Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals (Oxford Oral History Series)
Dunaway’s informative introduction describes the folk music revivals of the twentieth century as having their origins “in the Romantic belief in human possibility.” Dunaway and Beer discuss three major folk revivals, those of the folk singers who descended on Greenwich Village in the 1940s (e.g., Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie); the singers and songwriters brought together in the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements; and the eclectic folk “boomlet” of today. Rather than accounting for them in a straightforward narrative, their text consists largely of excerpts from interviews with singers, songwriters, promoters, and activists; each chapter focuses on a major topic—early collectors, Greenwich Village in the 1940s, the Red Scare, folk music and the civil rights movement, folk-rock—and provides historical background. Among the interviewed are Pete Seeger, Lee Hays of the Almanac Singers, Sing Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber, Arlo Guthrie, Mary Travers, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Bob Dylan, and Holly Near. Brief biographies of the interviewees add further to a marvelous resource for anyone interested in American folk music. --June Sawyers