The Death Of 60's Folk Music

Cafe Society
1

I was wondering the other day exactly when the 60’s folk music phase died. I am thinking in terms of Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins and their ilk.

At one time, they could sell out stadiums and toured the world to packed houses. I am sure they continued to record the occasional album or two, but for the most part, they seem to have gone from hot tickets on college campuses and European concert halls to discount albums in $1.00 bargain bins - almost overnight.

Was there any particular year or event that signaled the end of 60’s folk music?

2

I would say 1965, when Bob Dylan became a rock and roller. Over the next 5 years or so most of the younger people from the folk scene became more or less pop singers (like Joni Mitchell and Judi Collins – even Phil Ochs’ records were more folk-rock and art-rock than traditional folk). A lot of the wave of American rock bands that broke right after that – the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, etc – were made up of musicians who drifted over from the folk scene. The older musicians (like Dave Van Ronk and Pete Segger, say) who stuck to traditional music continued to do their thing before a shrinking audience.

I guess Joan Baez is kind of the exception – she played rock festivals and her records became more pop, but she more or less stuck with the folkie act.

3

It was overwhelmed by the British Invasion. The Beatles especially brought back popular tunes.

In addition, the folk movement was never very deep. Look at the most popular songs even at its height: it was rock and people like Sinatra.

Dylan didn’t need a weatherman to know how the wind blew, and it was blowing away from folk (and, in addition, he liked the rock sound).

4

Famously, when Bob Dylan played at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966, his electric set was greeted by an audience member shouting “Judas!” This heckle was picked up on the live album.

However, people like Donovan carried on with the genre for quite a while after, and Crosby, Stills and Nash were still giving it folk at Woodstock in '69.

5

Please let me know where these cheep $1 cd’s are because they cost more than popular rock star’s cd’s to buy. Some of the older folk singers, just like old rock singers have lost their voice to aging. A few still sing ok. You have to move on to the new artists or any genre looks like nothing new is being produced.

6

The British Invasion knocked most of the folk acts off the charts, but if it hadn’t, they would have fallen off of their own accord. It was a very limited type of music. The Weavers had done practically everything that the folk movement would be known for, and the Kingston Trio hammered it home. Slightly later, Peter, Paul and Mary made their splash largely (but certainly not entirely) doing covers of Dylan songs, and Dylan in his folk phase was mostly recycling Woody Guthrie (and benefitting from the fact that most people had never heard Guthrie).

Mind you, these are all great acts, and there were a number of others (some of which have been mentioned above). But overall there weren’t enough original ideas floating around to sustain a large movement, especially in light of what happened in popular music after the Beatles. I think this is because a lot of the music was so derivative of the work of artists who, themselves, were seldom heard: Leadbelly, Blind Gary Davis, Guthrie, Odetta, etc. It was, in all too many cases, exactly analogous to hearing early rock songs filtered through the ever-so-white voice of Pat Boone. Even the Beatles couldn’t have survived that.

The most enduringly successful musicians (Dylan, Baez, Collins), for the most part, saw the dead end and shuffled off to join the pop mainstream, as did less successful folkies like Roger McGuinn. Some acts, like Peter, Paul and Mary, continued to do well. PP&M were still charting until 1970, when Peter Yarrow decided to make lewd advances on a couple of minors. And they live on every time PBS wants more money.

The story doesn’t quite end there, though, because in 1967 some Brits (especially Fairport Convention and Pentangle, and later, Steeleye Span) managed to connect with their own folk tradition, and so managed to invent British folk rock. British folk rockers have always tended to cross-pollinate with more purist folk acts (e.g., Martin Carthy) and there’s often been a strong jazz influence (going back to Davey Graham, and carrried on by people like Bert Jansch). And a number of straight rock acts also were heavily into folk, most notably Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. So this has remained fertile ground in Britain, and even though it’s been in decline since the 80s, it’s never gone away. Thank heaven.

7

The story of the Hootenanny tv series is a fascinating and instructive one. That Wiki article does a very good job of capturing the times.

Selections from the series have been re-released and they should be essential viewing for anyone who wants a look at the history of pop music. They were recorded at college campuses in 1963, a sea of coats and ties and formal flowered dresses. That describes both the performers and the students. The concerts resemble nothing of what we think of today as rock concerts.

Hootenanny was infamous for not inviting politically-charged folk singers to perform, but that was the least of its problems. Folk music of the early 60s was simply not very interesting, musically compelling, or diversified. The folkies of the 60s would drive it to new heights, but did so only by absorbing the energies of the rock world. Even the pre-Beatles rock of the early 60s, much of which is justifiably derided, stands up far better today than the folk music does. It had an energy that even the bounciest folk could not match.

The Beatles killed folk stone cold dead in the U.S. and did it in a single February night in 1964. Folk survived its death the way all musical genres do: it became a curiosity or a cult or camp. Some great folk music has been written since 1964. Some of it has been disguised as rock music but is still recognizably folk. But the bankable commercial folk genre didn’t have enough substance to stand up to the tsunami of rock.

The comedy performances on the Hootenanny DVDs are well worth searching out, though. Vaughn Meader is explosive.

8

I just found a record at Goodwill this morning that caught my attention. It was titled Hootenanny something and a Folk group recorded all the songs. The date 1977 was on it. Nice coincidence, because you seldom see the word today. I got the Stan Roger’s Northwest Passage instead, and am about to listen to it now.

9

I don’t think 60’s folk music was necessarily killed stone cold dead when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 but it definitely morphed into a different form: folk-rock. Within a short time, groups like The Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful were scoring hits with this hybrid of folk music with jingly-jangly electric guitar based rock. Of course the makeover was complete when Dylan went electric.

And here’s a clip featuring that moment in that concert that was also used at the end of Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” documentary on early Dylan.

10

Well, my entire point is that folk-rock is not folk.

11

Folk music evolved. It did not die.

12

If it has any rock in it it’s not folk? What would you call Fairport Convention cover of Matty Groves, which is a traditional song with barely-electric accompanyment until the end, where there is a folk-rock solo? I’d say it’s still %75 folk. There’s a continuum and some (like FC) are/were more toward the Folk end than others.

13

Well, it evolved into something barely recognizable. Saying 60s folk didn’t die is like saying dinosaurs didn’t die, just because we still have chickens. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

There’s a pretty sizeable folk catalogue that still gets added to - but it doesn’t have the same drawing power as rock, hip-hop, or other types of amplified music. Brian Bowers, Carolyn Hester, and the like are producing new folk music but you have to search to find it. It certainly didn’t die when Dylan went electric or the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.

15

One word: Filk.

16

Someone else whose career died in a single day.

17

Go listen to some John Prine. Specifically, try Hello in There, Paradise, Sam Stone, The Great Compromise, Donald and Lydia, or Souvenirs (among many others). I’d call that some of the best folk ever written.

18

two words: slack-key

Aloha :cool:

19

Hootenanny was awful, but wonderful! Where else could you see both Woody Allen and Woody Guthrie? Gee, and Stan Getz?

Sure some of the music sucks. Some of the musiic always sucks. And at least the censorship – and those who rebelled against it – called attention to the bad attitude our government had in those days.

I loved the folk music of the early 1960s and wasn’t very discriminating at first. But the good stuff endures and the merely “popular” settles down and becomes unfamiliar, don’t you think?

20

Dylan played rock before he played folk, back in Minnesota. Ever hear Mixed-up Confusion? It’s on Biograph, though I’ve had it on a bootleg for a long time. It’s a great rocker, recorded 11/14/62.
From everything I’ve read about Dylan, which is quite a lot, I think the accusation that he moved to rock because folk was a dead end is nonsense. I’ve just read the collected interviews, and in them somewhere (in one of the ones where he isn’t totally bullshitting) he says that one reason he went into folk was that he couldn’t afford a band. It was also what was happening in the Village, and he was pretty hooked on Woody. If you remember Don’t Look Back, he was playing acoustic sets in England while Subterranean Homesick Blues was charting. Also, it’s not like rock was not a lucrative genre in 1962. I know, I listened to it then.

This is not to say that the public wasn’t ready for folk rock. Sounds of Silence was acoustic on Wednesday Morning 3 AM, when some random CBS guy added a rock background - and made it a hit.