Ronald D. Cohen (1940–2023)

I really wanted to like this book, but there's something about it that's unsatisfactory. Specifically: It's too centered on Pete Seeger and Israel Young. Both are important to the story, but you might leave this book thinking they're the entire story.

The book's well researched and told well. It covers the background of the folk "revival" of the early 1960s well, and doesn't entirely dismiss the work done by the popularizers who dominated what Seeger called "The Folk Scare." And it mentions--and examines--many contributors to folk music's (popularity? existence? I can't find the right word) from the 40s through the 60s. But it keeps returning to Pete and Izzy. And it pretty much ignores the fact that folk music survived, and still has both an audience and performers.

What the book doesn't do is put the music and the period into a useful context. That it briefly became part of the Popular Music Machine is important; so is the way that machine works. And there's no acknowledgement that although that machine damages most everything it touches, most of those musicks manage to survive, pretty much unharmed, after the machine moves elsewhere.

In fact, we need a book that explicitly addresses those issues. It's part of our cultural reality. This isn't that book.

This book's worth reading, and certainly you'll learn from it. I just found its emphasis a little misguided.

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Had some fun reading about Ralph Rinzler, here. Ralph's role in the bluegrass community is similar to his folk community involvement, but he seems to have been more important to the bluegrassers. Hadn't realized that he'd worked in both genres; I'm guessing he didn't separate the roles.… (mais)