to answer anew, two questions: What is folk music? And what can it do? Over the decades, the debate has not only continued but grown to include related questions: Is it folk music if it’s a professional musician singing it? Is it folk music if it has an electric guitar? Is it folk music if it’s popular? Is it folk music if it’s not popular? Is it folk music if it’s presented with the help of a corporate sponsor? Is it folk music if you have to plug your ears? These questions weren’t first asked at Newport, and they’ve never been answered—indeed, they may never be. And most of the people who ask these questions know that, but they ask anyway. John Cohen, who played at the first Newport Folk Festival with the New Lost City Ramblers, said at a panel discussion in 2015, “Maybe the festival needs controversies.” Perhaps even more accurately, maybe the fans do.
Through the years, the festival, and the questions behind it, have made different sounds—the earth-moving power of Odetta in 1959; the big-dreaming, group-singing “We Shall Overcome” of 1963; the electric shock of Bob Dylan in 1965; the out-and-proud Indigo Girls, who made nine appearances in ten years in the 1990s; the radio-ready strumming and shouting of the Lumineers today—but to hear the people who were and are there tell it, it feels like one conversation stretched out over a lifetime.
2
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS LIKE SLEEPING BEAUTY
George Wein’s road to putting on the Newport Folk Festival was circuitous. The first music festival he ever produced was in his own house.
George Theodore Wein was born October 3, 1925, in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in nearby Brookline. His parents, Barnet and Ruth, were second-generation Americans of Eastern European Jewish ancestry; his father was a doctor, and in his memoirs Wein recalls that “his clientele included people from every station in life.” Both his parents also loved music and show business, and Wein was singing from an early age around the house and occasionally on children’s radio shows.
Wein started playing jazz piano in school, and he and his older brother Larry spent many nights of their adolescence driving around New England—and sometimes to New York City—listening to giants of jazz such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and others.
Sometimes they did more than listen. If a good band was playing nearby, the Wein brothers would invite the musicians back to their family home for a late dinner cooked by their mother; jam sessions invariably happened afterwards. “For whatever reason, my parents saw nothing unusual about the situation,” Wein later wrote. “They welcomed these musicians into their house as close friends.”1
Wein joined the army in 1943 and served in France, then finished his military time serving at a hospital in New Jersey, the better to make the scene on New York’s 52nd Street after hours. After the army, he began playing in better and better places in the Boston area while he was supposed to be attending classes at Boston University. He loved playing the music, but the closer he looked at the life of a jazz musician, the less he liked it. Great musicians, players he knew were better than he, were living in poverty. He didn’t see much of a future in an onstage life.
In 1949, he was playing with clarinetist Edmond Hall at the Savoy, in Boston. At the end of their first monthlong run, the manager wanted to re-sign them. Wein asked club manager Steve Connolly for more money—Hall was making $120 to play eight shows a week; Wein and the rest of the band were paid $60 each. Connolly, Wein remembers, was sympathetic, but no more money was forthcoming.
Wein had another suggestion: in lieu of more money, he asked for every other Saturday night off. This would allow Wein and Hall to take better-paying gigs elsewhere. Connolly agreed, and the system worked. But when March 1, 1949, loomed without an engagement, Wein and Hall rented Jordan Hall, at the New England Conservatory of Music, and put on their own show.
“I knew [the Hall-Wein group] was not enough to fill the hall,” Wein writes. “We had to do something special.” They put together a bill with some of the other heavyweights of Boston jazz, and “Edmond Hall and George Wein Present: From Brass Bands to Bebop” went off without a hitch and made $1,200.
Later that year, Wein ran the series Le Jazz Douxce out of a suite in the Hotel Fensgate, in Boston, with the trumpeter Frankie Newton, and he promoted an unsuccessful series of rhythm and blues shows in Maryland. Even so, the life of a promoter, even an only occasionally successful one, was making more sense than that of a freelance piano player.
Wein was still playing, but as he writes, “I had neither the confidence [nor] the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” The lack of confidence stemmed from his experiences with great pianists such as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson and Earl “Fatha” Hines; the lack of desire came from the hard financial times he and his compatriots were experiencing.
Determined to find another way to keep music in his life, Wein opened the nightclub George Wein’s Storyville in Boston’s Copley Square Hotel in September 1950. That location lasted only six weeks, but a new place in the Buckminster Hotel in Kenmore Square was successful enough that by mid-1953 he was running two clubs at the Copley: Storyville and Mahogany Hall. (He would also run seasonal Storyvilles in the towns of Gloucester and Magnolia.) The clubs ran until 1960, but in 1953 Elaine and Louis Lorillard met Wein at Storyville and proposed a jazz festival in Newport to liven up the boring society summers.
According to Burt Goldblatt’s history of the jazz festival, the Lorillards helped put on two concerts by the New York Philharmonic in Newport’s Casino Theatre in the summer of 1953. (Originally scheduled to be held outdoors, they were forced inside by the weather.) They didn’t do well artistically or financially.
Later that summer, John Maxon, at the time the director of the Rhode Island School of Design, was at a lunch at the home of George Henry Warren and his wife in Newport. Maxon remembers telling Elaine Lorillard, “Do you really think people want to hear what they undoubtedly hear in the wintertime? They would like to hear something different. If you want to do something, why don’t you put on a jazz festival? It would be a wild success. You can’t fail.” So the Lorillards ended up in Storyville, pitching the idea of a Newport jazz festival to owner George Wein. In 1967, he recalled thinking, “I’d never thought about Newport before then, but I figured it might work, and I knew I wanted to do more in life than own a jazz club, and so I kept saying, ‘Sure, sure, but call me in a couple of days if you’re really interested,’ half knowing that these people wander into the club and unburden themselves of some great project and never call you back, and half hoping that she would.”
The sleepy resort city seemed an unlikely choice for such a show, but then, Maxon said, the unlikely sometimes takes hold in such terrain: “Newport is a very strange place. They really are terribly unimpressed. They’re bored and worldly, but they are nice people, and they’re terribly grateful for something new.”2
The first festival, entitled “The First American Jazz Festival,” was held July 17 and 18, 1954, presenting the full spectrum of jazz “From J to Z.” The first day’s concerts featured Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lee Konitz, Oscar Peterson and more. The second day included an afternoon panel discussion on “The Place of Jazz in American Culture” and performances by Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Lennie Tristano, Gerry Mulligan and Gene Krupa. A reported eleven thousand people showed up, even though it rained on the second day, and Down Beat magazine said that the festival “opened a new era in jazz presentation.” The producers cleared $142.50.
Patrick O’Higgins—who handled festival publicity for three years and wrote the Helena Rubinstein biography Madame—later said, “I think what happened was they said we’ll all go to this bloody Festival because it’s going to be a terrible flop. Mrs. Lorillard was going to be chased out of town, and much to their surprise it had the opposite effect.”3
For the next five years, Wein and his fellow board members made the jazz festival the preeminent showcase of the genre in America, while he also ran his nightclubs and instituted other fests, including the Midwest Jazz Festival, in French Lick, Indiana,