When We Were Good

The Folk Revival

Author: Robert Cantwell
ISBN: 9780674951334

When We Were Good traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the sixties from early nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy; the Jewish entertainment and political cultures of New York in the 1930s; the Almanac singers and the wartime crises of the 1940s; the watershed record album Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music; and finally to the cold-war reactionism of the 1950s. This drove the folk-song movement, just as Pete Seeger and the Weavers were putting "On Top of Old Smokey" and "Goodnight, Irene" on the Hit Parade, into a children's underground of schools, summer camps, and colleges, planting the seeds of the folk revival to come. The book is not so much a history as a study of the cultural process itself, what the author calls the dreamwork of history.Cantwell shows how a body of music once enlisted on behalf of the labor movement, antifascism, New Deal recovery efforts, and many other progressive causes of the 1930s was refashioned as an instrument

Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publish Date: 1996

Subjects: History / United States / 20th Century, Music / Ethnic, Music / Genres & Styles / Folk & Traditional

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Raza Recource Centro (Location: Wall B, Shelf 1)