When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
by Robert S. Cantwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert S. CantwellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-04-25
ISBN: 0674951336
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Book Reviews of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
Book Review: Brilliant, political, incisive
Summary: 5 Stars
I agree with some of the other reviewers that this is not a speed read, but it's not because of academic jargon, of which there is very little. Cantwell is fond of long, twisty sentences, many of which I had to read twice, but it was worth the effort. If the prose is complex, it's because there are plenty of meaty, complex ideas behind it.
Reading this book set my brain on fire. Cantwell makes lots of non-obvious but convincing connections between the folk song revival of the 1960s and:
* The IWW of the 1930s
* Summer camps in the northeast US in the 1950s
* The McCarthy witch hunts
* The growing power of consumer culture
and much, much more.
This is a very political book, and unashamedly so. Cantwell relates popular culture to economics and history with powerful arguments that show how the lessons of the Great Depression of the 1930s were deliberately distorted and finally lost through the efforts of the military industrial complex that needed to perpetuate itself after World War II.
He describes the longing of the 60s folk generation for authenticity, justice, and national identity with great sympathy. I was there, and it all rang true for me. And Cantwell was there too--his description of the effect that Pete Seeger had on his life is especially moving, and gives the book a personal depth that enriches the entire narrative.
This is the best book about music I've ever read that Greil Marcus didn't write. If you liked INVISIBLE REPUBLIC or LIPSTICK TRACES, I think you'll really go for this one.
Summary of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
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.
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