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.
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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.
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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
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.
--
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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/
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