When We Were Good: The Folk Revival

by Robert S. Cantwell

When We Were Good traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the sixties from early nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy; the Jewish entertainment and political cultures of New York in the 1930s; the Almanac singers and the wartime crises of the 1940s; the watershed record album Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music ; and finally to the cold-war reactionism of the 1950s. This drove the folk-song movement, just as Pete Seeger and the Weavers were putting "On Top of Old Smokey" and "Goodnight, Irene" on the Hit Parade, into a children's underground of schools, summer camps, and colleges, planting the seeds of the folk revival to come. The book is not so much a history as a study of the cultural process itself, what the author calls the dreamwork of history.

Cantwell shows how a body of music once enlisted on behalf of the labor movement, antifascism, New Deal recovery efforts, and many other progressive causes of the 1930s was refashioned as an instrument of self-discovery, even as it found a new politics and cultural style in the peace, civil rights, and beat movements. In Washington Square and the Newport Folk Festival, on college campuses and in concert halls across the country, the folk revival gave voice to the generational tidal wave of postwar youth, going back to the basics and trying to be very, very good.

In this capacious analysis of the ideologies, traditions, and personalities that created an extraordinary moment in American popular culture, Cantwell explores the idea of folk at the deepest level. Taking up some of the more obdurate problems in cultural studies--racial identity, art and politics, regional allegiances, class differences--he shows how the folk revival was a search for authentic democracy, with compelling lessons for our own time.

Genres: Music, History, Folklore

432 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

Reviews

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 1 out of 5]

I very seldom, and would like to never, give the lowest rating to any book, movie, or album, but I have no choice with this piece of pulp.

Can we agree to remove "folk" music from this pretentious pedestal where it sits, and write about it, argue about it, play it, and even enjoy for what it is--a musical genre just like any other that some people enjoy and others don't, played by musicians for all kinds of motives and with all levels of skill? With this agreement we could leave behind the deification, mystification, politicization, and cultural categorization (high or low, your choice, that frankly I could not care less to know).

Ahhhh, heaving a sigh of relief now that I have that out of my system, let me apologize to Mr. Cantwell, who surely meant well, but was trapped in the cesspool of credulousness that surrounds this subject. He is merely following in the line of Harry Smith and the Lomax family in capturing a supposed folk art under supposedly pristine conditions and according it a moral plane supposedly above all other forms of music. Well, as we know by now, and Mr. Cantwell might have suspected in 1996, that's crap. See my review of [[ASIN:0743278984 Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song]] for an example of a clear-eyed study of one particular song (referenced in Cantwell) and its place in the canon.

I had hoped to find a history of folk music and musicians in the 20th century, not all the other baggage that the music seems to drag with it. It is this annoying attitude that Christopher Guest so accurately and gently (even lovingly) punctured in [[ASIN:B0000ALFVD A Mighty Wind]].

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a scholarly look at the folk revival period of the 1960s and its history. Cantwell discusses the political legacy of folk music stemming from the 1930s labor movement. The book focuses on iconic figures such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and how they shaped the sound and definition of folk music. Cantwell does a good job summarizing the influence of oldtime and other American traditional musics on the revival period and the evolution of folk music from traditional sources to a singer/songwriter trend. While the topic is often fascinating, it often gets obscured through an excess of commas and parenthetical phrases and meanderings. The content rates high, but the journey to get through it does not.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good quasi-academic but deeply soulful analysis of the 'roots' of the raising of the urban folk revival, its country roots, and what it's emergence had to say about popular culture, politics, and the desire for a whole that is bigger than the sum of our parts. Highly recommended.