What's old _ and new _ at Newport folk festival
http://www.newsok.com/whats-old-and-new-at-newport-folk-festival/article/feed/62850
ERIC TUCKER
Published: July 30, 2009
Joan Baez was just 18 when she performed at the first Newport Folk
Festival, a self-described neurotic and high maintenance teenager who
remembers trembling in her sandals as she waited her turn on stage.
She sang in her signature soprano that night, and her career quickly
took off; she released an album on a major record label, landed on
Time magazine's cover and made repeat appearances at the festival
alongside on-off romantic partner Bob Dylan.
"I didn't faint; I sang, and that was the beginning of a very long
career," Baez says about her 1959 festival appearance. "It's all very
extraordinary that my career has been going on all that long time and
so has Newport."
Baez returns to Newport this weekend as the heralded festival marks
its 50th anniversary. She shares the bill with 90-year-old Pete
Seeger, another of the festival's original performers and a towering
folk icon, as well as Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins and more contemporary acts.
The half-century milestone lends an air of nostalgia to an event that
not only helped pioneer the concept of grand-scale outdoor concerts
but has also been inexorably linked to fierce social activism
especially in its early years.
"The Newport Folk Festival has always sort of been the standard
bearer of early music festivals," says New York rock radio
personality Dennis Elsas. "If you say, 'and they played the Newport
Folk Festival,' it resonates a certain time. It resonates the time of
Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan."
The microphone was often a platform for promoting civil rights and
protesting war.
In 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary, Seeger, Baez, the Freedom Singers and
other performers clutched hands and belted out the civil rights
anthem "We Shall Overcome." That same year, his first at Newport,
Dylan performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game," which recounts the
assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. And Baez joined
audience members and representatives of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee on a civil rights march through Newport.
"I think it showed that songs can be an important thing in
democracy," says Seeger, who will close out both nights of this
year's festival with a singalong. "If we call this a democratic
country, how do you make it a democratic country? And songs are among
the ways it's made."
The folk festival was started in Newport by music impresario George
Wein as an offshoot to his jazz festival, which began in 1954 and
celebrates its 55th anniversary in August.
"There was a utopian feeling there," says Wein, 83, who continues to
operate both festivals. "All the artists got $50, no matter how big
or how small they were. And the money was used to just go out and
find folk performers and bring them up the next year."
Baez had been making the coffeehouse and folk club circuit in the
late 1950s when she caught the attention of folk singer Bob Gibson,
who invited her to appear alongside him at the first Newport festival.
The pair sang "We Are Crossing Jordan River" and "Virgin Mary Had One
Son." The audience of thousands was the largest Baez had ever seen,
and she was hardly the self-assured performer she may have seemed.
"Looking back, I barely know that child who stepped onto that stage,"
Baez says. "That child who was up on the stage was 18 years old and
had a high, high soprano and was as neurotic as anybody could
possible be and was high, high maintenance."
The festival did more than advance her career. Guthrie introduced his
epic "Alice's Restaurant" to a mass audience in 1967. James Taylor
played there in 1969 at age 21 and Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison
were there before becoming household names.
Then, of course, there's Dylan.
He was 22 at his first Newport performance in 1963 and easily
solidified his role in the folk canon, bellowing out topical solo
ballads with his guitar and harmonica.
He famously turned the genre upside down in 1965 when he performed
with an electric guitar.
"I was so mad myself, I said, 'Damn it, if I had an ax, I'd cut the
cable,'" Seeger recalls.
Baez says she felt betrayed, though the sentiment passed.
And Wein recalls coaxing Dylan to return to the stage unplugged
to assuage the crowd.
"I said, 'There'll be a riot out there, Bobby, if you don't go back.'
He said, 'I don't have a guitar.' And I said, 'Does anyone have a
guitar for Dylan?' Of course, 20 guitars went up in the air."
The festival dwindled in popularity in the late 1960s as interest in
rock music peaked, Wein says. Rowdy fans crashed the gates at the
1971 jazz festival, and Wein temporarily relocated the event to New
York. The Newport City Council voted that same year against a folk
festival, which wouldn't return to the city until 1985.
Baez and Seeger have performed on and off at Newport over the years,
and Dylan returned in 2002.
Festival organizers contemplated making the 50th anniversary into a
reunion show but decided contemporary acts, including the
Decemberists, Neko Case and Iron Wine, should be included too, says
co-producer Jay Sweet, explaining: "If you don't continually
replenish with the newer voices that will then become their
generation's voices, if you don't do that, there's going to be a gap there."
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Joan Baez receives warm welcome
Friday, July 31, 2009
By DONNIE MOORHOUSE
NORTHAMPTON - Joan Baez knew it would be a good night the moment she
stepped on stage to begin her Tuesday performance at the Pines
Theater in Look Park. The crowd was standing already, showering her
with the praise of anticipation.
"I can see you are going to be a tough crowd to crack," she joked,
before opening her 65-minute set with "Lily of the West."
Certainly the audience's anticipation (not necessarily expectation)
was warranted. They were about to witness a legendary folk performer
in a first-class venue on one of the first dry nights of summer.
Just as certainly you could debate whether or not Baez delivered the
goods over the course of the 19-song presentation - which was as much
about the songwriters she admired as it was a retrospective of her career.
Baez has always been a first-class interpreter of the songs of her
time, covering Dylan, and in recent performances adding John Lennon's
"Imagine," and the traditional "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
Steve Earle was the object of her affection on this night in the Pines.
From her new release "Day After Tomorrow," she offered the T-Bone
Burnett/Elvis Costello penned "Scarlet Tide," and the Steve Earle
song (Earle produced the new record) "God is God."
She also covered Earle's "Christmas in Washington," staying away from
any real discussion of the politics of the song other than to call
the nation's capital "a dangerous place."
Baez did dedicate "Joe Hill" to celebrate "the power and strength of
the Iranian people" and performed "Gospel Ship," a song she referred
to as "white gospel."
Her voice failed her at times, most notably flattening out on Eliza
Gilkyson's "Rose of Sharon" and "Just The Way You Are," a song
written by Dirk Powell, a member of her four-piece band.
Baez shelved the band for a handful of songs, preferring first to go
a capella and then delivering a solo acoustic version of "House Carpenter."
As powerful as her reading of "Long Black Veil" may have been, it was
negated by a meandering cover of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's
Alright," which included, unfortunately, her imitation of Dylan's style.
But there were few in the house, without a pen in hand, who were
willing to critique the singer. It was much more a chance to pay
homage to Baez, which they did at every turn.
Baez returned for two-song encore that was highlighted by the classic
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."
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