Folk Music, 1970s-2020

FOLK MUSIC, 1970s–2020. By 1970 the musical style most people termed “folk music” was well established within the larger popular music industry and seemed poised to continue its growth. Guitar-slinging singer-songwriter “folkies” Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez sold millions of records in the new decade and continued to wield stylistic influence over a younger generation of musicians and audiences. An ever increasing musical cast joined them, commingling folk with rock, country, and blues, and also found stardom in the era, including Ry Cooder, Joni Mitchell, Taj Mahal, John Prine, Bill Withers, Jackson Brown, Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, James Taylor, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The music which the Old Left had worked so hard to popularize had finally gained a featured spot in American popular culture.

Of course, few of the new generation possessed the ideologically focused mission of Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. In addition, the majority of the new generation of folkies were less wedded to the acoustic instrumental and sing-along modes that characterized traditional folk music, the music of the Old Left, or the earlier folk revival of the fifties and early sixties. Most were products of the counterculture, shared a progressive political vision, and used music to create a better world, but were not out to raise class consciousness and overthrow capitalism. Rather, they sought to use music to insure a clean environment, stop the proliferation of nuclear arms, secure equal rights for women and minorities, end the Vietnam War, and curb the arms race. They shared a remarkable degree of musical open-mindedness towards styles and older musicians of all kinds, from traditional bluegrass to reggae to urban blues to world music. An army of lesser-known musicians and music fans joined them, taking their music across the country. College campuses, hip urban neighborhoods, small New England hamlets, and western mountain towns all had their coffeehouses and small venues, bluegrass bands and finger pickers, harmonica blowers and flat pickers, fiddlers and slide players, Stratocasters and Les Pauls, local guitar and dulcimer luthiers, and an expansive, inclusive, democratic, and community-focused approach to music. Established folk music ‘zines such as Sing Out! and Broadside spawned similar publications and radio programs devoted to folk music proliferated. Folk festivals, only a few of which existed in the post-WWII years, now sprang up everywhere from Duluth, Minnesota to Epsom, New Hampshire, to Kerrville, Texas to Weiser, Idaho, presenting traditional folk and blues, a variety of ethnic genres, and singer-songwriters. Lesser known artists could count on a circuit of decent venues, places to stay, appreciative audiences, and a fair price for their labor.

The folksy, hippie, grass-roots attitude of so many in the scene also found expression in the rise of small, independent record companies in the 1970s, a trend that would continue for thirty years. “Indie” labels such as Biograph (Canaan, NY), Folk Legacy (Sharon, CT), Biscuit City (Denver, CO), Paredon (Brooklyn, NY), Old Homestead (Brighton, MI), Philo (North Ferrisburg, VT), Green Linnet (New Canaan, CT) and many more featured an assortment of regional and national folk acts. Rounder Records and Flying Fish were especially notable indies. Founded in Boston in 1970, Rounder and its subsidiaries released and distributed hundreds of blues, world beat, R&B, folk, country, roots rock, and bluegrass recordings over the next forty years. The label’s roster included a host of well-known artists - - George Thorogood, Allison Krauss, JD Crowe, Nanci Griffith, Shelby Lynne, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Rounder would also release recordings by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and veteran Wobbly labor bard Utah Phillips. Ironically, when the label’s staff voted to unionized in 1979, the owners fought the effort and labor relations remained strained for years thereafter. Appropriately, when Rounder associate Bruce Kaplan sought an outlet for more politically oriented music, he bolted and established Flying Fish Records in Chicago in 1974. The label recorded more than three hundred albums, mostly in the folk vein and often with a progressive politician cant. Doc Watson, Tom Paxton, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Stéphane Grapelli, John Hartford, the Red Clay Ramblers, and Nancy and Norman Blake all found a home on Fish. (Oddly, when Kaplan died unexpectedly, Rounder purchased the Fish catalog in 1995.)

Not surprisingly, the do-it-yourself attitude that pervaded folk music on the Left since the 1930s led thousands of musicians to record and release their own LPs, cassettes, and CDs as the cost of doing so declined. That trend continued and became even more prevalent from the 1990s onward, extending beyond folk to other musical styles from punk to electronica. This DIY approach among folkies insured the survival of folk music, political or not, as the country and the music industry underwent significant changes in the four decades after 1980. Like the rest of the economy, the record industry experienced a downswing in the 1980s and the cost was severe. Record companies disappeared, mergers took place, promotional dollars dried up, and star artists lost their contracts. What’s more, within a decade clubs went out of business, the coffeehouse circuit died, and the dollars available for music and musicians shrank. At about the same time, a more conservative political and cultural climate overtook the country, one in which the political sentiments expressed in the music and culture of folk music lost favor. Folk music’s temperament seemed out of place in the harsh world that characterized Ronald Reagan’s mainstream America. Simultaneously, the audience for folk music grew smaller as baby-boomers aged and spent less of their time and money on music. By the mid-1990s the era of “pay to play” arrived on the scene. Where working musicians of all types in cities like Chicago previously received a “guarantee” (a fixed amount of payment) for a club performance, they now played for a percentage of the door, paid the sound person out of their take, and were responsible for most of the promotional labor and costs. The American Federation of Musicians counted for little, except for those linked to symphonies and commercial studio work. Some relief came in 1993 when activist folk musicians formed AFM Local 1000 and received a charter that allowed musicians throughout the country to become members. The union held special appeal to folk musicians, grew quickly, and today its membership list reads like a who’s who of folk artists of all ages. Its pension plan and emergency relief has proven a life saver for a host of flat pickin’ folkies.

One might have expected all these changes to be the death knell of music with a message. In truth, folk music and its rock-oriented derivatives moved off the center stage of the industry, but did not disappear. On occasion, folk recordings even sold well and climbed upward on the sales charts. Stadium-rock superstar Bruce Springsteen went acoustic and political in 1995, taking his cue from Steinbeck and Guthrie for The Ghost of Tom Joad album. That same year, Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, recruited political punk rocker Billy Bragg and Chicago’s fave alternative rock band Wilco to record an album of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs. Released in 1998, Mermaid Avenue included both Guthrie’s political and very personal material and generated considerable sales and high marks from critics. The ghosts of both Joad and Guthrie finally rode in the first-class section of the music train.

As the club scene diminished in the 1990s, folk acts would spend more time performing in schools, at “house concerts,” and for concert series at community cultural centers, all of which tended to pay better than clubs and many of which received public support. Folk festivals in Philadelphia, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Kerrville, and other major cities and smaller towns, many of them founded in the 1970s and still in operation in 2020, continued to offer opportunities and encouraged music with political messages outside the mainstream. They would also offer music programming in the community throughout the year. Other festivals with more specific progressive themes also sprang up. In 1985 Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp joined forces to create an annual “Farm Aid” festival to raise funds to assist farmers and their families facing mortgage difficulties and offer emergency aid during financial crises and natural disasters. The festival takes place annually, has raised millions of dollars, and typically features a broad range of performers who play country, folk, bluegrass, polka, gospel, and rock. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a group of women who sought to advance the women’s rights cause created the Womyn's Music Festival in 1976. The annual event ran until 2015, devoted exclusively to women and women’s music. Men were not allowed to attend. A host of queer-core, riot grrrl, and LGBTQ punk acts were joined by popular folk-styled musicians at the gathering, including Tracy Chapman, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Holly Near.

In this environment, a small group of determined folk musicians that sought to advance labor’s cause were also able to sustain some kind of career. This fact is particularly notable because the fortunes of organized labor diminished under both the Republicans and Democrats from the 1970s onward. None of these musicians achieved fame or fortune. Utah Phillips (1935-2008) returned from the Korean War, hopped freight trains across America, and turned to a life of labor activism and music in the 1960s that lasted until his death in 2008. A member of the IWW, Phillips wrote songs and told stories about railroading and the hobo life, and was well known for singing and teaching audiences the Wobbly standards of the Joe Hill era. Elsewhere, Hazel Dickens, the child of a West Virginia coal-mining family, put her musical skills to work for labor and women. Dickens (1925-2011) made a number of recordings that featured coal-mining labor songs and can be heard in the films “Harlan County USA” (1978) and “Matewan” (1987). She was also the subject of the documentary “Hazel Dickens: It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song” (2001). Si Kahn (b. 1944) took a slightly different approach in his musician and activism. In the sixties, Kahn relocated to the South to advance the Civil Rights cause and carried his guitar with him. Thereafter, he gained a reputation as a topical songwriter who focused on workers and their families. His activism often took precedent over his musical career and Kahn spent fifty years working on behalf of a variety of progressive causes - - prison reform, the rights of labor, improved immigration detention policies, grassroots community development, violence prevention, and environmental protection.

To say that folk music, in traditional or contemporary garb, with or without a political cant, is thriving in the new millennium America would be wrong, though it maintains a particular niche in the larger world of music. Musicians continue to find the space to be musically and politically creative within the folk category, writing and singing acoustic-based music to express themselves on everything from political issues to their own existential emotional crises. Moreover, musicians who use songs as weapons to create a better world can no longer be confined to the folk category to the degree that they were in the 1930s or 1950s or even to the folk rock category of the 1970s or 1990s. Reggae, punk, hip hop, alt-country, heavy metal, Celtic, and electronic categories have all offered songs for the Left, for workers, for equality, and a more just world. The bigger issue for folk and all other forms is how they will fare in the —post-2010 digital era. Combined sales figures for revenue from all types of recordings — vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and downloads - - have plummeted in the last twenty years. In terms of total numbers, more recordings were sold in 1973 than in 2019. Online streaming makes up the vast majority of music revenue today, and little of that goes to musicians as the rate paid to artists is minuscule on digital “airplay.” The question in 2020 is not whither the folk, but wither all music?

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