ARTIST | SONG | ALBUM |
---|---|---|
John Lee Hooker | Great Fire Of Natchez | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
John Lee Hooker | Bus Station Blues | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
Mississippi Fred McDowell, Annie Mae McDowell & Rev. Robert Wilkins | What Do You Think About Jesus | Blues With A Feeling |
Mississippi Fred McDowell | Lord I'm Going Down South | The Blues at Newport 1964 |
Rev. Gary Davis | Samson and Delilah | Rev. Gary Davis At Newport |
Rev. Gary Davis | You Got to Move | Rev. Gary Davis At Newport |
Mississippi John Hurt | Spikedriver Blues | Newport Folk Festival 1963 |
Mississippi John Hurt | Stagolee | Newport Folk Festival 1963 |
Mississippi John Hurt | Trouble, I've Had It All My Days | Live Oberlin College & Newport '63 |
Skip James | Sick Bed Blues | Blues At Newport 1964 |
Skip James | Hard Time Killing Floor Blues | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
Son House | Death Letter Blues | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
Son House | Son's Blues | Blues With A Feeling |
Son House w/ Mance Lipscomb | Pony Blues | Great Bluesmen Newport |
Muddy Waters | Walkin' Blues | Blues With A Feeling |
Muddy Waters | Flood | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
Muddy Waters | I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man | At Newport 1960 |
Doc Reese | Hey Rattler | The Blues at Newport 1964 |
Elizabeth Cotton | Freight train | The Blues at Newport 1964 |
Mance Lipscomb | Freddie | Blues With A Feeling |
Lightnin' Hopkins | Mojo Hand | Live At Newport |
Jesse Fuller | San Francisco Bay Blues | Blues With A Feeling |
Jesse Fuller | Double Double Do Love You | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
Robert Pete Williams | The Prodigal Son | The Prodigal Son |
Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry | Key To The Highway | Blues At Newport 1963 |
Sleepy John Estes | Cleanup At Home | Blues at Newport |
Howlin' Wolf | Dust My Broom | Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966 |
Howlin' Wolf | Meet Me In The Bottom | Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966 |
Memphis Slim | Harlem Bound | Newport Folk Festival: Best of the Blues |
Show Notes:
Rev. Robert Wilkins, Newport, 1964 |
The Newport Folk Festival is an annual folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the previously established Newport Jazz Festival. The Newport Folk Festival was founded in 1959 by George Wein, founder of the already-well-established Newport Jazz Festival, backed by its original board: Theodore Bikel, Oscar Brand, Pete Seeger and Albert Grossman. The festival in its initial guise ran from 1959 to 1970, with no festivals scheduled in 1961 or 1962. The festival was revived in 1985. The festival's beginning in 1959 parallel the blues revival period and all of the great rediscovered bluesman appeared at the festival. The first bluesmen to appear at the festival were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee in 1959. Others who performed at Newport include Muddy Waters, who issued a live album of their 1960 performance, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Rev. Robert Wilkins, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Pete Williams, Lightnin' Hopkins and many others. Today is part two of or look at the great blues performances of Newport in particular chronological order. The following information comes from the book Blues Music in the Sixties A Story in Black and White by Urlich Adelt.
"Even during the hiatus of folk song enthusiasm in the 1950s, a small group of connoisseurs kept promoting the music and helped to prepare for the full-scale folk revival between 1958 and 1965. 20 The folk music magazine Sing Out! was launched in 1950 as a small-scale operation and would grow into a formidable publication in the 1960s. Harry Smith’s six-disc Anthology of American Folk Music, which featured commercial recordings of blues, gospel, and string band music from the 1920s and 1930s, came out on Folkways in 1952 and would serve as an inspiration for many emerging folk musicians in the 1960s and as an impetus to rediscover the musicians featured on the recordings.
The Newport Folk Festival was one of the main catalysts of the 1960's folk revival. The showcasing of rediscovered blues artists, in particular in the years between 1963 and 1965, aptly demonstrates the emergence of a distinctive white blues fan culture that drew from notions of folk authenticity developed in nineteenth-century Europe and refined by the folk revivalists. …The Newport Folk Festival also revealed a particular form of antimodern blues purism, which entailed a nostalgic rediscovery of and hunt for prewar black musicians. This purism would eventually clash with the diluted but not necessarily less racialist white notions of blues authenticity represented by the plugging in of Mike Bloomfield and others.
Howlin Wolf with Hubert Sumlin on Guitar, Newport Folk Festival (1966) by David Gahr |
Although the first two Newport Folk Festivals in 1959 and 1960 were financial disasters, they drew about twelve thousand people each, an impressive number for the time. …The financial problems of both the jazz and the folk festival and the raucous crowds at the jazz festival in 1960 forced the organizers to cancel the folk festival in 1961 and 1962. …After the two-year hiatus, the Newport Folk Festival became a nonprofit operation in 1963. Among the board members of the newly established Newport Folk Foundation were George Wein, Pete Seeger, and Alan Lomax. The foundation’s mission was 'to promote and stimulate interest in the arts associated with folk music.' In addition to organizing the festival, this included fostering folk music and material culture in the field and in schools. Ralph Rinzler, another member of the board of directors, worked as talent and folklore coordinator and would seek out potential performers for the festival in rural regions of the United States and Canada.In an attempt to democratize the festival, each participant would receive a standard fee of fifty dollars (regardless of popularity) as well as travel and food reimbursements. The directors invited a larger number of amateur musicians, more women and musicians from a wider musical spectrum.
Interestingly, although the blues was racially coded as black or of black origin at Newport, much of the music in question was a nostalgic rehash of styles dating back to the 1920s and 1930s fraught with essentialist notions of blackness, and therefore few black people attended the concerts. Blues performers had only represented a small part of the lineup at the first two Newport Folk Festivals, but they became one of the major attractions in the years between 1963 and 1965 and contributed to a genre that fans could separate from folk music."