Rainbow Quest American 1940 1970 Politics
For a brief amount of time from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, folk music captured a mass audience in the United States, as college students and others swarmed to concerts by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In this comprehensive study, Ronald D. Cohen reconstructs the history of this singular cultural moment, tracing it is roots to the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on scores of consultations and a lot of manuscript collections, as well as his own spacious files, Cohen shows how a wide range of traditions — from hillbilly, gospel, blues, and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic, and political protest music — all contributed to the genre known as folk. He documents the primary work of John Lomax and other accumulators who, with the assistance of recording companies, preserved and disseminated folk music in the 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of left-wing politics and the rise of the mercantile music marketplace helped to stimulate wider interest in folk music. Stars emerged, such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Josh White. With the success of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio in the 1950s, the stage was set for the full-blown “folk revival” of the early 1960s. Centered in New York’s Greenwich Village and sustained by a flourishing record industry, the revival disseminate to college campuses and communities all over the country. It included a wide array of performers and a supporting cast of journalists, club owners, record company executives, political activists, managers, and organizers. By 1965 the boom had passed it is peak, as rock and roll came to dominate the marketplace, but the folk revival left an enduring musical bequest in American culture.
Review”There is an enormous amount of historical data here. It is terrifi to have it all available in one place.” — Norm Cohen
“Thorough, engaging, and informative, this book makes a substantial contribution to the field…” — Paul F. Wells, director, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University
From the PublisherA well-informed chronicle of the folk music boom in mid-twentieth-century America.
About the AuthorRonald D. Cohen is professor of history at Indiana University Northwest, and editor of Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and Gordon Friesen’s “Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography” (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
Rainbow Quest American 1940 1970 Politics Picture
Rainbow Quest American 1940 1970 Politics Image
Rainbow Quest American 1940 1970 Politics Picture
Rainbow Quest American 1940 1970 Politics Picture
Most helpful client reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
 A outstandingly informative historical survey
By Midwest Book Review
Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970 by Ronald D. Cohen (Professor of History, Indiana University Northwest) is a to an outstanding degree informative historical survey and commentary of the phenomena of folk music’s mass audience appeal as represented by concerts and album sales from such luminaries as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers, and scores of others. Originally centered in New York’s Greenwich Village and sustained by a robust record industry, this revival of folk music through the 1950s and culminating in the mid-1960s when it was overtaken by “The British Invasion” and the dominence of Rock ‘n Roll. Still, those glory years of folk music popularity have left an astonishing musical bequest that still reverberates within the American culture. Rainbow Quest is a seminal, core addition to any 20th Century American Music History reference collection and supplemental reading list.
25 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
 troubled roots, vexing ambiguities, lasting legacy
By Jerome Clark
In this, the introductory serious, comprehensive, and scholarly booklength history of the American folk revival (or at least one of them; one may argue that a kind of folk revival is occurring right now), Ronald D. Cohen draws on years of exploration to document a arousing and attention holding cultural moment. If you’re mesmerized in the subject, you will unquestionably want this book, and you will be thankful for it is wealth of information. Even those of us who have followed the folk revival for a long time will learn a outstanding deal. I suppose to return to the book again and again in search of facts not readily, or at all, available elsewhere.
This, however, is not the sort of revisionist history that one day an individual will write. That becomes evident on the commitment page, where Cohen honors “Pete Seeger, who has sustained me over the last five decades.” If, like me and the counter-hagiographical historians sure to write the next draft of revival history, you consider Seeger something of a sanctimonious hypocrite, you may find Cohen a trifle irksome. On the other hand, you’ll find validation in Seeger quotes that Cohen innocently drops, such as an amazing statement in regards to Josef Stalin on page 30. Made in 1993 — 40 years after the death of a tyrant who killed more people, including Communists, than any other figure in history (between 20 and 40 million, according to best estimates) — Seeger, a lifelong, self-identified Communist, ultimately manages what at firstborn looks like a critical assessment, even an apology for his years of service to a spectacularly unworthy cause. On second and further readings, however, Seeger’s meaning grows ever murkier and in the long run takes on in a positive manner Orwellian dimensions. For all his public persona as a radical liberal, whatsoever personal virtues he undoubtedly possesses notwithstanding, Seeger is in his ideological heart radically illiberal. Nothing in this book will convince any attentive reader otherwise.
Cohen himself has not one thing unfavorable to say with regards to the Old Left/Popular Front culture that saw traditionalisti music as a utile agitprop tool and proceeded to purge it of all “unprogressive” elements, fashioning a crude caricature of the real stuff. To Cohen the oppositions are the anti-Communists — he appears to make no distinction among liberal anti-Stalinists and demagogic reactionaries like Joe McCarthy and his ilk — and phrases such as “dark clouds of anticommunism” hover over the text.
He justifiedly condemns the abominable, anti-democratic exercise of blacklisting, which sidelined, for a time, the careers of Seeger and the Weavers. Such victimization, however, does not make them heroes, only victims; in Stalin’s Soviet Union dissident balladeers and writers went to the gulag, often times never to be seen again. In America in the meantime, after the unpleasantness had passed, Seeger et al. went back to well-paying careers. All the while, they managed to compose not a single protest song when it comes to the fate of their counterparts in the unfree nations of the Soviet empire. The Seegerites, after all, were members of that generation of ideologues who, in George Orwell’s wry observation, were opposed to fascism but not to totalitarianism. Even their opposition to fascism, however, was conditional. When Stalin and Hitler formed the confederacy that started World War II and ended only when Hitler later turned on the USSR, Seeger and his fellow Almanac Singers were unrestrained in their opposition to American intervention versus German/Soviet aggression. The conflict in Europe, their songs informed us, came in regards to because of the sinister machinations of greedy British capitalists (the theme of the Almanacs’ jaw-dropping rewrite of the traditionalisti “Liza Jane”) and hence Britain’s fate was of no concern to decent people. After Hitler attacked Stalin, of course, not anyone supported intervention more fervently than these putative pacifists.
The early folk revival was at it is core a political movement, and Cohen’s is in good portion a political book. That affects his treatment of the music, regarding which he utters scarcely a discouraging word. But it needs to be said that, with the exception of the magnificently gifted Woody Guthrie, the Stalinists invented a immense body of very bad music. Seeger and the Weavers trafficked in a preposterously sentimentalized portrayal not only of Soviet dictators but of ordinary Americans, conspicuously including union members. As a liberal Democrat who grew up in a union family, I employed to entertain fantasies in regards to banjo-smashing whenever I’d listen Seeger burbling another patronizing ditty with regards to the workers’ struggle. Seeger, the Weavers, and their comrades seemed to infantilize everything they touched. And yet….
For all their moral and musical failings, they alerted their fellow citizens to our country’s (and others’) rich inheritance of established song. They played a huge and honorary role in the invention (in a heap of cases rediscovery) of authentic rural folk artists — no one more so than folklorist and Marxist Alan Lomax, who alone or, in his youth, with his father John Lomax found Lead Belly and Mississippi Fred McDowell, among a lot of others, and gave them stages and careers. They started folk-music recording labels (most conspicuously Folkways) which afforded both rural and urban performers a voice and a new audience. Most of the urban music from those days is forgettable, a great deal of of it downright cringe-inducing, but the best of it endures. Besides such gifted performers as Dave Van Ronk, the Kossoy Sisters, Fred Neil, the Dillards, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (all, with the exception of the anti-Stalinist socialist Van Ronk, at least artistically apolitical), the second stage of the revival developed one of the towering figures in American music, Bob Dylan — when it comes to whom, oddly, Cohen has comparatively little to say. Yet, in going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan both revitalized folk music and freed the revival from the suffocating effects of the Stalinist culture that made it possible. Today’s folk musicians are better for it, and so is their music.
7 of 13 persons found the following review helpful.
Intriguing
By Mahir Ali
Any book that prompts such a lopsided anti-”Seegerite” rant will have to be worth reading. Pete Seeger himself would be the original to confess that he is far from perfect. Yet it is very difficult for any person with an iota of good sense to see him as anything other than profoundly liberal in the best sense of the world, and as the sort of figure Americans may genuinely be proud of.
I would have been inclined to book on the basis of Ronald Cohen’s commitment alone, but I take place also to be intimate with the quality of his scholarship. Given the subject, it is possible to commend the book without reservation – even as I place my own order.
See all 3 client reviews…
|