Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals

by David King Dunaway, Molly Beer

Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near. Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers. Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals, but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved. For everyone who ever
picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this will be a book to give and cherish. Extensive notes, bibliography, and discography, plus a photo section.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, American History

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 2010

About the author

David King Dunaway received the first Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in folklore, history, and literature. For the last thirty years he has been documenting the life and work of Pete Seeger, resulting in How Can I Keep From Singing: Pete Seeger, published initially by McGraw Hill in 1981 and currently revised, updated, and republished by Villard Press at Random House in March, 2008. He has served as a visiting lecturer and Fulbright Scholar at the Universities of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Copenhagen University, Nairobi University, and the Universidad Nacional de Columbia. Author of a half dozen volumes of history and biography, his specialty is the presentation of folklore, literature, and history via broadcasting. Over the last decade he has been executive producer in a number of national radio series for Public Radio International; his reporting appears in NPRs Weekend Edition and All Things Considered. He is currently Professor of English at the University of New Mexico and Professor of Broadcasting at San Francisco State University. "

Reviews

[amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for work - a useful overview for a project on folk revival music and copyright - but with some personally interesting trains of thought.

Like Bob Dylan on how "folk music is the only music where it isn't simple. It's never been simple. It's weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible, and ghosts. I've never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight."

And Arlo Guthrie on playing and replaying: "If you do the same three minutes of your life every day, after a decade, that three minutes is like a half hour because you know every part of it. It gives you room to tinker and play in a field that goes by quickly in most people's minds, but in your experience is a much bigger playing field" - how skill in sports makes time slow down.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great collection of reminiscing and illumination of the folk music revivals by key movers and shakers - performers as well as those behind the scenes - of the 1930s, 1950s, and into the early 21st century. The authors conducted interviews with key players and condensed some of them for this book around themes like early collectors, the Greenwich Village scene, the Red Scare, and even folk-rock. It is fascinating to hear, not only from Pete Seeger in his own words, but from his father, musicologist Charles Seeger (Like father, like son - Like Pete, Charles had his own problems with the federal government). It is great fun to just pick it up and read a few quotes from these interviews.

[Jonathan Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't just a history book talking about the events and progression of folk music. The content is mostly first person accounts from the people who made the progress happen, like Charles Seeger, Moses Asch, Ronnie Gilbert, etc. with snippets of historical context.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my folk music Bible. It's a brilliant account of the folk music revivals, compiled entirely in interviews with key people in the 20th century American folk music community. David King Dunaway is among my favorite folk music historians, and he cites tons of great reading material if one chooses to further study the American folk revivals.