Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I assume you mean that I'm a gourmet and expert on '60s folk-rock,
rather than post-punk folk-rock. Not to cop out, but I feel like I'm
not enough of a fan or expert of post-punk folk-rock to comment in
depth. None of the folk-rock-influenced paisley underground stuff
grabbed me; it seemed to me like duller second-generation derivations
of the real thing, sometimes latching on to the most surface attributes
(12-string guitars, retro cothes) without offering anything like as
much substance in the songs.

Here are a few '80s albums with some folk-rock influence that I like,
though -- none of them especially folk-rock or paisley underground, but
all of them out of the indie/underground scene:

Penelope Houston, Birdboys (moody singer-songwriter/folk-rock from
ex-lead singer of the Avengers, one of the first Californian punk
bands)

The Subterranean Dining Rooms, There's No Rock'n'Roll Singer Without a
Spanish Knife (weird Italian band, a little like Syd Barrett singing
folk-rock as if English were a third language)

Jeff Kelly, Coffee in Nepal (sometimes sounds a little like Tim
Buckley's folkiest stuff crossed with Ray Davies)

Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane, Moonlight (strange primitive auteurish
folk, like a skeweed uncommercial early Joni Mitchell)
  

    
Gene Clark was the Byrd who was afraid of flying; that was one of the
reasons he left the group in 1966.

All of Clark's post-Byrds albums came out in the States (and almost
always in the UK as well), with the exception of "Roadmaster," a 1973
album of outtakes that onl came out in Holand. There was also a
Dutch-only 1975 compilation, "Kansas City Southern," so perhaps he had
an especially strong cult following in Holland (as Gram Parsons does).

I don't know if he had an especially strong following in the UK in the
1970s, but he definitely seems to have a much stronger cult in the UK
now than he does in the States now. You might have seen that the August
issue of MOJO gave a five-star frothing-at-the-mouth review of a
reissue of his 1974 album "No Other" (with bonus tracks). As I
mentioned near the beginning of this topic, I just don't get Clark's
solo work, though I loved his stuff in the early Byrds. I find much of
his post-Byrds records (some done as part of Dillard & Clark)
dullsville, particularly "No Other," as it happens. But there are
plenty of cultists who disagree.

The answers as to Clark's status and distribution in the UK in the
1970s will likely be in the upcoming Gene Clark biography (to come out
in a year or two on Backbeat Books), by my friend John Einarson. It
should be good; he's interviewed tons of people who knew and worked
with Gene, including all three of the surviving original Byrds
(McGuinn, Hillman, and Crosby).
  

    
Really? I was going to ask if there were anyone around today you felt
embodied the original spirit of folk-rock, and then it looked like
Darrell beat me to it. The reason I was thinking on those lines was
because I remembered when REM first came out, and a lot of older folk
were grumbling "The Byrds did it first, and did it better," and as I
was trying to come up with a counter-argument it occurred to me that
times of innovation move very quickly, and innovators like to keep up
with the current, rather than stick and explore the stuff they've
discovered. Then, later, other innovators come along, innovators of a
different sort, and think "Well, this here certainly has a lot of
potential that hasn't been dealt with," and they work out other
versions of it, with some modern touches based on past history. There
are still, I think, lots of ideas that pop music has discarded or only
briefly dealt with which could be picked up and re-examined. 

Richie slipped in with more. 
  

    
Darrell was asking about the post-punk era so I was commenting about
bands from the '80s, rather than from today. But Ed, as to artists
around today who I think embody the original spirit of folk-rock, or at
least do folk-rock that I like, I'd cite Will Oldham, who's done
off-the-wall songs under various guises (such as Palace and Anomoanon).
I also like Matt Suggs, who sounds like Ray Davies doing Americana.

I should have also said that I don't find lesser derivations of the
original style in subsequent generations a syndrome unique to
folk-rock. I think it happens in every major musical movement:
rockabilly, Chicago electric blues, bop, whatever. It gets harder to be
innovative in the style the more ground gets ploughed, and harder to
avoid sounding self-conscious if you're taking the style as a reference
point decades later.
  

    
I think the whole 'Americana' genre is largely a continuation of the folk-
rock stream, more than it is a branch of country music, which is how it's
often portrayed.  I see danm little, for instance, about the Texas
songwriter scene that's tied to the country music of the last 40 years or so
other than some southern vocal intonations.  It's where you'll find a lot of
the surviving folk-rockers still working, since they don't seem intersted in
pursuing most contemporary pop conventions and can't get played on straight
country radio, and just as folk-rock was the home of the best non-R&B
songwriting of the 60s, Americana is where I find much of the best
songwriting today.
  

    
I think post-1970, Texas singer-songwriters (whether native and/or
Texas-based) have often been noted for boundary-crossing combinations,
in varying degrees, of folk, country, and rock, as well as some R&B,
blues, polka, and more in some cases. Shortly after the 1960s folk-rock
I covered in my books, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, the Flatlanders,
ex-Flatlanders Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and
Townes Van Zandt all did this, and others like Kinky Friedman, Robert
Earl Keen, Nanci Griffith, Tish Hinojosa, Junior Brown, Lyle Lovett,
and Steve Earle could be seen as part of this lineage.

In the 1960s, though, Texas spawned relatively little prominent
folk-rock, although there were musicians in the Texas folk scene who
made their mark after they'd moved, as Janis Joplin did after she went
to San Francisco. There were a few Texas folk-rock connections that I
didn't have the space to go into in the books in great depth, though I
mentioned them. The 13th Floor Elevators had some connections to the
folk scene, and did one great folk-rock song, "Splash I," co-written by
Roky Erickson and Clementine Hall (wife of the Elevators' electric jug
player, Tommy Hall). Johnny Winter did an uncharacteristically Byrdsy
surreal folk-rock song, "Birds Don't Row Boats." The Loose Ends, with
the teenaged T-Bone Burenett, did "A Free Soul." Doug Sahm was firnedly
with Dylan, and the Sir Douglas Quintet did a good ANimals-like
version of the trad folk song "It Was in the Pines" (perhaps better
known by the titles "Black Girl" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?").
Mouse & the Traps did the all-time most accurate "Highway 61"-era
Dylan imitation, "A Public Execution." Jimmy Gilmer of "Sugar Shack"
fame even did some lukewarm folk rock on "Folkbeat." He was friends
with Texas folksinger Carolyn Hester, on whose 1961 Columbia album
Dylan made his first appearance; both Gilmer and Hester were produced
at times by ex-Buddy Holly producer Norman Petty, who worked over the
border in Clovis, New Mexico. And later Gilmer's backup group the
Fireballs had a big hit with a cover of Tom Paxton's "Bottle of Wine."

But there really wasn't a major Texas 1960s folk-rock scene,
particularly in comparison with the huge New York and California ones.
Ed, I know you're very up on Texas music history (Ed wrote "The Sound
of Texas" chapter in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of
Rock'n'Roll"). Any thoughts as to why this was? My feeling is that it's
at least in part due to the absence of really big major labels in
Texas at the time, though there were plenty of indies. I think there
might have been a lot of promising folk-rock-type singer-songwriters
and groups in Texas that recorded little or not at all.
  

    
By the '70s, though, Austin was quite hot. And still is, imho.
  

    
Well, another reason there wasn't much of a music scene at *all* in
Texas during that period is for the very reason Janis (and Chet Helms,
and Gilbert Shelton, and many others) went to San Francisco: the only
major boho place was Austin, and during LBJ's presidency, it just got
hotter and hotter. Houston had a small folk scene which spawned Guy
Clark and Townes van Zandt, but Dallas' bands (mostly blues bands)
moved to Austin or San Francisco (Steve Miller being a '60s case in
point) because it was a really hostile environment, and Lubbock's
weirdos, too, eventually washed up in Austin.

But from talking to people from that era, Austin just got too hard to
live in for a while: capricious pot busts would yield a joint or two
and suddenly you were seeing sentences of about a century per joint.
The Vulcan Gas Company, the main psychedelic dance hall, was pretty
much harrassed out of business, and strenuous efforts were made to keep
the city "clean" for LBJ's visits and those of visiting dignitaries on
their way to the Ranch in Johnson City. Doug Sahm had glowing tales of
San Francisco, it looked like Janis (and the Mother Earth people, who
included man Austinites in their number like Powell St. John and Toad
Andrews) was doing okay, there were Austinites in a colony over on
Potrero Hill (The House on Connecticut Street being the most famous
center of activity then), the 13th Floor Elevators made much more money
at the Avalon than they did in San Marcos (or Austin), and so why sit
around waiting to get busted when you could move out west and enjoy
yourself? I mean, look what happend to Roky Erickson, found with a
couple of tabs of acid and shipped off to the Rusk State Hospital for
the Criminally Insane and shock treatment-ed almost to death -- and
certainly harmed psychologically almost beyond redemption.

This began to turn around with the coming of the "progressive country"
scene in around 1974. Austin had cooled off legally (although a lot of
the neighborhoods where the freaks had lived had been levelled for
University buildings), Willie Nelson left a burning house and a
disintegrating marriage in Nashville to move to a nice spread near
Dripping Springs and began to appear at freak-friendly venues like the
brand new Armadillo World Headquarters, people like Houston White and
Powell St. John began to move back, and KOKE-FM, under the guidance of
Joe Gracey started this "progressive country" format (which they pretty
much made up as they went along) and found that the Houston folkies
and a lot of the California bands -- New Riders, Commander Cody, etc --
loved that they were getting airplay there alongside Lightnin' Hopkins
and the Dead. Progressive country is the grandfather of Americana, I'd
say. Or, rather, folk-rock's the grandfather, and progressive country
the father. 

But a lot of folks stayed in California, too scared even then to move
back. 

Looks like I just explained Ari's slippage!
  

    
Where do The Pogues fit into the discussion of post-Brit-folk-rock?
  

    
I'm not a big Gene Clark fan either. I've a copy of Echoes
around here, and listen to it about every 2 years or so,
certainly is folk-rock.  Even if his LPs were released in
the states, I did not seem them in shops as often as in
the U.K. in the 70s.

Is innovation the highest virtue in music? I don't know,
I tend to think that synthesis is closer to the real
dynamic/function of music.  And identity seems a big 
compelling factor as well. 

Sometimes I think that part of the reason the U.S. is
so hyped on pop music is that people are groping a 
little harder for identity, and music is a tool
in the process.

I can't remember who said it but <captward>'s comments reminded i
heard someone was say that some "LP's/CD's" suggested/demanded an
entire genre.  Bowie's 'Low/Heroes', the Byrds 'Sweetheart of the
Rodeo' and other such definative works seem to fall into that category.
  

    
That's quite interesting stuff about the Texas '60s scene, Ed, thanks
for elaborating. Seems like the tumultuous Austin scene of the '60s
would be good fodder for a book, if not an especially commercial one. I
recently heard an interview with a George Kinney, who was in an
obscure Austin band of the time, the Golden Dawn (who were friends of
the 13th Floor Elevators and recorded for the same label, International
Artists). He also said that there was a lot of harassment of the
hippies and countercultural in general from the authorities in Austin.
He also, interestingly to me, noted that the Houston-based
International Artists (run by Kenny Rogers's brother Leland) had
ambitions of being a label on par with the majors or biggest indies
(hence the title International Artists), but didn't get there, because
of disorganization and other reasons.

As we noted briefly in the topic about "Turn! Turn! Turn!" last year,
there were other Elevators-folk-rock connections in that some of their
material was written by Powell St. John. Also, Tommy Hall told Janis
Joplin biographer Alice Echols that Janis Joplin was thinking of
joining the Elevators, though I'm not totally convinced that was the
case, and it's hard to imagine that combination sticking if they ever
tried it out.

I'm not a Pogues fan, I admit, but I see their contribution to
post-Brit-folk-rock as fusing traditional Irish folk with punkish rock
energy. In that sense they were a variation on bands like Fairport
fusing 1970-style rock with traditional English folk. The Pogues,
incidentally, were actually not Ireland-based, but formed in London;
singer Shane MacGowan was born in England and had been in the London
punk band the Nipple Erectors (later shortened to the Nips).
  

    
Back to Gene Clark and the Byrds: "Echoes," a compilation based around
Clark's first solo album, isn't bad. It in fact sounds a good deal
like the Byrds, particularly since so original Byrds Chris Hillman and
Michael Clarke were the rhythm section on Clark's first solo LP, "Gene
Clark & the Gosdin Brothers" (1967). But much of it sounds to me rather
like filler or slightly second-rate 1966-era Byrds, though I like the
song "Tried So Hard," which Fairport Convention did a very good version
of on the BBC in the late 1960s (since issued officially) -- better
than Clark's, actually.

I think part of the reason Clark has a vociferous cult following these
days is because he projects an aura of reticent vulnerability, a
fellow too sensitive to survive the rigors of the music business, or
perhaps even too sensitive to survive a failed love affair. It's a
romantic sort of image, a little similar to the one attached to Nick
Drake, another folk-rock singer-songwriter with a cult following,
though one that's these days more widespread than Clark's.

I've taken a view of "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" that's seen as
contentious in some quarters. I think it's far more important as a
signpost for a genre than it is for the music itself; I was never
excited by its country-rock (the album was just reissued in an expanded
two-CD edition by Columbia with mucho outtakes, by the way). I admire
the Byrds for their willingness to take an unexpected and in many ways
unpopular left turn into something different, but I didn't think the
album was so hot, though it was undeniably influential on getting some
other artists interested in country-rock.

Also, as I noted a little while ago, there were actually some other
musicians in Southern California doing similar country-rock before that
on some obscure recordings (Hearts & Flowers, the Dillards' Capitol
singles, little-known Gene Parsons/Clarence White-affiliated singles).
Not to mention that even the Byrds themselves had done rockier
country-rock on parts of their prior albums, on tracks like "Time
Between" (with Clarence White as guest), "The Girl With No Name," and
"Old John Robertson."

I would have been much more interested in hearing the album that
McGuinn originally envisioned to follow up "Notorious Byrd Brothers"
(the album before "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"): a double-LP that would
cover the history of twentieth-century popular music in five parts,
from traditional folk, country, and bluegrass to the (at the time)
latest electronic music, as heard on the synthesizer instrumental
outtake "Moog Raga." Hillman and new member Gram Parsons weren't
interested in that, though, and with McGuinn's willing participation,
were instrumental in steering the group's direction into country-rock,
with McGuinn's idea abandoned.

Although McGuinn expressed regret to me that his ambitious
double-album never got the chance to be pulled off, he did tell me, "It
would have been fun if we could have pulled it off. I agree it was
extremely ambitious, and it's almost doubtful that we could have done
it. But I would love to have tried, at that time. Basically, we *did*
do it, not just in one album, but in a series of albums. We've done
old-time music, and almost every genre you can think of."

Any thoughts, dissenting or otherwise, on "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"
and the musical success of the Byrds' change in direction?
  

    
I was dazzled by "Sweetheart" and followed country-rock for years afterward.
It struck me as something deeply authentic, from the same well that produced
Neal Cassady. But then I was a kid. Today I think the mix is too dense. I
guess it was a kind of supergroup album, with all those changing lineups on
the different songs. The cover art was also a big part of the experience. I
was galvanized to see a copy of the poster (an old Levi's thing) at the
Oakland Museum's recent exhibit on California clothing styles.
  

    
I mean I was electrified, not coated with a thin layer of zinc.
  

    
Oh, man, but you look good in zinc. 
  

    
  
"Sweetheart of the Rodeo" at the time was revelatory for 
me, although if you had been listening to folk in the 60's
you could sort of hear it arriving. I like that in music
though -- seeing vaugely anticipated trends congeal.

Notorious Byrd Brothers was a slightly more interesting but 
flawed masterpiece in retrospect.  In general there seems 
an elusive visionary thread moving through all of the Byrd's 
albums, I don't know if I'd say that any of it is consistent, 
except perhaps "Untitled" which covers all the bases.  

Notorious Byrd Brothers & Untitled are about the only
re-releases I listen to from beginning to end of their
catalog these days.

That was a sweet mix though the country-folk-rock thing,
echoed excellently in S.F. by the Dead, and NRPS. 
  

    
There's a chapter on folk-rock's late-'60s feed into country-rock in
"Eight Miles High," but for those who want to get into the birth and
flowering of country-rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s in
meticulous depth, I'd also recommend John Einarson's book "Desperados:
The Roots of Country-Rock" (Cooper Square Press, 2001), which is wholly
devoted to early country-rock.
  

    
Richie, one thing that occurred to me was that there's a group of at
least three important black people in folk-rock, producer Tom Wilson,
guitarist Bruce Langhorne, and performer Richie Havens. Folk-rock isn't
exactly a genre where you expect to find many black people, especially
ones as influential and important in forming and shaping the genre as
Wilson and Langhorne were. Was there something about the backgrounds of
these three men (and any others you can think of) in common which
might have sent them down this road? How, for instance, did Wilson get
from being the guy who first recorded John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor
professionally to producing Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel?
  

    

Tom Wilson was a staff producer at Columbia Records and he was assigned
Bob Dylan.  I don't think he knew what to do with him and the engineers
there didn't either.   
  

    
But he went on later to do some very good folk-rock work, for instance
with Simon & Garfunkle. He also oversaw the overdubbing of "Sounds of
Silence," which, although it may have shocked Paul Simon whe he heard
it, was still a pretty good job. I mean, good producers learn: David
Rubinson was supposed to be doing Broadway show cast albums, but he
wound up with Moby Grape and has done some excellent work since. 
  

    
I'd add Arthur Lee of Love to the list of important blacks in
folk-rock.

It's a good question as to what led these guys into folk-rock (as
opposed to other forms of music) and what they might have had in
common, and one that I couldn't really figure out myself. These four
particular men didn't have that much in common in their backgrounds,
except maybe for Langhorne and Havens, who were both immersed in the
New York folk scene before making the transition to folk-rock.

Arthur Lee is unusual not just in being a prominent African-American
in folk-rock, but also in that he came from rock to folk-rock, not folk
to folk-rock. That was hardly a singular kind of journey; Al Kooper
did the same thing, for instance. But Lee came from a rock/R&B
background (he was one of the first musicians to record with Jimi
Hendrix, on the early-'65 Rosa Lee Brooks single "My Diary"). And
unlike many young black musicians, he was deeply enamored of the
British Invasion: he's cited the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger as a
big inspiration. In one interview from the 1990s, he even expressed
admiration for the Dave Clark Five!

Most importantly, perhaps, he was a Byrds fan. His influences weren't
so much folk and rock, as rock and folk-rock itself. Some people
(including Jac Holzman when I talked to him) didn't think of Love as
folk-rock, but as simply a rock band. But when you listen to the first
Love album, the similarities to the Byrds in the guitar playing and
songwriting are overwhelming on many of the tracks. Plus the 1967 Love
album "Forever Changes" in my estimation rates as the finest grafting
of acoustic-flavored folk-rock with string and horn arrangements.

As for Tom Wilson, in addition to producing Dylan's first electric
rock recordings (with the exception of a few obscure late-1962 tracks
that ended up on the flop "Mixed Up Confusion" single and bootlegs), he
also worked, as Ed notes, with Simon & Garfunkel, though only briefly
in their electric phase (though that phase did take in their key
initial folk-rock track, "The Sound of Silence"). He also did some
other folk-rock of note, like a couple of the best tracks from Jim &
Jean's "Changes" album, Nico's "Chelsea Girl" album, and some stuff for
the Blues Project. Though as Ed notes his initial production
background was in cutting-edge contemporary jazz, Wilson also did some
notable rock production in the late 1960s not strongly tied to
folk-rock, for the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, the
Soft Machine, and the Animals.

As to how he made the journey from John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor to
Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, I think he, like many key ancillary
figures in folk-rock history, somehow found himself in the right place
at the right time, and rose to the occasion although there wasn't much
in his background to indicate that he was qualified. It's still unclear
as to exactly why he was chosen, other than that Dylan's manager
Albert Grossman wanted to replace Dylan's first producer, John Hammond
(who'd signed Dylan to Columbia). Hammond told Dylan biographer Anthony
Scaduto that he suggested Wilson as his replacement when it seemed
like Hammond could no longer work with Dylan (primarily because of
Grossman's objections).

When Wilson was replaced himself in mid-1965 by Bob Johnston, the same
kind of almost arbitrary decision-making seemed to be in place:
Johnston had done little of major note before being asked to produce
one of the hottest artists in the world, his credits having been with
artists like rockabilly singer Mac Curtis and over-the-hill easy
listening singer Patti Page. His prime qualification seemed to be that
he was convenient (as he was already working for Columbia) and quickly
available. Johnston rose to the occasion too, not only with Dylan (who
he produced for the rest of the '60s) but also, as it happens, with
Simon & Garfunkel for a while, and with others like Leonard Cohen. And,
in a not entirely unexpected circle, Wilson was replaced as Dylan's
producer (according to what Al Kooper told me) because, again, Grossman
wanted somebody else in.

Wilson died 25 years ago, and I'm sure had he lived longer, he would
have been grilled by music historians and had more to say about what
happened. But he did comment on his transition from jazz to folk to
folk-rock in an interviwe quoted in Dylan's "Biograph" box, worth
excerpting here: "I didn't even partiuclarly like folk music. I'd been
recording Sun Ra and Coltrane and I thought folk music was for the
dcumb guys. This guy played like the dumb guys but then these words
came out. I was flabbergasted. I said to Albert Grossman, who was there
in the studio...'if you put some background to this, you might have a
white Ray Charles with a message.' But it wasn't until a year later
that everyone agreed that we should put a band behind him. I had to
find a band. But it was a very gradual process."

Wilson had a degree from Harvard in economics, and I imagine that must
have been an uncommon qualification not just for a 1960s record
producer, but for a 1960s African-American in general. This is only
speculation, but perhaps because of that unusual background, he was
more comfortable working with whites (who comprised the vast majority
of folk-rockers) than many blacks would have been, and vice versa.
  

    
Duh, yeah, I should have remembered Arthur Lee. And, for that matter,
his guitarist Johnny Echols. 

So how did Havens and Langhorne get into this? Remember, on the folk
scene, there were very few young black people, and they tended to do
blues, like Taj Mahal did. 
  

    
To comment a little more on the African-American role in folk-rock, it
does seem to me to have been maybe a little lower than could have been
expected. Although blacks were certainly a minority of the total
performers involved in the folk revival, there were certainly some: not
just the rediscovered country bluesmen, but also younger performers
without a primarily blues orientation.

Some predated the 1960s (Brother John Sellers, whom Bruce Langhorne
accompanied in one of his early professional gigs), and some were very
much part of the early-'60s folk scene, if not too well remembered
today, like Casey Anderson, Herb Metoyer (who wrote a song that Fred
Neil recored, ""Fools Are a Long Time Comin'"), Terry Callier (who was
rather a folk-jazzer), and Len Chandler. One of them, Dorris Henderson,
made a minor contribution to folk-rock when she moved to England in
the mid-1960s and recorded folk with John Renbourn, and later briefly
joined the UK-based electric folk-rock band Eclection.  The folk
revival was closely allied with the Civil Rights Movement in the
early-to-mid-1960s, and there were other kinds of folk performers that
appeared on the folk circuit and at festivals, including the Staple
Singers (then still known as a gospel group, though they were already
covering Dylan songs, and made their contribution to folk-rock when
Roebuck Staples's electric guitar tremolo influenced Langhorne).

But there was not the huge flow of young black performers with a folk
background going the route to become folk-rock singer-songwriters, with
the notable exception of Havens (who was in my view better as an
interpreter of songs than a songwriter). Perhaps young blacks in
general in the mid-1960s felt the pull toward R&B and soul music far
more than they did to folk and folk-rock, though one could argue that
the lyrical vistas opened by folk-rock did affect the songwriting and
music of some major black performers of the late 1960s, like Sly & the
Family Stone and the Norman Whitfield productions for the Temptations.
In the case of Jimi Hendrix, the influence of Dylan in particular is no
secret, both in the several Dylan songs he covered ("All Along the
Watchtower" being the most famous by far) and on Hendrix's own
songwriting and singing.

When the initial folk-rock frenzy was at its height, there were some
histrionic accusations in folk magazines like Sing Out! that folk-rock
was primarily a White dilution-exploitation of African-American forms.
I don't agree with that myself; folk-rock music drew from a lot of
different styles, not just the blues or primarily black-originated
ones. It's interesting, though, that at the outset a few critics viewed
folk-rock as another in a line of music styles watering down the
innovation of black musicians for a white audience.

We've noted that the blues is part of folk and thus part of folk-rock,
 though not the major one. Very few established blues performers,
whether young or old or acoustic or electric, seemed influenced by folk
or folk-rock songwriting. One example I can think of is J.B. Lenoir, a
second-division Chicago electric bluesman who'd recorded in the 1950s,
but by the mid-1960s was doing underrated acoustic blues with protest
and social conscience overtones. Those two albums of mid-'60s Lenoir
material were not released in the US at the time, and Lenoir died in
1967. It might be fitting-a-square-peg-into-a-round-hole hindsight, but
I wonder if blacks might have made a greater contribution to folk-rock
had more black blues musicians followed Lenoir's direction, with
electric instruments and American record releases.

Ed slipped in, I'll talk more about Havens and Langhorne in the next
post.
  

    
Len Chandler! Almost forgot about him! I interviewed him for Broadside
magazine back in '66, one of my first interviews (the first was Tim
Buckley). Trivia note: Len was married at the time (may still be) to
Judy Collins' sister. Who looked eerily like her. 

Lenoir actually was something of a legend by the '60s, because his
"Mama Talk To Your Daughter" was a big, big hit in the '50s and was
covered by all kinds of people on the Chicago blues scene. But yeah,
"Eisenhower Blues" and the like was protest blues. 

One thing, though, is that at this particular point, blues was fast
losing its audience to age, and young musicians were likely to want to
get into soul or some of the more experimental Sly-like stuff. 
  

    
Odetta has to fit into that continuum someplace. Her early Fantasy LPs
suggest that she was a folkie from the start (well, after playing in the
chorus of Finian's Rainbow), doing stuff like Woody Guthrie and "The Frozen
Logger" rather than the gospel-and-blues repertiore that she moved through
later. And of course, she did at least one whole album of Dylan songs.