Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 [Paperback]

This, however, is not the sort of revisionist history that one day somebody will write. That becomes apparent on the dedication page, where Cohen honors "Pete Seeger, who has sustained me over the last five decades." If, like me and the counter-hagiographical historians certain to write the next draft of revival history, you consider Seeger something of a sanctimonious hypocrite, you may find Cohen a trifle irksome. On the other hand, you'll find validation in Seeger quotes that Cohen innocently drops, such as an astounding statement about Josef Stalin on page 30. Made in 1993 -- 40 years after the death of a tyrant who killed more people, including Communists, than any other figure in history (between 20 and 40 million, according to best estimates) -- Seeger, a lifelong, self-identified Communist, finally manages what at first looks like a critical assessment, even an apology for his years of service to a spectacularly unworthy cause. On second and further readings, however, Seeger's meaning grows ever murkier and finally takes on positively Orwellian dimensions. For all his public persona as a radical liberal, whatever personal virtues he undoubtedly possesses notwithstanding, Seeger is in his ideological heart radically illiberal. Nothing in this book will convince any attentive reader otherwise.

Cohen himself has nothing unfavorable to say about the Old Left/Popular Front culture that saw traditional music as a useful agitprop tool and proceeded to purge it of all "unprogressive" elements, fashioning a crude caricature of the real stuff. To Cohen the enemies are the anti-Communists -- he appears to make no distinction between liberal anti-Stalinists and demagogic reactionaries like Joe McCarthy and his ilk -- and phrases such as "dark clouds of anticommunism" hover over the text.

He rightly condemns the abominable, anti-democratic practice of blacklisting, which sidelined, for a time, the careers of Seeger and the Weavers. Such victimization, however, does not make them heroes, only victims; in Stalin's Soviet Union dissident balladeers and writers went to the gulag, often never to be seen again. In America in the meantime, after the unpleasantness had passed, Seeger et al. went back to well-paying careers. All the while, they managed to compose not a single protest song about the fate of their counterparts in the unfree nations of the Soviet empire. The Seegerites, after all, were members of that generation of ideologues who, in George Orwell's wry observation, were opposed to fascism but not to totalitarianism. Even their opposition to fascism, however, was conditional. When Stalin and Hitler formed the alliance that started World War II and ended only when Hitler later turned on the USSR, Seeger and his fellow Almanac Singers were unrestrained in their opposition to American intervention against German/Soviet aggression. The conflict in Europe, their songs informed us, came about because of the sinister machinations of greedy British capitalists (the theme of the Almanacs' jaw-dropping rewrite of the traditional "Liza Jane") and therefore Britain's fate was of no concern to decent people. After Hitler attacked Stalin, of course, nobody supported intervention more fervently than these putative pacifists.

The early folk revival was at its core a political movement, and Cohen's is in good part a political book. That affects his treatment of the music, about which he utters scarcely a discouraging word. But it needs to be said that, with the exception of the magnificently gifted Woody Guthrie, the Stalinists produced a vast body of very bad music. Seeger and the Weavers trafficked in a preposterously sentimentalized portrayal not only of Soviet dictators but of ordinary Americans, prominently including union members. As a liberal Democrat who grew up in a union family, I used to entertain fantasies about banjo-smashing whenever I'd hear Seeger burbling another patronizing ditty about the workers' struggle. Seeger, the Weavers, and their comrades seemed to infantilize everything they touched. And yet....

For all their moral and musical failings, they alerted their fellow citizens to our country's (and others') rich heritage of traditional song. They played a large and honorable role in the discovery (in some cases rediscovery) of authentic rural folk artists -- no one more so than folklorist and Marxist Alan Lomax, who alone or, in his youth, with his father John Lomax found Lead Belly and Mississippi Fred McDowell, among many others, and gave them stages and careers. They started folk-music recording labels (most prominently Folkways) which afforded both rural and urban performers a voice and a new audience. Most of the urban music from those days is forgettable, some of it downright cringe-inducing, but the best of it endures. Besides such talented performers as Dave Van Ronk, the Kossoy Sisters, Fred Neil, the Dillards, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott (all, with the exception of the anti-Stalinist socialist Van Ronk, at least artistically apolitical), the second stage of the revival produced one of the towering figures in American music, Bob Dylan -- about whom, oddly, Cohen has relatively little to say. Yet, in going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan both revitalized folk music and freed the revival from the suffocating effects of the Stalinist culture that made it possible. Today's folk musicians are better for it, and so is their music.