{"id":24102,"date":"2014-09-01T00:01:12","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T05:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24102"},"modified":"2014-08-31T19:50:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-01T00:50:09","slug":"qotd-1960s-folk-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/09\/01\/qotd-1960s-folk-music\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: 1960s folk music"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I always love it when some record from the &#8220;Sixties folk music boom&#8221; comes on the radio, and one can wallow for three minutes in comically twee clean-cut earnestness: the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Brothers Four and all the other college boys pretending to be field-hands. As for the songs, I quoted in my Seeger send-off this trenchant analysis of his lyric style by James Lileks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8216;If I Had A Hammer&#8217;? Well, what&#8217;s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they&#8217;re about a buck-ninety, tops.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Just so. Anyone can have a hammer, and hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening, hammer out danger, hammer out a warning, hammer out love between one&#8217;s brothers and one&#8217;s sisters all over the land.<\/p>\n<p>But, upon reflection, the fact that the thought is idiotic is, I think, the point. If it made sense, it would sound too polished, too written, too Tin Pan Alley. It can&#8217;t be easy sitting in your study and writing brand-new &#8220;folk&#8221; songs when you&#8217;re a long way from the cotton fields. So somehow these guys got it into their heads that, if you sounded like a simpleton, it would come over as raw and authentic. I once spoke to a Vegas pal of Bobby Darin&#8217;s, who gave an hilarious account of Darin, coming out of his finger-snappy tuxedo phase, and agonizingly re-writing and re-re-writing his &#8220;folk anthem&#8221; &#8220;A Simple Song Of Freedom&#8221; because he was worried it was insufficiently simple.<\/p>\n<p>The legacy of this period is less musical than political: half-a-century back, the self-consciously childlike &#8220;folk song&#8221; met the civil rights movement and helped permanently infantilize the left. I caught an &#8220;anti-war&#8221; protest in Vermont a few years ago and the entire repertoire was from the Sixties, starting with &#8220;Where Have All The Flowers Gone?&#8221;, which as a poignant comment on soldiering was relevant in the Great War but has no useful contribution to make in a discussion on Iraq. And, as I observed of Pete Seeger&#8217;s visit to the &#8220;mass&#8221; protest movement of our own time, the more pertinent question with the Occupy Wall Street crowd is &#8220;Where have all the showers gone?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mark Steyn, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steynonline.com\/6064\/a-mighty-wind\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;A Mighty Wind&#8221;, <em>Steyn Online<\/em><\/a>, 2014-02-01<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I always love it when some record from the &#8220;Sixties folk music boom&#8221; comes on the radio, and one can wallow for three minutes in comically twee clean-cut earnestness: the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Brothers Four and all the other college boys pretending to be field-hands. As for the songs, I quoted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28,41],"tags":[311,200,835],"class_list":["post-24102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","category-quotations","tag-1960s","tag-music","tag-occupymovement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6gK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24103,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24102\/revisions\/24103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}