Newport Folk Festival: 50 Years Later

MADELEINE BRAND, host:

For 50 years, the Newport Folk Festival has been at the center of a debate over what constitutes real folk music. The tension between tradition and innovation runs throughout the festival's history, perhaps most memorably when Bob Dylan went electric. The tension is still there.

This year features indie rockers along with festival veterans, as Joel Rose reports.

JOEL ROSE: The breakout star of the first Newport Folk Festival was an 18-year-old singer with dark eyes and long black hair who wasn't even listed on the official program. Her name: Joan Baez.

Ms. JOAN BAEZ (Musician): I stood at the bottom of these stairs with my knees literally knocking. And I thought, well, I'll walk up these stairs to this immense audience of 13,000 people and I'll either faint or vomit or I'll sing. And as usual, I sang.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. BAEZ: And it was a big hit.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. BAEZ: (Singing) Some call him David, think I'll call him Manuel. Oh, think I'll call him Manuel. Oh, I think I'll call him Manuel. Glory be to the newborn king.

ROSE: Baez joined Bob Gibson on stage for a couple of songs. Baez was one of the young traditionalists. Back then there was such a thing as popular folk music. For example, The Kingston Trio had five No. 1 albums. And there was a deep divide between the trio's fans and those who preferred to take their folk music straight.

Ms. BAEZ: I mean, I hid my Belafonte and Kingston Trio records at the back of my stash of albums because I had labeled myself a purist, but I loved those albums.

(Soundbite of laughter)

ROSE: The Newport Folk Festival embraced the popular and the obscure from the beginning, says founder George Wein.

Mr. GEORGE WEIN (Founder, Newport Folk Festival): It wasn't going to be the commercial or the noncommercial. It was going to be both. It was going to really present a totality of the world of folk music.

ROSE: Four years later, Wein says he hired a producer who had played at the early festivals and had the respect of everybody on both sides of the debate. Pete Seeger.

Mr. PETE SEEGER (Musician): We wrote a letter to George, said George, you had some young folks, but how about the old folks back in the hills: coalminers, ex-lumberjacks, grandmothers who like to sing to their grandchildren? That's folk music. That's real folk music.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Man: (Singing) I woke up this morning, put on my highway shoes. (unintelligible)

ROSE: All of the artists agreed to perform for the same modest fee of $50. This meant the producers could save money on the headlining acts, some of which they used to send a folklorist around the country looking for lesser-known talents. George Wein remembers those festivals fondly.

Mr. WEIN: We all ate together. We didn't eat in restaurants. We'd eat in the back lawn of the house that we had. It was like a picnic every night. It worked. It really worked.

ROSE: Newport was the model for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which started in 1967, but by then the Newport festival had already lost some of its innocence.

(Soundbite of song, "Maggie's Farm")

Mr. BOB DYLAN (Musician): (Singing) I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

ROSE: Bob Dylan famously plugged in at the 1965 festival, much to the dismay of the purists. Wein says attendance started to decline as Dylan took a lot of young fans with him to rock music.

Mr. WEIN: That was the beginning of the end of that great world that we had built. It lasted another four or five years, but it was never the same after that.

ROSE: The festival shut down in 1971. George Wein went on to other events and there wasn't another Newport Folk Festival until the 1980s. But Joan Baez says it was Newport in name only.

Ms. BAEZ: I remember going back when they kind of reinstated it many years later, and I thought, oh, goody, after the show everybody will sit around and play guitars and banjos. And then I realized that didn't happen anymore.

ROSE: Baez will be back in Newport this weekend for the 50th anniversary of her debut, along with festival veterans Pete Seeger and Del McCoury. And the festival is once again stretching the definition of folk music.

(Soundbite of music)

ROSE: Deer Tick and fellow Rhode Island band The Low Anthem are among the indie rockers on the bill.

(Soundbite of song, "Easy")

Mr. JOHN JOSEPH MCCAULEY (Singer, Deer Tick): (Singing) I woke up this morning. I was feeling that this should end.

ROSE: That's largely because of Jay Sweet, an editor for Paste Magazine and a booker for the festival. He says the musicians were part of the clean-up crew at Newport last year.

Mr. JAY SWEET (Editor, Paste Magazine): And now here they are both on the bill. You know, one year they're picking up bottles, water bottles and trash at the festival and the next year they're playing on the 50th anniversary.

ROSE: Sweet says part of the attraction for younger artists is the chance to join Pete Seeger on stage for the big sing-along at the end of the day. And the 90-year-old singer is happy to oblige. Still, you can sense a hint of nostalgia for the days when he shared the stage with coalminers and lumberjacks.

Mr. SEEGER: Well, I place my hope in the thousands, tens of thousands now, small festivals. Quite unexpected people get heard from.

ROSE: For Pete Seeger, the real legacy of the Newport Folk Festival plays out all year long all over the place.

For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose.

(Soundbite of song, "Playboys and Playgirls")

Mr. DYLAN: (Singing) The laughter in the lynch mob ain't gonna do no more.

BRAND: NPR Music will be live from Newport all weekend. You can hear performances and download a sampler at the new npr.org.

(Soundbite of song, "Playboys and Playgirls")

Mr. DYLAN: (Singing) The laughter in the lynch mob ain't gonna do no more. Not now… Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.