in general. I never was awed by any musician on a star basis or anything like that. And I think these were humbling experiences, to see these guys who were great musicians in their own right and were just being musicians. I just got along very easily.”
And he was struck by the fact that virtually none of the artists whom he and Rinzler pulled out of rural backwaters and back porches had any problem suddenly playing or singing into a microphone miles away from home to thousands of strangers: “They never really were awed themselves by the idea that they were going to play in front of ten thousand people. They just went out and played. You would have thought they’d be terrified. But they just went out and played. I found that to be stunning.”
While the traditional musicians may not have been awed by the venue, Rinzler writes of helping to polish his discoveries’ live-performance techniques. More importantly, though, he sometimes also had to explain to them that their most traditional songs were what the Newport organizers and audiences wanted.
A craftsperson can make something that looks like something he’s just seen in a newspaper, thinking that that’s what’s the latest thing. So he’ll copy a crockpot that’s mass produced and sold at K-Mart because that’s what he sees in the paper…. Doc Watson wanted to play Eddie Arnold songs and Chet Atkins songs because he knew that Nashville was a symbol of success and he figured that for him to be successful he had to sing what was popular….
Doc, being an imitation of a Nashville performer, would never have been as successful as he was being himself. And that took time and fieldwork … to take out the deepest cut of tradition that they were in contact with through their family or community and encourage them not to imitate pop Nashville or pop Cajun or rock musicians but to play the grassroots stuff that was unique and distinctive regionally and familially.5
The efforts by the Newport Folk Foundation to foster and develop folk art and traditions, as well as their appreciation, had plenty of successes during the 1960s. In 1968, a grant to high school English teacher Eliot Wigginton and a group of his students at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School helped sustain and expand the Foxfire Project, which became a magazine and series of books on the oral history and traditions of Appalachian culture that continues to this day.
Local and regional music benefited from the exposure and efforts of Newport, of course: Ralph Rinzler wrote in a memo to the board in 1965 that Jimmie Driftwood organized a small festival in Mountain View, Arkansas, and “found that once the event had passed the singers and pickers had gotten so accustomed to coming to Friday night rehearsals that they just kept showing up at the courthouse every Friday night throughout the year. Several years have passed and now they come by the hundreds rather than the dozens.” The Moving Star Hall Singers, from the Georgia Sea Islands, made their public debut at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and by the next year had played two engagements in Los Angeles.
The greatest accomplishment of the Newport Folk Foundation, however, is probably the beginning of the revitalization of Cajun and zydeco music.
It’s been said that the performance by an ad-hoc Cajun band at Newport in 1964 was the first large-audience performance of Cajun music outside of Louisiana. Contemporary Cajun king Steve Riley, leader of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and his former bandmate David Greely agree that the show was critical for the cultural flowering of Cajun music—and that the appreciation worked in both directions.
In the 1960s, Cajun culture in Louisiana was generally considered an embarrassment. Burton Grindstaff wrote in the Opelousas Daily World, “I contend there is no more music coming from a fiddle, accordion and triangle when three Cajuns get together than seeps through the cracks in your house when crickets feel an urge to make themselves heard. Cajuns brought some mighty fine things down from Novia [sic] Scotia with them, including their jolly selves, but their so-called music is one thing I wish they hadn’t…. All we can do is sit back and wait for the verdict from Newport, scared stiff.”6
In the 1965 Newport Folk Festival program, Paul Tate of the Louisiana Folk Foundation wrote that the disdain for Cajun music came from the circumstances of the Acadians’ arrival in Louisiana: having been expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755 and spent ten years wandering down the coast of the United States, “the Acadian sought in Louisiana not a new life but the old life in a new location.”
This led to a lack of integration between the Cajuns and the rest of Louisiana, leaving most Cajuns with the choice between standing seemingly aloof from their immediate surroundings or renouncing their heritage. Cajun music, Tate wrote, “lay captive, isolated and dying, hedged in by a ‘sub-tradition’ of mediocre imitation of country or Western or popular music.”
While Dewey Balfa’s performance at Newport put the lie to Grindstaff’s fears and turned the New England region on to the beauty of the Cajun music and culture, David Greely, a former student of the late master’s, says that the reaction to that performance had a similar effect on Balfa.
In Newport, Balfa said he would “bring home the echo of the standing ovation” he received there to Louisiana. Greely says Balfa returned to Lafayette, Louisiana, determined that his music would no longer get second-class treatment. Balfa himself later said, “My culture is not better than anyone else’s culture. My people were no better than anyone else. And yet, I will not accept it was a second-class culture.”7
In 1965, Tate wrote to the board that the music was on its way back. Just in the year since the Newport performance, Tate related examples of Cajun music being played at official and quasi-official Louisiana events, including the first-ever performance of Cajun music in the governor’s mansion.
The foundation, he wrote, sponsored music competitions at such Louisiana institutions as the Dairy Festival in Abbeville, the Cotton Festival in Ville Platte, the Rice festival in Crowley, the Yambilee Festival in Opelousas and the Acadian-style Mardi Gras activities in Church Point, Kaplan and Mamou:
We had been greatly concerned about the rapid loss of status of Acadian music in favor of western and country music, rock and roll, and popular music….
The invitation of the Cajun band to Newport had the desired effect of giving stature to traditional Acadian music played on traditional instruments. Directly related to this recognition of authentic Cajun music, there has occurred a revival of interest in such music far beyond anyone’s expectations.8
In the 1966 festival program, Tate wrote that Cajuns had lit out for Minneapolis, Houston, Boston and Denver, as well as going on a four-week tour of Europe. “The Newport Folk Foundation is principally responsible for what is happening to Cajun music today,” he added, concluding that the promulgation of the music was resulting in “a greater appreciation and understanding of Acadian culture and the Cajun soul—by the Cajun as well as by those with whom he comes in contact.”
By 1968, the state formed the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. In 1977, several small festivals united to form what we now know as the Festival de Musique Acadienne, which has run ever since. Thanks to the tireless efforts of musicians, folklorists and fans alike, Cajun culture is now recognized as one of the distinct American cultures.
Alongside the foundation’s fieldwork, many of the blues players who came to Newport in the first years of the nonprofit era were discovered by record collectors. Inspired by the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, these aficionados began to look for the men behind the songs, figuring that at least some would still be alive—the original recordings had been cut in the 1920s and 1930s, which wasn’t so far in the past.
Indeed, Dick Spotswood’s introduction of Mississippi John Hurt at the 1963 festival was an entertaining example of the process: “This spring, Tom Hoskins, my friend, went down to Avalon, Mississippi, after we had decided that there was a good chance that John might be there. He heard his old record of Avalon Blues and on there was a line, ‘Avalon’s my home town, always on my mind.’ Putting two and two together, we decided there must be an Avalon, Mississippi. We went there; the first person we asked knew where he was, he played a few notes for us, and we said, ‘That’s all.’”9
(Hurt, speaking from the stage, remembered it a little differently: “Spotswood