[6 articles] New and old celebrate 50 years of folk at Newport
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/08/03/new_and_old_celebrate_50_years_of_folk_at_newport/ By James Reed Globe Staff / August 3, 2009 NEWPORT, R.I. - No matter how diverse the programming, there's always a naysayer who grumbles about the mix of old and new at Newport's fabled folk festival. This was not the year to complain. To celebrate the event's golden anniversary, this year dubbed Folk Festival 50, the event was one of the most triumphant and inclusive in recent memory. And to think it almost didn't happen. When the festival's future was in question earlier this year, original executive producer George Wein took back the reins and scrambled to fill two days with an impressive lineup that appealed, in producer Jay Sweet's words, to "the musical omnivore.'' The musicians, in particular, acknowledged how the music had come full circle from heritage artists to the ones who will build on their legacy. The Avett Brothers' Scott Avett mentioned Ramblin' Jack Elliott's huge influence on his band. Backstage yesterday, Judy Collins embraced Neko Case upon meeting her for the first time. And nearly everyone praised Pete Seeger, the festival's headliner on both days and iconic elder statesman of folk who's kicking hard at 90. Besides, younger music fans are increasingly interested in who shaped some of their favorite modern artists. And this year the festival had a noticeably youthful presence; 9,200 people (fort capacity: 10,000) attended Saturday, giving the festival its highest single-day ticket sales since Bob Dylan's heralded return in 2002. Early Saturday Elliott, who was celebrating his 78th birthday, peppered his set with folk staples such as "San Francisco Bay Blues.'' Later on, Fleet Foxes eased their way into a spectral kaleidoscope of psych-folk, and as Iron & Wire grew more introverted, the audience received Sam Beam and his acoustic guitar more like a wild rock star. Meanwhile, Billy Bragg used the Newport setting to dust off some of the Woody Guthrie songs ("Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key'') he previously recorded with Wilco. Perhaps no other band this weekend synthesized the electric energy of rock 'n' roll with the spirit of old-fashioned storytelling quite as well as North Carolina's Avett Brothers. Fans could hardly contain themselves. Providence had a good showing with local bands the Low Anthem and Deer Tick, the latter of whom attracted a huge spill-over crowd. Saturday's powerhouse performance came from Mavis Staples, who gave pulpit-pounding sermons with "Wade in the Water'' and "The Weight.'' Equally affecting were Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who had a strong set of mostly older tunes but threw in a surprise cover of Jefferson Airplane's psychedelic freakout "White Rabbit.'' The Decemberists, though, staged Saturday's most amusing bit of theater. Frontman Colin Meloy announced that band members would reenact when Dylan went electric at the festival in 1965, including the moment when Seeger nearly cut the electrical cords to stop the chaos. It was a fitting segue into Seeger's set, where he led the audience in spirited singalongs of "This Little Light of Mine'' and "This Land Is Your Land.'' It was hard to deny the joy and novelty of seeing Seeger commanding a stage that included the Fleet Foxes shaking tambourines and Welch and Rawlings sharing a microphone with Elliott and Ben Kweller. It seemed impossible that Sunday could top this. But it nearly did with strong early sets from singer-songwriter Josh Ritter and the Campbell Brothers, who made it feel like Sunday morning in the front pew with an electric mix of gospel and soul played on steel guitars. Making her Newport debut, Case was in fine form, unleashing her sweeping voice to unfurl over the harbor with songs from her new album. Mostly, though, yesterday was especially heavy on the legends. The Del McCoury Band, the festival's only bluegrass act, sang high-lonesome harmonies in their dapper suits, with McCoury's voice still dulcet and nimble at 70. And Arlo Guthrie was as much of a rascal as ever, remembering the stories behind tunes such as "The Motorcycle Song.'' Next up was Joan Baez, who first played Newport in 1959 as an unannounced guest, striking a perfect balance between looking back and forward. For every new song ("God Is God''), there was an iconic older one (a particularly poignant solo rendition of Dylan's "Forever Young''). Even Collins, radiant in black and strong in voice, mentioned how extraordinary Baez's set was, and then played her own. She welcomed Baez back on stage, walking hand in hand together, and sang an endearingly unrehearsed duet of Baez's "Diamonds and Rust.'' Seeger ended the festival with more singalongs. As the last song ended, the generational gap - onstage and in the audience - had been gloriously closed. -------- Newport Folk Festival: 50 Years Later http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111369533 by Joel Rose July 30, 2009 - The breakout star of the first Newport Folk Festival was an 18-year-old singer with dark eyes and long black hair. She wasn't even listed on the official program. Her name: Joan Baez. "I stood at the bottom of these stairs with my knees knocking," Baez says. "And I thought, I'll walk up these stairs to this immense audience, 13,000 people, and I'll either faint or vomit or sing. And as usual, I sang. And it was a big hit." A Divided Community Baez was one of folk music's young traditionalists. Back then, there was such a thing as popular folk music. For example, The Kingston Trio had five No. 1 albums, and a deep divide separated the trio's fans from those who preferred to take their folk music straight. According to founder George Wein, the Newport Folk Festival embraced both the popular and the obscure from the beginning. "It wasn't going to be the commercial or the noncommercial; it was going to be both," Wein says. "It was going to be an event that had never happened, and really present a totality of the world of folk music." Four years later, Wein hired a producer who had played at the early festivals and earned the respect of everybody on both sides of the debate: Pete Seeger. Seeger had his own ideas about the essence of folk. "Coalminers. Ex-lumberjacks. Grandmothers who like to sing to their grandchildren," Seeger says. "That's folk music. That's real folk music." All of the artists agreed to perform for the same modest fee of $50, which meant the producers could save money on the headlining acts. Some of the money was used to send a folklorist around the country looking for lesser-known talents. Stretching The Definition Of 'Folk' Newport was the model for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which started in 1967. But by then, the Newport festival had already lost some of its innocence. Bob Dylan famously plugged in at the 1965 festival, much to the dismay of purists. Wein says attendance started to decline as Dylan took a lot of young fans with him to rock music. "That was the beginning of the end of that great world we had built," Wein says. "It lasted four or five years, but it was never the same after that." The festival shut down in 1971. Wein went on to other events, and there wasn't another Newport Folk Festival until the 1980s. But Baez says that was Newport in name only. "I remember going back when they instated it many years later, and I thought, 'Oh, goody. After the show, everyone will sit around and play guitar and banjos,' " Baez says. "And then I realized that didn't happen anymore." Baez will be back in Newport this weekend for the 50th anniversary of her debut, along with festival veterans Seeger and Del McCoury. Today, the festival is once again stretching the definition of "folk music." Deer Tick and fellow Rhode Island band The Low Anthem are among the indie rockers on the bill. Part of the attraction for younger artists is the chance to join Seeger on stage for a big singalong at the end of each day. The 90-year-old singer says he's happy to oblige, but he conveys a tinge of nostalgia for the days when he shared the stage with coalminers and lumberjacks. Seeger says the real legacy of the Newport Folk Festival plays out all year long, all over the country. "I'll place my hope in the thousands, tens of thousands of small festivals all over the place," he says. -------- Newport Folk Fest draws thousands http://www.eastbayri.com/detail/130453.html Young, older acts make for special day 8/2/09 By Ted Hayes NEWPORT - Even before the first act took to the stage Saturday morning at George Wein's Newport Folk Festival 50, there was a feeling among many of the 9,200 music lovers who flooded into Fort Adams State Park that this year was going to special. The music - and the vibe - didn't disappoint. The festival's opening day turned out to be a rousing coronation of the 50-year-old festival's renewed relevance in an age of, as performer Billy Bragg put it, "people who can't pay their mortgages and can't trust the government to help them." Many of the older folk stars who gave the festival its mystique - Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliot and others - were there, as were a host of younger acts who seemed happy Saturday to pick up the torch from their elders. And with Sunday's lineup more a nod to that older set, with Joan Baez, Seeger and Arlo Guthrie set to perform, Saturday's mostly younger crew had the sellout crowd rocking. The day started out with Tift Merritt, who played her first-ever set on the main stage, and continued with Bragg, whose simple songs speak of disaffection, alienation and rage. He didn't disappoint, nodding in his performance to Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and others. His songs, too, were a musical nod to those men and the issues they sang about and fought against. One of his first numbers was "I ain't got no home," an old Guthrie tune that he said is as relevant today as when it was written 70 years ago. "Rich man took my home and drove me from my door," he sang. "And I ain't got no home in this world anymore." Bragg closed his hour-long set with a take-off on Bob Marley's "One Love," imploring the crowd to join in with him as he sang "Let's drop the debt and it will be alright." Behind the stage, George Wein stood and smiled. He's 83 now, but his fire remains. He helped found the festival in 1959, and said he was thrilled to have such a great line-up and turnout on Saturday. "People really like it," he said. "It's amazing we've been doing this for 50 years." Throughout the day, a succession of new bands and more established stars flooded on and off the stage, many of them stopping to stop and talk to Wein before and after their sets. There were the Avett Brothers, a North Carolina outfit that mixes traditional acoustic instruments with sharp, biting vocals and a strong beat. There were Fleet Foxes, whose harmonies lulled the sun-soaked crowd. And their were others, on the main stage as well as the other two, including Iron and Wine, a Rhode Island outfit that so packed the Harbor Stage area that it was difficult to get within 100 yards of them by the time the music started. Out at the main stage Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, long-time folk festival favorites, were one of the day's highlights, though they almost didn't make it. They arrived in a giant silver SUV not more than 20 minutes before their scheduled start time under a Newport police escort, and Welch explained that they almost got stuck at Logan and wouldn't have made it but for the escort. Looking out at the sea of faces and dozens of boats out beyond the field, she played along with the crowd and asked if anyone on a yacht was a fan of banjo just before grabbing her five-string. She received a couple of air horn blasts in response and laughed as she started to pick. The crowd, as is usual at the folk fest, was peaceful, though there were a few, mostly weather, related incidents. Several people succumbed to heat exhaustion, including one woman who collapsed next to the stage and had to be revived by EMTs. Mostly, though, festival-goers kept hydrated, applied gallons of sunscreen, and settled in for what many said was the best festival day in years. Ross Mahew drove from Hartford, Conn. with his wife and four-year-old daughter and got their around 10 a.m. Saturday. He said he came to see some of the newer bands, but said he was blown away by Billy Bragg's set. "He's pissed off and he has a right to be," he said. "That's a big theme this year. That's what this festival is all about I think ... having fun, playing music and being aware of what's going on around you." Note: Stay tuned for reports on Sunday's lineup, which includes Arlo Guthrie, Seeger, Joan Baez, Rhode Island's own Deer Tick, the Dave Rawlings Machine and more. -------- Old folk, and young, mark half century in Newport http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/music/general/view/20090802old_folk_and_young_mark_half_century_in_newport/srvc=home%26position=3 Music Review George Wein's Folk Festival 50 By Daniel Gewertz Sunday, August 2, 2009 The folk gods were smiling on the 50th birthday festival yesterday: Perfect weather, a big crowd of 9,200 and a savvy musical mix. Saturday was the more youthful and trendy of the two days. While the three-stage affair ventured far afield, it rarely became irrelevant to folks' definitions, as last year's fest did. The Decemberists came the closest to pure pop. Pete Seeger, 90, a star from the 1959 fest, ended the day with a sing-along set with his grandson, Tao Rodriguez Seeger. A sign on one woman's hat read: "I'm older than the folk festival, but younger than Pete." Yes, this was a 50th birthday event. But since Newport folk was on hiatus for 15 years (1970-'84), one might be more impressed with another metric: This is the 25th straight year there has been a Newport Folk Festival, since its return in 1985. Figuring out a way to program a popular folk festival in an era when folk was far from "booming" - now that's an achievement. Billy Bragg, performing solo, sang Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home," making it a lament and also an aggressive, up-to-the-minute political protest. Then, reworking "Joe Hill," he sang an affecting "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night." Tom Morello was a compelling solo. He's added an intimate side to offset his political rousers and thumping anthems. Tao Seeger fronted a superb band, roving merrily from Americana to Irish, to klezmer, to a Puerto Rican ballad. Fiddler Laura Cortese sparked the frisky, nimble sound. The Avett Brothers delighted their adoring fans with banjo-driven songs, one sounding like an update of the old "talking blues." Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have rarely sounded as harmonically tight and haunting, which is amazing considering that, because of plane delays, they needed a police escort to get to the fest on time. Her sleepless state made Welch feel she was "on drugs, a cheap thrill." She made the most of it with an intense, reverb-heavy version of "White Rabbit." Fleet Foxes sounded angelic. And highly effective. And when Mavis Staples led her molten-hot band in "The Weight," she went beyond nostalgia: Time stood still. -------- Newport folk fest was a day for the young and Pete Seeger, too http://www.projo.com/news/content/Newport_Folk_2_08-02-09_7IF8OL4_v12.38ad8a1.html August 2, 2009 BY RICK MASSIMO NEWPORT "It's the most predictable story told," The Avett Brothers sang Saturday at George Wein's Folk Festival 50; "In with the new, out with the old." That was how the day played out. Not that the old guard wasn't represented Ramblin' Jack Elliott, singing on his 78th birthday, gave a weathered dignity to chestnuts such as "Freight Train" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright"; Mavis Staples got everyone from Elliott to the hipster roadies dancing to her mix of gospel music and Stax soul. But the day belonged to the young acts at Fort Adams. Singers and players who were a quarter of the age of the closing act, Pete Seeger, made their mark on the crowd and on the tradition of folk at Newport, always an elastic concept. Young singer-songwriters made a mark as well. Ben Kweller's shaggy, amiable mix of introspective tropes and jam-band grooves charmed a big crowd on the second stage; Iron and Wine, the performing name of singer-songwriter Sam Beam, chilled the second-stage crowd with simple, spare stuff. The third stage was where the volume was for most of the day, with Langhorne Slim getting things off to a foot-stomping start with electric Delta-inspired blues. The Avett Brothers were the hit of the early going on the main stage, with high, clear bluegrass-inspired harmonies and high-octane, foot-stomping tempos on songs such as "Left on Laura, Left on Lisa," then shifting on a dime to lovely ballads such as "The Ballad of Love and Hate." Rhode Island's own Low Anthem made their Newport debut on the third stage, lowering the temperature in the audience with the lovely harmonies of the opener, "Charlie Darwin," and moving on to the slow, sinister rock crawl of "To Ohio." Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams switched among a bevy of instruments ranging form electric guitar to drums to bowed crotales to evoke a range of emotion. Billy Bragg, who worked wonders on the main stage earlier, made a point of heading over to see Low Anthem and later pronounced them "really beautiful. ... The great music, it's not what you play; it's what you don't play." (For his part, Miller said Bragg's comments "killed me.") Indie-rock darlings Fleet Foxes entranced the main stage audience with a combination of head-rush harmonies and psych-rock grooves, and The Decemberists, who generally flit in and out of the folk tradition, continued to do so. A mostly acoustic "Isn't It a Lovely Night" had a classic vibe, while the suite-like "Valencia," started off with harpsichord and ended up with anthemic distorted guitar made even more celestial by a glockenspiel hook. The Oregon-based Decemberists also pulled of a piece of high theatre during "Cautionary Song," with half the band playing the song and the other half walking through the audience with marching percussion to set up in the middle of the crowd for a humorous reenactment of Bob Dylan going electric in 1965. All that said, the day's highlight came at the end, with the cross-generational outpouring for folk icon Pete Seeger, who celebrated his 90th birthday this year. Bragg set the crowd off in the afternoon with a combination of well-observed detail ("The Space Race Is Over") and political stridency ("Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night"), the latter quality only gaining dimension as Bragg ages. But he was deeply appreciative of the chance to share a stage with Seeger. So was Tom Morello, the Rage Against the Machine guitarist who performed a politically-charged solo set as The Nightwatchman, who called Seeger "the living embodiment of justice and everything that is good about America." "It's unbelievable," said Jeff Prystowsky of The Low Anthem. Seeger was preceded on the stage by a tribute video featuring George Wein, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and more, while the man himself ambled on with his grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger (who updated the folk tradition with electric guitars and drums with his own band on the third stage earlier). And the day ended with a sing-along with the Seegers, Rodriguez-Seeger and his band, Bragg, Americana pioneers Gillian Welch and David Rawlings (who played the main stage earlier), and members of The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Low Anthem and more, for a run through "This Little Light of Mine," "Guantanamera" and of course "This Land Is Your Land." It wasn't the equivalent of the All-Stars crowding around Ted Williams at Fenway Park, but actually, yes it was. The cross-generational appreciation extended to the audience, too. As The Decemberists played, George Pires, 67, of Providence, said he enjoyed them, as well as Fleet Foxes. "I like music generally anyways," he said; "it doesn't matter who's playing it." And Karina Argot, 21, drove from New Jersey to see The Avett Brothers; thanks to the traffic, she missed them by hours. But as Seeger played on, she said, "This is making my life right now. Who could ask for more?" And the generational mix worked; the attendance was 9,200, the most since Bob Dylan returned to the festival in 2002. -- [email protected] -------- Joan Baez Returns to Newport 50 Years After Debut http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2009/08/joan-baez-returns-to-newport-5.html By Roger Catlin August 2, 2009 It was 50 years ago to the day that Joan Baez, just 18 years old, stepped on stage at the inaugural Newport Folk Festival. "For me, it was pretty overwhelming because I thought it was the largest number of people that had ever assembled on the face of the Earth. I think there were 15,000 people. I was very young and I was very scared," she said on Sunday, hours before she'd return to the Newport stage. "I was a very lucky young girl to have been invited," Baez, 68, said of the 1959 event. "I was invited by Bob Gibson. I was standing there with my little knees knocking and went up onstage, feeling as though I had been invited to my own execution. But, in fact, instead of fainting or dying, I sang. And I was happy with the results of it." So was everybody else. She got a major label recording contract, was crowned queen of the folk movement, landed on the cover of Time magazine. "It was very well received and kind of sent me on my way from coffee houses into a larger world of music," Baez says. Half a century later, to the date, Baez was back in Newport, at the annual folk festival now called the George Wein's Folk Festival 50. But before her performance, she was speaking to reporters back in California via satellite regarding an upcoming "American Masters" portrait of her coming this season. She said she hadn't checked out the audience at Newport yet. "But I imagine they've changed the way my own audiences have changed. They've grown older with me. And, at the same time, they've brought younger ones along with them, as mine have also done. And I'm grateful for all of that". Newport is one of two big anniversaries for Baez this month. She was also part of the Woodstock concert in Bethel, N.Y. marking its 40th anniversary. There was no way then to realize what a cultural impact it would have. But there were hints, she said. "I think flying over Woodstock in the last helicopter in, before the big storm made it impossible for anybody else to enter by air, with my mother and my manager and Janis Joplin peering out over the crowds, all gravitating in one direction, we knew something big was about to happen. "And when we were there, I think we knew that something very big was happening, and certainly afterwards it had happened. And it's a marking point in people's lives forever, that they were there or they were on their way there or they were on the wrong coast or their parents wouldn't let them go or, God forbid, they hadn't been born yet." Baez has used her music as part of a long life of activism and looking back at what has changed in that time, she has some satisfaction, in part because "I think I was just smart enough early on to not expect too much," she said. However, "in the civil rights, there was an enormous amount that was actually accomplished. And it's really easy to trash everything that didn't get accomplished. I think none of us involved in the peace movement ever really gave ourselves enough credit for having ended the war in Vietnam. We did it. You know, it wasn't because Nixon had a change of heart. It was really because we internationally forced that point. But she said, "As far as having world peace, I was smart enough to know that wasn't going to happen, certainly not overnight and it may never happen." Still, she added, "there are so many things that are possible yet to do, but not to somehow make, create an impossible vision for ourselves, but really start wherever it is we can. "Joan Baez: Sing Me Home" premieres Oct. 14 on "American Masters" on PBS. -------- Also, see: Newport Folk Festival turns 50: The ultimate playlist http://music-mix.ew.com/2009/08/01/newport-folk-festival-50-playlist/ . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
