The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a Grammy award for Best Country & Western Performance at the awards' inaugural ceremony in 1959. At the time, no folk-music category existed in the Grammy's scheme. The next year, largely as a result of "The Kingston Trio" album and "Tom Dooley", the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album "At Large." At one point, The Kingston Trio had four records at the same time among the Top 10 selling albums for five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959 according to "Billboard Magazine's" "Top LPs" chart, a record unmatched for more than 50 years and noted at the time by a cover story in "Life Magazine".
The revival at its height
American folk music revival
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
1959 Mid-1960s. In the 1960s. The mid-1960s.
who is the original singer of you're gonna miss me when i'm gone
user
Over the years, the original has been recorded by many artists, most notably by Charlie Monroe. Lulu and the Lampshades were the first to use the cup game for percussion when performing the song
assistant
who is this mentioned person?
user
He  was an American country and bluegrass music guitarist.
assistant
does he have siblings?
user
Yes, Bill Monroe, Bertha, Birch
assistant
what are his single works?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
among the above three brothers; was the first one part of any band?
user
Yes,  Blue Grass Boys
assistant
was he also a guitarist?
user
No, he was a mandolinist.
assistant
was he into folk music?
user
Yes, Monroe's fortunes began to improve during the American folk music revival, associating his style more with traditional folk music than with the country-and-western genre with which it had previously been identified.
assistant
when did this revival touch its highest peak?
user
Monroe's fortunes began to improve during the American folk music revival of the early 1960s. Many college students and other young people were beginning to discover Monroe, associating his style more with traditional folk music than with the country-and-western genre with which it had previously been identified. The word "bluegrass" first appeared around this time to describe the sound of Monroe and similar artists such as Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley, Jim and Jesse, and the Osborne Brothers. While Flatt and Scruggs immediately recognized the potential for a lucrative new audience in cities and on college campuses in the North, Monroe was slower to respond.
Bill Monroe | Folk revival
Under the influence of Ralph Rinzler, a young musician and folklorist from New Jersey who briefly became Monroe's manager in 1963, Monroe gradually expanded his geographic reach beyond the traditional southern country music circuit. Rinzler was also responsible for a lengthy profile and interview in the influential folk music magazine "Sing Out!" that first publicly referred to Monroe as the "father" of bluegrass. Accordingly, at the first bluegrass festival organized by Carlton Haney at Roanoke, Virginia in 1965, Bill Monroe was the central figure. In 1964, before the Grateful Dead got together, Jerry Garcia caravanned across the country from California to tag along with Monroe.
Bill Monroe | Folk revival
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had, in earlier times, contributed to the development of country and western, jazz, and rock and roll music.
American folk music revival | Introduction
The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States that began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Oscar Brand had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward musical styles that had, in earlier times, contributed to the development of country & western, jazz, and rock and roll music.
Folklore of the United States | Folk music
The revival turned up a tremendous wealth and diversity of music and put it out through radio shows and record stores.
American folk music revival | Archivists, collectors, and re-issued recordings
Even after the folk revival faded in the mid-1960s, it left a loyal audience for bluegrass music. Bluegrass festivals became common, with fans often traveling long distances to see a number of different acts over several days of performances. In 1967 Monroe himself founded an annual bluegrass festival at Bean Blossom in southern Indiana, a park he had purchased in 1951, which routinely attracted a crowd of thousands; a double LP from the festival featuring Monroe, Jimmy Martin, Lester Flatt, and Jim and Jesse was released in 1973. The annual "Bill Monroe Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival" is now the world's oldest continuously running annual bluegrass festival.
Bill Monroe | Later years
The huge commercial success of the Kingston Trio, whose recordings between 1958 and 1961 earned more than $25 million for Capitol records or about $195 million in 2014 dollars spawned a host of groups that were similar in some respects like the Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, and more. As noted by critic Bruce Eder in the "All Music Guide", the popularity of the commercialized version of folk music represented by these groups emboldened record companies to sign, record, and promote artists with more traditionalist and political sensibilities. The Kingston Trio's popularity would be followed by that of Joan Baez, whose debut album "Joan Baez", reached the top ten in late 1960 and remained on the Billboard charts for over two years.
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
Dylan's record enjoyed some popularity among Greenwich Village folk-music enthusiasts, but he was "discovered" by an immensely larger audience when a pop-folk-music group, Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with a cover of his song "Blowin' in the Wind". Peter, Paul & Mary also brought Pete Seeger and the Weavers' "If I Had a Hammer" to nationwide audiences, as well as covering songs by other artists such as Dylan and John Denver.
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
During the 1950s, the growing folk-music crowd that had developed in the United States began to buy records by older, traditional musicians from the Southeastern hill country and from urban inner-cities. New LP compilations of commercial 78-rpm race and hillbilly studio recordings stretching back to the 1920s and 1930s were published by major record labels. The expanding market in LP records increased the availability of folk-music field recordings originally made by John and Alan Lomax, Kenneth S. Goldstein, and other collectors during the New Deal era of the 1930s and 40s. Small record labels, such as Yazoo Records, grew up to distribute reissued older recordings and to make new recordings of the survivors among these artists.
American folk music revival | Archivists, collectors, and re-issued recordings
The Kingston Trio, a group originating on the West Coast, were directly inspired by the Weavers in their style and presentation and covered some of the Weavers' material, which was predominantly traditional. The Kingston Trio avoided overtly political or protest songs and cultivated a clean-cut, collegiate persona. They were discovered while playing at a college club called the Cracked Pot by Frank Werber, who became their manager and secured them a deal with Capitol Records. Their first hit was a catchy rendition of an old-time folk murder ballad, "Tom Dooley", which had been sung at Lead Belly's funeral concert. This went gold in 1958 and sold more than three million copies.
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
The American folk-music revival began during the 1940s; building on the interest in protest folk singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, it reached a peak in popularity in the mid-1960s with artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. In 1948, Seeger formed the Weavers, whose mainstream popularity set the stage for the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s and also served to bridge the gap between folk, popular music, and topical song. The Weavers' sound and repertoire of traditional folk material and topical songs directly inspired the Kingston Trio, a three-piece folk group who came to prominence in 1958 with their hit recording of "Tom Dooley".
Folk rock | Folk revival
The Weavers' career ended abruptly when they were dropped from Decca's catalog because Pete Seeger had been listed in the publication Red Channels as a probable subversive. Radio stations refused to play their records and concert venues canceled their engagements. A former employee of People's Songs, Harvey Matusow, himself a former Communist Party member, had informed the FBI that the Weavers were Communists, too, although Matusow later recanted and admitted he had lied. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Despite this, a Christmas Weaver reunion concert organized by Harold Leventhal in 1955 was a smash success and the Vanguard LP album of that concert, issued in 1957, was one of the top sellers of that year, followed by other successful albums.
American folk music revival | Early years
This was how many urban white American audiences of the 1950s and 60s first heard country blues and especially Delta blues that had been recorded by Mississippi folk artists 30 or 40 years before. In 1952, Folkways Records released the "Anthology of American Folk Music", compiled by anthropologist and experimental film maker Harry Smith. The "Anthology" featured 84 songs by traditional country and blues artists, initially recorded between 1927 and 1932, and was credited with making a large amount of pre-War material accessible to younger musicians. (The "Anthology" was re-released on CD in 1997, and Smith was belatedly presented with a Grammy Award for his achievement in 1991.) Artists like the Carter Family, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Uncle Dave Macon, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Stanley Brothers, as well as Jimmie Rodgers, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Bill Monroe came to have something more than a regional or ethnic reputation.
American folk music revival | Archivists, collectors, and re-issued recordings
The folk revival in New York City was rooted in the resurgent interest in square dancing and folk dancing there in the 1940s, which gave musicians such as Pete Seeger popular exposure. The folk revival more generally as a popular and commercial phenomenon begins with the career of The Weavers, formed in November 1948 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert of People's Songs, of which Seeger had been president and Hays executive secretary. People's Songs, which disbanded in 1948–49, had been a clearing house for labor movement songs (and in particular, the CIO, which at the time was one of the few if not the only union that was racially integrated), and in 1948 had thrown all its resources to the failed presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, a folk-music aficionado (his running mate was a country-music singer-guitarist).
American folk music revival | Early years
The critical role played by Freedom Songs in the voter registration drives, freedom rides, and lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early '60s in the South, gave folk music tremendous new visibility and prestige. The peace movement was likewise energized by the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK, protesting the British testing of the H-bomb in 1958, as well as by the ever-proliferating arms race and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Young singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, had been signed and recorded for Columbia by producer John Hammond in 1961.
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
The American folk music revival, which focused on culture and entertainment, began in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Great Depression, folk music styles were disseminated around the country, as Delta blues, Latino and Cajun musicians, and itinerant honky tonk singers spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. The growth of the music industry in the same period was also important; higher potential profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters, and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that musical fads, such as Hawaiian slack-key guitar, never died out completely, since a broad range of rhythms, instruments, and vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate popular genres.
Roots revival | History
As McCarthyism began to dominate the United States population and government, it was more difficult for folk artists to travel and perform since folk was pushed out of mainstream music. Artists were blacklisted, denounced by politicians and the media, and in the case of the 1949 Peekskill Riots, subject to mob attack.
Music and politics | American folk revival
She was one of the singers, along with Seeger, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, who appeared at Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington and sang "We Shall Overcome", a song that had been introduced by People's Songs. Harry Belafonte was also present on that occasion, along with Odetta, whom Martin Luther King introduced as "the queen of folk music", when she sang "Oh, Freedom" ("Odetta Sings Folk Songs" was one of 1963's best-selling folk albums). Also on hand were the SNCC Freedom Singers, the personnel of which went on to form Sweet Honey in the Rock.
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
Monroe's style involved playing lead melodies in the style of a fiddler, and also a percussive chording sound referred to as "the chop" for the sound made by the quickly struck and muted strings. He also perfected a sparse, percussive blues style, especially up the neck in keys that had not been used much in country music, notably B and E. He emphasized a powerful, syncopated right hand at the expense of left-hand virtuosity. Monroe's most influential follower of the second generation is Frank Wakefield and nowadays Mike Compton of the Nashville Bluegrass Band and David Long, who often tour as a duet.
Mandolins in North America | Bluegrass and the jug band
By the late 1960s, the scene had returned to being more of a lower-key, aficionado phenomenon, although sizable annual acoustic-music festivals were established in many parts of North America during this period. The acoustic music coffee-house scene survived at a reduced scale. Through the luminary young singer-songwriters of the 1960s, the American folk-music revival has influenced songwriting and musical styles throughout the world.
American folk music revival | Legacy
The second revival gained momentum after the Second World War, following on from the American folk music revival as new forms of media and American commercial music appeared to pose another threat to traditional music. The key figures were Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd. The second revival was generally left wing in politics and emphasised the work music of the 19th century and previously neglected forms like erotic folk songs. Topic Records, founded in 1939, provided a major source of folk recordings. The revival resulted in the foundation of a network of folk clubs in major towns, from the 1950s.
English folk music | Folk revivals 1890–1969
Starting in the mid-20th century a phenomenon termed the folk music revival began, forming a new contemporary type of folk music. It was somewhat centered on but not limited to the United States. While sometimes termed the American Folk Music Revival, it was somewhat international and does not fit some narrower definitions of American folk music even when the artists were American. Prominent artists from this movement include Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Burl Ives, and others. A more commercially oriented version of folk music emerged in the 1960s, including performers such as The Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, The Highwaymen, Judy Collins, The New Christy Minstrels, and Gordon Lightfoot, as well as counterculture and folk rock performers including Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Arlo Guthrie, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
American folk music | 20th century folk revival music
From the late 19th century there were a series of movements that attempted to collect, record, preserve and later to perform, English folk music and dance. These are usually separated into two folk revivals. The first, in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, involved figures including collectors Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Frank Kidson (1855–1926), Lucy Broadwood (1858–1939), and Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954), centred around the Folk Song Society, founded in 1911. Francis James Child's (1825–96) eight-volume collection "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads" (1882–92) became the most influential in defining the repertoire of subsequent performers, and Cecil Sharp (1859–1924), founder of the English Folk Dance Society, was probably the most important figure in understanding of the nature of folk song.
English folk music | Folk revivals 1890–1969
The Weavers' first big hit, the flipside of Lead Belly's "Good Night Irene", and a top seller in its own right, was in Hebrew ("Tzena, Tzena, Tzena") and they, and later Joan Baez, who was of Spanish descent, occasionally included Spanish-language material in their repertoires, as well as songs from Africa, India, and elsewhere. The commercially oriented folk-music revival as it existed in coffee houses, concert halls, radio, and TV was predominantly an English-language phenomenon, though many of the major pop-folk groups, such as the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, The Highwaymen, and others, featured songs in Spanish (often from Mexico), Polynesian languages, Russian, French, and other languages in their recordings and performances.
American folk music revival | Ethnic folk music
Baez's early albums contained mostly traditional material such as the Scottish ballad, "Mary Hamilton", as well as many covers of melancholy ballads that had appeared in Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music", such as "The Wagoner's Lad" and "The Butcher Boy". She did not try to imitate the singing style of her source material, however, but used a rich soprano with vibrato. Her popularity (and that of the folk revival itself) would place Baez on the cover of "Time Magazine" in November 1962. Baez, unlike the Kingston Trio, was openly political, and, as the civil rights movement gathered steam, aligned herself with Pete Seeger, Guthrie and others.
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
This break from bluegrass tradition was not well received in some quarters—some thought it wasn't the way Bill Monroe meant for Bluegrass to be played. "Our reason for doing the newer-type music wasn't pretentious or irreverent or sarcastic or disrespectful," explained Curtis Burch. "We just felt like people were ready to see that you could really expand the sound, using those same instruments." (Monroe was a fan of New Grass Revival.) In 1979, they became the backup group and opening act for Leon Russell, further alienating them from the mainstream bluegrass community.
New Grass Revival | Separation from mainstream bluegrass
While the Romantic nationalism of the folk revival had its greatest influence on art-music, the "second folk revival" of the later 20th century brought a new genre of popular music with artists marketed through concerts, recordings and broadcasting. This is the genre that remains as "contemporary folk music" even when traditional music is considered to be a separate genre. One of the earliest figures in this revival was Woody Guthrie, who sang traditional songs in the 1930s and 1940s as well as composing his own. Among Guthrie's friends and followers as a collector, performer, and composer was Pete Seeger. In the 1930s, Jimmie Rodgers, in the 1940s Burl Ives, in the early 1950s Seeger's group the Weavers and Harry Belafonte, and in the late 1950s the Kingston Trio as well as other professional, commercial groups became popular.
Contemporary folk music | Folk revival of the mid-20th century in the English-speaking countries
Many topical songwriters with social and political messages emerged from the folk music revival of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, and others. The folk revival can be considered as a political re-invention of traditional song, a development encouraged by Left-leaning folk record labels and magazines such as Sing Out! and Broadside. The revival began in the 1930s and continued after World War II. Folk songs of this time gained popularity by using old hymns and songs but adapting the lyrics to fit the current social and political conditions.
Music and politics | American folk revival
The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a Grammy award for Best Country & Western Performance at the awards' inaugural ceremony in 1959. At the time, no folk-music category existed in the Grammy's scheme. The next year, largely as a result of "The Kingston Trio" album and "Tom Dooley", the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album "At Large." At one point, The Kingston Trio had four records at the same time among the Top 10 selling albums for five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959 according to "Billboard Magazine's" "Top LPs" chart, a record unmatched for more than 50 years and noted at the time by a cover story in "Life Magazine".
American folk music revival | The revival at its height
These were drawn on for the most influential collection, "The Scots Musical Museum", published in six volumes from 1787 to 1803 by James Johnson and Robert Burns, which also included new words by Burns. The "Select Scottish Airs" collected by George Thomson and published between 1799 and 1818 included contributions from Burns and Walter Scott. With the Industrial Revolution the process of social stratification was intensified and the themes of popular music began to change from rural and agrarian life to include industrial work songs. Awareness that older forms of song were being abandoned prompted renewed interest in collecting folk songs during the 1830s and 40s, including the work of William B.
British folk revival | Origins
Ethnic folk music from other countries also had a boom during the American folk revival. The most successful ethnic performers of the revival were the Greenwich Village folksingers, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, whom "Billboard Magazine" listed as the eleventh best-selling folk musicians in the United States. The group, which consisted of Paddy Clancy, Tom Clancy, Liam Clancy, and Tommy Makem, predominantly sang English-language, Irish folk songs, as well as an occasional song in Irish Gaelic. Paddy Clancy also started and ran the folk-music label Tradition Records, which produced Odetta's first solo LP and initially brought Carolyn Hester to national prominence.
American folk music revival | Ethnic folk music
By the late 1950s, a revival of Appalachian folk music was taking place across the country, and bands like The Weavers were paving the way for future mainstream stars like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Bluegrass was similarly revitalized and updated by artists including Tony Rice, Clarence White, Richard Green, Bill Keith and David Grisman. The Dillards, however, were the ones to break bluegrass into mainstream markets in the early 1960s.
Music history of the United States in the 1950s | Roots revival
After the Monroe Brothers broke up in 1939, Bill Monroe formed his own group, after a brief time called the Blue Grass Boys, and completed the transition of mandolin styles from a "parlor" sound typical of brother duets to the modern "bluegrass" style. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1939 and its powerful clear-channel broadcast signal on WSM-AM spread his style throughout the South, directly inspiring many musicians to take up the mandolin. Monroe famously played Gibson F-5 mandolin, signed and dated July 9, 1923, by Lloyd Loar, chief acoustic engineer at Gibson. The F-5 has since become the most imitated tonally and aesthetically by modern builders.
Mandolins in North America | Bluegrass and the jug band
In the 1950s and 1960s dedicated folk music collectors spread out across the country to record traditional music. The songs and tunes were popularized on public radio by performers such as Alan Mills, Stu Davis, Marg Osborne, and the Travellers.A number of musicians who grew up listening to this traditional music became singer-songwriters in the 1970s; for example, Gordon Lightfoot and Ian and Sylvia. English music: There were two folk music revivals in England. The first, led by Cecil Sharp, was academic. It involved the collection of songs and tunes and their publication in journals. It was at its peak about 1910.
Roots revival | English-speaking countries
Folk-song collecting continued after World War I, but the nationalist impulse had subsided and with the tradition disappearing there were fewer singers available as sources. In 1932 the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society merged to become the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). New forms of media such as the phonograph and sound film meant that from the 1920s American music began to be increasingly important and even dominant in popular British culture, leading to a further sharp decline in traditional music. British folk song might have become a purely academic interest had it not been for a second wave of revival with a very different emphasis.
British folk revival | Second revival 1945–69
Monroe developed a distinctive style of mandolin playing which emphasized strong syncopation and chording, and played in keys, such as E and B, seldom used by old-time and country musicians. He and his band, the Blue Grass Boys, played at the Grand Old Opry in late 1939 to popular acclaim, and other bands began to incorporate the new "bluegrass" music into their repertoires. Mandolin players in these bands took elements of Monroe's style and then added their own flavor.
Bluegrass mandolin | History
Several Appalachian musicians obtained renown during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, including Jean Ritchie, Roscoe Holcomb, Ola Belle Reed, Lily May Ledford, and Doc Watson.
American folk music | Appalachian music
Pete Seeger played the banjo on their Grammy-nominated 1961 album, "A Spontaneous Performance Recording", and Bob Dylan later cited the group as a major influence on him. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem also sparked a folk-music boom in Ireland in the mid-1960s, illustrating the world-wide effects of the American folk-music revival. Books such as the popular best seller, the "Fireside Book of Folk Songs" (1947), which contributed to the folk song revival, featured some material in languages other than English, including German, Spanish, Italian, French, Yiddish, and Russian. The repertoires of Theodore Bikel, Marais and Miranda, and Martha Schlamme also included Hebrew and Jewish material, as well as Afrikaans.
American folk music revival | Ethnic folk music
The British Invasion of the mid-1960s helped bring an end to the mainstream popularity of American folk music as a wave of British bands overwhelmed most of the American music scene, including folk. Ironically, the roots of the British Invasion were in American folk, specifically a variant known as skiffle as popularized by Lonnie Donegan; however, most of the British Invasion bands had been extensively influenced by rock and roll by the time their music had reached the United States and bore little resemblance to its folk origins. After Bob Dylan began to record with a rocking rhythm section and electric instruments in 1965 (see "Electric Dylan controversy"), many other still-young folk artists followed suit.
American folk music revival | Rock subsumes folk
Proponents included Andy Stewart (1933–93), whose weekly programme "The White Heather Club" ran in Scotland from 1958 to 1967. Frequent guests included Moira Anderson (born 1938) and Kenneth McKeller (1927–2010), who enjoyed their own programmes. The programmes and their music were immensely popular, although their version of Scottish music and identity was despised by many modernists. The fusing of various styles of American music with British folk created a distinctive form of fingerstyle guitar playing known as folk baroque, pioneered by figures including Davy Graham and Bert Jansch. This led in part to British progressive folk music, which attempted to elevate folk music through greater musicianship, or compositional and arrangement skills.
Scottish folk music | Second revival
In the 1930s, radio programs such as the Grand Ole Opry kept interest in Appalachian music alive, and collectors such as musicologist Alan Lomax continued to make field recordings in the region throughout the 1940s. In 1952, Folkways Records released the landmark "Anthology of American Folk Music", which had been compiled by ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, and contained tracks from Appalachian musicians such as Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, and G. B. Grayson. The compilation helped inspire the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Urban folk enthusiasts such as New Lost City Ramblers bandmates Mike Seeger and John Cohen and producer Ralph Rinzler traveled to remote sections of Appalachia to conduct field recordings.
Appalachian music | Folk revival
Folk music, which often carried the stigma of left-wing associations during the 1950s Red Scare, was driven underground and carried along by a handful of artists releasing records. Barred from mainstream outlets, artists like Seeger were restricted to performing in schools and summer camps, and the folk-music scene became a phenomenon associated with vaguely rebellious bohemianism in places like New York City (especially Greenwich Village), North Beach, and in the college and university districts of cities like Chicago, Boston, Denver, and elsewhere. Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta speculate that: [I]t is interesting to consider that had it not been for the explicit political sympathies of the Weavers and other folk singers or, another way of looking at it, the hysterical anti-communism of the Cold War, folk music would very likely have entered mainstream American culture in even greater force in the early 1950s, perhaps making the second wave of the revival nearly a decade later [i.e., in the 1960s] redundant.The media blackout of performers with alleged communist sympathies or ties was so effective that Israel Young, a chronicler of the 60s Folk Revival, and was drawn into the movement through an interest in folk dancing, communicated to Ron Eyerman that he himself was unaware for many years of the movement's 1930s and early '40s antecedents in left-wing political activism.
American folk music revival | Early years
The British folk revival was an academic movement to transcribe and record traditional British songs during the late 19th and early 20th century. Pioneers of this movement were the Harvard professor Francis James Child (1825–96), compiler of "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads" (1882–92), Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), Frank Kidson (1855–1926), Lucy Broadwood (1858–1939), and Anne Gilchrist (1863–1954). The Folk Song Society was founded in 1898 to promote this new endeavour. A major figure in this movement was Cecil Sharp who was the most influential on the repertoire of subsequent performers and defining the nature of folk song. His lectures and other publications attempted to define a musical tradition that was rural in origin, oral in transmission and communal in nature.
Roots revival | History
The Kingston Trio provided the template for a flood of "collegiate folk" groups between 1958 and 1962. At roughly the same time as these "collegiate folk" vocal groups came to national prominence, a second group of urban folk revivalists, influenced by the music and guitar picking styles of folk and blues artist such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Brownie McGhee, and Josh White, also came to the fore. Many of these urban revivalists were influenced by recordings of traditional American music from the 1920s and 1930s, which had been reissued by Folkways Records; Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" was particularly influential.
Folk rock | Folk revival
Major traditional performers included the Copper Family, The Watersons, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, and Shirley Collins. The fusing of various styles of American music with English folk also helped to create a distinctive form of guitar fingerstyle known as ‘folk baroque’, which was pioneered by Davy Graham, Martin Carthy, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. Several individuals emerged who had learnt the old songs in the oral tradition from their communities and therefore preserved the authentic versions. These individuals, such as Sam Larner, Harry Cox, Walter Pardon, and Frank Hinchliffe, released albums of their own and were revered by folk revivalists.
English folk music | Folk revivals 1890–1969
These performers and several others were instrumental in launching the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
Music history of the United States in the 1960s | Folk music
The movement became global in the 1960s and 1970s. In most cases, the folk music being revived was not quite extinct, though some hadn't been played for years or was moribund; such cases include the Celtic music of Cornwall and the Isle of Man, for example. In other cases, such as Cameroon and the Dominican Republic, no revival was necessary as the music remained common, and was merely popularized and adapted for mainstream audiences at home and abroad.
Roots revival | History
The peak of traditional English folk, like progressive and electric folk, was the mid- to late-1970s, when, for a time it threatened to break through into the mainstream. By the end of the decade, however, it was in decline. The attendance at, and numbers of folk clubs began to decrease, probably as new musical and social trends, including punk rock, new wave and electronic music began to dominate. Although many acts like Martin Carthy and the Watersons continued to perform successfully, there were very few significant new acts pursuing traditional forms in the 1980s. This began to change with a new generation in the 1990s.
English folk music | Traditional folk resurgence 1990-present
One of his longest lasting legacies was his bringing a group of Spanish performers, known as the Spanish Students, to the United States. These performers inspired imitators and gave rise to the widespread playing of the mandolin in the United States, where it was previously unknown.
Henry Eugene Abbey | Legacy
The song gained renewed popularity during the American folk music revival. In 1959, it was included on the Kingston Trio's first live album, "...From the Hungry i", which reached #2 on the Billboard Pop chart and won a RIAA gold record in 1960. It was also included on the Smothers Brothers first album, "The Songs and Comedy of the Smothers Brothers! Recorded at the Purple Onion, San Francisco", released in 1961. Other folk singers who performed the song include Josh White and Burl Ives. Musical historian John Bush Jones wrote that the song "so evokes the American West that during the folksinging craze of the later 1950s countless Americans thought 'They Call the Wind Maria' was a folksong, not a show tune!"
They Call the Wind Maria | Folk music revival
At the beginning of the twentieth century, mandolin orchestras were popular throughout North America. Large numbers of mandolins were sold, particularly by the Gibson Guitar Company, which manufactured and promoted a new type of flat-backed mandolin. After a time, the mandolin orchestra craze died out, but the mandolins remained. In the southern United States, they began to be used in the performance of traditional mountain folk music. At the end of the 1930s, a new musical genre which combined Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes, blues and African American banjo with traditional American songs began to develop. Bill Monroe, a Kentucky fiddler and mandolin player, was the first to bring all of the elements of this new genre together.
Bluegrass mandolin | History
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people were inspired by folk singers such as Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. The American Folk Revival was beginning to take place, focused on the issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and Free Speech Movement. Pockets of folk singers were forming around the country in places such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. One of Guthrie's visitors at Greystone Park was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie.
Woody Guthrie | Folk revival and death
But Leventhal persisted, and in 1955 he organised a Christmas Eve Weavers reunion concert at New York City's Carnegie Hall, persuading the members to take part by convincing each one that the others had already agreed. The concert ignited the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which in turn led to Leventhal recognising the talent of a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, and promoting his first concert, at the Town Hall in New York City in April 1963. Denied a passport until 1955 because of his Communist sympathies, Leventhal organised world tours for folk singers that the U.S.
Harold Leventhal | Folk music
The second revival involved large-scale public performances of English music, beginning with the appearance of the Copper Family at the Royal Albert Hall in 1952, together with a proliferation of folk clubs meeting mainly in the upper rooms of public houses. Starting in the late 1960s the songs were performed in a contemporary style; this was the origin of the British folk rock style.
Roots revival | English-speaking countries
Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the United States government during the Cold War era was very powerful and in some ways overpowered the message of folk artists, such as in relation to public opinion regarding Communist-backed political causes. Various Gallup Polls that were conducted during this time suggest that Americans consistently saw Communism as a threat; for example, a 1954 poll shows that at the time 51% of Americans said that admitted Communists should be arrested, and in relation to music 64% of respondents said that if a radio singer is an admitted Communist he should be fired. Leading figures in the American folk revival such as Seeger, Earl Robinson and Irwin Silber were or had been members of the Communist Party, while others such as Guthrie (who had written a column for CPUSA magazine New Masses), Lee Hays and Paul Robeson were considered fellow travellers.
Music and politics | American folk revival
In 1933, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Buchanan expressing interest in attending the festival. Blakemore, who was politically powerful in the area, had the roads to the festival expanded in anticipation of the crowds Roosevelt's visit would draw. More than 12,000 people attended the festival in 1933. The festival grew increasingly elaborate and culturally significant, with attendance and attention from academic folklorists, musicologists, and journalists. By 1936, a 10-day White Top Folk Conference was held at Marion College before the festival opening.
White Top Folk Festival | Expansion
In 2004, NPR published the book titled "The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to American Folk Music", Linda Ronstadt wrote the foreword. The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance by Michael F. Scully (University of Illinois Press, 2008) In 2007, James P. Leary published "Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music", which proposes a redefinition of traditional American folk music and identifies a new genre of music from the Upper Midwest known as "Polkabilly", which blends ethnic music, old-time country music, and polka. The book was awarded the American Folklore Society’s Chicago Folklore Prize for the best book in the field of folklore scholarship.
American folk music | Books
Some who defined commercialization as the beginning of this phase consider the commercial hit "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio in 1958 as marking the beginning of this era. In 1963–1964, the ABC television network aired the "Hootenanny" television series devoted to this brand of folk music and also published the associated magazine "ABC-TV Hootenanny". Starting in 1950, the "Sing Out!", "Broadside", and "The Little Sandy Review" magazines helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did folk-revival-oriented record companies. In the United Kingdom, the folk revival fostered young artists like the Watersons, Martin Carthy and Roy Bailey and a generation of singer-songwriters such as Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell, Donovan and Roy Harper; all seven achieved initial prominence in the 1960s.
Contemporary folk music | Folk revival of the mid-20th century in the English-speaking countries
The late 1940s and the early 1950s saw the beginning of popular folk music with groups like The Weavers. The Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and several other performers were instrumental in launching the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
Music history of the United States in the 1950s | Folk music
Bill Monroe was made an honorary Kentucky Colonel in 1966. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as an "early influence") in 1997. Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams Sr., and Johnny Cash are the only other performers honored in all three. As the "father of bluegrass", he was also an inaugural inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1991. Monroe was a recipient of a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
Bill Monroe | Legacy and influence
The duplicated songs on the 1963 set seem to be fresh recordings. Certainly the sound is better on the six LPs that comprise the 1963 set than on the thirty 78 rpm records that make up the 1950 set.
Burl Ives Presents America's Musical Heritage | Introduction
The revival was part of a wider national movement in the period around the First World War, and contributed to the creation of the English Pastoral School of classical music which incorporated traditional songs or motifs, as can be seen in the compositions of Percy Grainger (1882–1961), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1951), George Butterworth (1885–1916), Gustav Holst (1874–1934) and Frederick Delius (1862–1934). In 1932 the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society merged to become the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Some of these revivalists recorded folk songs on wax cylinders, and many of the recordings, including Percy Grainger's collection, are available online courtesy of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
English folk music | Folk revivals 1890–1969
The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, The Kingston Trio, Odetta, and several other performers were instrumental in launching the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
1950s in music | Folk music
The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in 1952 under the title "American Folk Music", was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had previously been released commercially on 78 rpm. These dated from the abbreviated dawn, sometimes called the "golden age", of the commercial country music industry, that is, between 1927, when, as Smith explained, "acoustic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales", and the artists, in many cases, sunk into obscurity. Originally issued as budget discs marketed to regional, rural audiences, these records had long been known, collected, and occasionally reissued by folklorists and aficionados, but this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers.
Harry Everett Smith | Anthologist of American folk music
These individuals, such as Sam Larner, Harry Cox, Walter Pardon, and Frank Hinchliffe, released albums of their own and were revered by folk revivalists. In Scotland the key figures were Hamish Henderson and Calum McLean who collected songs and popularised acts including Jeannie Robertson, John Strachan, Flora MacNeil and Jimmy MacBeath. In Wales the key figure was Dafydd Iwan, who founded the Sain record label in 1969.
British folk revival | Nature of the revival
Around 1960, folk music enthusiasts Peter and Polly Gott moved to Madison County. They quickly met Lee Wallin, who played the banjo regularly at local events, and Lee introduced them to his relatives. In August 1963, Gott and folk musician John Cohen recorded Lee, Cas, Berzilla and several relatives for the album, "Old Love Songs and Ballads", which was released by Folkways Records the following year. Cohen made subsequent field recordings of Wallin family members and their cousin, Dillard Chandler, in 1965 and 1967, many of which were released by Smithsonian Folkways on the 2005 album, "". Dillard Chandler was the subject of Cohen's 1973 documentary, "The End of an Old Song".
Wallin Family | American folk music revival
As well as being an accomplished bluegrass vocalist, Bush also is an accomplished instrumentalist on mandolin and fiddle winning title of National Fiddle champion at fifteen years of age. He was a founding member of the New Grass Revival and has been called a modern day Bill Monroe, or as Sam would tell . . Sam, affectionately "Sammy", or "Mr. Entertainment", also recalls meeting Mr. Monroe as a young teen. After demonstrating his mandolin technique Monroe offered the advice: "stick to the fiddle". Sam is one of the main attractions at the annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado and plays the eight p.m.
Sam Bush | Performance
This movement was evident first in the USA where George Korson followed John Lomax's collection of the work songs of Cowboys with investigations of coal miner's songs, particularly from the Appalachians, from 1927. Despite reservations about these songs, whose authors were often known and so they did not fit into the mould of traditional music, after World War II folklorists largely accepted this music as folk song. Pete Seeger's Folkways LP "American Industrial Ballads" (1956) was an early survey of this kind of song. The American song collection of over 200 songs in "Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People" by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax in the 1940s (not published till 1967), explored worker's song further.
Industrial folk music | The folk revival
"Folk music revival" refers to either a period of renewed interest in traditional folk music, or to an event or period which transforms it; the latter usually includes a social activism component. A prominent example of the former is the British folk revival of approximately 1890–1920. The most prominent and influential example of the latter (to the extent that it is usually called ""the" folk music revival") is the folk revival of the mid 20th century, centered in the English-speaking world which gave birth to contemporary folk music. See the "Contemporary folk music" article for a description of this revival.
Folk music | Folk music revivals
In the later 1980s, things began to look much more positive for the genre. After disbandment, Fairport's Cropredy Festival went from strength to strength growing to a regular 20,000 fans a year, and when they reformed in 1985 they were able to embark on increasingly successful tours and produce a series of highly regarded albums. The reason for this recording revival was partly because they abandoned the mainstream record business, instead focusing on growing their own audience and producing records through their own labels (Woodworm and Matty Grooves). The Albion Band survived by becoming involved in theatre productions and, from 1993 by shifting down to a small acoustic outfit that could play the still extensive network of folk clubs.
British folk rock | Resurgence 1985–present
The "Anthology" has had enormous historical influence. Smith's method of sequencing tracks, along with his inventive liner notes, called attention to the set. This reintroduction of near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music from the selected years to new listeners had impact on American ethnomusicology, and was both directly and indirectly responsible for the aforementioned folk music revival. The music on the compilation provided direct inspiration to much of the emergent folk music revival movement. The Anthology made widely available music which previously had been largely the preserve of marginal social economic groups. Many people who first heard this music through the Anthology came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds from its original creators and listeners.
Anthology of American Folk Music | Influence
Archivists and artists such as Alan Lomax, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie were crucial in popularising folk music, and the latter began to be known as the Lomax singers. This was an era of folk music in which some artists and their songs expressed clear political messages with the intention of swaying public opinion and recruiting support. In the UK, Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd performed similar roles, with Lloyd as folklorist and MacColl (often with Peggy Seeger) releasing dozens of albums which blended traditional songs with newer political material influenced by their Communist activism. In the later, post-war revival, folk music found a new audience with college students, partly since universities provided the organisation necessary for sustaining music trends and an expanded, impressionable audience looking to rebel against the older generation.
Music and politics | American folk revival
Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" is one of the most famous American folk songs and its lyrics exemplify Guthrie's socialistic patriotism. Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", was a popular anti-war protest song. Many of these types of songs became popular during the Vietnam War era. "Blowin' in the Wind", by Bob Dylan, was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, and suggested that a younger generation was becoming more aware of global problems than many of the older generation. In 1964, Joan Baez had a top-ten hit in the UK with "There but for Fortune" (by Phil Ochs); it was a plea for the innocent victim of prejudice or inhumane policies.
Music and politics | American folk revival
Earliest American scholars were with The American Folklore Society (AFS), which emerged in the late 1800s. Their studies expanded to include Native American music, but still treated folk music as a historical item preserved in isolated societies. In North America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of traditional music collectors Robert Winslow Gordon, Alan Lomax and others to capture as much North American field material as possible. Lomax was the first prominent scholar to study distinctly American folk music such as that of cowboys and southern blacks. His first major published work was in 1911, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, and was arguably the most prominent US folk music scholar of his time, notably during the beginnings of the folk music revival in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Folklore of the United States | Folk music
The first English folk music revival had seen a huge effort to record and archive traditional English music by figures such as Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second revival in the period after the Second World War, built on this work and followed a similar movement in America, to which it was connected by individuals like Alan Lomax, who had fled to England in the era of McCarthyism. Like the American revival, it was often overtly left wing in its politics, but, led by such figures as Ewan MacColl and A.
British folk rock | Origins
Upon returning from World War II, Jamieson become concerned that increasing use and culture surrounding radios in the United States would have a negative impact on the surviving musical and folk traditions of America. He teamed up with Margot Mayo, an accomplished folk musician in Tennessee, to preserve samples of musical styles and techniques with the 5-string banjo. Together, they amassed several hundred hours of audio recordings that have since been archived in the Library of Congress Folk Center that hold samples of music played with varying techniques and musical styles. These recordings serve as a historical reference for the folk styles that developed and spread in the Appalachian mountains.
Robert Stuart Jamieson | Historical contributions and preservation
These groups also sang many English-language songs of foreign origin.
American folk music revival | Ethnic folk music
In 1928, Mississippi John Hurt, a self-taught amateur musician and farmer, recorded 13 songs for Okeh Records which failed to achieve commercial success. Believing his musical career to be over, Hurt continued farming, apparently thinking little of his brief recording gig. Post WWII, few records cut by southern musicians in the 1920s were commercially available. Hurt's records were particularly rare, since few had been manufactured in the first place. But Harry Smith, a member of a tiny subculture of obsessive, cranky collectors, put two John Hurt cuts on his influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, prompting many blues hobbyists to begin searching for him.
Newport Folk Festival | Revival of Mississippi John Hurt
There was a strong nationalist element in the motivation for collecting folk song. As part of a general mood of growing nationalism in the period before the First World War, the Board of Education in 1906 officially sanctioned the teaching of folk songs in schools. One of the major effects of the folk song revival was the creation of a distinctive English form of classical music, known as the English "national" or "pastoral" school. Sharp, among others, promoted the revival of English folk music as a response to the commonly held view that English art music since the death of Henry Purcell had relied heavily on European composers and styles and was therefore indistinguishable from other national forms.
British folk revival | Revival and national identity
The fad died out after World War I, but enough had learned the instrument that it remained. The mandolin found a new surge with the music of Bill Monroe; the Gibson F-5 mandolin he played, as well as other archtop instruments, became the American standard for mandolins. Bowlback mandolins were displaced. The instrument has been taken up in blues, bluegrass, jug-band music, country, rock, punk, Celtic and other genres of music. While not as popular as the guitar, it is widespread across the country.
Mandolin playing traditions worldwide | United States
Many previously obscure songs became standards at hootenannies and folk clubs due to their inclusion on the "Anthology". Some of the musicians represented on the "Anthology" saw their musical careers revived, and made additional recordings and live appearances. This document is generally thought to have been enormously influential on the folk & blues revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The "Harry Smith Anthology," as some call it, was the bible of folk music during the late 1950s and early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene.
Anthology of American Folk Music | Influence
The revival began to gain momentum in the 1950s with the establishment of a network of folk clubs, such as the Blues and Ballads Club in London in 1953 and a number of festivals, such as that at Sidmouth from 1955.
Music of the United Kingdom (1950s) | Folk music and roots revival
The revival of the Newport Folk Festival coincided with this era and many singer-songwriters who began at this time continued their involvement with the music industry.
Broadside (magazine) | 1980s revival
His first major published work was in 1911, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads". and was arguably the most prominent US folk music scholar of his time, notably during the beginnings of the folk music revival in the 1930s and early 1940s. Cecil Sharp also worked in America, recording the traditional songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916–1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell and is considered the first major scholar covering American folk music. Campbell and Sharp are represented under other names by actors in the modern movie "Songcatcher". One strong theme amongst folk scholars in the early decades of the 20th century was regionalism, the analysis of the diversity of folk music (and related cultures) based on regions of the US rather than based on a given song's historical roots.
Folk music | North America
In the late 1930s, Bill Monroe formed the Blue Grass Boys (named after his native state of Kentucky, the "blue grass state") and combined diverse influences into Appalachian folk music. These include Scottish, Poland and Southeastern Europe and folk, as well as doo wop, country and gospel. Monroe became the father of bluegrass music, and his band was a training ground for most of bluegrass' future stars, especially Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Flatt and Scruggs popularized bluegrass as part of the Foggy Mountain Boys, which they formed in 1948. Though bluegrass has never quite achieved mainstream status, it did become well known through its use in several recorded plays, including the T.V.
Music history of the United States in the 1950s | Bluegrass
Folksinger/songwriter Hedy West, active in the American folk music revival and famous for her song "500 Miles", was born in Cartersville.
Music of Georgia (U.S. state) | American folk music revival
Later, a dynamic of class and circumstances was added to this. The most prominent regionalists were literary figures with a particular interest in folklore. Carl Sandburg often traveled the U.S. as a writer and a poet. He also collected songs in his travels and, in 1927, published them in the book "The American Songbag". "In his collections of folk songs, Sandburg added a class dynamic to popular understandings of American folk music. This was the final element of the foundation upon which the early folk music revivalists constructed their own view of Americanism. Sandburg's working class Americans joined with the ethnically, racially, and regionally diverse citizens that other scholars, public intellectuals, and folklorists celebrated their own definitions of the American folk, definitions that the folk revivalists used in constructing their own understanding of American folk music, and an overarching American identity".
Folk music | North America
Along with recording and re-recordings of older Appalachian musicians and the discovery of newer musicians, the folk revivalists conducted extensive interviews with these musicians to determine their musical backgrounds and the roots of their styles and repertoires. Appalachian musicians became regulars at folk music festivals from the Newport Folk Festival to folk festivals at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. Films such as Cohen's "High Lonesome Sound"— the subject of which was Kentucky banjoist and ballad singer Roscoe Holcomb— helped give enthusiasts a sense of what it was like to see Appalachian musicians perform.
Appalachian music | Folk revival
Many progressive folk performers continued to retain a traditional element in their music, including Jansch who became a member of the band Pentangle in 1967. Others largely abandoned the traditional element of their music. Particularly important were Donovan (who was most influenced by emerging progressive folk musicians in America such as Bob Dylan) and the Incredible String Band, who from 1967 incorporated a range of influences including medieval and Eastern music into their compositions, leading to the development of psychedelic folk, which had a considerable impact on progressive and psychedelic rock. Acoustic groups who continued to interpret traditional material through into the 1970s included Ossian and Silly Wizard.
Scottish folk music | Second revival
Merle Haggard led the rise of the Bakersfield Sound in the 1960s, when the perceived superficiality of the Nashville Sound led to a national wave that almost entirely switched country music's capital and sound within the space of a few years. At the same time, bluegrass became a major influence on jam bands like Grateful Dead and also evolved into new, progressive genres like newgrass. As part of the nationwide roots revival, Hawaiian slack-key guitar and Cajun swamp pop also saw mainstream success.
Music history of the United States | Country and folk
The museum later acquired two more McCord quilts. The last quilt belonging to the McCord's family, the "Triple Irish Chain" quilt, originally made for McCord's daughter, Millie McCord Canaday in 1900, was sold to the Henry Ford Museum by her great-great grandson's family in 2012.
Susan McCord | American folk art revival
Finney wrote of this revival, "This winter of 1857–58 will be remembered as the time when a great revival prevailed. It swept across the land with such power that at the time it was estimated that not less than 50,000 conversions occurred weekly."
Christian revival | 1857–1860 revival in America
The mutual relation of the "songs" to European romance is also addressed, with views and examples of a 'west-east' influence/counter-influence. The authors note that evidence of a "zealous guardianship of a vernerable tradition... makes it conceivable that the Andalusian music we hear today does not differ radically from what we might have heard in medieval Andalus."
James T. Monroe | "Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs"
The early 1940s saw the first major commercial success for Appalachian folk. Singers like Pete Seeger emerged, in groups like the Almanac Singers and The Weavers. Lyrically, these performers drew on early singer-songwriters like Woody Guthrie, and the whole scene became gradually associated with the political left (Garofolo, 196). By the 1950s, the anti-Communism scare was in full swing, and some performers with a liberal or socialist bent were blacklisted from the music industry. In the middle of the 1940s, Western swing reached its peak of popularity. It was a mixture of diverse influences, including swing, blues, polka and popular cowboy songs, and included early stars like Bob Wills, who became among the best known musicians of the era.
Music history of the United States | Roots of country music
In the 1890s and into the early 20th century, musicological recordings were made among indigenous, Hispanic, African-American and Anglo-American peoples of the United States. Many worked for the Library of Congress, first under the leadership of Oscar Sonneck, chief of the Library's Music Divisions. These researchers included Robert W. Gordon, founder of the Archive of American Folk Song, and John and Alan Lomax; Alan Lomax was the most prominent of several folk song collectors who helped to inspire the 20th century roots revival of American folk culture. Early 20th scholarly analysis of American music tended to interpret European-derived classical traditions as the most worthy of study, with the folk, religious, and traditional musics of the common people denigrated as low-class and of little artistic or social worth.
Music of the United States | Education and scholarship
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were significant figures in the American folk revival of the early 1960s and played important roles in promoting and influencing the early development of the folk boom. In December 1964, "Billboard Magazine" listed the group as the eleventh best-selling folk musicians in the United States based on sales figures for that year. The Clancys' friends, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, also appeared on the list in first, seventh, and ninth positions, respectively. The small folk record company, Tradition Records, that Paddy Clancy ran with the help of his brothers, recorded several significant figures of the folk revival and gave some important musical figures their first start in the recording industry.
The Clancy Brothers | American folk revival
The Irish Montserratian tradition has largely died out, with the last performer, George Allen, a fiddler, dying in 1966.
Music of Montserrat | Folk music
During the 1950s and early 1960s in the UK, a parallel folk revival referred to as the second British folk revival, was led by folk singers Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd. Both viewed British folk music as a vehicle for leftist political concepts and an antidote to the American-dominated popular music of the time. However, it wasn't until 1956 and the advent of the skiffle craze that the British folk revival crossed over into the mainstream and connected with British youth culture. Skiffle renewed popularity of folk music forms in Britain and led directly to the progressive folk movement and the attendant British folk club scene.
Folk rock | Folk revival
Monroe gave his blessing to Presley's rock and roll cover of the song, originally a slow ballad in waltz time, and in fact re-recorded it himself with a faster arrangement after Presley's version became a hit. Several gospel-themed numbers are credited to the "Blue Grass Quartet", which featured four-part vocal arrangements accompanied solely by mandolin and guitar – Monroe's usual practice when performing "sacred" songs. Both Flatt and Scruggs left Monroe's band in early 1948, soon forming their own group, the Foggy Mountain Boys. In 1949, after signing with Decca Records, Monroe entered what has been called the "golden age" of his career with what many consider the classic "high lonesome" version of the Blue Grass Boys, featuring the lead vocals and rhythm guitar of Jimmy Martin, the banjo of Rudy Lyle (replacing Don Reno), and fiddlers such as Merle "Red" Taylor, Charlie Cline, Bobby Hicks, William Hicks and Vassar Clements.
Bill Monroe | "Original Bluegrass Band" and Monroe's heyday as a star
"The Death of Floyd Collins" was based on one of the first great media events of the century, the story of a spelunker who became trapped in caverns near Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The song was one of a series of "event" songs recorded in the mid-20s. The songs told of train wrecks, natural disasters and outlaws, stories often lifted directly from the daily newspapers. The form was not new, and in fact, the music and lyrics owed much to the folk songs of the previous century. The trend did not develop as a natural revival, either. It was devised by the recording companies in response to the drop in sales they were experiencing as the public turned its attention from what had been the latest technological development, records, to an even more alluring medium, radio.
Andrew Jenkins | The Jenkins Family