergent realityor a productof all that camebefore, sui generis.More simply,the "counter culture"can best be conceptualizedas partof a long historical-intellectualprogres- sion beginningwith the "Gardenof Eden"image of man. The theme of man removedfrom the state of naturehas recurredthroughout Judeo-Christian-Grecothought. Rousseau,Hobbes, Locke,Calvin, and nearlyall social philosophersand metaphysicianshave chosento idealizean existenceprior to primordialman when all was well, and life was simple and free of the "social nausea"ascribed to us by the existentialists. Socratesurged the young to adopt an asceticstyle of life. This sentimentwas repeatedby early Catholictheologians, particularly Francis of Assisi. The Euro- pean Romanticists,in the wake of Rousseau,lauded the "noblesavage." In North America,James Fenimore Cooper exhibited a preoccupationwith the hero of the wilderness.The transcendentalistsof the mid-nineteenthcentury, Thoreau and Emerson,deified the man behind the plow. The force of these argumentsled to some action. For example, the writings of such GermanRomanticists as Joseph von Eichendorffand Nikolaus Lenauproduced the Wandervoigeln,a movement 1 This is a revised and expanded revision of a paper originally presented at the Ohio-Indiana American Studies Association meetings at West Lafayette, Indiana, April 22-24, 1971. 2 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N. Y., 1969). THE FOLK MUSIC REVIVAL AND THE COUNTER CULTURE 395 which inspiredmany of Weimar Germany'syoung people to roam CentralEu- rope, begging for food, composingpoetry, and singing folk songs.3Mark Twain's HuckleberryFinn, on a lesserscale, had a similarimpact, as did popularromantici- zation of the cowboyand the hobo. The productsof John Steinbeck,and particu- larly, Jack Kerouac,Woody Guthrie,and Bob Dylan, have invited the young to experience"the road."In a sense, the "counterculture" can be considereda suc- cessorto all of theseintellectual and literary trends. Political thinkers, such as Marxists,anarchists, syndicalists, and even Social Darwinists,all includedin their sociopoliticaltheorems the state of nature.This "state of nature"coloration of man, reinforcedby Aldous Huxley's Savage in Brave New World, was widely acceptedby left-wing radicals,particularly after the successof the Bolshevikrevolution. American Communists, particularly those loyal to the Comintern,were no exception.During the late 1930s, the Communist Party-U.S. A. idealizedthe Americanrural folk as beingidentifiable with the pro- letariat.The Okies and Arkies were seen as charactersfrom a Gorkyplay, and ruralfolk music was declared"people's songs."4 It was in this ideologicalframe- work that "folk music"came to town, to be nurturedand cherishedfor several decadesby politicallyoriented intellectuals and the occasionalfolk musicbuff.5 After World War II the "people'sartists" trend was interdictedby the advent of the McCarthyera and the applicationof the mediablacklist to folk-styledsing- ers, such as Pete Seegerand the Weavers. As membersof People's Artists, Inc. were being summonedto testify before Congressionalsubcommittees, an artistic and literaryfad which exploredthe traditional"road" concepts of the American experience came into existence in the bohemian communitiesof several large metropolises.This movementwas called the Beat Generation,or by journalists suchas Herb Caen,"beatniks." The beatsproclaimed disaffiliation from American societyand its institutions.In place of the ProtestantEthic, they adoptedthe pos- ture of the "White Negro," a concept coined by Norman Mailer. The "White Negro" idealized stereotypesof black behaviorand advocatedimitation of such traits.Jazz, the music of urbanblacks, became the languageof the Beat commu- nity, and the musicianthe ideal man.6Many of the foundersof jazz, such as Jelly Roll Morton,had begun their careersas house musiciansin Southern"red light" districts.They often affectedargot, dress,and life-stylesthat were ostentatiously unconventional.'At firstthe jazzmenand theirfollowers were generally black, but as the music'spopularity widened, it generatedan interracialsubculture. From the esoteric"bop" era of the late 1940s there emergeda highly definablesubculture known as the "jazzcommunity."s Many of the attitudesof this "community,"such 3Irmgard Hunt, "Towards Soul: The American Hippie-A German Romantic?" Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (Spring, 1970), 736-749. 4See William Wolff, "Use Traditional Tunes for New Union Songs," Daily Worker, November 16, 1939, p. 7; and Marjorie Crane, "The Folksongs of Our People," Sunday Worker, September 21, 1941, p. 4 (section 2). 5 R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana, Ill., 6 i971). Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," in The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, ed. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York, 1959), 371-394. 7 Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" (New York, 1950), xi-xii. 8 Alan P. Merriam and R. W. Mack, "The Jazz Community," Social Forces, 38 (1960), 211-222. 396 JENS LUND and R. SERGE DENISOFF as the use of marijuanaas a social drug and aversenessto conventionalfashion, survivetoday in the "counterculture." It has also contributedmany termsto the contemporaryyouth culture,including the word "hippie"itself, which was origi- nally derogatory.9For the Beat, the noble savageof the fifties was the blackjazz musician,in time to be replacedby the folk singer. During the time New York's GreenwichVillage was the East Coast'sversion of San Francisco'sNorth Beach,beats encountered the remainingleftists and in- tellectualsinterested in folk music.Various songfests were still held in the Village as rent-partiesor fund-raisingevents to fight Pete Seeger's congressionalcon- tempt citation or to help finance the shaky Sing Out! magazine.In time, these sporadicevents were routinizedinto weeklyaffairs held in the Village'sWashing- ton SquarePark. In GreenwichVillage, the beats and the folk-aficionadoscame into contact with each other, resulting in a synthesisof attitudesand appearances.For the neophytebeats, a loosely definedform of "folk music"took the place of jazz as the dominantmusical genre. This was, in part, due to the increasingcommerciali- zation of the music and the "CrowJim" attitudesof those jazz musiciansbeing attractedto black nationalism.The personinterested in folk musicoften affected the bohemian appearanceand life-style, and the blacklistedperformers thus found themselveswith a new audience.Alan Lomax,the distinguishedfolklorist, perhapsbest enunciatedthe life-style aspect in his paper, "The Folkniks-And the Songs They Sing." Lomaxdeclared, "To be folk, you live folk. 10 Many col- legiates and bohemianstook this dictum quite seriously.Time magazine,in its profile of Joan Baez, made note of the life-style associatedwith the nonstudents at Boston'sHarvard Square: "Drifters, somewhat beat, with Penguinclassics pro- truding from their bluejeans . 'they just lie in their pads, smoke pot, and do stupid things like that.' "11 The fact that such individualsexisted as earlyas 1962 seemedto be a harbingerof what would lateroccur on campusesacross the nation on a muchlarger scale. The "folkniks"were, of course,still a veryesoteric minority, while the majority of popularmusic concerneditself over ninetypercent of the time with themesof courtshipand everlastinglove.12 Even the ostensiblyoffensive offerings of Elvis Presleyusually ended in a vine-coveredcottage. The magic of the early Presley yearswas soon dissipatedby the conscriptionof its namesake,public hostility to his black counterpartsand the misfortunesthat befell his imitators.For the "taste culture"of this period,a vacuumwas createdwhich allowedfolk musicto