260 MUSICultures 39 Bouët et Solomos, ont le mérite d’avoir The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk fait le pari d’une véritable rencontre Music Revival by Ray Allen, explore the par-delà ces failles. Que les auteurs aient uneven development of folk music in réussi ou non n’enlève rien à la valeur de the twentieth century. These excellent leurs contributions au débat. texts balance synchronic and diachronic analysis, using the songs as a starting point. This perspective is useful and even RÉFÉRENCES essential for scholars interested in cultural capitalism and how the hegemony of Comaroff, Jean et John. 2012. Theory the recording industry is experienced from the South. Or, How Euro-America by creative people. These two books, is Evolving Toward Africa. Boulder: together with Michael Scully’s The Never- Paradigm. Ending Revival: Rounder Records and Folk Alliance (see my review in MUSICultures Fabian, Johannes. 2002 [1983]. Time and 37, 2010), provide the beginning of an the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its approach to these issues. Object. Columbia University Press. “To Everything There Is a Season” proposes that Pete Seeger’s songs and significance arise dialectically from his political conflict as a creative person with “To Everything There Is a Season”: the times in which he lived. The chapters Pete Seeger and the Power of Song. are organized chronologically and each 2011. Allan M. Winkler. New York: centres on a song representing Seeger’s Oxford University Press. 256pp, black response to the issues of the day. Chapter and white photographs, bibliography, One, “Talking Union,” explains Seeger’s index. Accompanying online audio musical background and the steps that recordings. Cloth, $23.95; paper, led him to Woody Guthrie and a now $12.95. mythical voyage across America that laid the foundation for Seeger’s enduring Gone to the Country: The New Lost political significance. City Ramblers and the Folk Music Chapter Two, “If I Had a Hammer,” Revival. 2010. Ray Allen. Champaign, starts with Seeger’s return from service Il: University of Illinois Press. in World War II and concludes with the 328pp, black and white photographs, founding of Sing Out! magazine and the discography, bibliography, index. Cloth, success of the Weavers. Chapter Three, $80.00; paper, $25.00. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” follows the personal and professional MICHAEL B. MACDONALD impact of Seeger’s appearance before University of Alberta the House Un-American Activities Committee, his years as a “blacklisted” Two new books, “To Everything There Is a artist, and his reemergence as a Top 40 Season”: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song by recording artist. Chapter Four, “We Shall Allan M. Winkler, and Gone to the Country: Overcome,” follows Seeger through the Book Reviews 261 folk revival and the civil rights movement. figure – the highest in the land, and who is Chapter Five, “Waist Deep in the Big symbolic of the legal system that secures Muddy,” opens in the middle of the (in) private ownership. Was the performance famous 1965 Newport Folk Festival where an empty gesture with troubling Bob Dylan, a Seeger acolyte, symbolically resonances for Seeger’s own career? Was and historically distanced himself from it meant to be irony? Did Seeger do it the folk revival. In most music history intentionally? If one takes a moment to textbooks this is the moment when the consider Seeger as a cultural entrepreneur folk revival ends. But as this book shows, instead of an activist, he appears to be Seeger’s career, and the development of a very astute business person able to the folk revival, were far from over. channel the energy of social unrest into Chapter Six, “Sailing Down My products. Seeger might have performed Golden River,” follows Seeger’s move blue collar music, but he certainly never from global social politics to local was blue collar himself. As with Whitman environmental politics. During the time and Thoreau, and contemporary popular covered in the first five chapters, Seeger musicians such as Springsteen, the tried to live the fantasy of “Daddy goes performance of working-class alienation away to work and comes home to family.” has become a commodified gesture, just as Toshi and the children were left to deal the banjo has become an emblem of Pete with the realities of living in Pete’s Seeger, the folk product. Is the celebration Thoreauvian ideology, and sadly, even in of Seeger part of an elaborate American this text, their voices are rarely heard. ritual that obscures the deepening It was not until the years examined in penetration of cultural capitalism? Is Chapter Six that Seeger remained close Pete Seeger a living analogy to the Che to home, inspired to lead an effort to Guevara t-shirts produced in factories that clean up the Hudson River, which ran Guevara would have wanted to liberate? Is near his home and was declared “dead” he a symbol that performs the opposite of in the mid-60s. Winkler concludes that what it appears to perform, a revolution Seeger “fought for justice, in one form that in fact participates in economic or another…or when the ground shifted colonialism? under him, he found another cause” (190). Seeger is not the only one caught in As the glow of hero worship inspired the bind of capital. From an economic by this book diminished, I was left with perspective, marketing to both sides of a nagging discomfort heightened by American hegemony – the conservative repeated viewings of Seeger’s performance as well as the radical – makes sense. While at President Obama’s inauguration. At that the author does not explore this side of event, Seeger sang two verses of Woody Seeger’s legacy, the publisher (Oxford Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” that University Press) is not afraid to support are not often reproduced. These verses Apple iTunes, providing a link to songs pose the question: Is this land for you and from Apple’s service on the first page of me? Accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, the book, instead of sending the reader Seeger performed an anti-anthem against to Smithsonian Folkways or a local retailer private property at a celebration of a state to purchase a list of key albums. Are the 262 MUSICultures 39 editors of this book in the same position musicians) impossible. If this is folk music, that Seeger found himself, and have they they said, it has left us behind. chosen not to notice? So perhaps there I approached Ray Allen’s Gone to the is poetry in the fact that the iTunes link Country with this in mind. Allen picks up at is broken. Songs hold this book together, the very end of the folk revival narrative, used as chapter titles, and are essential the pop period ushered in by the 1965 listening to enter the emotional territory: Newport Folk Festival, with Dylan and the they help to navigate the material, since Paul Butterfield blues band thundering, Seeger’s political history took some Pete Seeger in a rage, and the New Lost rather abrupt changes of direction. But City Ramblers playing as a backup band unfortunately there is no album list or to old-time Texas fiddling legend Eck reference list for the included songs, Robertson (whose first recording was nor clues to navigate Seeger’s extensive made in 1922). Allen intends to shed bibliography. This omission, and the lack of light on the “purists, traditional and neo- a substantial bibliography, unintentionally ethnic camp of the movement” which was poses a meta-question: Is part of Seeger’s made up of “city players who were simply journey to find folk music, and do we mesmerized by the sounds of traditional readers also have to journey? music and the exotic cultures and bygone I do not wish to suggest that the eras those sounds evoked” (5). Allen is folk gesture is simply a marketing ploy interested in a frank conversation, often designed by clever marketing agents and drawing from discussions with the NLCR distributed by a media savvy industry; themselves, about the power of cultural that would mistake the sophisticated and artistic authenticity. power of hegemony. I worked in the folk The first four chapters provide the music industry long enough to know that back-story of the original three members everyone believes in the democratizing of the Ramblers, situating them relative mission of folk music, but that this mission to more familiar names in the folk revival is synonymous with expanding markets movement. Mike Seeger, Pete’s younger for cultural commodities. This creates brother, was central to the development conceptual problems. I encountered the of the NLCR and we are given another New Lost City Ramblers (NLCR) at version of their family background. For exactly such a paradoxical moment. We those interested in Charles and Ruth were backstage at the Vancouver Folk Crawford Seeger, this section is especially Music festival in 2006, sitting close to each interesting. other in the shade of blue porta-potties. New York City, an important but I didn’t say much. I had been a fan for undocumented character in the folk quite a few years and was astounded that revival, also takes centre stage in Allen’s I was actually getting a chance to speak account. The title Gone to the Country with them. But they weren’t happy: Mike prepares the reader for a story of rural- Seeger said that the noise of the festival was ization (opposite of urbanization?) that alienating, and the competing sound-wash highlights the romantic allure of the from other stages made on-stage acoustic American countryside for naïve urban intimacy (essential for non-amplified youth.