Why Sixties Folk Rock Still Matters
In reference to my title, “Why Sixties Folk Still Matters”: Yes, it is true that all generations tend to prefer the music they grew up with in their teens. But my defense of ’60s music is not just about reliving the youth of people of a certain age. (Hey, fellow Boomer.)
Nor is my point merely that from a historical perspective, the music of the Sixties is a good way of helping us understand what was going on in the culture at the time. That’s true of any era. But you could certainly make a case that folk rock was central to the Sixties in a way that is not typical. The music of the day did not just serve as background music for what was going on. In many ways, it was the thing itself that was going on. Music was the dividing line in the generation gap that surfaced in every major issue of the day. Music defined the hippie generation — and in the process also defined all those who were not “with it.” It affected everything from fashion — long hair on men, bell-bottoms, paisley shirts, and tie-dye — to ideology.
It was music that put the “movement” into the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. By that I mean not that it made those things easy to dance to, but that music gave those movements a sense of community and commitment. When you gathered in protest singing “We Shall Overcome” or “I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin’-to-Die Rag” — or when you listened at home to “Society’s Child” or “Alice’s Restaurant” (singing a bar or two and walking out) — or if you were serving in Viet Nam and singing “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” — you knew, number one, that you were not alone in sensing that something’s happening here that somebody ought to speak up about. And do something about. Music wasn’t just a means of bringing issues to public attention. It was a part of the protests themselves, a key to the mechanism of change.
How central was Sixties music to the culture? Just think of the fact that the event heralded as THE generation-defining moment, Woodstock, was an event whose purpose was to showcase the music of the day. Yes, music in other eras certainly makes important cultural impacts, but not in a way that touches on just about everything happening in the culture of the day.
But it’s not just the cultural impact in its day, its significance as historical artifact, that makes Sixties music so worth paying attention to. It’s always interesting to appreciate and enjoy the aesthetic variations in an art form we enjoy. In the same way that, if you’re a book lover, we may find it useful and fascinating to read the literature of earlier eras, so too is it worthwhile to understand and admire what was happening in the music of that time. As it happens, the Sixties was a particularly rich time for music, crucial to the creation of rock as a serious art form. I’m tempted to say that the Sixties were instrumental to rock’s development, but in truth the core instrumentation of rock — electric guitar and bass, drums — was already in place. What the Sixties did was expand the parameters of rock in terms of style, subject matter, and lyricism.
The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin deemed the novel the highest form of literature because of its blend of language styles — a blend he called heteroglossia. The idea was that in the novel different characters have their own world views and language styles, all of which interact with one another. The novel, then, is inherently “dialogic.” In a lyric poem, on the other hand, you get the “monologic” voicing of one language style — that of the poet who is expressing his or her thoughts or feelings of the moment. Aside from the poetic elements that entered rock lyrics in the Sixties (which I’ll have more to say about in a moment), one of the key elements of Sixties folk-rock is that it was fully dialogic in terms of the music. Musical styles were brought into dialogue with one another in a series of new blends. You wouldn’t call it “heteroglossia,” I suppose, since the blend was not of glossaries or language styles but musical styles. Heteromusica, perhaps?
Now rock, even at its most late-‘50s banal, had always owed something to its sources in the blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel. What was happening at the cusp of the 1960s, though, was that too much of the soul was being drained out of it all — or at least out of the stuff that was making it onto the airwaves via AM radio stations aimed at white audiences. It was the insipid nature of a lot of that stuff that accounted for the “folk boom” of the early ’60s. Here was something authentic, as opposed to a watered-down version of something that only hinted at authenticity. And it was something that spoke to and about the world around us, engaging with that world with some lyrical intelligence.
So the first key blend of folk rock is the obvious one: the harmonies of folk music, its acoustic underpinnings, the emphasis on what the song has to say about the human condition — all of that infiltrated the rock song. But already we’re into a whole lot of blending. There was the American folk tradition, arriving on the scene via Harry Smith’s famous, and epic, 1950s Anthology of American Folk Music as well as some Smithsonian collections and the looming presence of figures like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. There was the British folk tradition, a rich trove of material collected by Francis Child in the late nineteenth century and Cecil Sharp in the early twentieth. Dylan of course led the way in this first blend of British and American folk and rock, with his borrowings from traditional materials right from the start. The Child Ballad “Lord Randall” provided the starting point for “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall,” and he often drew on British folk melodies as framework for his reworked words: “Scarborough Fair” led to “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Nottamun Town” provided the melody for “Masters of War.”
The Byrds showed the way from folk to rock when they put Dylan songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” to an electrified rock beat. And yeah, here I’ll say that they were indeed “instrumental” in the rocking-up of folk, with the instrument in question being Roger McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker. Dylan was not long in plugging in himself, as he famously did at Newport in 1965 — with Pete Seeger, according to legend, reputedly threatening to cut the cord with an axe. Dylan’s electrified sound made it onto vinyl beginning with 1965’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” But even before he “went electric” himself, Dylan’s songs often had a rock lilt to them. Have a listen to “It Ain’t Me, Babe” or “My Back Pages” from the Another Side of Bob Dylan album. It’s rock music without the electricity — and Beat poetry without the page (or the saxophone).
But the borrowings didn’t end with the blending of folk and rock (with its blues underpinning). With another nod to Bob and Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding, the Sixties saw another blend coming in from the country. Again, the Byrds were quick to pick up on the possibilities of the country/rock blend, but there was room on that bandwagon for plenty of others as well, from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to Poco, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Linda Ronstadt, all laying down track for the countrified rockers who would follow — The New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Eagles, The Band, The Grateful Dead. Creedence and other exemplars of swamp rock picked up some of the rhythms of New Orleans-styled rhythm and blues.
And there were more international influences as well, with George Harrison being the first of many guitarists of note to pick up a sitar. George’s first attempt at playing it offered another interesting blend, as he played it making use of the Western musical scale on “Norwegian Wood.” The Incredible String Band incorporated instruments and sounds from all over the world in their acoustic brand of psychedelic folk. They didn’t necessarily claim expertise or even proficiency on those instruments — Robin Williamson of the Incredibles has said they were after a kind of “naïve” music that would allow them to just pick up unusual instruments and play them by playing with them. Expertise not required — the sound is the thing.
The end result of all this borrowing and blending of musical styles was to erase the usual divisions and boundary lines between forms of popular music. It is futile to pretend to distinguish a folk song of the Sixties from a folk rock song or a rock song of the time. The whole point was that rock had absorbed all sorts of influences and accommodated them, and by the end of the decade the distinctions between folk and folk rock and rock had become meaningless. You can listen to the hard-rockin’est bands of the Sixties, the ones that were anticipating heavy metal like Iron Butterfly or Led Zeppelin, and hear the gentlest and most melodious acoustic guitar picking imaginable as well as the raucous electrification. Give a listen to Zep’s “Going to California” or “Gallows Pole,” or Butterfly’s “Slower than Guns.” In fact, notice how even the band names suggest the blending of the industrial metal and the rarefied natural, the heavy and the light — a zeppelin made of lead, a butterfly of iron.
Reason number two to re-value folk rock of the Sixties is that it was at this time that rock became literate, or at least a heck of a lot more sophisticated and interesting in terms of its lyrics. For the first time, songwriters brought a poetic sensibility to their lyrics. Quite simply, the words mattered. And what were the words about? A heck of a lot more than dancing with the one you’re sweet on at the sock hop. Or dealing with the psoriasis of heartbreak after the one you’re sweet on danced with some other gal or guy at the sock hop. Part of that something more was paying attention to the events of the day, which become the raison d’être of what we usually call the protest song. (Feel free to call it “topical song” or whatever label you prefer.)
To some extent, this sort of political engagement was a carryover from the left-leaning ideology — thank you, Woody — of the folk tradition. So it is no surprise to see the prevalence of topical songs in the heroes of the early Sixties folk movement. Dylan’s “Masters of War” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” come immediately to mind, or Buffy Saint Marie’s “Universal Soldier” or Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t a-Marching Anymore.”
Among the most common targets of protest/topical commentary? First and foremost, the increasingly unpopular Viet Nam War and the draft, focal points of songs like Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers,” The Animals’ “Sky Pilot,” Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son.” Concerns about nuclear proliferation motivated Barry McGuire’s hit version of PF Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction.” For civil rights, give a listen to Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” Environmental concern spread in the wake of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, surfacing in songs like Spirit’s “Nature’s Way” or Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (and the paving of paradise). The generation gap was fodder for Steven Stills’s “For What It’s Worth,” Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and The Who’s “My Generation.” There were also more generalized complaints about modernism, materialism, and conformity; think of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” or the many songs that dreamed of a pastoral retreat from the modern world, like Paul Williams’s “Out in the Country” (best known from the version by Three Dog Night).
To a great extent folk rock’s literacy can be traced to its roots in folk, where the oral tradition had put a premium on memorable storylines and refrains, and where the leftist ideology had nurtured an emphasis on the song’s message, often cutting against the grain of bourgeois values. But there was another strain at work as well, as poets and other sorts of writers turned to music as a medium for poetic expression. After all it is likely that writers were naturally inclined to admire the literacy and social engagement of folk, and they were hardly immune to the toe-tapping appeal of rock, and certainly they were drawn to the popularity of both in seeing folk rock as another avenue for their creative efforts. Leonard Cohen was already a published and acclaimed poet before he started writing songs. In fact, his classic “Suzanne” was published first as a poem in Cohen’s collection Parasites of Heaven before it was recorded by Judy Collins and then Cohen himself.
Richard Fariña was not yet acclaimed as a writer, but as an aspiring writer he had published several poems, including “Celebration for a Grey Day,” which (with “Celebration” pluralized) also became the title of the first album he recorded with his wife Mimi Baez (sister of Joan). Fariña famously died in a motorcycle crash after a party celebrating the publication of his novel Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, with blurb by his college friend Thomas Pynchon. According to David Hajdu in Positively Fourth Street, his wonderful biography of Fariña, Dylan, and the Baez sisters, Fariña’s influence on Dylan — and on the future of rock — may have been more profound than previously acknowledged. When he and Dylan were hanging out with Eric von Schmidt in London in early 1963, the charismatic Fariña talked enthusiastically about his ideas for a hybrid brand of folk that would include poetic lyrics and the energy of rock. And his second album with Mimi, 1965’s Reflections in a Crystal Wind, featured electric guitar and drums to complement his driving dulcimer and Mimi’s delicate finger-picked acoustic guitar playing. That came out the same year as Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, which shocked the world with the rock beat and electric guitars on songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone.”
There were other links between folk rock and the literary world as well. Activist poet Ed Sanders founded the Fugs (as well as the literary journal Fuck You). Broadway director Jacques Levy co-wrote “Chestnut Mare” with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, originally intended as part of a folk rock play to be called Gene Tryp, based on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Levy of course would later co-write “The Hurricane” with Dylan in the 1970s. But beyond the writers who moved into the realm of music, there were plenty of musicians who absorbed the ethos and spirit and word-consciousness of writers and brought those elements to their music. In this regard, the Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder loom large. Dylan, Donovan, and Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band have all pointed to Kerouac as at least one source of inspiration for their creative spirit. And it is not a stretch at all to see Dylan’s “Desolation Row” as kindred to Ginsberg’s generation-defining “Howl.” Ginsberg himself saw the connection between Dylan and the Beats early on. In Martin Scorsese’s film No Direction Home, Ginsberg says that when he first heard “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” he wept at the thought that “Beat illumination” had just been passed on from one generation to the next.
Note that this blending of a poetic/literary impulse with song lyrics constitutes another sort of hybridization, with other sorts of world views entering the musical language of folk-rock. And growing out of both the poetic impulse and the incorporation of diverse music styles was one more key contribution of folk rock. Essentially, folk rock opened up popular music to more eternal and universal themes of the human condition — as in the search for spiritual value. It brought intellectual and spiritual depth into (or perhaps it’s back into) popular music. In The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell says that what people seek (and what they can find in myth) is not the “meaning of life” but the “experience of being alive.” The difficulty for most of us — and certainly for the soul of American culture coming out of the 1950s — is that, again to quote Campbell, “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about” (5–6).
Certainly the topical songs of the folk-rock era brought a sense of lyrical sophistication to the issues of the day, and that was in itself a valuable contribution to bring to popular music. But that concern with social conditions and the day-to-day elements of our lives, that’s the stuff of “outer value” that Campbell says fails to address the deeper concerns of our being. But Sixties music turned in that inward direction as well. It was not just about addressing issues of social injustice — though that’s certainly something worth crediting. It was also about probing the nature of existence. It was not so much, in Campbell’s terms, about a search for the meaning of life as about a search for the experience of life. That experience was to be found somewhere other than in the day-to-day routine of a 9-to-5 job and the nuclear family safely ensconced in suburbia behind a white picket fence.
So: in Sixties music you see an interest in matters not just of the conscience, whereby things of outer value were questioned, but in matters of consciousness and altered states of consciousness. That constituted further opening-up of the subject matter in popular music. Yes, certainly the drug culture was part of that, leading directly to psychedelic rock. Perhaps the drugs helped people immerse themselves more deeply in the listening experience. But whether it was drug-aided or not, Sixties folk rock rewarded a deeper kind of listening. Perhaps it even required it, asking listeners to dedicate more than two to three minutes to listen to a song. So you had things like the Doors’ “The End,” or Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” lasting about a dozen minutes. Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” ran seventeen minutes. (Interesting side note: “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” was a faulty transcription of the original version of the song, “In the Garden of Eden,” as Adam sings his love to Eve.) There are some jams from Dead concerts back in the Sixties that are likely still going on, on earth as it is in heaven.
The point is that Sixties folk-rock called for a deeper engagement with the music on the part of the listener. The music was no longer background music to dance to or woo to, but something to take seriously, inhaled deeply and considered and pondered and probed. This was music to put on the turntable, turn out the lights, and just listen to in a darkened room. And it was no accident that this is also the era that saw the first really good quality home sound systems — which at the time were ridiculously large. But who needs room for furniture when you’ve got a good stereo system? It was also music that featured lyrics that were worthy of reading and absorbing as you listened, printed in neat columns on those nice big artistic and colorful album covers.
The opening-up of subject matter in folk-rock meant that the music could take a philosophical turn, as in the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” or “Within You and Without You” or “A Day in the Life.” And too, it was music that could speak to the dark night of the soul, as in Jesse Colin Young’s “Darkness Darkness” or, again, The Doors’ “The End.” Think of the Stones expressing “Sympathy for the Devil” — outdoing even John Milton in Paradise Lost, where the devil got the best lines but still didn’t evoke much in the way of sympathy. Or think of the Stones negotiating the line between desire and necessity in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” with its wonderfully strange imagery of the bleeding man in a glass or the footloose man at a woman’s feet.
Even when the subject matter was familiar — love and lost love — there was suddenly a great deal more complexity than “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “I’m happy just to dance with you” or baby you left me and I’m sad and I didn’t know I could feel so bad. Just think of the angry recrimination of so many Dylan songs (“Like a Rolling Stone” or “Positively 4th Street” or “She Belongs to Me”) or the spiteful and ironic request that the lover who crossed the ocean should send him “Boots of Spanish Leather” — good for walking away, one imagines. But the explorations into the nature of human relationships expanded to topics like parental relationships — Murray McLachlan’s “Child Song” and Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son” come to mind — in complex ways that allowed for ambivalence in expressing both pain and appreciation. That sort of ambiguity was a far cry from a simplistic complaint about not trusting anyone over thirty.
I won’t belabor the point further. The Sixties was the era that raised rock ‘n roll — the best of it, at least — to something worth taking seriously, something worth thinking about and worth appreciating on more than one level. It did so by opening up rock to a kind of hybridized blending of musical styles, by incorporating lyrics that strived for poetic freshness and complexity of language, by bringing to the music a depth that strove for intellectual and spiritual richness and complexity. Truthfully, none of this seems very surprising to us listening to the best rock of today or from the past half-century. But that’s the point. Those attributes were not part of the make-up of rock before folk rock came on the musical scene, and they were afterward. It was in the Sixties, with the merging of folk and rock, that rock became an art form.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988.
Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina, Picador, 2001.
Scorsese, Martin. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Paramount, 2005.
P. S. — Interested in reading more about Sixties folk rock? Watch for my forthcoming series “Tuning in to the Natural World: Sixties Folk Rock and the Rise of the Modern Environmental Movement.” Specifically, the series tracks the growth and influence of environmentally themed songs from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in late 1962 to the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970. You are hereby cordially invited to check them all out (all sixteen) at your leisure. Happy reading and happy listening!
