I Got a Song. Rick Massimo

plucked from obscurity and given a chance to see and feel the appreciation that people had for their long-ago work.

      But the process didn’t always work like it was supposed to. Folklorist Phil Spiro said, “I’m half inclined today to say that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it.” Some of these artists were only part-time musicians even in their prime, Spiro explained, and bringing them into the entertainment business thirty years later was a shock.

      We … consciously or unconsciously tried to shape the music they played on stage. The same statement could be made for the guys running Paramount during the thirties, but at least their motive was simple profit, which motive the artist shared. Our motivation was a strange combination of ego, scholasticism and power. I wonder now what would have happened if we had just left them alone instead of telling them what songs to sing and what instrument to play them on….

      Worst of all, aside from a couple of people like Chris Strachwitz and Dick Waterman, the rediscoverers all too often didn’t see the old guys as real, breathing, feeling, intelligent people. In general, we were collectors of people, who we tended to treat as if they were the very rarest of records—only one copy known to exist.¹⁰

      And Jack Landron, who performed as Jackie Washington in the Club 47 scene and at Newport in the mid-1960s, says that as with so many other processes, the experience of musical integration was very different for white and nonwhite players and fans:

      For the white kids, they were put into contact with black musicians [about whom] they said, “Oooh; I admire what they’re doing, and I wanna learn how to do it, and these people aren’t what Daddy told me they were.” They were having a sense of discovery, whereas I think nonwhite people were having a sense of a lessening of tension. Which is a different experience.

      And one enters an experience like that with a certain level of apprehension or distrust; “How far is this gonna go?” … The white kids were discovering something that the nonwhite people knew. So [for us] there wasn’t a sense of excitement about it.¹¹

      Still, the rediscovery by the Newport Folk Festival and Foundation in the 1960s of long-forgotten artists and the unearthing, development and encouragement of traditional performers tucked away in America’s hollows and highlands had effects that spread across the nation and outlasted the first incarnation of the festival itself.

      During his travels, including those for the Newport Folk Foundation, Rinzler began to notice that music wasn’t the only old-time tradition that fascinated him. “Often while listening to people sing,” he later said, “I’d sit down on a folk chair or put my foot on a folk basket, or kick over a folk table.”¹²

      That appreciation for folk art, craft and story led Rinzler to start collecting items from the places he’d been and eventually to present them at the folk festival, both as exhibits and for sale. It didn’t work out very well; later, he said, “At Newport I persuaded the board to do traditional craft and found to my chagrin that Newport was the wrong venue. I personally paid for the inventory and I shudder to think now the enormous physical effort and danger that was involved with hauling a 15-foot U-Haul with a bumper hitch behind an old station wagon, loading, unloading and repacking it at every stop with pots and rugs which weighed a ton.”¹³