The Berkeley Folk Music Festival

“Mississippi” John Hurt, Sam Hinton, and Arthel “Doc” Watson, 1964.

In 1962, Barry Olivier organized not one, but two Berkeley Folk Music Festivals: the traditional summer event and a winter festival. The folk revival was at its high-water mark, both nationally and internationally. Berkeley took its place as a key node in the folk revival festival circuit. The festivals grew more ambitious, with more attendance and participation.

As with the larger revival, Olivier and the Berkeley Festival grappled with questions of what counted as “folk” music: should the revival concentrate only on traditional artists resurfacing from the murky lost past of the hinterlands or were the younger emulators part of the mix? What about the new singer-songwriters who had a sense of traditional music, but had started to add their own words and sounds to the genre? Was the most significant region of American folk music the South above all other regions, and what did it mean to bring together black and white Southern sounds out West during the heyday of the modern African-American civil rights movement? What about the new, electric pop sounds that were starting to ring out on radios, infused with folk traditions but jingle-jangling in new, more technicolor directions?

Not only the Berkeley Festival’s concerts, but also its workshops, panels, and conferences became places for encountering, discussing, and singing about these questions during the height of the folk revival in the early 1960s.

Mance Lipscomb returned to Berkeley too. He not only performed his blues-oriented solo sounds for attentive, adoring audiences, but also jammed with old-time mountain musicians such as J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers and he played folk songs by the campfire with Pete Seeger. This cross-pollination of artists serves as a reminder that at places such as Berkeley, the racialized genre categories of American music—blues for Blacks, country for rural whites, folk for urban whites—gave way in festive moments of musical exchange.

While some in the folk revival remained obsessed with preserving musical and cultural purities, others embraced the opportunities to mix and match. After all, the music had common origins among working-class and rural peoples of all sorts even though the commercial music industry had divided up vernacular music by race during the Jim Crow era. In their musical collaborations, perhaps Lipscomb, the members of the Mountaineers, Seeger, and others worked in parallel to the integrationist phase of the modern African-American civil rights movement. Without erasing enduring legacies of racism or simple differences of performance style, they sought out commonalities across genres of American music that were artificially separated by race.

Others at the 1963 festival included cowboy song collector-singer Sam Eskin and cowboy songster Tony Kraber. John Henry Mitchell performed and also called the barn dance held with J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers. Barbara Dane made a surprise appearance by the campfire in the University’s Eucalyptus Grove.

Another newcomer was local singer Janet Smith, sister of Mayne Smith. Both performed at some of the earliest concerts Barry Olivier had organized in Berkeley. Mayne and Janet’s father was the American Studies scholar Henry Nash Smith, who was a faculty member at the University of California. His book Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, published in 1950, helped to define American Studies as a field. Smith emphasized the power of the West in the cultural imagination of the United States. He shaped the so-called “myth and symbol school” of American Studies scholarship. While never directly involved in the Festival itself, Smith was among those in Berkeley whose intellectual inquiries, with their focus on American heritage and the allure of the American West in particular, created the context in which the Berkeley Festival emerged. Henry Nash Smith examined the American West in a scholarly manner. Janet and Mayne would personalize the search: Janet through ballad singing and dulcimer playing; Mayne through an eventual turn toward cosmic-cowboy country sounds.

While Pete Seeger dominated the 1963 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, the hidden stars of the proceedings were the North Carolina mountain music group J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers. At Berkeley, J.E. and his band of family members and friends linked past and present together in an evocative manner. Arriving in Berkeley in a van that barely made it from North Carolina and back home, their old-time string band sound seemed to arise straight from the dusty old 78 rpm records that Harry Smith had bootlegged to create the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith in fact planned to include one of their songs on Volume Four of his edited collection, which did not see the light of day until it was released in 2000).

Mainer had been an important participant in the formation of country music. He performed with his brother Wade on radio stations in the 1920s and the pair recorded commercially for the RCA Victor Bluebird label in the early 1930s. The brothers eventually split up. In the 1940s, J.E. continued to make records for the King label while Wade performed for President Franklin Roosevelt, invited to Washington DC by none other than Alan Lomax in 1941. Lomax would again record J.E. on the “Southern Journey” he embarked upon with Shirley Collins in 1959, just after the pair left the Berkeley Folk Music Festival to travel throughout the American South.

It was Chris Strachwitz, however, who seems to have been crucial in bringing Mainer and his band to the Berkeley Festival. The traditional music enthusiast recorded the group in their hometown of Concord, North Carolina in April of 1963 for an album, The Legendary Family From The Blue Ridge Mountains, released on Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label later that year (see below for the album cover and liner notes). A number of the songs from the recording became standards among musicians in the California bluegrass scene.

By now, the Festival was getting quite big. It consisted of over five days of events: evening concerts, workshops, noon concerts, folk song circles, coffee hours, a cabaret featuring local performers, campfire sings, a barn dance, and a big final Jubilee concert in the Hearst Greek Amphitheater. In many respects, it was the realization of Olivier’s original, grandiose proposal to the Office for Drama, Lectures & Music in 1958. Yet Olivier strived to stay true to what had developed along the way: a festival that was at once world class, yet still casual and accessible. As he wrote to Glenn Mainer, son of J.E., to give the Mainers a sense of what to expect: “we maintain an informality in all the events and play it pretty cool.” In 1964, the combination of easy-going, laid-back California attitude and large-scale, international folk circuit ambition would continue to develop at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

In 1964, the Seventh Berkeley Festival attracted 7,000 fans to the final Jubilee concert alone. It featured, most excitingly, the first major West Coast appearance by “Mississippi” John Hurt, whose late 1920s commercial 78 rpm recordings had primacy of place on Harry Smith’s Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music. Following the end of his recording career, Hurt worked as a farmhand near Avalon, Mississippi until one day in 1963, a young blues enthusiast from Washington, DC, Tom “Fang” Hoskins, arrived. Hoskins had noticed that on one of Hurt’s old recordings, the musician sang about Avalon, and on that clue, traveled to Mississippi in search of the man who sang to Hoskins and many others so magically but mysteriously from the grooves of Harry Smith’s Anthology compilation.

When Hoskins arrived, Hurt thought he might be an FBI agent, since it was 1963, square in the middle of civil rights voter drives in rural Mississippi. Nonetheless the two located a guitar, Hurt performed for Hoskins, and then Hurt decided to travel with Hoskins to Washington, where he eventually recorded songs for the Library of Congress, among other labels. At Berkeley one year later, he stole the show, and Hurt went on to a remarkable second act for the next two years on the folk revival circuit until his death in 1966.

Barry Olivier’s decision to place Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson on the bill together at the 1964 Berkeley Folk Music Festival was perhaps indicative of how the height of the folk revival ran parallel to the high-water mark of the civil rights movement in its integrationist phase. As Freedom Summer unfolded in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, with its volatile (and ultimately deadly) mix of Black and white activists attempting to break Jim Crow rule with voter registration drives among disenfranchised African-American populations, way out west at Berkeley, the folk revival reimagined the South musically. An African-American Mississippi songster who loved country music and a white Appalachian flatpicker who loved the blues joined together to perform music across the color line that still dominated the South socially (with plenty of racism present in the Bay Area itself too, unfortunately). While some in the folk revival sought to essentialize musical genres and categories of racial identity, Hurt and Watson picked their guitars right past these demarcations and limitations on music making.

The big draw for many fans at the 1964 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, however, was neither Hurt, nor Watson. It was, instead, Joan Baez. Having grown up partly in Northern California as well as in the folk stronghold of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Baez had become a folk superstar by 1964. Her appearance at the Berkeley Festival helped bring the event to a new level of popularity. She not only performed at the big Sunday Jubilee Concert in the Heart Greek Amphitheater, but also participated in panels, round robins, and other events.

Alice Stuart discusses her debut at the 1964 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Festival and other topics and performs songs from across her career. Recorded at Northwestern University Library, 25 May 2012.

A flier from the Free Speech Movement protests of fall 1964.

Photographs clipped from Cavalier magazine’s November 1964 article about the 1964 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

In September of 1964, Barry Olivier issued a confident announcement to “West Coast Folk Leaders.” Sending the letter to festival organizers, band managers, music shop owners, folklorists, journalists, and musicians, Olivier invited them to join him at a symposium to discuss the state of the folk revival on the West Coast. He wrote, “The folk movement on the West Coast has developed some special characteristics—most important of which seems to be a friendly spirit.” To Olivier, “There is less of the ‘show biz’ feeling among the performers and within the activities.” Therefore, he explained, “In the interests of furthering serious folk music activity on the West Coast, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival is sponsoring an informal conference for the organizational leaders….” There were “mutual problems” to discuss, Olivier noted, but mostly the West Coast scene and the Berkeley Festival seemed to be gathering momentum in 1964. The following years, however, would bring changes and transitions. The Festival—and the West Coast folk scene as a whole—would continue to grow, but in surprising and unexpected directions.

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