OutTakes
Commentary by Edd Merritt,
August 11, 2011, page 12.....

What’s the Folk in Folk-Festival Now?

Start wearing purple, wearing purple
Start wearing purple for me now
All sanity and your wits they will all vanish
I promise, it’s just a matter of time . .
So yeah, ha!
Gogol Bordello – Start Wearing Purple

It was a sunny Saturday in Newport, Rhode Island. We lounged on the grass outside of Fort Adams, soaking up the rays, savoring the tunes, munching Ben and Jerry’s and sipping Magic Hat. (Do you have to go to Newport for that?)

It was my first Folk Festival in 45 years. I missed Dylan’s foray into electronics by a year, but it was still the talk on the street then, with sympathies just about evenly split between his courage and his betrayal.
In July 1966, I was blessed with the Navy’s discovery of my inferior vision that got me booted from Naval Officer Candidate School and into the enlisted ranks just in time for the Folk Fest, then held within walking distance of the Naval War College. After finishing cleaning latrines as part of our transit company duty, my fellow non-com Horiuchi and I traded dungarees for civvies and headed down the block. Although he was more a jazz aficionado than a folkie, his ears, nonetheless, were tuned to the Baez sisters, Eric Anderson, Bob Gibson, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, Phil Ochs and my musical hero, Tim Hardin.
Horiuchi, who was pleading his case for conscientious objector status with the base reverend, and I, who was waiting for the train to North Chicago for enlisted boot camp, managed to catch both Folk and Jazz Festivals. Our friends still living in their militarily-gated community, marching to class and eating at attention while waiting to get pinned with ensign bars, were jealous as hell.
And Vietnam, of course, waited for all of us.
This year’s Folk Festival seemed light years away from that time. Folk music has taken on a new dimension. I suppose it’s akin to all of music that Dylan foretold as he plugged in and turned on with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band using electric-powered amps to enhance the then modern folk poet’s lyrics. Oh, once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bum a dime in your prime, didn’t you? Wha! Wha! on the guitar. Bang on the symbols. Beware doll you’re bound to fall. You thought they were all a kiddin’ you.
This year, there were drums in every act we saw except the Wailin’ Jennys. The Jennys replaced sticks beating on snares with close harmony and a soulful sound.
The group calling itself Typhoon had 13 members, almost as large, it seemed, as my high school marching band. There were three of everything – violins, horns, percussionists, guitars – and a keyboard. The trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn blasted harmonic brass melodies. The guitarists strummed and tested their lungs to get heard over instruments, and the violinists kept their bows rosined and wheeling, even though I sensed more than heard them.
We are a new “folk,” even in the guise of our forbearers, at least two of whom, Pete Seeger and Earl Scruggs, were there. Seeger, a member of the Folk Fest’s first board of directors 52 years ago, wandered throughout the venue with his signature banjo. He stopped behind where we were lounging to pop into the “kids’ tent” and pluck some tunes for the 10-year-olds who were busy building Lego creatures. He held to Newport tradition on Sunday by leading a group sing-along to close the festival. Not bad for a 92-year-old.
Scruggs, a mere 87, was joined on stage by his two sons playing electric guitars. Bedecked in suit, white shirt and tie, with his characteristic stone face, he picked his banjo with the dexterity of someone half his age. He broke into a grin as the band began the classic Flatt and Scruggs version of the Ballad of Jed Clampett – Then one day he was shootin’ for some food and up through the ground came a bubbling crude . . .
But the day was really for the young. Gogol Bordello, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and The Decemberists all demonstrated where folk music has traveled. Rawlings hit it on the head when he commented at the beginning of their set that, “We’re happy to be here playing folk songs that we wrote.” Welch said, “You know it’s folk music if folks like it.”
Gogol Bordello, on the other hand, described itself as a gypsy-punk band from the lower east side of Manhattan whose front person, Eugene Hutz, said his early musical heroes were Jimi Hendrix and Parliament Funkadelic as well as the gypsy music of his native Ukraine – a flight apart from Appalachia and the protest songs of Seeger in the 60s.
Newport has come a long way in its evolution, as has the music that our young call theirs. Colin Meloy of the Decemberists writes songs of crushing human interaction that play out through a beat that set the stand-up crowd near the stage into a swaying, clapping frenzy.
In my day, we snapped our fingers, man. It wasn’t cool to let our bodies give way to emotions. You had to hide your toe-tapping – Scruggs and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot notwithstanding.
You were there with no direction home, a complete unknown, just like a rolling stone.