The Newport Folk Festival is an annual American folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the Newport Jazz Festival. The festival was founded by music promoter and Jazz Festival founder George Wein, music manager Albert Grossman, and folk singers Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Oscar Brand. It was one of the first modern music festivals in America and remains a focal point in folk music. The festival was held in 1959 and 1960, then annually from 1963 to 1969, first at Freebody Park and then at Festival Field. In 1985, Wein revived the festival; it has since been staged annually at Fort Adams State Park.
History Founding The Newport Folk Festival was started in 1959 by George Wein, founder of the well-established Newport Jazz Festival and owner of Storyville, a jazz club in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1958, Wein became aware of the growing Folk Revival movement and began inviting folk artists such as Odetta to perform on Sunday afternoons at Storyville. The afternoon performances consistently sold out and Wein began to consider the possibility of a "folk afternoon embedded within the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival". Wein envisioned the program to be "similar in scope and tone to the highly successful blues and gospel shows" that had taken place at the Jazz Festival in previous years. Wein asked Odetta, Pete Seeger, and the Weavers to perform in the afternoon in addition to the Kingston Trio. Some in the jazz community accused Wein of crass commercialism in booking these groups because they deviated from, and had a larger following than, most jazz musicians of the time. This pressure, coupled with his various conversations with those in the folk community, made it clear to Wein that an afternoon program at the Jazz Festival would not suffice and that there was demand for a full folk festival.
Aware of his own limitations in the folk scene, Wein asked Albert Grossman, then Odetta's manager, to join him in planning and producing the festival. Grossman accepted and began working with Wein to book talent and organize the weekend. Pete Seeger was also involved with the founding of the festival. Theodore Bikel and Oscar Brand were also founders of the festival.
The inaugural festival, held at Freebody Park, included Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, the Kingston Trio, John Jacob Niles, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Odetta, The New Lost City Ramblers, and more. Perhaps the most notable performance was the surprise debut of the eighteen-year-old Joan Baez, who was brought on as a guest of Bob Gibson.
The festival returned in 1960 and was expanded to include three nights. The lineup placed an emphasis on music diversity, booking performers from Africa, Scotland, Spain, Israel, and Ireland alongside "traditional" folk musicians such as Pete Seeger, Ewan McColl, John Lee Hooker, Cisco Houston, and Tommy Makem.
A tradition of protest The Newport Folk Festival has a rich connection to protest movements. In the '60s, the festival became a platform for artists who played a substantial part in the civil rights and anti-war movements, including Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and the Staple Singers, among many others. In the mid-80s, a new generation of artists—from the Indigo Girls to Tom Morello—also provided keen social commentary from the Newport stage, advocating for women's rights, the LGBTQ community, peace, climate awareness, clean air and water, and the continued call for civil rights activism.Massimo, I Got A Song, 2017 In 1988, Ben & Jerry joined forces with Wein's Festival Productions, Inc. to sponsor the event through 1999, a partnership that helped the festival thrive and reinforced its progressive identity.
Civil Rights Movement In 1962, two young members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed a gospel vocal quartet named the Freedom Singers. And in 1962, Pete and Toshi Seeger assisted the Freedom Singers in organizing a nationwide collegiate tour. As a result, the civil rights movement became deeply embraced by the folk music community. In 1963, the Freedom Singers performed on the first night of the Newport Folk festival, and on the second night Joan Baez joined SNCC activists and roughly 600 festival-goers on a march through Newport. The crowd walked past the Bellevue Avenue mansions and into Touro Park, where SNCC's executive secretary James Forman and Freedom Singers leader Cordell Reagon delivered speeches, rallying support for the March on Washington scheduled for the following March.
For the final performance on Friday, Wein had scheduled Peter, Paul, and Mary. But under the persuasion of Albert Grossman, who was managing Peter, Paul, and Mary, Wein decided to allow Bob Dylan (whom Grossman was also managing) to close the night. After Peter, Paul, and Mary finished their afternoon set, Wein announced that they would reappear at the end of the evening. Dylan performed a set consisting of particularly topical songs: "With God on Our Side", "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall". Peter, Paul, and Mary then returned and performed an encore of "Blowin' in the Wind". Amidst a "deafening roar of applause" they brought to the stage Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Theo Bikel, and the Freedom Singers. The singers stood in a single line facing the audience with crossed arms and clasped hands and began to sing a variation on the Baptist hymn "I'll Overcome Some Day". The hymn's new incarnation -- "We Shall Overcome" -- had become an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement.
Revival of Mississippi John Hurt In 1928, Mississippi John Hurt, a self-taught amateur musician and farmer, recorded 13 songs for Okeh Records which failed to achieve commercial success. Believing his musical career to be over, Hurt continued farming, apparently thinking little of his brief recording gig.
Post WWII, few records cut by southern musicians in the 1920s were commercially available. Hurt's records were particularly rare, since few had been manufactured in the first place. But Harry Smith, a member of a tiny subculture of obsessive, cranky collectors, put two John Hurt cuts on his influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music prompting many blues hobbyists to begin searching for him. In 1963, Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart acquired a tape of Hurt's Avalon Blues through their informal network of tape traders. Hurt had recorded Avalon Blues at the end of a week-long stay in New York that spanned Christmas 1928. Apparently homesick in the big city, Hurt included a line about his home in Avalon being always on his mind.
Hoskins and Stewart were able to locate Avalon and track Hurt down. After asking Hurt to perform, to ensure he was actually who he claimed to be, Hoskins convinced Hurt to move to Washington, D.C., and embark on a national tour.
The tour culminated on Saturday evening of the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, when Mississippi John Hurt performed alongside Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, and John Lee Hooker for a blues workshop at the Newport Casino. The performance is considered to be a seminal moment for the folk revival and caused Hurt to rise to fame. He performed extensively at colleges, concert halls, and coffeehouses and appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, on Pete Seeger's public TV show Rainbow Quest, and had a write up in Time magazine.
Electric Dylan controversy
Bob Dylan's 1963 and 1964 performances solo and with Baez had made him popular with the Newport crowd, but on July 25, 1965, festival headliner Dylan was booed by some fans when he played with several members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band as his backing band.
It is usually said that the reason for the hostile reception by a small number of fans was Dylan's "abandoning" of the folk orthodoxy, or poor sound quality on the night (or a combination of the two). The controversy regarding the reaction of the audience at this event is often overplayed, as it was not the general reaction of the audience, but rather that of a small number of folk "purists", including Pete Seeger. The reaction of "the crowd" to Dylan's performance, certainly from eyewitness accounts, was generally quite enthusiastic. This performance, Dylan's first live "plugged-in" set of his professional career, marked the shift in his artistic direction from folk to rock, and had wider implications for both genres. The performance marked the first time Dylan performed "Like a Rolling Stone" in public. Johnny Cash, who was a major influence on Dylan, had played an electric guitar at the 1964 Newport Festival. A letter which Cash wrote to the editor of Broadside which called for the people at the Newport Folk Festival to "shut up and let him sing" shortly before the 1964 festival had a major influence on Dylan's shift in the direction for his musical career as well.
Despite the musical transition, Dylan's growing status within the larger counterculture ensured that his place in the expanding movement would remain secure.
Dylan did not return to Newport until 2002, when he played a headlining performance while wearing a wig and fake beard.
Johnny Cash introduces Kris Kristofferson In 1969, the Johnny Cash troupe was to perform on opening night of the festival. Cash had recently become aware of Kris Kristofferson, a young, relatively unknown country singer-songwriter, and convinced George Wein to allow Kristofferson to join him onstage. Kristofferson's performance of "Me and Bobby McGee" and other songs gave him a launch into his musical career. The 1969 festival also included the debut festival performance of James Taylor, who performed "Carolina in My Mind" to a standing ovation during a "young performers" showcase. However, Taylor only performed for 15 minutes before Wein ended the festival early with the announcement that Apollo 11 had landed on the Moon.
End of Folk Festival, hiatus, and return The Folk Festival did not return to Newport in 1970, due to financial issues and local controversies involving the Newport Jazz Festival. Following a riot at the jazz festival in 1971, Wein moved his jazz festival to New York, but the folk festival was dormant for over a decade.
In 1981, Wein returned to Newport with his Jazz Festival at a new waterfront site: Fort Adams State Park. Robert L. Jones, Wein's longtime producer, ran the shows. Jones worked for Wein as both a road manager and producer of jazz and blues events. But his life in music began in Boston folk clubs with artists such as Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric von Schmidt, and Bob Dylan, and he first came to Wein's attention as a talent scout, traveling across the country with folklorist Ralph Rinzler to bring undiscovered artists of all kinds to the Newport stage.Vaughn Watson, "Keeping Up With Bob Jones," Providence Journal, 8/1/2002 It was Jones' dream to revive the folk event, and in 1985, he persuaded the Weins to bring back the Newport Folk Festival.
1985-2006