“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” is a ravishing documentary – elegant and transporting, full of lyrical black-and-white images and gritty performances of timeless power. The film tells the story of the Newport Folk Festival from the pivotal years of 1963 to 1966, and when I say it “tells the story,” I mean there’s a surprisingly sharp and resonant narrative at play that we’ve never seen before. Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary “Festival” covered these same years, but that film was more of a scattered collage of folk, blues and country.
It turns out that Lerner, who died in 2017, shot 100 hours of footage in Newport, almost all of which got stuck in a vault; this has never been seen before. These are the images that director Robert Gordon and his editor and production partner, Laura Jean Hocking, drew inspiration from to construct “Newport & the Great Folk Dream.”
The film presents a vision of Newport that is much richer, broader and ingeniously structured than that of “Festival.” This movie was good, but it has never been better. The new film feels pivotal, and I think there’s potentially a big audience there, made up of all the people who have been passionate about American folk music over the decades, but also the new generation of folk-oriented fans who felt ignited by “A Complete Unknown.” I’m tempted to say: forget that pesky word popular. This is a film for music fans of all stripes.
Early in the documentary, there are shots of Johnny Cash, skinny and hungry, and there is an indirect but deliberate mention of the year 1965. As soon as we hear that year, we know exactly what that means, because the entire mythology of Newport centers around what happened then: the famous Sunday night set when Bob Dylan went electric, changing the world of folk music and the world at large.
“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” expands our view of this moment in two ways. It presents such a vast and exquisite slice of the music that existed in Newport that it leaves us with a much deeper sense of what Dylan was. disturb. At the same time, the festival was caught in its own evolution. The real change had begun at the 1964 festival, the first to take place after the Beatles’ arrival in America (February 7, 1964) – and it was Beatlemania, more than anything Bob Dylan did, that signaled the beginning of the end of folk music as the reigning populist form. Dylan aside, electric instruments were already dotting the Newport stages – we see Howlin’ Wolf, ax in hand, doing a raging blues number. And the spirit of the crowd evolved in parallel.
Newport’s famous majestic image is of all those lawn chairs extending from the stage in neat rows, almost as if it were a very large wedding. But each year the festival began to wind down, with kids hanging out and drinking, showing up at the party; at times the women danced barefoot in their bras. What began as a highly civilized The event began to grow, on a small scale, into the roots of Woodstock. There is a performance by Mimi and Richard Fariña at the 1965 festival that is simply breathtaking. The song they do is called “House Unamerican Blues Activity Dream,” which sounds very 1950s, but what a groove! It’s like hearing a drugged version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” and the crowd goes wild. Even Joan Baez is unleashed, right up there on stage (Mimi, who beams like Margaret Qualley, was Joan’s sister), and the message is: This isn’t your father’s folk music… or even the folk music of 1963. This was a whole new thing.
The popular dream, as the film presents it, was about music of various persuasions merging into a community of spiritual and political power. This was truly Pete Seeger’s dream, fueled by his alliances with unions and African-Americans, and it was why he was hauled before HUAC in 1955 (his refusal to name names made him a hero). At the 1963 festival, Seeger, who produced the event, made the momentous decision to ask the board of directors to pay each artist the same amount of money: $50. Very radical and very folk.
The music from that year’s festival embodies this burning idealism. The first full performance in the film is Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson performing “The Coo Coo Bird,” an incandescent number that seems to rise from the earth. The Moving Star Hall Singers’ performance of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” is so primitive and ancient that it resembles one of the field recordings collected by Alan Lomax (the legendary ethnomusicologist who was one of the festival’s organizing curators) that Moby sampled on “Play.” The New Lost City Ramblers do a bluegrass number that the fiddler turns into a version of rolling country rock ‘n’ roll, and the Freedom Singers nearly set fire to “Woke Up This Morning.”
In many ways, the 1963 Newport Folk Festival was a preparation for the March on Washington, the historic civil rights demonstration that would take place just a month later. The 1964 edition builds on this spirit, but the music is more seductive, unruly and more personal. There are still the sopranos with trembling voices – Mary Travers and Joan Baez duet on the civil rights anthem “Lonesome Valley”, Judy Collins performing a sublime “Carry It On”. But there’s also the anarchic stomp of the Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers, an extraordinary young Buffy Sainte-Marie singing “Co’dine” (about her addiction), music from Egypt, Senegambia, Nova Scotia and Hawaii, and the ecstatic energy of José Feliciano’s guitar in “Walk Right In.”
The folk world thought of itself as a world of sonic purity, but suddenly that idea became horse and buggy. It would have been nice if the film let us know more about the arguments that happened behind the scenes – between Lomax and Seeger and the festival board members. But they were all, on some level, about judging people’s purity. And it must be one of the greatest ironies in pop music history that Dylan, when he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” defined the avant-garde of folk music by issuing a challenge to the old world, but by the time you get to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, it was the folk purists who had to come to terms with how times were changing. They are the ones stuck on the “old road”.
“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” makes it clear, in a way never before seen, that Dylan didn’t come to perform his groundbreaking electric set in a vacuum. For one thing, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which he had assigned to accompany him during the night (they had a quick rehearsal), was already on the program. What’s more, all the energy of the festival was bursting in a new way. If you still think Peter, Paul, and Mary are quaint, just listen to them perform “If I Had My Way.” The intensity is thrilling. The Chambers Brothers, wielding electric guitars, have an infectious funk. By the time Dylan comes in and plays “Maggie’s Farm,” the stage is literally set. Loudon Wainwright III sums it up perfectly: “There was a certain morality about folk music. Like, it’s precious and you shouldn’t fool with it, and certainly not fuck with it. Well, that night, Dylan fucked with it.”
Folk music has never been the same, but not because Bob Dylan played an electric set. That’s because folk music was about community, activism, and a kind of radiant altruism that allowed people to blend into a sacred mass. The counterculture of the ’60s sometimes pretended to be about this (and sometimes it was), but that’s not really what the ’60s was about. In the ’60s, people were going into themselves, engaging in sex and drugs, singing their own song, to the point where they often couldn’t see anything else. The 1960s stood on the border between the culture of peace and love and what would become the culture of narcissism.
When Dylan finishes his performance, we hear boos from the crowd. Yet, watching “Newport & the Great Folk Dream,” it seems that less capital that we have been led to believe. People were booing because Dylan, the popular messiah, had let them down. But how could it have been otherwise? The film presents the 1966 Newport Folk Festival as an epilogue, because by that time the dream of what folk music was – a force that seemed like it could change the world – had ended. Rock’n’roll had taken over. Self-glory had taken over. Yet, during a fabulous moment in Newport, a moment that only lasted for a moment, everyone blamed Dylan the Messenger. “Newport & the Great Folk Dream” is a testament to the purity he helped end, but it’s also a testament to the beauty that remains.
