Festival

This wonderful film documents performances at the Newport Folk Festival during the years 1963 to 1965. It was directed, written, and produced by Murray Lerner. It languished in neglect for many years until recently published books about Bob Dylan made prominent mention of it and the Martin Scorcese documentary on Dylan used portions of it to illustrate Dylan's infamous electric performance in 1965. A recently released DVD of the film makes it generally available. Festival prominently features Dylan but only as part of a much larger group. He does not dominate the film. Notable performers are Joan Baez, Peter Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Mississippi John Hurt, Howling Wolf, Son House, the Staple Singers, Fred McDowell, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and many others.

Filmed in black and white, Festival is a time capsule of those years during the 60s before Woodstock and before the counter culture had reached full flower. But you can see it coming in the film, both in the performers and the people in the audience. The film is at its weakest in the interviews it features with performers and audience members who are asked to talk about folk music, social protest, and problems in contemporary America. Most of the comments are foolish and uninteresting and, from the 2006 perspective, dated, even anachronistic. Son House’s comments on the meaning of the blues, and Michael Bloomfield’s comments on Son House, are exceptions.

The music is not dated at all and gives this film its power. One wishes only for more of it, and that the film did not cut many of the performances short. Among the best performances are those by Odetta, Son House, Howling Wolf, Joan Baez, and Dylan. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band gives an outstanding performance, as do the Freedom Singers, the Staple Singers, and many of the others. There is a short but remarkable performance of “Walk the Line” by a young and probably under the influence Johnny Cash. All of the performances are good. It is wrong to single any of them out.

The film features the first number in Dylan’s famous 1965 electric set, “Maggie’s Farm.” I had heard the performance was weak, the music sloppy, but if the film is any indication it was quite good. Elsewhere in the film he performs “All I Really Want to Do,” part of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and rehearses “Like a Rolling Stone”—his real break with the folk movement. Each time Dylan ends his performance, the audience chants, almost desperately, “More, more!”

By the performers it presents, and the order in which it presents them, Festival explores the relationship of the American folk revival in the 1950s to traditional folk music, to the blues, to Appalachian and country music, and to the civil rights movement. Despite the many famous African American performers who appear, only a few African Americans are in the audience. At this point in its history the Newport Folk Festival was mostly for white people. When Howling Wolf performs, you do see a small group of African Americans enjoying his singing--but everyone in the audience enjoys him. He may give what amounts to the most astounding performance in the film. The audience listens respectfully to most of the performers. For Howling Wolf, there is astonishment and an intense visceral reaction—everyone sways and swings.

The movie was made at a time when for white audiences African American performers represented victimization, suffering, and authenticity. There were not yet accepted on equal ground and were instead regarded to an extent as case studies, as symbols of a problem. There is a certain patronization, and the film tends to present the African Americans as a group, one after the other, rather than spreading them out in the film. But the fact they are there at all is significant and evidence of how music, especially the blues and the folk traditions, helped begin bridging racial divides in America. The performances by Howling Wolf, Son House, the Staple Singers, Fred McDowell, the Freedom Singers, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others, alone, make the film worth seeing.

Festival reminds you of the importance of Pete Seeger, of the fact that Joan Baez sang beautifully. It reminds you that Peter, Paul, and Mary, despite their commercial origins, were really good singers and an important part of the music scene during the 1960s. Mary Travers was a dynamic presence whose face and body language expressed her moral and emotional commitment to the words she sang. Her swaying blonde hair is an instrument of power and commitment. My discovery from this film was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which I shall now go listen to, along with the many Appalachian and blues musicians featured.

I never attended the Newport Folk Festival, but as I watched this film I kept looking for myself in the audience.