8. Conclusions
Mance Lipscomb on stage in the Hearst Greek Amphitheater at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert.
The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive offers an unparalleled glimpse of the folk revival on the West Coast in the “long 1960s.” It helps us better see the cultural dynamics of the era in distinctive ways. Striving to link its participants to the past through shared musical experiences, the Festival hoped to establish robust connections between the old and the contemporary, then and now.
The Berkeley Festival also tells a story about how the folk revival sought to reconfigure hierarchies of power in modern America. When Barry Olivier brought musicians such as Mance Lipscomb, Mississippi John Hurt, Arthel “Doc” Watson, Los Tigres Del Norte, the Hackberry Ramblers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the Na Rhma Ci Wa American Indian Dancers, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, and many others from the margins of American society to Cal, it was as if he was declaring that their knowledge was as worthy as that of any prestigious professor on the faculty. Their musical beauty, communal spirit, individual brilliance, and necessary expertise burst in through the superficial boundaries of the campus gates.
In doing so, the Berkeley Festival not only asserted the tremendous value of traditional music, but also transformed who belonged on a university campus. The event’s many workshops, panels, cookouts, campfires, coffee hours, lunches, and casual concerts became egalitarian spaces of interaction by people from disparate social origins. Meanwhile, the Jubilee Concerts brought new voices to center stage at the Hearst Greek Amphitheater, a venue that was, after all, modeled after the ancient amphitheater at Epidaurus and whose construction, funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was meant to portray Berkeley as the “Athens of the West.”
A flier for the final, 15th Annual Berkeley Folk Music Festival Open Air Jubilee Concert, Sunday, 11 October 1970, at the Hearst Greek Amphitheater on the University of California campus.
Part of a rich range of folk music on the West Coast, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival galvanized a diverse, celebratory world of music and experience. It was ultimately less concerned with drawing strict lines over what counted as folk purity and authenticity than back East.
Instead, the Festival provided a setting in which to wonder about cultural heritage and roots in a place where, as Malvina Reynolds sang, new, suburban housing tracts that “all look just the same” were rapidly appearing. Like other Northern California countercultural creations, such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, with its daring combination of futuristic technologies and nostalgia for a romanticized, vanishing American frontier, the Berkeley event asked if modern Americans could develop effective, even liberating, connections to the past as a way to confront contemporary life. Participants at the Festival were, by and large, less convinced than Brand and the Whole Earth hippies that they had discovered an answer, but out in the Bay Area, where Gold Rush memories mingled with emerging Silicon Valley dreams, they turned to the pleasures of shared music-making in search of possible answers.
In the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive, we hear their polyphonous song ring out. As the tune gets revived again in the digital age, who knows where the melody might go, what harmonies might arise, which dissonances might cut through or thrillingly resolve?