The Folk Revival Wasn’t What You Think

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]In the 1960s, a new generation set out to rediscover America's forgotten music.

[00:00:04]They traveled back roads, searched dusty archives, and brought old songs and old voices back into the spotlight. It's a story we like to tell ourselves that something lost was finally found again.

[00:00:15]But the deeper you look, the more complicated it becomes. Whether the college kids and coffee house patrons knew it or not, the revival they were participating in didn't simply uncover the past, it shows it. Certain sounds were lifted up, others left behind.

[00:00:29]Traditions rooted in the American South were carried forward, but often reshaped to fit new audiences, new stages, and new expectations. And somewhere in that process, the line between preservation and interpretation starts to blur.

[00:00:43]That's tonight on the B part. Beyond the A part, there exists a narrow band of time suspended between fact and folklore.

[00:00:55]There are three acts to every story, but only two parts to every tune. Listen closely. You're hearing the B part.

[00:01:05]From the edge of the Appalachin Plateau, across the country, and wherever the night has found you, good evening and thanks for joining our broadcast. I'm Hayes, and tonight I'm joined by a man who was once told he had the physique of a male fashion model, but spent the rest of his life hiding it under NASCAR shirts. Welcome, my pal, Marcel. How you doing, buddy? I don't even know how you know that.

[00:01:25]>> Cuz I love you.

[00:01:28]>> Oh, yeah. I was getting fitted for a tuxedo. Thank you for bringing that to the world. I love that everyone now knows that.

[00:01:34]>> I mean, you know, you got to lift your buddy up every now and again, you know.

[00:01:37]>> Yeah. Good wing, man.

[00:01:40]>> So, what are we doing today?

[00:01:41]>> Yeah, man. So the folk revival of the 1950s and60s is largely seen as this period of of kind of rediscovery, drawing back on our past, finding something that was lost and and bringing it back to the spotlight. And the story is actually a little more complex than that.

[00:02:03]Um, we've touched on on similar things that kind of lead us into to our first, you know, angle here. We we talked about the Lomax family a few episodes back and how they were largely central in kind of documenting a lot of the folk music that was about to be forgotten is maybe a way to think about it. We can give credit where credit is due. They did document a lot of that music. And in that process, the recording industry, which you touched on in the last episode, was kind of really coming into its own in the 1950s. This new development had come out, Marcel. was a huge bit of technology known as the LP. We don't have to just listen to one song at a time now. We can let maybe six songs on a record go by.

[00:02:47]>> Wow.

[00:02:48]>> So, so what you start to see is this kind of anthologizing of of 78 RPM records that these record companies were holding on to since the Lowmaxes and other people like Ralph Pier were recording them in the in the 20s and 30s. And these things actually start to catch on in popularity. Uh at at the same time that this um this technological advancement had happened.

[00:03:11]There was also a bit of a a revival in acoustic music that was kind of happening in the late 1940s largely led by Pete Seager with his group the Weavers. You know, in in 1948, the same year the Weavers were formed, he wrote his banjo book. Do you know about his >> Oh, yeah.

[00:03:27]>> You know, right? Like most people, I think in the 1960s cite Pete Seager's banjo book as the one that they actually learned how to play banjo from.

[00:03:34]>> And there's a great fun fact about the banjo book. That is the book that invented the terms hammer on and pulloff. That's the first time they were ever used. Pete Seager just came up with them and put them in the banjo book. We wouldn't have those words without Pete Seager.

[00:03:46]>> That is nuts, man. I didn't I didn't even realize that cuz I've honestly never read the book myself. I just kind of like I I was a Scrugs book guy myself. What what can you So if you know anything about the weavers, what can you tell me about them? Is there any thing that sticks out in your mind?

[00:04:00]>> Uh particularly just my collection of uh children's folk songs recorded by the Weavers that I have on record over there from my son.

[00:04:08]>> Absolutely. And and I think that was kind of what they were largely known for back in the day, right? Was taking like these traditional like kind of nursery rhyme type folk songs and and making them popular on the radio and stuff. But we also are kind of like forgetting or or it's been forgotten because it was literally edited from Deca Records catalog for a while. The Weavers uh were also a very political band. Pete Seager, I don't you probably already knew this, was kind of a card carrying member of the Communist Party, right? Or or at least had affiliations with them. 1948, this band was kind of starting to gain popularity. I don't know if you know anything about the political climate in America in the early 1950s. In recognizing a communist, physical appearance counts for nothing. If he openly declares himself to be a communist, we take his word for it.

[00:04:57]McCarthyism, right? The the kind of communist witch hunt that was happening in America. And this is honestly where things get really serious. In 1953, Deca Records dropped the Weavers because of Pete Seager's affiliation with the Communist Party. It was it was some kind of like publication that he was found in, you know, that was being circulated.

[00:05:16]and then not only dropped him, but deleted the Weaver's catalog from their catalog. Not only was it like, "Hey, we're done with you guys. Like, we don't even want to make money off of your music anymore." At this time, you know, the Weavers are broken up. Seager kind of leverages into his own like kind of personal career at that point. And if you look at the the kind of music that he releases as like a I think a bird's eye view, a lot of it is like educational and like audience participatory kind of music, you know, sing along type of things if you listen to his live recordings. So he he kind of goes more into what you were initially pointing out in the Weaver's catalog.

[00:05:53]You know, it's like, well, this is the stuff that we were able to do that didn't, you know, spin controversy. And and I'm not quoting him or anything and saying that, but that's kind of how to me it looks, right? And this is, I think, the kind of version of Pete Seager and in that particular slice of the Weaver's catalog that spawns like the actual folk revival boom that happens in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. This is like the industry being like, we we want that meat and potatoes of what you do, but we don't want any of the political stuff. And the band eventually gives on that. This is the exact same thing that happened to the Black Eyed Peace.

[00:06:35]If you're thinking about like nextgen groups that kind of spawned after this, the Kingston trio, in my opinion, is like a prime example of the Pete Seager/weavers lineage of this folk revival thing. They are even described as like the Weavers but without the political material. They were a West Coast band and they kind of appropriated like the the collegiate look it's sometimes described, you know, like they had the kind of like wool sweaters or like cardigan kind of things that they would wear. They were even, I think, trying to present an image of safety or something. You know what I mean? Like, yo, we're not we're not going to challenge anything here. We're just singing, you know, Tom Douly, >> your sons and daughters are safe. Come listen to the Clancy brothers with our sweaters. They obviously contributed to the the folk processing of a lot of the tunes that they sang that were traditional. So like they kind of made their own versions of the lyrics is what I mean like or this is just what happens, you know, from one region to another or one person to another. They add a verse, they change a verse. It's like they kind of whitewash them a little bit. They take any of the accent out colloquial dropping of syllables and they straighten out the words. They maybe edit them in certain places to take out some of the like controversial topics. Right. Yeah.

[00:07:45]>> Hang your head. Hang your head and cry.

[00:07:50]Ari and you know you're bound to die.

[00:07:53]>> Hang down your hip tongue dye. Hang down your head and cry.

[00:08:01]Hang down your hip tongue dye.

[00:08:12]Well now, boy. hang down your head.

[00:08:17]Hang down your head and boy.

[00:08:21]>> And I think that's something that you can kind of point to in, like I said, this this lineage of like Weaver's Pete Seageresque kind of early folk revival people. They were selling albums. The the Kingston Trio uh I think it said they I forget how many millions of dollars they made between 1958 and 1961 when they released their first couple albums, but it was millions of dollars in the late 50s and early 60s, you know.

[00:08:42]So a folk band, three guys with with banjos and acoustic guitars. At the same time, in parallel, there was the other half of that split off into its own branch to create the other prong of the early folk revival, say like Odetta, who was known as like the voice of the civil rights movement, you know. So you have these overtly political folk singers that are coming to popularity. Odetta had the highest selling album of 1963.

[00:09:07]Odetta sings folk songs. She was actually seen as an influence for other people in that political arm. So we're thinking our Joan Bayz's and our Bob Dillons. You know, Bob Dylan from the very beginning was seen as a Woody Guthrie kind of lineage guy, right? Like he he appropriated that image of like the traveling kind of vagabond type dude. Sang a lot of extremely overtly political songs early on. Was solo acoustic guitar, vocals, and harmonica only. So he like very strictly confined himself to the like folk image and in box at that point in time. You know there there are these two prongs that are kind of what do I want to say they're like supporting this mo movement as a whole up through the early 1960s and 1963. I brought that up for a reason with Odetta. The next year there was this band that came across from England that completely disrupted everything in the United States of America called the Beatles. They brought with them a horde of other British rock and roll bands and that largely is seen as as what like killed the folk revival. Beyond that, it's like an afficionado only kind of music or like a it's it's just a political kind of music. Through the late60s, folk music was seen as a very political kind of thing. like a lot of those early bands that were clean and poppy like Peter Paul and Mary and some of those were getting behind the civil rights movement and kind of like you know following that through.

[00:10:32]We we framed the folk revival in popular culture as this like we're honoring past culture and bringing these these tunes and these artists back to life that had been forgotten. But if you think about it, like we even said with Pete Seager's career specifically that he was kind of cherry-picking the songs and the material that he was doing after he was kind of a political outcast. You know, it's natural to think that not only was that happening on a material kind of level in terms of the songs that they were singing, but the artists that we were were kind of choosing to bring back from the past and not only play their material, but record them again and bring them on the folk festival circuit.

[00:11:11]So the artists that we just named, Pete Seager, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Joan Bayz, Kingston Trio, they're all new bands.

[00:11:18]They did not exist in the 1920s and 30s when Ralph Pier was going around and recording people, right?

[00:11:23]>> Some of the artists though that these people list as huge kind of influences.

[00:11:28]One that that you see a lot in the folk revival texts is Doc Bogs from Virginia, if I'm correct, had that grally kind of character to his voice, even on his early recordings from the, you know, the the 20s. He was born in 1898, so he was like he was in his like 30s, you know what I mean? When he was recording those tunes when these folk anthologies were being released on LPs in the the 1950s, Doc is one of the characters that they started to rediscover on these records.

[00:11:55]And I think it was largely like, man, listen to the unique voice that that guy has. And he had a really cool like banjo style and stuff, too. So Mike Seager actually goes on a mission during those years to find Doc Bogs again. Like is Doc Bogs still around? You know, it's like the the VH1 equivalent of like where are they now, I guess.

[00:12:14]>> Um getting the band back together.

[00:12:16]>> Exactly. Cuz you know, these kids were like these are my heroes and we have no idea who they are or where they where they are. That kind of stuff. discovers that Doc Bogs had, you know, had a very brief recording and playing career in the late 20s, early 30s and then became a coal miner and was like a career guy the rest of his life. You know what I mean? And and I think this is important because one, how many other musicians existed in the South that were Doc Bog's contemporaries that maybe had the exact same or a similar type of story? You know what I mean? They they played music, but they but life took over, you know what I mean? and they had to either farm or become a coal miner or do this and do that. There were a million people like that and Doc Bogs is the one that they chose because he was the guy that just so happened to get that record deal back in the late 1920s. So, it's already kind of a curational kind of thing that's happening because he was the one in a million that got the recording contract and then he was the one in a million of the recordings that got made in that period that people decided to point to and and rediscover. And I think because he largely lived out the narrative of the songs that these people were singing at this point in time, the image of the southern working man, you know. So what you're what you're getting at, if I can try to boil this down a little bit, is that it's not a terrible thing to go out and find, you know, Doc Bogs and to to get him recording or performing again. Like that's kind of a braille move. Uh, you know, guy was stuck in a bad situation. We're helping him out. We're giving him more music.

[00:13:47]the the the like the wrinkle where it gets a little weird is if this music is now presented as like or framed as like a massive part of the southern condition, all of the southern condition and like the feeling of it. And really what we're getting is like a small small snippet of it. So we have a lot of people in in the folk revival that are being exposed to these older artists and they're not really getting a clear picture of what was going on in the 1920s or earlier.

[00:14:15]>> Agreed. And and even like you know Doc Bogs aside there, you know, you can look at a million other artists, but one that comes to mind is Elizabeth Cotton. I I think she uh she's brought back like a lot of her tunes are kind of popularized, you know what I mean? But then maybe overlooked as an artist in certain ways, you know, it's like her tunes were were good enough and and people even tried to take credit for Freight Train. You know, there are people that we we've talked about similar things with the recording industry and stuff like that. and how how does crediting work and all that kind of stuff. You know, in some ways she may she may have been able to contribute more of an authentic view of what it was like to be, I don't know, a black woman from North Carolina or something like that, but it was like her songs were given the platform more than like maybe she was as an artist. You know, once again, there's this kind of like cherry-picking or curational thing that's going on, you know, like what's going to be most relatable to the people that are buying these LPs or buying these concert tickets or watching the television special or whatever, you know, you're not you're not getting an authentic picture. You're getting whatever was served up to you and and and there might be authenticity buried in that or or there might not be at all.

[00:15:24]It might have been repackaged and sort of reformatted or like you're saying, curated, cherrypicked. So it's it'll be something you like.

[00:15:32]>> It's almost like we're talking about something, right? That's like a the mechanism in action. It's not like one person is making these choices, you know, but as a whole, like for some reason the movement was headed this way, right? I guess another way to say that is like the folk revival just didn't like preserve a tradition. It interpreted one or part of one. I think it's fair to say if you look at these tunes and the the artists that that first generation was looking at, you know, southern and black musical traditions were like foundational to the folk revival of the '60s, but in many cases were like filtered, adapted to fit that concert setting, the the college audience. That leads to many southern and black musicians that that just weren't even discovered at all.

[00:16:17]You know, there's another interesting point to bring up in relation to that and tie it back into where you and I come from because we're talking about a lot of artists from the south that weren't represented from that early generation in a revivalist kind of sense, but current southern musicians like bluegrass musicians were actually able to kind of make this thing work for themselves in a way. It's almost as if instead of letting a northern audience and northern artists who were interested in southern culture reinterpret their music, they were kind of picking up these narratives that were popular with northern audiences. The the kind of southern working man, the, you know, mother and dad, daddy are dead, the all the the train songs, all that kind of stuff. They were picking up on these narratives that were popular with northern audiences, writing songs to fit them, and then recording it themselves as southerners. So the the bluegrass musicians were still driving the bus.

[00:17:13]They were still in charge of the music they were creating in their cataloges and everything, whereas these earlier folk musicians and someone had to go out, rediscover them, and sort of like dress them up and tell them what to sing or whatever. There was there was another hand on what they were doing whereas the bluegrass musicians were just still going and they could see the trends and take advantage of them.

[00:17:32]>> Exactly. And and and I don't know if they would have explicitly thought about it like that but I think that's what happened right because Bill Monroe was a businessman. Flatt and Scrugs were businessmen you know >> and their wives.

[00:17:42]>> Yes. Louise Scrugs is the is the reason right that those guys I mean they wrote the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. They were featured on one of the most popular television shows in the United States of America. Everyone heard bluegrass.

[00:17:54]>> A big welcome for Lester Flat, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys.

[00:18:04]>> I I don't say this in like a critical way. I just mean they played into the stereotype of that Southerner that the Beverly Hillbillies was kind of like curating at that point.

[00:18:13]>> And they did it they did it knowingly, right? They did it as a business decision, right? Yes, >> that that that kind of shtick that they were pedaling was, you know, was for their own benefit and it wasn't someone else who talked him into it. All of those, you know, big business moves that they did were on purpose rather than being like coerced by someone else. To me, that just supports kind of what I what I think of as like the conclusion to this, you know, this this weaving tale that I've tried to tell today about the folk revival in that it was like it was a curational movement. You know what I mean? It was it was something that didn't provide a full detailed picture of the culture that it was trying to represent at times.

[00:18:56]>> I think worse so it it tried to portray itself that way sometimes or or aspects of that movement and people in that movement tried to portray it as such as as sort of like a savior mechanism when in reality it's a curation mechanism.

[00:19:12]>> It sold a lot of LPS.

[00:19:15]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:17]>> But would you would you say that it was bad? Because I don't think I would. I mean, I have beef with the folk revival, but I wouldn't say it was like bad.

[00:19:24]>> We've danced on this line before, right?

[00:19:26]It there are bad things that happened as a result of its existence. I would say, right, there are people who influenced the movement that were not given the credit that they were due and like financially or otherwise. Um, but like the Bristol sessions, if we want to use that as an example, it put the music on such a stage that so many more people were able to consume it. It inspired them to go digging for more obscure artists that they were then able to kind of bring into the spotlight at that point in time, etc., etc. So, I I think, you know, that that is largely a a good thing that the people who got represented were represented, you know what I mean? But but there we have to recognize that people were left out, right?

[00:20:13]>> Yeah. It seems like uh American folk music uh comes with so much baggage uh and is it can be such a heavy topic that every time we have a boom in popular culture, it's it's because it's been watered down. It's been made palatable. Um and the sort of the raw truth of it, it is a lot. But when you get it in a mixed drink, it's, you know, it's a little easier to to pallet. And I think you can see that in Oh, brother, where thou, you know, I think you can see that in a lot of these booms that we've had. And uh the folk revival is just another example of that. And the Bristol Sessions is another example of that for sure.

[00:20:53]>> Absolutely. Either way, the cannon keeps growing as the history gets simpler, but if you listen closely, you just might hear the B part.