The Early Years: 1958-1961

3. The Early Years: 1958-1961

Barry Olivier had an idea for 1958. Having been an active participant in the Berkeley folk music scene for over a decade, what if he produced a fully developed annual folk festival on the campus?

One-man band Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller performing at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival with his fodella, a homemade bass cello played with foot pedals.

Olivier wrote to Betty Connors in the University of California, Berkeley Office for Drama, Lectures & Music to propose a “Summer Folk Music Jubilee.” He was not bashful about his idea or his role in bringing it to fruition. “As for my part in this festival,” he wrote, “I would like to be of the greatest assistance to you in making the greatest folk music festival ever assembled anywhere.”

Olivier mapped out a plan to organize, publicize, and host the event in late June of 1958. Connors and other administrators at Cal agreed to the plan. At first called a “A Weekend of Folk Music,” the Berkeley Folk Music Festival was born.

Very quickly, the gathering became the preeminent festival on the West Coast of the United States. Olivier secured appearances by prominent folk musicians such as Pete Seeger, the Kentucky-born mountain balladeer Jean Ritchie, and local one-man band stalwart Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller (seen here with his infamous “fodella,” a homemade bass cello played with foot pedals). Important scholars were part of the proceedings too, from Pete’s ethnomusicologist father Charles Seeger to Jimmy Driftwood to Frank Warner to Alan Lomax and his sister Bess Lomax Hawes. A multitude of other musicians and scholars would eventually join them.

The Berkeley model echoed other emerging folk festivals of the era, particularly those at parallel institutions such as the University of Chicago and Swarthmore College. From the start, however, Berkeley was different. It was not directed by students but rather by one person. This gave the Berkeley Festival continuity. It could rival the scale and energy of more organized folk festivals back East, such as the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.

Intriguingly, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival preceded the more famous Newport by a year. Possibly through figures such as Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, who journeyed to Berkeley in 1959 and subsequently served on the Newport Festival Foundation’s board of directors, Berkeley influenced the Newport model of workshops, panels, and concerts, which placed traditional musicians alongside their younger imitators and emulators.

1958

The 1958 Festival featured both international music and regional folk music from the United States. Playing the role of Master of Ceremonies as well as performer was Sam Hinton—an oceanographer based in San Diego who was also a songwriter and master of the harmonica among many other instruments (including the nose flute). Hinton would appear at every Berkeley Festival as a lead performer and on-stage host.

The duo Josef Marais and Miranda sang music from around the world. Margarita and Clark Allen performed Spanish, Mexican, and Gypsy songs and dances. Kentucky singer Jean Ritchie and Virginian Andrew Rowan Summers interpreted rural Southern ballads. Two other important figures appeared at the first Festival. The folk song collector Frank Warner, who had recorded and helped to popularize the song “Tom Dooley,” a breakout pop hit for the San Francisco group the Kingston Trio that year, traveled from the East Coast. So too did the banjoist Billy Faier, a crucial yet somewhat forgotten early shaper of the folk revival connections between East and West coast.

Sam Hinton and Jean Ritchie at a 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Billy Faier playing banjo. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Jean Ritchie at 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Sam Hinton, Andrew Rowan Summers, Josef Marais, Frank Warner, Jean Ritchie, Clark Allen, and Billy Faier at a 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Marais and Miranda performing at a 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival concert. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Clark Allen performing in front of an audience outdoors at a 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival event in the Faculty Glade. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Frank Warner performing at the 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival with a photograph of “Yankee” John Galusha. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Margarita and Clark Allen performing at the 1958 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Not wanting to be modest about the event, Barry Olivier wrote that, “The 1958 ‘Weekend of Folk Music’ Festival at UC was one of the most important events in the history of folk music and certainly last year’s most outstanding contribution to the art of folk song throughout the world.” As he announced the second annual Festival, planned for the summer of 1959, Olivier was hopeful that, “All across the United States and in Europe many people have heard of the Festival and its superb outcome.”

1959

The 1959 Festival built on the format and success of the initial event. Even bigger names debuted at the event. Pete Seeger made the first of four appearances at the Berkeley Festival. Jimmy Driftwood, a high school principal and important folksong collector and interpreter from the Arkansas Ozarks, joined the festivities as well.

Jesse Fuller, Merritt Herring, Jimmie Driftwood, Sam Hinton, Shirley Collins, and Alan Lomax at 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Pete Seeger and Sam Hinton at a 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Jimmie Driftwood on mouth bow with his son on guitar at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Pete Seeger at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Along with his partner, the English singer Shirley Collins, the folklorist Alan Lomax delivered a lecture (see and listen below), sang, and participated in numerous workshops and panels. Lomax was the son of Texas folklorist John A. Lomax, and in the 1930s had traveled with his father recording musicians for the Library of Congress. On the original trip, they recorded, among others, the famous African-American guitarist and “songster” Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. Eventually, Alan became Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, recording folk music across the United States and in the Caribbean.

In 1959, Lomax had just returned to the States from Europe, where he spent a decade in exile traveling widely to record traditional music in England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, and Italy, Alan Lomax was in the process of compiling the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music for Columbia Records. He was also in the midst of developing theories of global song style. These would preoccupy him for the rest of his life.

In the lecture at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, we hear some of the earliest pronouncements of Lomax’s new anthropological and ethnomusicological conjectures. They would eventually become his controversial Cantometrics and Global Jukebox projects, through which Lomax would use computers and statistics to attempt to map out systematically the variations and similarities of singing and musical performance styles across the world. In a related “choreometrics” project, he would eventually try to achieve a similar global characterization of dance as well.

Delivered as the Cold War raged, Lomax’s lecture offers an internationalist vision of folk music and culture. While many in the US folk revival at the time were focused increasingly on American music alone, seeking to discover the roots of music in the American South and West in particular, Lomax looked beyond a nationalist framework to a global sense of traditional music and its continued vibrancy.

Back to the US South Lomax would go, however. In the fall of 1959, a few months after the Berkeley Festival, Lomax and Collins embarked together on a field recording trip that became known as “Southern Journey” when the music they captured was released commercially in the early 1960s. The “Southern Journey” was a voyage that returned Lomax to many of the places where he first first recorded music with his father in the 1930s. Lomax—often accompanied by Collins—turned on their microphones for a wide range of musicians continuing to play the blues, country, gospel, Cajun music, drum and fife music, and much more in small communities across the American South. Some of this music became famous again in 1999, when the musician Moby sampled snatches of singing from, among others, Bessie Jones, for his album Play. Jones herself would perform at the Berkeley Festival in 1962.

Listen to Alan Lomax Lecture with Shirley Collins at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival

Shirley Collins and Alan Lomax at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier. Listen to Alan Lomax Lecture with Shirley Collins at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

In 1959, the innovative African-American performer Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller, a one-man band, performed at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival for the first time. A “songster” who could play anything from blues to ragtime to showtunes, Fuller was originally from Alabama. He arrived on the West Coast in the 1920s, and found work in Hollywood, including as an extra in films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924). By the late 1930s, he had settled in Oakland. Fuller penned the regional hit “San Francisco Bay Blues.” Bob Dylan and others imitated his placement of a harmonica in a neck brace so that one could play it while also playing guitar—or in Fuller’s case, guitar, kazoo, and the fodella. Fuller would continue to be an important creator of folk music and dance, with his own distinctive take on vernacular Southern Black expressive culture that, with his experiences in Hollywood and Oakland, he gave a West Coast veneer.

Jesse Fuller at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Jimmie Driftwood, Pete Seeger, Sam Hinton, Jack Elliott, and Alan Lomax at a 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Sam Hinton at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

“Ramblin'” Jack Elliott at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

At the 1959 Festival, a young local folksinger, Merritt Herring, would make the first of many appearances, heralding the coming generation of younger participants in the folk revival shaped by an emerging sense of the music forged by Seeger, Lomax, and others. The same dynamic was found in the unannounced performance by Woody Guthrie’s running buddy and eventual folk legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, born Elliot Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn, NY.

1960

In 1960, the Scottish folksinger Ewan MacColl and his partner, Pete’s half-sister Peggy Seeger, performed, as did Pete’s half-brother Mike Seeger. Mike appeared at the Festival with his trio the New Lost City Ramblers, who were quickly gaining a reputation on the college folk circuit for their faithful renditions of old-time American stringband music from the 1920s and 30s. Traditional folksinger Sandy Paton made an appearance and Sam Hinton hosted onstage again as the master of ceremonies.

New Lost City Ramblers (Mike Seeger, John Cohen, Tom Paley) at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Samuel “Lightnin'” Hopkins performing at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Ewan MacColl at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Peggy Seeger at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

John A. Lomax, Jr., Alan’s brother, joined as folklore scholar at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Richard R. “Slim” Critchlow, whom Barry Olivier would go on to record for an album, performed cowboy songs. Perhaps the most intriguing performer at the event was the Texas bluesman Samuel John “Lightnin'” Hopkins, who made his first West Coast folk appearance at the Festival. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Frankenstein called the entire event a “skillfully shaped” program.

Slim Critchlow performing at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

John A. Lomax, Jr. and Samuel “Lightnin'” Hopkins performing at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Sandy Paton at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

Sam Hinton at the 1960 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Phillip Olivier.

1961

The lineup for the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival mixed familiar names with a few astounding new arrivals. Marais and Miranda, Sam Hinton, Frank Warner, Jean Ritchie, “Slim” Critchlow, and Merritt Herring once again performed. Joining them was a more formal presenter of folksong, John Langstaff.

In contrast to Langstaff, but keeping right up with him was Mance Lipscomb. The African-American “songster” from could play a wide repertoire of styles and songs. Lipscomb had been working as a sharecropper in Navasota, Texas when Bay Area-based traditional music enthusiast Chris Strachwitz met him while seeking out Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins (who appeared at Berkeley in 1960). Strachwitz subsequently recorded Lipscomb and helped the guitarist and singer travel to Berkeley for what was his first appearance before a large audience in an urban setting. Lipscomb was admired by many folk revivalists for his range of musical knowledge and his forceful performances. He would go on to a successful career on the folk circuit for the next decade and into the 1970s.

Over 15,000 people attended the Festival in 1961. Many not only took in the performances, but also joined in the Festival’s panels and workshops. There, they participated in passionate, at times contentious, debates at the heart of the folk revival concerning how to define folk music.

Journalists picked up on the ways in which the Berkeley Festival was about more than just the presentation of music; it was also about engagement with larger questions of culture and society. Writing in the San Francisco Examiner, John Bryan wrote, “The Berkeley Festival provides a kind of Cape Canaveral for a wide range of ‘natural’ and ‘learned’ talents and its informal workshops and audience-artist meetings give the observer a good chance to see the real conflicts in the idiom.” These “conflicts” were over the difference between what many heard as the “real” folk music of traditional musicians and music learned secondhand at a distance from a community or family setting. At Berkeley, Bryan wrote, “The folk music fan (better known in these parts as ‘folknik’), was presented with an essential question, one to be asked throughout the festival…. When does ‘folk music’ go from the people to the archives and is the ‘book learned’ product truly folk music at all?”

The debate broke out fully, according to Bryan, at a workshop on “different approaches to folk music.” John Langstaff “defended the position that in rendering folk songs, everything in the original notations counts, little should be changed.” Jean Ritchie, by contrast, declared that “I just feel comfortable singing the songs like they do at home but I change them according to how I feel.” Singing cowboy “Slim” Critchlow agreed with Ritchie. Bryan suggested that not only the musicians at the workshop, but many attendees at the 1961 Berkeley Festival were taken by these questions, discussing them throughout the event.

Frank Warner at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Mike Putnam.

Merritt Herring, 1961. Photo: Dennis Galloway.

Merritt Herring performing at the Jubilee Concert in the Hearst Greek Amphitheater at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Cliff Subier.

Miranda and Josef Marais, Jean Ritchie, Sam Hinton, Frank Warner, and John Langstaff at a 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival panel discussion. Photo: Cliff Subier.

Josef and Miranda Marais at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Mike Putnum.

Mance Lipscomb at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Mike Putnam.

Lipscomb at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Mike Putnam.

Jean Ritchie at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, playing dulcimer. Photo: Cliff Subier.

John Langstaff at the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Cliff Soubier.

“Slim” Critchlow, 1961. Photo Dennis Galloway.

Frank Warner and Jean Ritchie at a Berkeley Folk Music Festival panel.

Charles Seeger at the Hearst Greek Amphitheater, 1961. Photo: Mike Putnam.

"Binding all present to the music and to the people of the past"

The first years of the Festival saw Barry Olivier getting established with his annual multi-day event at the University of California. Concerts, workshops, lectures, panels, and more made use of the full range of venues on the campus, from lecture halls and classrooms and proscenium stages to barbecues among the redwood and eucalyptus trees. In 1962, as the folk revival hit full stride nationally and internationally, Olivier would expand the Festival to a much larger format. However, many noted that it never lost its feeling of what Olivier had called the “spirit that pervaded both audience and artists binding all present to the music and to the people of the past who made the music that is called ‘folk music.'”

The Berkeley Folk Music Festival

& the Folk Revival on the US West Coast—An Introduction