Hootenanny

According to Todd Gitlin in “The Sixties,” “Folk music was the living prayer of a defunct movement, gingerly holding the place of a Left in American culture.” A socialist party organizer named Myles Horton ran the Highlander Folk School in the hills of Tennessee from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, where workshops were given for civil rights workers, and folk and gospel songs were learned and spread around. Striking North Carolina tobacco workers had a song called “I Will Overcome,” which, spread through the Folk School to Pete Seeger, became the anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

All this would have been news to my parents. Staunchly anti-Communist as we all were during the Cold War, they nevertheless warmed to folk music. The earliest records I remember were folk songs by Marais and Miranda on old 78’s. Josef Marais was from South Africa and once he met his wife Miranda, they had a successful partnership singing and playing South African traditional folk ballads as well as others. How well I remember “Train to Kimberly,” with its sounds imitating the train, a song made by native South Africans who watched the first trains running up to the diamond mines. I find here http://www.maraisandmiranda.com/, that the lullaby I’ve always used “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” may also have come from them!

One of the few things on television my Dad came out of his study to watch was the Tennessee Ernie Ford variety television show, which ran from 1956 to 1961. I see it as a pre-cursor to the folk music hit scene in the 1960’s. Like his earlier radio show, it included country and western and pop songs and a gospel song at the end of every evening. We owned some of his gospel albums and I can still hear Tennessee Ernie’s voice singing songs such as “Faith of Our Fathers.”

Ian & Sylvia

Folk music came out of the woodwork and spun a hit show across the television networks called “Hootenanny” from 1963 to 1964. My Dad set up a reel to reel magnetic tape recorder above the television set and taped all the shows! We kids learned how to use it and I remember many evenings holding my littlest sister as she fell asleep to the music of Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, The Chad Mitchell Trio.

Looking back, I find that “Hootenanny” sparked controversy in folk circles, unbeknownst to those of us out in the hinterlands. Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie were the first to publicize the term “hootenanny,” but Seeger was asked to perform only if he provided information about his past involvements with the Communist Party. He refused and many folk singers boycotted the show as a result. Seeger’s first appearance on network television was on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1969. By then I was long gone. I heard the legendary Seeger in the flesh only once, hosting and singing in impromptu folk/blues concerts below the Lincoln Memorial at the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. in 1968.