Folk-Rock started as we were graduating from high school. Folk music never really went away but performers started using electrified instruments with a rock-style beat to give their music a larger audience.
I liked
traditional acoustic folk music, but I liked the new folk sounds, with a few
exceptions. I didn’t like Donovan, or
Tom Rush’s new style.
Here are
excerpts from two books trying to describe the folk-rock phenomenon.
Folk +
Rock + Protest = An Erupting New Sound
So
blared the headline in Billboard Magazine on August 21, 1965, trumpeting the
onslaught of a new way of making music that was the shaking the foundations of
its industry to the core.
The
Byrds and Bob Dylan had started it, with huge hits that married the lyrical
content and integrity of folk music with the visceral power of rock.
Many
more such artists were on their way to the same destination, bearing messages
that would change the world, from Simon and Garfunkel, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and
the Mamas and the Papas to Buffalo Springfield, Donovan and Jefferson Airplane.
By the
end of the 1960s, when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young carried the folk-rock
flame forward into the next decade, it was so entrenched within popular music
that hardly anyone was even bothering to call it folk-rock anymore.
The erupting
new sound became, to a large extent, THE sound of rock music and its
generations of listeners.
Turn!
Turn! Turn The 60s Folk Rock Revolution
Richie
Unterberger. Backbeat Books. San Francisco, 2002.
1965 was
a year of tumult and transition. The Viet
Nam War was costing American lives, and the draft doubled in size. The Voting Rights Act, Civil rights, and race
riots dominated the nation’s TV viewing and conversations.
In July
1965, the Newport Folk Festival was surprised by Bob Dylan’s appearing in black
leather while playing electric guitar, with which he shattered the festival’s
calm with a high-volume rendition of “Maggie’s Farm,” backed by the electric
Butterfield Blues Band. He performed
only a short set before returning alone with an acoustic guitar to play “It’s
All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
Of
course Dylan’s first (and largely unknown) electrically-backed recording – a 45
of the rockabilly tune “Mixed-Up Confusion” briefly released in 1962.
In
September 195, Dylan told Newsweek: “I’ve never written a political song,” and
in a direct hit on folk music’s idealism, he added, “Songs can’t save the
world. I’ve gone through that.”
Singing
Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revival. David Dunaway and Molly Beer. Oxford University Press, 2011.
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