Daily Archives: June 1, 2017

Rick Massimo, who covered the event for nine years for The Journal, traces the ups and downs of the festival from its beginning to its current renaissance.

There's been a whole lot written about the Newport Folk Festival since 1959, when Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio and a very young Joan Baez played at Freebody Park. Entire forests have been denuded to supply enough pages for the endless descriptions, anecdotes and analyses of the night in 1965 when Bob Dylan "went electric."

Now former Providence Journal reporter Rick Massimo has written the first book to cover the entire history of the Folk Festival, titled "I Got a Song; A History of the Newport Folk Festival." Massimo, who covered the event for nine years, traces the ups and downs of the festival from its beginning to its current renaissance, when tickets are sold out even before the acts are announced.

Massimo, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said the book grew out of a series of stories he wrote for The Journal to mark the 50th anniversary of the Festival in 2009.

The Journal had sent Massimo to New York, where he spent the day with George Wein, the founding producer of the festival (and its older brother, the Newport Jazz Festival). On the train ride back to Providence, Massimo said, he was planning a series of articles, and realized there was enough material there for a book.

And here it is, from the Wesleyan University Press, with an official publication date of Tuesday.

"The book is so valuable to me, I can't tell you," Wein said in a phone interview. "It brings back memories of things I've forgotten about. It's so important that we know our own history. We didn't keep records the way we should have back then, which was a mistake on our part. But we were too busy just trying to put on the festivals."

Massimo pointed out that Wein is a jazz man through and through, with a deep knowledge (and love) for jazz. Folk, not so much.

So, Massimo wrote, over the years Wein has employed four men to serve as his "native guides" to the folk world: Albert Grossman, Pete Seeger, Bob Jones and Jay Sweet.

"He knows what he doesn't know," Massimo said of Wein. "And he knows what he needs to get to make up for that."

"My job in life has been to create things," Wein said. "But I never tried to be a micro-manager. You have to give autonomy to the people who are working for you."

Of the four native guides, Seeger is the most famous and most loved. Jay Sweet, current executive producer for the Newport Festivals Foundation, frequently invokes Seeger's spirit, and the Folk Festival runs a program each day called "For Pete's Sake" to honor the traditions of bluegrass, gospel and roots music.

It was Seeger who presided over the early '60s period that Wein dubbed "Utopia," when every performer played for $50 each, and the spirit of the civil-rights movement was a palpable presence. Utopia was aptly represented in 1963, when Dylan, Baez, Seeger, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul & Mary were among those singing "We Shall Overcome" at the festival finale.

Utopia was punctuated by the night of July 25, 1965, when Dylan split the folk world by playing with a rock band.

Massimo captures the event by assembling an artful collage of eyewitness accounts, fragmented and often contradictory. The crowd booed. Or they cheered. Or both. Seeger wanted to cut the power cables with an ax. Or he didn't. What Dylan did was a horrible sellout. Or it was fantastic.

"It didn't take me long to realize that the range of recollections on the part of the people who were there, that was the story," Massimo said. "It's refracted through so many different lenses, and the fact that there is so little agreement says so much about what happened."

The Folk Festival has had its share of down times in its 58-year history, and from 1971 to 1985 it disappeared from Newport entirely, overwhelmed by the impact of rock and the riots that marred the Newport Jazz Festival.

The festival returned to Newport in the '80s to a different location, at Fort Adams State Park, and a different vibe. For one thing, the music ended by sundown. And the festival acquired corporate sponsors.

If anyone symbolized the festival in those years, it was the Indigo Girls, who played eight times between 1991 and 1999. What's more, they respected the history and communal ethos of the festival.

But by 2006, Massimo wrote, the festival was at a low point. Even the Indigo Girls, who used to generate sellouts, only drew 4,600 people (out of a possible 10,000). In 2007, Wein sold his festivals to an outfit called Festival Network. But by 2009, Festival Network had defaulted on its payments to the state, which owns Fort Adams, and Wein had grabbed the reins again.

One of the few holdovers from Festival Networks was Sweet, who would become the fourth of Wein's "native guides." Sweet has made the Newport Folk Festival a place to be once again, programming hip young choices such as The Avett Brothers, Fleet Foxes, the Decembrists, the Lumineers and Rhode Island's Deer Tick, plus surprises such as Jack White, Beck, and Roger Waters.

Sweet uses the festival's storied history as a draw, and expects the people who play Newport to know they are somewhere special.

"I think the key phrase is 'Let them know you know where you are,'" said Massimo. "If you can play a set that indicates you know you're at a festival that was started by George Wein and Pete Seeger, you will be OK."

Massimo is confident that Wein, 91, has put a structure in place that will keep the Folk Festival (and the Jazz Festival) in Newport after he has gone. The Folk Festival is located on a peninsula on an island, Massimo said, and it will never be a massive happening such as Coachella or Bonaroo. But as long as it maintains its organic, word-of-mouth appeal, it should be fine.

The question of what constitutes folk music was debated well before the Newport Folk Festival started, and continues to this day, and Massimo poses a series of rhetorical questions early in his book: Is it folk if it's played by a professional musician. Is it folk if it's played on an electric guitar? Is it folk music if it's popular? Or not popular?

In Wein's mind, folk music is still being made. "There are young people who want to play acoustic instruments, and they want to sing songs related to what is happening in the world," he said.

Massimo will be at Books on the Square in Providence on July 27, at the Newport Folk Festival July 30, and at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River on Aug. 2.

asmith@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7485

On Twitter:@asmith651

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New book chronicles Newport Folk Festival - The Providence Journal

Sometimes, one has to see political narratives not in terms of instrumental tactics, or technocratic probes but in terms of folklore and stereotypes. They capture the nature of truth in a way that a secular narrative cannot. One senses this as one looks at the BJPs ambitions to conquer the south.

In an electoral sense, the BJP is an outsider to south India. It is stereotypically a Hindu-Hindi party. It today claims to be a national party ready to spread the saffron wave deep south. At one level, it feels like an alien invasion. Fundamental to this strategy is the years of networking built by the RSS. The BJP is only the tip of the iceberg completing an electoral victory after the RSS has entered the south. The geographies of the imagination do not convey the idea of an election but more an act of infiltration.

For years, the south was a fortress which the BJP could not enter. Part of the reason for this is that the BJP spoke an idiom of nation-state and identity politics the south did not share. The BJP reflected a narrative the south was contemptuous of. It reflected the waves of social movements, which had fought for social justice, while the BJP remained a casteist party. Second, the BJP equated Hindi with India, an equation which the south, particularly Chennai, would not accept. One remembers Annadurai talking of a seceding south being listened to by a tolerant Congress. It is a prospect a BJP would not tolerate. It is the emptying out of political movements and the return of pragmatic politics that has made the south ready for BJP.

I remember as a child I went home for vacation to the south. As I crossed the Andhra Pradesh border, I almost felt I was seceding every summer. The south, I felt, was a different country where we behaved differently. Apart from Bollywood, as a child, I did not feel Hindi India had much to offer. Frankly, I felt as Indian as anyone, it is only the BJP dialect I felt was parochial. The decline of a cosmopolitan south concerned with justice has made it vulnerable to the BJP.

In fact, when one thinks of politics in Kerala, one thought of the Church, the CPI(M), and the Congress. There was a vitality to the debates on land and even the Church had a sense of the organic, native, and indigenous the BJP could never have. Today Marxist ideology is dead, the Church is conservative, the Congress dead-wood. It is as if a whole cast of characters and a wonderful set of scripts brilliantly enacted by the Congress and CPI(M) have been erased. The result is the entry of the BJP as a B grade alternative to the great cameo acts of the past. In a way, what one sees here is the decline of acts of political justice. The new aspirational, mobile, global south Indian is more ready for the BJP and Narenda Modi than for epic battles of ideology and electoral politics.

The BJP knows its footprints are still new. It has to adapt local styles and heroes and the irony is that film which once kept it out is becoming the vehicle for its belated entry. In the earlier era, that film scripted a theory of politics that made the BJP irrelevant. But one must remember it was in an era where the film star and the politician was one person, like the DMK script writers, like Rama Rao, or Raj Kumar. Film and politics were warp and weft of one imagination. Today the ideological power of the film is over. What it however left behind was the fan club, cadre of fans who were as powerful as the CPI(M) cadre or the RSS shakha. In a pragmatic way, the BJP has decided to co-opt the stars with fan clubs, giving them a fan base which eventually becomes a party base.

There is something surreal about the possibility of a Rajinikanth joining hands with a Modi. It is like a confluence of two badly scripted films. It is like politics as a symbolic fiction and film as a symbolic politics combining to create a new utopia, a hybridity to fill up the emptiness of southern politics. It is as if a pan-Indian second-hand state is being created, which makes pragmatic sense to both sides. A Rajinikanth keeps southern populist honour intact as RSS cadre merge with is fans in surreal delight. Rajinikanth could have been a counter to the Modi wave, giving a respite to southern politics. Unfortunately, an alliance of convenience might make him the Trojan horse of Indian politics. For an old-fashioned politico like me, it is the ultimate nightmare. Politics is the happy transition actors in the twilight of stardom are looking for and the BJP has a pragmatic sense of this.

The BJP is a master of factional politics in Andhra Pradesh. Fundamentally, it acts as if every party is a regional extension to its nationalist presence. It becomes both a complement and an opposition to each party quietly capturing the oppositional space, which is a temptation to many out of power politicians.

Its real politics is its politics of patience. And pragmatism. The arrival of the BJP will create a new pragmatic politics without the old colour and character of the south. It will be an irony of democracy, which political pundits will take years to recover from.

Shiv Visvanathan is social science nomad

The views expressed are personal

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Modi, Rajini, churches: Why south India finds BJP more acceptable now - Hindustan Times