Folk music’s never-ending moment in the sun
Films like Inside Llewyn Davis continue to romanticize and mythologize the genre
I nside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers’ film about the Greenwich Village folk music scene in 1961 — which was released on DVD last month — has a scene depicting our earnest hero driving down that proverbial old lonesome road. He turns on the radio only to hear some Top 40 novelty gibberish, immediately hits the next channel, which blessedly plays classical music.
Davis (played by Oscar Isaac) follows the folk cohort by blanketing pop as inconsequential, a self-serving dogma: anything with electric guitars and a backbeat was considered “commercial” — trash designed to discourage people thinking about the world of injustice out there. However, the early ’60s did produce many classics: think Roy Orbison, the great girl groups — The Shirelles, The Crystals — Motown artists, black groups like the Drifters, the Coasters, and Ben E. King’s magnificent Stand By Me.
Davis’s pat phrase for his set-closer is, “It was never new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” as if folk songs were put on Earth by God. The line is at best artistic license and, at worst, a lie; all songs were once new, maybe some changed over the years, and now they’re old, and if they survived the tumult of time, so much the better.
The flabby-lipped line is a tip-off that Llewyn’s life is a lie. He’s what John Lennon would, four years later, dub a Nowhere Man (“Hasn’t got a point of view …”). Throughout the film Davis gets nowhere and winds up shouting, at a woman playing autoharp, the movie’s funniest double entendre: “I hate f--king folk music!”
I was 13 in 1961, ripe for the fashion for “authenticity” sparked by the hit parade successes of The Kingston Trio, the Limelighters, Peter, Paul and Mary and others. At first blush they were an alternative to the confections of the Bobbys — Bobby Vinton, Bobby Curtola, Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Tillotson, Bobby Vee — with their slick hairstyles and snappy stage suits (or cardigans) and saccharine teen-dream hits. I enjoyed country-folk harmony groups like The Greenbriar Boys and New Lost City Ramblers (both from New York City).
Our psychic saviour was Bob Dylan, partly because in 1961 he made a mythic trip from Duluth to New York to visit a dying Woody Guthrie — the Great Depression-era singer of socio-political songs — and partly because he was so contemporary, ripping songs from headlines (especially on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times Are A Changin’ albums).
Raven-haired Joan Baez, his eventual lover, reflected “purity,” her powerfully melancholy, near operatic, untutored voice singing Elizabethan laments and American folk ballads; by their very nature they put the lie to the cheap sounds of materialism. (She lived in seclusion in an oceanside manse in Big Sur.)
Devotion to “authenticity” marked the folk scene, Ethan Coen told The Guardian, “and the serious- ness and piousness that went with it. I’m sure (the singers) did consider themselves folklorists trying to preserve a tradition. More than that specifically, it’s kind of a hallmark of the period — against convention, not wanting to sell out, not wanting to be bourgeois.”
“Which side are you on?” was more than a rhetorical question. Many folk songs from the Depression parroted pro-union sentiment. Others were antiwar. In the early 1950s the left, and singers like Pete Seeger and The Weavers, took a drubbing in Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee: the dreaded Blacklist destroyed careers. Folk songs became associated with the ban-the-bomb movement and civil rights campaign for blacks (We Shall Overcome, a spiritual Seeger adapted, was its anthem).
Thus, folk music had a contentious history by the time Davis appears on the scene. The title Inside Llewyn Davis begs the question: what’s he made of, what’s his motivation, where does he stand politically?
The film largely bypasses the Village scene’s competitiveness: Dave Van Ronk, Erik Andersen, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, Bob Gibson, Tom Lehrer (folk’s satirical funnyman) and, later, Canadians Ian & Sylvia and Gordon Lightfoot all had record contracts and toiled in the shadow of Dylan, whose bio was wrapped in tall tales and tomfoolery. The 20-yearold Dylan arrived in the Village in ’61 with brazen charisma — move aside, boys! Someone asked Van Ronk, once dubbed “the Mayor of MacDougall Street,” if anyone else could be the “next Dylan.” Yeah, sure, he wrote: “All you had to do was write (the monumental anti-bomb song) A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall — for the first time. That was what Bobby had done, and none of the rest of us did that.”
Suzanne Vega (born 1959) reacted to the Coens’ view: “They took a vibrant, crackling, competitive, romantic, communal, crazy, drunken, brawling scene and crumpled it into a slow, brown, sad movie.” There’s the paradox: Folk was all those things, but also unconsciously (and self-consciously) insular and “slow, brown, sad.” The postwar prosperity of capitalism was the enemy. Folk camaraderie was a defence mechanism.
For some reason, commentators have insisted that Llewyn is based on Van Ronk, a broad-ranged singer who played second fiddle to Dylan once Bobby hit the Village. The Coen Brothers have persistently denied this. Llewyn’s voice is blandly smooth while Van Ronk’s was roughhewed; Llewyn was totally self-absorbed while Van Ronk was known as a genuine “nice guy.”
Sing Out!, folk’s bible since 1950, hit the mark: “We’re supposed both to sympathize with Davis and see him as a prototype for all the poor schlemiels that didn’t become Baez or Dylan. … It’s hard to sympathize with Davis, though, because he’s a world-class jerk who crafts his own misery. Nor does it feel like he views the music he so fiercely protects as anything more than a meal ticket.”
Hitching to Chicago for another failed audition, he gets picked up by obnoxious, heroin-addicted jazzman Roland Turner — jazz then being eclipsed by folk in popularity — who puts him down mercilessly: “We play all the notes — 12 notes in a scale, dips--t, not three chords on a ukulele.”
The desire for success often trumped the craving for authenticity. Peter, Paul and Mary was created by manager Albert Grossman in 1961, and two years later made Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind a No. 1 hit. “The answer is blowin’ in the wind” was a precursor to today’s ubiquitous “it is what it is.” The hugely successful trio was dissed for “selling out” (to Warner Bros., no less). Grossman quickly engaged Dylan.
Dylan adopted a rock band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, an explicitly “up yours” statement; Bobby was abandoning folk for the larger, wilder waters of the mass rock market. Pete Seeger — who died Jan. 17 at age 94 — sat on stage with a horribly worried look on his face. Rock had taken over, and folk’s moment in the sun was over.