Still plugged in
TWO RECENT BOOKS PROFILE ENDURING FOLK MUSIC FESTIVALS AND WHAT THEY CAN STILL OFFER
The Mariposa Folk Festival: A History By Michael Hill Dundurn 240 pp; $19.99
I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival By Rick Massimo Wesleyan University Press 260 pp; $33
The festivalization of pop music is a hot topic right now. Between the scandal that was Fyre Festival, run by a 25- year- old “Madoff for millennials,” and the recent, abrupt shut- down of the Pemberton Music Festival in British Columbia, perhaps it’s time to take stock of what these large- scale events are doing to shape our experience of music.
And, for that matter, of their hosts. Many urban centres ( and other locales such as California’s Coachella Valley), hot for tourist dollars, are marketing themselves as destinations via their festival offerings. Festivals supply a brand for the 21st- century city, a way to sample the local, even though the festival formula, now predictable, looks much the same across the offerings, regardless of location or genre.
Tempting as it may be to regard festivals of the past through the hazy filter nostalgia offers – ascribing to them a sense of honesty, fairness or a genuine wish to present good music to a desirous public – the earliest popular festivals were serving much the same function. Two recent books, Rick Massimo’s I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival and Michael Hill’s The Mariposa Folk Festival: A History, reveal that such noble aspirations have always been complicated by the fickle pop music market.
That these books were released within weeks of each other is notable, given the two institutions’ similarities to (and dependence on) each other, but I’ ll return to that later. Thorough research in both volumes contextualizes Mariposa and Newport not only within their respective regions and markets, but also their genre – folk music – demonstrating that they could have emerged only during the folk music craze of the late 1950s and early ’60s. The two festivals then spent the next 50-plus years defending what they meant by “folk.” Hardly fair: had The Kingston Trio not paved the way for folk to dominate the charts with their 1958 remake of “Tom Dooley,” the festivals likely would never have happened in the first place.
Thus began a half-century of explaining and redefining the genre. Massimo draws on the work of preeminent folk music scholars, including Robert Cantwell, Benjamin Filene, Ronald Cohen and Neil Rosenberg, to demonstrate just how hard it is to contain the genre in a digestible definition. Indeed, the festivals grappled with this routinely, even hosting panels on the very subject in their early days, as do contemporary folk music societies, ever in the throes of an existential crisis.
It’s easy to get angry at folk music, especially the boomer- era model – which privileges solo singer- songwriters on a limited range of acoustic instruments singing traditional material or providing socio- political commentary or personal, introspective lyrics – that dominates ideas of what it should represent, or accomplish. I’ve run up against these restrictions many times in my own work, frustrated that the genre isn’t allowed the flexibility bestowed on other genres, or the opportunity to change with the times. To that vocal minority that still holds on tightly, I’d argue that the commercial boom – as with all once marginal genres like hip-hop or reggae or electronic dance music – funneled money necessary to get lesser-known performers on record and onto the festival stage. By the early 1960s, Cantwell observes, folk music had become big business: “The word ‘ hootenanny,’ descriptive of folkmusic get- togethers of varying degrees of inclusion and informality, began showing up on merchandise such as sweatshirts, shoes, candy bars, bath mitts and pinball machines. It was also the title of a magazine and television show that ran for two seasons on ABC.” Meanwhile, acts like The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte were making hundreds of thousands of dollars from their records alone.
More troubling than the “whither folk music” argument is the stance that this music of the people should be made without concern for financial return. Alan Lomax, among the principal troglodytes on the issue, called the adoption of Ameri can musics around t he globe part of a “big money- making machine” instead of a possible folk process in itself. Again, a noble stance, trying to keep cash out of the equation – especially for Lomax, who often eschewed a stable salary in favour of his treacherous trips around the globe to collect obscure repertoire – but one that hardly fares in the contemporary neoliberal context, where everyone is a competitor. The appeal of folk music and its sense of community, to a world smothered in materialistic excess, as Massimo notes, is understandable. But to survive as a folk musician, you have to turn it into a commodity.
Other parallels to the contemporary pop festival scene are hard to ignore. By now heading down the late-septuagenarian path, original attendees of Mariposa and Newport might lament Coachella and Osheaga as mere photo ops battling the Instagrammer’s fear of missing out. Yet source material from both Hill and Massimo document people climbing “all over each other in blind opportunism, rushing to the stage to be photographed in the right ‘scene’.” At Mariposa, concert- goers often missed key performances while they scoured the site in search of Bob Dylan or Gordon Lightfoot upon hearing rumours they might appear. Even 50 years ago, the festival was not about the music so much as about the experience.
I resisted the tendency to write off the texts as mere products of a never- ending parade of boomer nostalgia, however, because they have a lot more to offer than that. I was happy to read them together; in particular, reading Massimo’s first provided t he necessary historical foundation for Hill’s book. Published by Wesleyan University Press, it seemed subject to a strict review, though the academic rigour never gets in the way of clear writing and good storytelling.
Massimo grapples with the “what is folk” question throughout the book, contextualizing it against the original folk boom, counterculture rock, the songwriting ’ 70s and the eventual neardeath of the genre as electronically informed genres popped up in the ’80s. A return to the more traditional forms offered by Newport was precipitated by rootsoriented revivals in the ’90s and 2000s, bringing a new generation to the folk format.
Massimo – as does Hill – examines the minutiae of running a festival. The parallels between the two events are striking: both started within two years of each other, both in resort towns, and both at times succumbed to the in- fighting and limited revenue streams most non- profits face at some point. Each held to the premise that no artist, regardless of stature, should be given preferential treatment – or more money. Part of the festivals’ early ethos was that folk was music of the people, and all people should be treated equally. That sure keeps the costs low.
While Massimo provides the context above, Hill offers more details, having scoured the Mariposa archives at York University for past correspondence, invoices, programs, photos and more. His work is in part indebted to the groundbreaking research of Mariposa scholar Sija Tsai, but owes much to his own role as current Artistic Director of the festival as well. At times, the discussion gets a little too inside- baseball, which will appeal less to the general music reader and more to those curious about folk music’s inner dynamics or the battles of running a festival. However, if you have any friends in the Canadian folk music community, you’re bound to find them quoted in Hill’s lengthy – and often entertaining – interviews.
As both Mariposa and Newport round the corner towards their 60th birthdays, perhaps newbie festivals can look to their history for advice on what and what not to do in order to keep appealing to a fickle public. Keep talking about music, ask what it means, allow it to change. Folk music can offer a barometer for understanding our relationship to popular music at large; a kind of conscience by which we measure our treatment of artists or the political climate. The festival is a product of our time: a yearning for connection with fellow listeners when music has otherwise been siphoned into individualized experience. It’s also the result of trying to keep music a commodity, a way to pay our musicians’ rent, when all other commercial models have failed. We need the festival for both of these reasons, but we cannot assume the audience is uncritical in their engagement with it. The fact that Mariposa and Newport are still around while other festivals crash and burn demonstrate the need to keep adapting, letting go of outdated ideas of what music is supposed to be, and listening to the listeners.