The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk Read Free Book Online Page B

arrival and grew out of the leftist movements of the Depression era. Desperate strikes, unemployment, and vast hordes of dispossessed small farmers engaged the sympathy and support of the middle class, which was pretty hard-hit itself. Enter the Communist Party. Communist organizers assisted tenant farmers in setting up unions in the South and Southwest, and supported rent strikes and anti-eviction campaigns in black ghettos in the Northeast, which, along with an anti-lynching campaign, established links with the black community. In spite of their small numbers, the Communists seemed to be everywhere, and they were damned good organizers.

    In the course of their work among coal miners and textile workers in Appalachia, and with rural and ghetto blacks, some of the Communist field workers became aware of the music of the southern mountains and black singing traditions (especially gospel music). They saw these folk songs as social documents—I have heard people go to great lengths to prove that the most apolitical ditty was in fact a coded assault on the oppression of the workers—and also as potential organizing tools. At first, their enthusiasm met with little support among their urban counterparts. While they were celebrating eccentric hill-country balladeers like Aunt Molly Jackson, the cultural commissars were off on a crazed search for Communist art, encouraging sympathetic composers to write workers’ oratorios. Before long, though, these progressive masterpieces fell into well-deserved oblivion, and picket lines and rallies began to feature that now-familiar fixture, the “folksinger.”
    The urban intelligentsia had always been susceptible to nostalgic longings for “simpler” times and lifestyles, but it had tended to present its rural gleanings as an adjunct to the “art song.” Classical composers had produced settings of peasant airs and dances, which would be tossed in to lighten up programs of “serious music.” Medieval lyrics were presented as educational artifacts, and dreaded accordingly. The new wave of politically progressive folksingers was something different. The tuxedos and evening gowns of the concert hall were replaced by work clothes, in a spirit of proletarian unity.
    There was something else going on as well: a lot of both the middle-class left-wingers and the workers back in the 1930s were first- or second-generation immigrants, and the folk revival served as a way for them to establish American roots. This was especially true for the Jews. The folk revivalists were at least 50 percent Jewish, and they adopted the music as part of a process of assimilation to the Anglo-American tradition—which itself was largely an artificial construct but nonetheless provided some common ground. (Of course, that rush to assimilate was not limited to Jews, but I think they were more conscious of what they were doing than a lot of other people were.) The more nativist “folk” were often embarrassingly aware of this fact. When Roger Sprung, one of the original Washington Square bluegrassers, showed up with a couple of his buddies at the Asheville Folk Festival in the early 1950s, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the festival organizer
and a hard-shell North Carolinian, grilled them thoroughly before letting them perform.
    “You boys from New York?” he asked, with obvious suspicion.
    Roger said yes.
    “You Jews?”
    Roger said, “Uh, yeah.”
    “You know Pete Seeger?”
    “Well, we’ve met him . . . ”
    “You Communists?”
    No, they were not.
    Lunsford himself was a racist, anti-Semitic white supremacist who in later years would steadfastly refuse to come to the Newport Folk Festivals because of Seeger’s involvement. Nonetheless, he finally decided that Sprung and his cohorts were not Communists, and allowed them to appear. However, he was master of ceremonies, and when they were due to come on, he got up and announced, “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to present the three Jews from New