THIS BOOK TELLS THE story of the Boston-Cambridge Folk Revival of the early 1960s, which set about to rekindle the fires of traditional music while doing its part to tend to the unfinished pursuit of liberty and justice for all in America. The Folk Revival, which deployed the integrity of our enduring national music as counterbalance to a toxic and heedless modern consumer culture, lasted roughly from 1959 to 1968. It is my belief that the Revival was an extension of the vigor of the eastern frontier, a renewal of the vows of the American Revolution, a restatement of the visions of transcendentalists, a reprise of the fervor of the abolitionists, and a reincarnation of the convictions of the Progressive Era in New England history.
In the beginning, the Folk Revival was meant to be not about celebrities but rather about art and ideals, regional culture, and youthful community. Its young participants sought to marshal the power of tradition, relationships, and creativity as an alternative to a civilization dominated by technology, materialism, and competition. Many of the people who were touched by folk music in their youth are still living among us. As both Club 47 and the Newport Folk Festival have marked the sixtieth anniversary of their founding, this seems to be a good time to take stock of the long musical inheritance and the growing legacy of the Folk Revival of New England.
I WAS DRIVING NORTH on Route 6 toward Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the spring of 2017, across a Cape Cod landscape that was just losing the last of its snow cover. In a few months, these lanes would be choked with summer traffic, but under the lemony light of an early April morning, the road was nearly deserted. In the truck with me was Betsy Siggins, who at one time or another had been Joan Baezâs college roommate at Boston University, comanager of Club 47 in Cambridge, and founder of the musical archive Folk New England. We were due to arrive at radio station WOMR to join disc jockey Bob Weiser at an on-air meeting with folk singer Dayle Stanley, whom neither Betsy nor I had seen since 1965.
In the early 1960s, dozens of young women musicians had followed in the musical footsteps of Odetta and Joan Baez, singing repertoires of traditional English ballads, African American blues, Appalachian tunes, and love songs to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars. Dayle Stanley stood out because she had begun to compose her own words and melodies, and because her work ventured beyond the conventional ideas of âfolk musicâ and into the creative realm of what might have been called âart songs.â Her writing stood on its own as poetry, and her music blended traditional forms and classical influences. Later in the decade, Joni Mitchell would come on the scene, followed, over time, by Carly Simon, Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, and a host of other singer-songwriters who became leading forces in American music. But back in a time when women singers in the folk scene were far more likely to be described as âinterpretersâ than as âcreators,â Dayle and her contemporaries Buffy Sainte-Marie and Bonnie Dobson had been among the earliest composers of the Folk Revival.
In 1963, Dayle was voted Bostonâs âMost Popular Female Folk Artistâ in a poll conducted by Broadside magazine. Growing up in Weymouth, Massachusetts, she had trained for opera and honed skills that she began to apply to folk music around the time that John F. Kennedy was inaugurated president. Dayle became an integral part of the new wave of about a dozen young Cambridge folk singers who gravitated around a coffeehouse called Club 47 Mount Auburn, located a bit south of Harvard Yard. There, an espresso-drinking, chess-playing clientele could hear her sing from a small stage that she shared with Tom Rush, Jackie Washington (whose given name is Jack LandrĂłn), Geoff Muldaur, Sylvia Mars, Keith & Rooney, Jim Kweskin, the Charles River Valley Boys, and, most notably, Joan Baez.
The Folk Revival gained momentum at nearly three dozen venues throughout Massachusetts, and many of the first performers started releasing recordings on small labels. Dayleâs first album, Child of Hollow Times, came out in 1963, a collection of love ballads, civil rights anthems, peace songs, and her own compositions. On the strength of that first record, Dayle won her Broadside âelectionâ; her songs were featured on radio station WBZ, and that September she appeared on WGBHâs televised program Folk Music USA. Her pure voice, choice of material, and riveting beauty drew a loyal audience, and in 1964 she released a second album, After the Snow. About a year later, she disappeared from public view, suddenly and completely. The Folk Revival would come to an end by 1968, and youthful attention moved on to rock music, adulthood, and the decades that followed, but at folk music gatherings and, later, on related websites, the question was often raised, Whatever happened to Dayle Stanley?
By 2014, I had become friends with David Wilson, former editor of the Broadside, and soon afterward I started volunteering with Betsy Siggins to collect recordings and publications from the 1960s for the Folk New England archive, which at that point resided in a number of personal residences and, in part, at the Cambridge Historical Society. Through David, I heard that Dayle might be living on the North Shore under a new name, and we sent word around folk music circles that we were interested in talking with her. Eventually, she got in touch, and it was arranged that Dayle, Betsy, and I would meet for an interview at the radio station in Provincetown.
We arrived early and walked up to the second-floor reception area. We sat for a bit, drinking coffee, then Betsy went down the hall for a moment. While she was gone, the elevator door across the way opened, and a short-haired woman in her seventies in a wheelchair was helped into the lobby by the gentleman who accompanied her. Dayle looked at me and asked, âShould I know you?â âNo,â I answered, âI was a fifteen-year-old kid watching you play at Club 47 . . . but you might remember her,â and I pointed to Betsy, who was just walking back toward us. Dayleâs face lit up, and she took Betsyâs hand in hers. âOh, Betsy!â she cried, âYou were so good to me!â
The two friends talked, exchanging stories of times together and the fifty years that had passed since last they had spoken. The decades of marriages, children, moves, and jobs were covered in a matter of minutes. The story emerged of Dayleâs abrupt retreat from performing; in reaction to personal crisis, she had felt compelled to leave her music behind and to begin a new life as âRamona Murrayâ in a nearby seaport town. She had raised a family, but challenges and serious physical illnesses had taken years, and then the love of a new husband, to heal. With the passage of time, she felt ready to come forward and talk with us at the studio and to hear songs that she had not listened to for five decades.
âWhat would you like us to play?â our announcer asked, and Dayle turned to me and said firmly, âYou choose.â I picked a civil rights song she had written titled âNobody Knows That I Have a Name.â As the record spun on the turntable, a compelling song issued forth from a youthful voice, and, in no time, radio host Bob Weiser was looking at me as if to say, Where has this been? After the piece came to a close, I turned to ask about its creation.
âDayle, you grew up in Massachusetts, in a comfortable suburban town, and yet you wrote one of the most powerful songs to come out of the Civil Rights Movement. How did you do that? How did you manage to put yourself so firmly in the circumstances of a Black man about to be murdered for stealing a bag of groceries?â
I watched her reflect for a moment, put her hand to her chin, and then she spoke, emphatically and clearly. Fifty years fell away, her physical challenges with them, and her eyes flashed as she said, âIt just wasnât fair,â she said, pronouncing the last word as if, in two Massachusetts syllables, it rhymed with day-uh. âIt was about the way they were treating Black people back then, not just in the South, but everywhere.â And then, turning in affectionate remembrance to her old friend, she repeated, âIt just wasnât fay-uh, Betsy! We had to do something!â
BETWEEN ROUGHLY 1959 AND 1968, Dayle Stanley, Betsy Siggins, thousands of other young people in New England, and eventually millions of them throughout the country were resolving that they should âdo somethingâ about race relations, about ending war as a method of handling political conflict, and about Americaâs abandonment of its cultural roots and its soul. We found ourselves drawn to music and, in particular, to traditional music, in an attempt to find a source of hope and stability in the throes of a chaotic world. Some of us marched, some of us organized, and some of us joined the Peace Corps. We were drawn together by the sudden, daunting, and exhilarating conviction that we all needed to set about to âmake a better world.â
There is much to remember from those times. Envisioning a better world was easy, but actually venturing forth to make it happen involved turning our backs on much of what we had been raised with in modern American culture. At fourteen years of age, it was easy for me to read Mad magazine and to mock the adult world of careers and conformity; at sixteen, the stories I was seeing on television about the Civil Rights Movement were no laughing matter. By the time I was eighteen, my older friends were coming back from Vietnam more profoundly disturbed than inspired by their service to their country, and the draft card in my wallet felt like a mortgage on both my integrity and my future. America seemed to be riddled with fault lines, and the comforts of suburbia felt walled in by a cocoon of denial and hypocrisy. Our youthful lives were shadowed by the realization that the world was a very troubled and a very hostile place.
Music appeared like a guardian angel. Rock ânâ roll had served to set my generation free, and then folk music gave us inspiration. By its nature, it seemed to be an exercise in bravery: solo, acoustic performances of honest, heartfelt songs by vulnerable souls who were barely beyond adolescence. The music seemed to allow us room to discover ourselves. The beguiling power of melodies and stories were wrapped in the mantle of the past, legacies that had been hidden away until we were old enough to grasp them. If the world was haunted by dragons of bigotry and hatred, we would be ready for them. Folk music was the sword that we could pull from a stone with our youthful and untested arms.
A tide had turned; all we had to do was switch on a radio to hear songs that resonated on college campuses from California to New York: young, vibrant voices singing about green fields, new frontiers, and cabins in the hills. A national folk revival had sprung up in the wake of decades of war and depression. The music sang to us in the swagger of voices from the wild American West and in the syncopated drawls that drifted up our way from the fertile river lands of the South. Songs about Mississippi cotton fields were being sung in a part of the country where the farmland had long since grown up to forest or had been paved into parking lots. Yet, soon enough, we began to realize that, along with the magic that came from the prairies and along the levees, there were old voices, old stories, and old cadences aplenty to be revived right here in New Englandâfrom the countryâs oldest frontier.
I was very lucky to be living in New England, partly because of my proximity to the coffeehouses of Boston and Cambridge, but, underlying that, because I was growing up in a part of the country where the past mattered, where both the landscape and an invisible but persistent sense of ethic seemed to keep an ancient eye on things. I felt this dimension very deeply as a boy, and I read as much local and regional history as I could lay my hands on, using adult library cards borrowed from my dad and from my third-grade teacher. Out in the woods, in the days before the trees were all bulldozed, you could still discover cellar holes and old mill foundations throughout Middlesex County. Once in a great while, you might dig up an arrowhead or an Indian penny, which my young friends and I decided must have been what the Native Peoples had used for money.
On my bicycle, I could visit old house museums with diamond-paned windows and enormous hearths that had been spared the civilized barbarity of Victorian âimprovementâ and, later, the terminal blight of suburban development. Treading on floor planks that were as wide as half a tabletop, peering through wavy glass set in leaded mullions, smelling the summer tang of pine attic boards that remained sturdy, three centuries removed from the forest, I was drawn to look at the world through something other than ten-year-old eyes. I discovered that, right where I lived, the patriot-farmers of the Revolution had been succeeded by the poets, reformers, and back-to-the-landers of transcendentalism. I learned that Henry David Thoreau had not just been a hermit, but that he had also been part of a movement of artists and reformers who had borne witness against the injustices of slavery and the slavery-expanding Mexican War.
Dressed in the vests or crinoline of their days, these people had called for America to turn back from the selfish and self-destructive urges of the Industrial Age. Women should have the right to vote, they said; African Americans should be emancipated; Native Americans should be treated with whatever justice was still possible; and people should not be living lives of âquiet desperation.â There were higher and better callings than being clerks or cogs in the machinery of commerce, and there was redemption to be had in the simplicity of the countryside. Witness had been made to all these truths, two decades before the Civil War, on my own home turf, which was now rapidly filling up with shopping centers, gas stations, and golf courses.
When I first saw Dayle Stanley wearing a jumper and leotards, Peter Childs in a beard and blue jeans, and Bob Dylan in dusty, thirdhand trousers that looked at least three inches wider at the waist than he was, I saw that they were more than âbeatniksâ and âweirdos.â As outlandish as their appearance seemed to my young suburban eyes, the songs they were singing and the manner in which they were singing them rang a whole set of much older bells than I was accustomed to hearing out loud. Begun in the late 1950s, this was a spontaneous creation of a handful of college dropouts, young bohemians, and lovers of traditional music that served to renew the work of New Englandâs revolutionaries, transcendental artists, abolitionists, pacifists, and reformers. In the very same streets of Cambridge that had been trodden by Alcotts and Emersons a hundred years before, young people were now lining up to listen to Joan Baez, Jack LandrĂłn, Tom Rush, and Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band. The Boston-Cambridge Folk Revival was what the era came to be called, and this book is a remembrance of those times and the lives of those who lived them.
THIS FLOWERING OF TRADITIONAL music in New England would last for only about a decade, but its momentum continued to influence events for years. By 1968, many local musicians were leaving for Manhattan, Woodstock, Nashville, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Boston folk singer Ed Freeman, who once described himself as âneck deep in good luck,â went from being a coffeehouse performer of British ballads to being road manager for the Beatlesâ final tour. He also talked his way into New York recording studio work, where he produced albums for Tom Rush, Gregg Allman, Tim Hardin, and Carly Simon. In 1971, Ed arranged and produced Don McLeanâs popular saga âAmerican Pie,â closing the song with a final chorus sung in rousing old ale house fashion by James Taylor, Carly Simon, Livingston Taylor, and Pete Seeger.
A few years later, Maria Muldaur topped the national charts with âMidnight at the Oasis.â Fritz Richmond, her fellow Kweskin Jug Band member, became a recording engineer, working on the creation of albums by Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne. Ragtime piano player Jeff Gutcheon became the original musical director of the New York production Ainât Misbehavinâ. Out in California, Mitch Greenhill took over the management group of Folklore Productions from his father, Manny, and would eventually pass the worldwide business on to his own son, Matthew. The hit song âUp Where We Belong,â cowritten by Buffy Sainte-Marie, won her an Academy Award in 1983.
Geoff Muldaur went west, continuing to apply his incredible vocal talents to traditional music, paying homage to the works of Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Stokes, and Gus Cannon, and eventually venturing into classical music composition. Geoff continues to sing solo, and he regularly teams up with Jim Kweskin in this new century. Betsy Siggins founded an archive of recordings, photographs, and publications that became known as Folk New England. Jim Rooney became one of the most respected figures in Nashville, working with Sun Records guru Ja...
