University Place

Jews and the 1960s American Folk Revival

– It’s my pleasure to introduce to you Madison’s very own Rivka Maizlish. Rivka is a PhD student in the History Department here at UW, working on a terrific dissertation on the history of folk music and folk culture in the United States in the 20th century. She has her BA from Brandeis University, she received her master’s here, and now she’s working on her dissertation. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, “To Arrange and Rearrange the 80-Year Project of American Folk.” She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and she’s also a Woody Guthrie Fellow at the Woody Guthrie Center this year. So it’s a pleasure to have Rivka speak on “Jews in the 1960s American Folk Revival”, Rivka. (audience applauding)
– Whoo! (“Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues” by Bob Dylan)
– [Bob] Here’s a foreign song I learned in Utah. Ha, va, hava Na, hava na Gi, hava nagi La, hava nagila (enthusiastic yodeling) (folk guitar music) (harmonica crooning)
– Okay, so you recognize this song, of course. (audience laughing) And you recognize the singer?
– Uh huh, yeah.

– Bob Dylan, or Robert Zimmerman, as he was born and Bar Mitzvahed in Northern Minnesota. And here is a more familiar song from Bob Dylan, the King of Folk.
Roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man How many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly Before they’re forever banned The answer my friend Is blowin’ in the wind The answer is blowin’ in the wind

– Sorry to cut you off, but that was great. You can sing along, with any of the songs I play. You can feel free to sing along. I want to suggest that these two songs, Blowin’ in the Wind and what Dylan called Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues are the two key songs for understanding the 1960s American folk revival and the role of Jews in shaping that folk movement. I’ll explain why, but first, to understand the 1960s folk revival, I think we need to understand the role of folk in earlier decades in America. How was the 1960s folk movement different from the popularity of folk festivals in the 1920s and ’30s? How is the ’60s folk revival different from the Popular Front use of folk in the ’40s, with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers. If there really was a 1960s American folk revival, to understand it, we have to understand what came before it and how the role of Jews in the 1960s may have differed from their role in earlier folk movements.

(folk guitar music) Between 1928 and 1945, roughly 150 annual folk festivals appeared in 27 different states drawing between 8,000 and 80,000 people each year. The white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon organizers of these festivals, some of them are shown here, shared one fundamental belief. They believed that modern society was hopelessly fractured and devoid of meaning, and that with folk music, they could create an authentic society. To these organizers, an authentic society was a society where every man and woman knew his or her place and played the role that was expected of them according to history, tradition, region, gender, race, and occupation. And they believed that folk music could help people understand their historically rooted identity. In 1931, Annabel Morris Buchanan founded the White Top Folk Festival on White Top Mountain in Virginia. It became so popular by 1933 that Eleanor Roosevelt attended. You can see her there, above the banjo player. This festival founded by Annabel Morris Buchanan was whites only, a whites-only folk festival, and Annabel Morris Buchanan’s favorite phrase which she said over and over again in promoting the festival was, know thyself.

She believed that through folk music, Americans could know themselves, which for her, because she was racist, meant knowing their Anglo-Saxon heritage. Folk was a way for Americans to connect to Irish Appalachian folk tunes and understand the superiority, according to her, of the Anglo-Saxon race. This is Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a famous banjo player who founded the very first folk festival ever in the United States in Asheville, North Carolina in 1928. I want to play Bascom Lamar Lunsford singing a folk song just to give you an idea of what a classic American folk song sounds like.

(“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” by Lamar Lunsford) I wish I was a mole in the ground Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground If I was a mole in the ground I’d root that mountain down And I wish I was a mole in the ground

– So like Annabel Morris Buchanan’s festival at White Top, Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s festival in Asheville was also whites only. And though he never repeated Buchanan’s favorite phrase, know thyself, having a fixed, rooted identity was the center of Lamar Lunsford’s festival, as well. He outlawed costumes from the festival, which meant anything from a grass hula skirt to even a beard. He was very angry when a folk singer had a beard and thought that was completely inauthentic. Minstrelsy or blackface performance would have horrified him as this ultimate example of playing with identity, when someone who’s white could pretend to be black. Tin Pan Alley loomed large as a threat to Lunsford’s idea of the authentic society. In the fast-growing, Manhattan-based song industry, song pluggers could invent and reinvent themselves in a number of different songs, ventriloquize different identities and the songs could be disseminated on the radio and on records, and anyone could play them outside of context. So just because Lunsford’s festival and Buchanan’s festival were all-white, I don’t want to suggest that it was only whites who were interested in folk music in the ’20s and ’30s. In 1941, the first black folk festival started at Fort Valley State College in Georgia, and these were black musicians playing traditional black music. However, the idea of a fixed community of racial identity was still at the heart of this all-black folk festival.

A lot of the musicians, including Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy, William Grant Still, who attended this festival, praised it because here were African-Americans playing their own music, not European music, not white music. So they still had this idea that folk could help people understand their true identity rooted in race and history. The National Folk Festival, founded by Sarah Gertrude Knott in 1934, was multicultural. Finally, we have a progressive who founds a folk festival to celebrate different cultures. There, Native Americans performed songs and dances at the National Folk Festival, African-Americans perform, different immigrant groups, Italians, Spanish, they even have Chinese dancers at some point. However, probably even more than Buchanan and Lunsford, Sarah Gertrude Knott was obsessed with the idea that everyone had to play the role assigned to them by race and history. Her worst nightmare was that a black blues singer would go and see the Italian Tarantella performance and get some ideas about syncopation in music and then incorporate that into their blues playing, or that the Italians might go listen to the black blues player and get some ideas about how to change their Italian music.

This woman hated that idea. She thought that that was destroying folk and that folk meant everyone understood their distinctive, unique essence. So where are Jews in all of this? Well, they’re not attending the folk festival at White Top. They’re not hanging out with Bascom Lamar Lunsford, trading tunes on the banjo and the balalaika. And they’re not even at Sarah Gertrude Knott’s multicultural folk festivals. They are at Tin Pan Alley. In 1937, the Andrews Sisters make the Yiddish song “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” a hit, and in 1928, Sophie Tucker made this Yiddish song “My Yiddishe Momme” a hit. Jews are song pluggers at Tin Pan Alley, they’re Jack Yellen, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Sammy Cahn, Jerome Kern, Frank Loesser, they’re involved in the very industry against which folk defines itself. This is folk music’s negation. And while the early folk enthusiasts were terrified of costume or blackface, Jews like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor often performed in blackface on Vaudeville. So while Jews would become very important in folk by the 1960s, in the 1920s and ’30s, they’re pretty much exclusively involved in the music industry that folk defines itself against. And Tin Pan Alley was so important in, for folk singers as being understood as folk’s negation that Bob Dylan even makes fun of Tin Pan Alley in 1962.

(“Tin Pan Alley” by Bob Dylan) – [Bob] This is unlike all the rest of the songs come out of uptown New York ’cause Tin Pan Alley thing, this one wasn’t written up there. Well, a few songs nowadays that aren’t being written up there. This was written down in the United States. (audience laughing)

– All right, so Bob Dylan’s making fun of Tin Pan Alley, but he’s also making fun of the idea that folk singers often made fun of Tin Pan Alley, right? And the fact that he can do this in 1962 shows how important Tin Pan Alley was in helping folk as a foil for the folk movement. But there was a space somewhere in the United States where Jews were discussing folk music in the 1920s and ’30s. In the pages of the communist publication The Daily Worker, many Jews and other leftists and radicals were discussing whether or not a Workers’ Music could help create revolution. In 1923, working class Jewish immigrants in New York formed the Freiheit Gezang Farein, a Yiddish Workers’ Chorus. The group was made up of mostly sweatshop workers, and they would meet for formal concert recitals and sing Yiddish choral arrangements. Often to little acclaim, someone wrote into the Daily Worker, “Our comrades can’t sing.” (audience laughing) But someone else had a more serious critique in the pages of the Daily Worker. A reader said, “The Freiheit Gezang Farein does valuable work, but we have so many comrades who do not happen to be born Jews, and they simply do not understand Yiddish.”

So their critique was, how can this be a workers’ movement if only a small group of workers can understand it? Michael Gold, a radical Jewish writer, had a different critique. He believed that the Yiddish chorus was too complicated, that the choral arrangements were too sophisticated, and that not all workers could understand it. Michael Gold was also a good friend of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and he would prefer a workers’ music that was more along the lines of what they did. He thought that the Communist Party should do what the Wobblies had done, what Joe Hill had done, and go out and find the songs that Americans already enjoyed, change the lyrics a little bit to be about unions and strikes, and there you have a workers’ music that can create a revolution. But others disagreed, and they thought that folk music was silly. “Froggie Went a Courtin'” is about a mouse marrying a frog? They thought that folk music was reactionary, you know, give me that old time religion, or they thought that folk music just was apolitical. The song I played from Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” what’s that have to do with revolution, right? So there was this debate, and interestingly among the black community is a similar debate. Some African-Americans felt that traditional black music represented slavery and minstrelsy a past that they were desperate to get away from, while others argued that playing traditional black music could help create community pride and be very useful for racial justice and a new birth of freedom. World War Two completely ended this debate. During the popular fight in the ’40s to defeat fascism, Jews and other leftists embraced all forms of American tropes, American culture, including American folk music. Here, of course, is Woody Guthrie with his famous This Machine Kills Fascists guitars, and here are some of the songs that came out of the Popular Front.

(“Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” by Woody Guthrie) (enthusiastic yodeling) Now I wished I had a bushel Wished I had a peck Wished I had a Hitler With a rope around his neck Hey, round, round Hitler’s grave Round, round we go

– That was Round and Round Hitler’s Grave. (audience laughing) This one is more classic.

We shall not, we shall not be moved We shall not, we shall not be moved Just like a tree That’s standing by the water We shall not be moved The union’s behind us We shall not be moved The union is behind us We shall not be moved Just like a tree That’s standing by the water We shall not be moved

– Very good, Pete Seeger would be proud of you for singing along. (audience laughing) So one concrete example of leftist Jews embracing folk music in the ’40s is Camp Kinderland, Camp Kinderland was established by the Workmen’s Circle in 1923 for a summer camp for kids for political education and Yiddish culture. They didn’t sing American folk songs at the beginning because why would they? This didn’t have anything to do with American folk songs. But by the ’40s, Camp Kinderland, show a picture here, began feeding its campers a steady diet of folk music, and campers who attended at Camp Kinderland in the ’50s, ’60s, ’40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, were primed to enter the 1960s folk fans and also with an education in social justice. One such Camp Kinderland camper was Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. She was the daughter of Italian communists, not Jewish, but when Bob Dylan met her, she was a member of CORE, and she had been a Camp Kinderland camper, and here she is gracing the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. So leftists Americans, Jews and non-Jews, embraced American folk music as a way to claim an identity that was American, but also radical. As a way to embrace American citizenship but also position themselves as dissenters.

In a sense, it was also a way of describing a different America where they could see themselves. This was the America of the Union Maid, of Casey Jones the Scab, of Pretty Boy Floyd the Outlaw, an America where there are no neutrals in Harlan County, where Washington is just a bourgeois town, where there’s a Jim Crow train and a union train, and where sometimes you take a strange notion to jump in the river and drown. I believe that this sense of carving out a separate, unique identity that’s dissenting or more radical or different from American culture while simultaneously embracing American identity is a sort of project that Jews had engaged in since they first immigrated to the United States. After the 1940s, they were more and more inclined to do this through American folk music. But this idea of being both uniquely American and specifically radical or dissenting was as threatening to the Right Wing in America as it was central to the Jewish experience. So after the Second World War, during the McCarthy era, folk songs, folk singers, radio shows, even folk songbooks were banned, blacklisted, attacked under McCarthyism. But the posture of claiming an American identity while maintaining difference and dissent sort of created some comic clashes between folk communists and the right. For example, Irwin Silber, who was a Jewish communist and folk enthusiast who would later play an important role in the ’60s folk revival was called up before HUAC in 1958 and asked if he ever taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science, which was a communist school in New York. He said yes, and then they asked, well, what did you teach, expecting an answer like, revolution and the state, and he said truthfully, square dancing.(audience laughing)

The Jewish left’s embrace of traditional American forums also made for some interesting culture clashes. For example, in the early 1950s, two young Jewish folk singers from New York came to Asheville, North Carolina to see Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s folk festival, and Lamar Lunsford took one look at these Jews with their long, curly hair and said, are you boys communists? And they may have been, but they were also banjo players (chuckles) By the early 1960s, those festivals, the ones created by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Annabel Morris Buchanan, and Sarah Gertrude Knott were in serious decline even as folk music was increasing in popularity. Sarah Gertrude Knott wrote in her diary in 1960, another spirit prevails, and she was right. By the 1960s, folk’s fan base was much younger, more urban, more social justice oriented, and much more Jewish. And there were different characters involved in the folk movement, as well. Here is Albert Grossman, manager for Bob Dylan as well as Peter, Paul and Mary and son of Jewish immigrants. Different venues for folk, as well. In addition to large outdoor festivals, there were clubs, most famously, folk singers gathered in Washington Square Park in New York, coffeehouses, college campuses were also a prominent place to find folk festivals and folk singers, and there were new folk festivals that, while they took the place of the old ones that had been all-white, most importantly in Philadelphia, Newport, Rhode Island, Chicago, and Berkeley.

And many of these folk festivals, including the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the Newport Folk Festival, were organized by Jews. Those 1960s folk revival was also more social justice oriented as compared to the whites only folk festivals, in the segregation itself, here you have a number of folk singers at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. They’re holding hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” The main difference, I think, in the 1960s folk movement is that young folk fans came to folk in the 1960s to escape the very sense of rooted, fixed identity that the earlier folk enthusiasts hoped to use folk to foster. So while earlier folk enthusiasts said use folk to know yourself, these younger fans came to folk to become themselves. And this often involved playing with identity. So here’s an example of a young Jewish musician named Elliott Adnopoz, who ran around with Woody Guthrie in the ’50s and changed his name to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. (“Diamond Joe” by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) There is a man you hear about Most every place you go His holdings are in Texas And his name is Diamond Joe And he carries all his money – So this guy’s from Flatbush. (audience laughing) This is a costume, that hat is a costume. I’m actually from Texas, so I can wear these boots, this is authentic, but this accent, all of this is fake. And he knew this, and his friends in New York knew this, and this was not a problem, this is what folk was all about, was taking on a different identity and playing with identity.

And I think the reason that most young folk fans in the ’60s came to folk in order to do this, to try and play around with identity and escape a historically rooted sense of identity was because they came to folk music through a very particular album, and this album was produced by Moe Asch and Folkways Records. This is Moses Asch, who was born in Poland in 1905, and his father, Sholem Asch, was a celebrated Yiddish writer. He wrote for The Forward, and The Forward asked young Moe Asch to create a Yiddish radio station. And so he did this and got an interest in Yiddish folk music, as well as an understanding of how to produce music, and in 1948, he founded Folkways Records, which became maybe the most important record label of the ’60s folk movement, blues, here’s Lead Belly on Folkways, Barbara Dane, Woody Guthrie, maybe the most important singer to record on Folkways, the year his Dust Bowl Blues. In this album, the original Folkways recording Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly, happens to be the album that got Bob Dylan into folk music. Changed his life when he heard this. But I think the most important Folkways record is The Anthology of American Folk Music which Moe Asch published in 1952. It came from a collection of folk records that this very eccentric guy from the West Coast, Harry Smith, had amassed. This is a six-disc collection, and there are all these folk songs, and Harry Smith was a very eccentric guy. He was an occultist, he called himself an alchemist, he believed he could turn metal into gold. And he did not arrange the songs on these albums according to chronology, you know, recorded in 1927, 1928, 1920, not according to who sings them, different singers appear at different points, not according to race, you know, black music, white music. He arranged them according to what he felt was their cosmic number, (audience laughing) their essential number.

And this was a huge hit, because it was folk music out of context. The songs didn’t have a meaning of, this is who you are because, you know, this is what your ethnic heritage is, or these are the songs from a lumber camp in Wisconsin, and this is, if you come from Wisconsin, this is you, this is your past. These were completely torn from context, and in fact, Moe Asch and Harry Smith both rejoiced when people complained, or at least just observed, that they couldn’t tell the race of the different singers. There’s some black musicians and some white musicians on this, and people listened, and they actually couldn’t tell the race, and that was something that Moe Asch, as well as Harry Smith, thought was delightful. I believe that folk fans in the 1960s really, through this album The Anthology of American Folk Music, came to understand folk as a way to escape time and place, even as earlier folk fans believed that folk was a way to ground people in time and place. Here’s a quote from a young folk fan from San Francisco. In 1964, he says, “All human beings feel, in varying degrees, alone, separated from their fellow man. And from this desire is born a song that reaches through time and tells the story of people we will never know and makes them real for us. And in some way that I do not understand, singing about these people makes me feel less lonely.”

Though alienation was a problem for early folk enthusiasts, but for them, people were alienated when they were torn from their context. Because of urbanization, they were brought to this city, they didn’t understand their past, that’s what made them alienated. For young folk fans in the ’60s, alienation came from being trapped in time and place and unable to speak to people across generations, metaphorically. This is from the Newport Folk Festival program in 1959, the great folk singer Odetta is here praised because, “Her style is so individual that she eludes placement in anyone’s tradition.” So if you think about the early folk enthusiasts caring so much that everyone stays according to their tradition, that they know exactly what each tradition is, this represents a radical break. And while folk enthusiasts in the ’20s and ’30s were very worried about different races mixing and combining their music, by the 1960s, folk fans were debating whether white musicians could play black blues, and most were agreeing that they could. This is the white blues player, Eric Von Schmidt. In 1964, in the Newport Folk Festival program, he asked to play fully, mirror mirror on the wall, can a white cat sing the blues at all? (audience laughing) And he says, yes, but he cautions, “Since the really deep blues are personal and introspective, we have to find and accept our own identities before we can really let go. When a white musician plays the blues,” he says, “It isn’t going to sound like the Delta or the South Side. It’s going to sound like them.”

Nothing could have been more horrifying to the early folk enthusiasts than the idea that a white singer could sing something from the Mississippi Delta and make it sound different, make it sound like them, give it a new context and give it a new sound. This bore the mark of the very alienated society that they were trying to heal. Worse, it bore the mark of the city, where different people of different cultures and races and backgrounds lived in close connection and could learn from each other’s music. This is Lightning Hopkins, Sam Hopkins, who also wrote in the same Newport Folk Festival program that he believed that white singers could absolutely play the blues. He says, “Blues dwell in everyone, it’s all in the soul.” But then he admitted that some white performers do have some trouble playing the blues, but the problem was not their race. He said, “They’re afraid to let go of themselves.” In other words, white singers playing the blues do not have an authenticity problem, they had a sincerity problem. Sincerity rather than authenticity is really at the heart of the 1960s folk revival. anyone can play the blues regardless of their race, but actually, as opposed to Jewish performers like, say, Al Jolson from earlier decades who saw their Jewish experience being marginalized in American society as sort of similar to the black experience, and therefore allowing them to sing black songs or have some sort of cultural affinity, he sees his Jewish background as actually a sort of barrier to connecting with, he’s specifically here talking about the great black blues singer, Son House. So here is Mike Bloomfield’s.

– It’s very strange, ’cause I’m not born to blues, you know, it’s not in my blood, it’s not in my roots or my family, I mean, I’m Jewish, you know? (people laughing) I’ve been Jewish for years. (harmonica crooning) To Son House, it’s a more serious thing, and hell, man, I’m not Son House, I’m not Son House, I’ve not been stepped on, you know, like he has. I don’t want to be that. Man, my father’s a full-time millionaire, you know? I’ve lived a rich, fat, happy life, man. I had a big Bar Mitzvah.

– So he had a big Bar Mitzvah, so he’s not Son House. I think this is interesting, he still believes he can play the blues because he feels it, but he does see a difference, and that difference actually is based on the fact that he’s Jewish rather than seeing a connection. So in the ’60s, historical identity really didn’t matter to your ability to relate to folk music. It could, in fact, even be a barrier. So I’ve mentioned Mike Bloomfield, Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or Eliot Adnopoz. I mentioned Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager, Peter, Paul and Mary’s manager, Moe Asch. We’ve seen how Jews were involved at many different levels of the 1960s folk revivals. Manager, singer, record producer. What about the grassroots level? I think for the 1960s folk movement to really be a folk revival of the people, it has to involve people who aren’t record producers, right? At this level, as well, Jews played an important role. This is Shirley Hoffman or Lee Hoffman, who produced a number of little folk magazines. This is Caravan, and you can see how sort of homemade it is. In the pages of these folk scenes, anyone could write in, and especially in her magazines, people debated what folk was. This is interesting that early folk enthusiasts would hate the idea that people who weren’t experts would be able to make a point about what they thought folk was. But this happened in the pages of these magazines.

Of course, Sing Out, famous folk magazine founded by Irwin Silber, the guy who taught square dancing at the Jefferson School of Social Science. Sing Out! was more political than some of the other folk zines, and here’s a quote from Irwin Silber, he says, “We believe the world was worth saving and that we could do it with songs.” You might find any of these folk magazines at Israel Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. This is Izzy Young, son of Jewish immigrants. He created a Folklore Center which is space for different folk singers to meet. He had a lot of rare folk records that you could listen to in here, and you could pick up magazines like Sing Out!, Caravan, also Broadside, which is an important folk magazine, you can see there on the right. So with Jews involved at almost every level, grassroots, singers, editors, producers, managers, was there a lot of Jewish content in the 1960s folk revival? Were they singing Jewish songs? Not really. Not very much, and I think part of this has to do with the fact that Jewish singers, again, came to folk wanting to escape historically rooted identity, and they wanted to do something new. A major exception to this, of course, is Theodore Bikel, who helped found the Newport Folk Festival along with Pete Seeger, George Wein, and others. He was a Jewish immigrant from Austria who was dedicated to preserving of Yiddish songs. This is his album from 1958, “Theodore Bikel Sings Jewish Folk Songs.” He’s also famous, of course, for playing the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. I want to play one of his songs just to give you a sense, maybe you can think of Bascom Lamar Lunsford playing “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” when you hear this, and sort of think about how they compare.

(“Tumbalalaika” by Theodore Bikel) (singing in a foreign language)

– One other example is Joan Baez, who’s not Jewish, and I think that’s significant. She records on her very first album in 1960 a Yiddish song, “Donna Donna,” which you also may be familiar with that. I’ll play that as well.

Wagon bound for market There’s a calf with a mournful eye High above him there’s a swallow Winging swiftly through the sky How the winds are laughing They laugh with all their might Laugh and laugh the whole day through And half the summer’s night Donna donna donna donna Donna donna donna don Donna donna donna donna Donna donna donna don

– It’s beautiful. What’s interesting about this song is that the person who composed the music actually also composed the music for “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” remember, the song that I brought up in the beginning as an example of Tin Pan Alley as an example of commercial Vaudeville music, the opposite of folk. So if the same composer is composing this folk song that Joan Baez, the Queen of Folk, sings, and something from Tin Pan Alley, the opposite of folk, what’s going on? Is Joan Baez not a folk singer? Is this song folk, is it not folk? The truth is that there’s no such thing as folk music in that folk has no fixed objective, meaning that the meaning of folk is constructed and redefined over time through different generations. With that in mind, I want to return, finally, to Bob Dylan. Here, Harold Leventhal presents– Harold Leventhal was also a son of Jewish immigrants and manager of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, and here he is, introducing Dylan at a program in 1963. I’ve blown up the blurbs here from the bottom of the program, which I think are very interesting. The one at the bottom says that Bob Dylan is, “The very best of the newest generation of citybillies.” What’s a citybilly? A citybilly is a hillbilly.

A hillbilly’s someone from the country, so a citybilly is a hillbilly who is from the country and also from the city. A hillbilly is also someone who’s white. But the next blurb here says that Bob Dylan is, “One of the most compelling blues singers ever recorded.” A blues singer’s usually someone who’s black. So what is Bob Dylan, is he from the city, is he from the country, is he white, is he black? Whatever he is, according to Sing Out magazine, “He’s so real, it’s unbelievable.” I would love for Irwin Silber or someone from Sing Out to explain to me how something could be so real that it’s unbelievable. (audience laughing) But return to some of his music now that I brought up before.

(“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan) How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man How many seas must a white

– Okay, you can finish it yourself. (audience laughing) So this is a Dylan original, it became an anthem of the civil rights movement, of course, but he stole the tune from a black spiritual called “Many Thousands Gone,” and here he is, singing that song in 1962.

No more auction block for me No more, no more No more auction block for me Many thousands gone

– He takes the tune and he changes it a little bit for “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And I think that this is significant because this is a black spiritual, and Bob Dylan is white and Jewish, and he’s taken the music from this black spiritual and changed it, he’s made it his own, it’s his own song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it becomes an anthem for civil rights. So I think this illustrates, first, the willingness to play with identity and try out different forms of culture that characterize the 1960s folk revival, but also, of course, the social justice orientation of the folk revival, this is a civil rights anthem. And now, finally, back to our favorite.

(“Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues” by Bob Dylan) – [Bob] Here’s a foreign song I learned in Utah. Ha, va, hava

– Okay, I’ll stop here, we don’t have to hear him yodeling again. But with this song, “Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues,” Dylan is playing with identity in a different way than he is when he takes “Many Thousands Gone” and turns it into “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In this case, I think he’s almost mocking authenticity. It’s a cheeky reminder of his own ethnic identity and sort of shows the boldness of him singing Dust Bowl ballads and Delta blues. He’s sort of calling attention to the constructed nature of identity. If he can sing like Woody Guthrie, then “Hava Nagila” can be some song from Utah with a yodel at the end of it. And I think the playfulness with which he does this really shows how he understands how identity can be constructed and reconstructed in different contexts. And I think that a Jew from Hibbing, Minnesota who lives in New York City would certainly recognize this. I think in addition to calling attention to the constructed nature of identity, with this song, Dylan is calling attention to the constructed nature of folk. Aside from Theodore Bikel, most folk singers in the ’60s were not really singing, they weren’t singing “Hava Nagila.”

Most young fans did not come to folk festivals in order to hear songs like that, but they might have been more excited by a song from Utah with a yodel at the end of it. Dylan understood, more than anyone else, the unique spirit of the 1960s folk revival in all of its complexities and contradictions. He preferred to call his music traditional music, rather than folk music, and for Dylan, and he was adamant about this and said it explicitly many times, a tradition is something that has to be living and changing. You can’t freeze it in time. He said, traditional music, quote, “Doesn’t need to be protected. Nobody’s going to hurt it. But like anything else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity thing.”

Eventually, Dylan tore apart the 1960s folk movement when he tried to change folk too much. Many people did not believe that electric music could count as folk music, and they couldn’t follow him that far. But still, more than any previous movement, folk movement in the United States, the 1960s folk revival was about questioning old traditions and seeing how they could come to life in new contexts. The community of folk fans in the 1960s were liberated individuals, not because they knew their place but because they had come to understand how their own identity could be constructed and could change with new contexts. Ultimately, the 1960s folk revival was defined by debates about the nature and value of old traditions in new contexts. I think this is a story that Theodore Bikel, at least, would recognize from his acting career. Thank you. (audience applauding)