“It Isn’t Nice” (live) by Judy Collins from Fifth Album [1965] 

I just finished my first semester of graduate school with a whirlwind final three weeks (I read something like 20 full books and skimmed another 10 or so, wrote 50 pages in three papers, and gave two paper presentations). Thank you for sticking around in my Tumblr absence. I’m back, at least for a few weeks.

One of the seminar papers I wrote tried to answer the question, “why the folk boom?” Why did folk music become such a popular genre between 1958 and about 1965, and not something else (say, calypso, which threatened to become massively popular in 1957)? And why then, as opposed to some other time? I won’t rehearse the paper here, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading some of the books for it. To anyone interested in this era, I highly recommend Ronald D. Cohen’s Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), an incredibly detailed chronicle of the whole revival, and Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), a more eloquent history of the various strands of American culture that intersected to make the folk boom what it was. 

To inspire myself in the writing process, I also listened to a lot of urban folk music from the late ’50s and early ’60s. Above all, I found a new appreciation for the songs of Malvina Reynolds.

Popular memory usually recalls the images of famous young stars like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul & Mary. But this 60-some-year-old understood the changing world as well as any of the disaffected youngsters around her. Her songwriting captured much of the spirit and many of the concrete goals of the various freedom movements (Civil Rights, New Left, peace/anti-war, Free Speech, etc.). Like members of these related movements, Reynold’s became more upset as violence against the Civil Rights Movement escalated and as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations repeatedly failed to protect Freedom Riders and protesters in the South, and her lyrics became more acerbic and more cynical.

In 1964, Reynolds wrote “It Isn’t Nice” to explain and justify the direct action tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. In her own performance, the music is jaunty and light in contrast to the serious protest lyrics. Soon after she published the song, singer Barbara Dane changed the melody a bit, added a more consistent chorus, and overall made the song a much more direct attack on establishment policies. Judy Collins then recorded it for her creatively-titled Fifth Album, released in November of 1965. This is my favorite version and the one posted above.

It wouldn’t take too many lyrical changes, I think, for this to become an OWS anthem. The song is especially effective in its attack on lack of government action in addressing grave injustices:

You were quiet just like mice,
Now you say we aren’t nice, 
And if that is Freedom’s price, 
We don’t mind.

“Willie the Weeper” by Dave Van Ronk [1961]

The vocal folk sound of groups like the Kingston Trio, The Weavers, or The Journeymen came across as tame compared to the rough jazz and blues vocals of Dave Van Ronk. While other solo folkies were still quietly strumming in the coffeehouse scene (see the first records by Joan Baez, Judy Collins and even Bob Dylan), Van Ronk was shouting covers of dirty blues songs about drugs (“Willie the Weeper”), sex (“Yas, Yas, Yas”), and hard labor (“Spike Driver’s Moan”). And those are just examples from his 1961 album Dave Van Ronk Sings.

In Van Ronk’s version of “Willie the Weeper” you can hear seeds of the more aggressive style of folk protest songs that emerged a few years later, as well as one source of inspiration for idiosyncratic singers like Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits.

Lastly, yes, you will no doubt have recognized that Cab Calloway’s huge 1931 hit “Minnie the Moocher” was based on the original “Willie the Weeper.”

“Ballad of Birmingham” by Jerry Moore [1967]

An Exploration of Music and Poetry, Day 14: Topical Song

Most of what I’ve posted in this playlist so far has been poetry about music, music about poetry, or some extension of those ideas. Today we look at poetry written about a real event. Since we’re dealing with the 1960s we get to look at the revival of broadsides, topical ballads published on the cheap, meant for distribution in public spaces.

Before I say anymore, you should all become acquainted with the Smithsonian anthology Best of Broadside 1962-1988:

89 songs, including some never commercially released. Compiled and annotated by Jeff Place and Ronald D. Cohen. 5-CD boxed set. It was a small underground magazine smuggled out of a New York City housing project in a baby carriage, filled with new songs by artists who were too creative for the folkies and too radical for the establishment. Underground—yet Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pete Seeger, and dozens of others first published songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Little Boxes,” and “Society’s Child,” in Broadside. The Best of Broadside features 89 songs from the Folkways collection, tapes from the Broadside magazine office, and some tracks released on other labels. The set contains a variety of performers, topics, and musical styles that tell tales spanning the 25 years of the Broadside era (1962-1988), but many of them address contemporary issues as well, since the new millennium has not see the end of warfare, nuclear threat, ethnic conflict, immigrants’ suffering, women’s unequal rights, ecological devastation, and social injustice. This is the underground music that fueled the innocent-sounding Folk Revival on the one hand and the explosions of angry rock and rap on the other. The Best of Broadside brings an era, its musicians, and its many stories to a new audience. The extensive notes feature the graphics of the original Broadside magazine and provide information on the careers of its many musicians with extensive discographies, the stories behind most of the songs as well as their full texts. They also describe the dramatic history of the magazine itself—a remarkable achievement of dedicated musicians and social activists. (Amazon product description)

“Ballad of Birmingham” does not come from that compilation, but it exemplifies this aspect of the 1960s folk scene and actually helped spark Broadside’s first major high-end publication. Here’s the story from the University of Illinois’s website on Modern American Poetry:

In 1962 [poet Dudley] Randall became interested in Boone House, a black cultural center which had been founded by Margaret Danner in Detroit. Every Sunday Randall and Danner would read their own work to audiences at Boone House. Over the years the two authors collected a group of poems which became the first major publication of Broadside Press, Poem Counterpoem (1966).

Perhaps the first of its kind, the volume contains ten poems each by Danner and Randall. The poems are alternated to form a kind of double commentary on the subjects they address in common. Replete with allusions to social and intellectual history, the verses stress nurture and growth.

In “The Ballad of Birmingham” Randall establishes racial progress as a kind of blossoming, as he recounts the incident, based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church by white terrorists. Eight quatrains portray one girl’s life and death. (Four girls actually died in the real bombing.) When the daughter in the poem asks permission to attend a civil rights rally, the loving and fearful mother refuses to let her go. Allowed to go to church instead, the daughter dies anyway. Thus, there is no sanctuary in an evil world, Randall seems to say, and one may face horror in the street as well as in the church.

After folk singer Jerry Moore read the poem in a newspaper, he set it to music, and Randall granted him permission to publish the tune with the lyrics.

The website includes a much more detailed account of Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham” (which was his very first broadside), of which I will only quote the following: 

Randall’s broadside reminds the audience of what is at stake in the struggle for civil rights—no sanctuary, no respect for innocence, the potential for violent resistance not just to social change, but even to the presence, new or continued, of blacks in community with whites. There is no such thing as staying out of the struggle in order to avoid trouble. The violence touches even this woman who would keep her family out of the danger of active political protests like the Freedom March. To read, buy, have, or give the card is to participate in the struggle she could not stay out of.

“This Little Light of Mine” by The Gateway Singers [1957]

Random Music History Song of the Day

At the same time the Kingston Trio was catching its first breaks in San Francisco, a more experienced group, The Gateway Singers were in the middle of a two-year stint as the regular band at the hungry i, the soon-to-be famous nightclub in the bay city. Originally an all-male trio similar to Greenwich Village folk legends The Weavers, the musicians decided that to strengthen the their sound and to enable the group to tackle more complex arrangements they would add a fourth voice. They chose the strong vocal chords of Emerlee Thomas, an African-American woman. 

The addition of Emerlee Thomas gave the group a unique sound for 1956, but her presence ultimately hurt publicity. The Gateway Singers - not The Kingston Trio - might have been the group that started the national folk revival if CBS executives hadn’t decided at the last minute to cancel The Gateway Singers’ scheduled performance on the Ed Sullivan Show because the group was racially mixed.

Posted above, you can hear the group in a 1957 recording of the famous gospel-folk song “This Little Light of Mine,” which was included on the album At the hungry i, released early the following year. The sound of The Gateway Singers was an influence on many other up-and-coming folk groups (I’m thinking of Peter, Paul and Mary in particular, although I have no proof). Even after the group split, some of its members had more popular success in groups like Bud and Travis and The Limeliters.

“Plastic Jesus” by The Goldcoast Singers [1962]

Random Music History Song of the Day

In 1962 Ed Rush and George Cromarty recorded under the name The Goldcoast Singers a song they had written in 1957. The song, “Plastic Jesus,” made fun of the materialist greed and unbelievable claims of some religious fanatics. In this case, the cheap plastic jesus of the song is apparently responsible for its owner’s serenity. This, the Goldcoast Singers original version, spoofs radio evangelists in particular. It’s all quite ridiculous.

Still in 1962, Ernie Marrs removed the spoken parts and added more verses to “Plastic Jesus,” turning into the more traditional song we know it as today.

The rhythm of some of the spoken parts of the original Goldcoast Singers version remind me a lot of Arlo Guthrie’s famous “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” from a few years later. Did all folkies try to sound alike back then?