Country Gentlemen and the Folk Music Revival (1957–1966)

The Country Gentlemen (perhaps the most nationally acclaimed of the bluegrass genre’s second-generation bands) are at the core of this chapter. During this period record labels across the United States took a greater interest in local bands and more of them appeared on 45 rpm discs and, secondarily, albums. The most important local label, Rebel Records, started the same year (1960) that weekend bluegrass festivals debuted in nearby Berryville, Virginia. An increasing number of local venues were booking live local and regional bluegrass bands as well as national acts. Spurred by the folk music revival, among other factors like increased radio airplay, the general interest in bluegrass was clearly on the rise.

I Come for to Sing

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.

We Love the Blues, but Tell Us about Jazz

Beginning in 1950, Broonzy would tour Europe and the United Kingdom for much of the 1950s while new generations in Britatin, Holland, France, Belgium, and more began discovering and rediscovering African American music from the pre-war period. Big Bill became one of the first African American blues artists to tour there, quickly becoming a fan favorite, especially in England. A subculture of continental Europeans from the period developed a lively community of jazz enthusiasts whose record collections and academic writings connected these post-war devotees across borders and languages. Central to their fascinations and curiosities was the juxtaposition between Bebop and traditional, New Orleans jazz. Many traditionalists loathed Bebop and through Big Bill, discovered the blues impact on but delineation from the music they loved so much. In the UK, the folk music revival spread, thanks in large part to Alan Lomax, and Lomax, by this point a good friend, found in Big Bill a treasure who could highlight his and the revival’s pretensions on black blues. In effect, Broonzy began navigating these audiences, essentially reinvigorating his career and building celebrity across the Atlantic.

Big Bill Broonzy

While touring Europe through the 1950s, Big Bill became a legendary musician whose music and history mesmerized European audiences in the UK and on the continent. Although successful, his tours there added frustrations and created personal relationships that would stay with him until the end of his life. In Holland, he met a young Dutch theatre costume designer with whom he fell in love and produced a son. From the early 1950s to his death in 1958, Big Bill would try to maintain his relationship with Pim van Isveldt while balancing the significant changes in his career and a wife back home in Chicago. Broonzy crafted celebrity in Europe that moved beyond the United States’ racial boundaries, eventually becoming an iconic figure for black music during the decade even if he had been marginalized within the folk music revival and changing music landscape back home.

Field Trip—Kentucky

This chapter explores the field recordings, films, and photographs John Cohen made in eastern Kentucky during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly of the musician Roscoe Holcomb. It discusses Cohen’s connection to the era’s folk music revival and how his documentary work in the region represented both a break with his predecessors and a continuation of the tradition’s dominant themes. Cohen was motivated by personal desire and aesthetic interests rather than reformism or politics. Under the influence of the modern folk revival, Beat culture, Abstract Expressionism, and existentialism, Cohen created a new documentary ethos and methodology. Yet, he also presented Holcomb and southern Appalachia in a familiar manner. In his photographs, on records such as Mountain Music of Kentucky, and in his film, The High Lonesome Sound, they represented pure tradition, symbols of folk authenticity in an increasingly standardized and commercialized America. This chapter also addresses how Holcomb, and some members of his family, challenged Cohen’s vision of their culture and home, and how Holcomb himself, despite his friendship with Cohen, occasionally resisted Cohen’s attempts to represent his private life for a public audience.

Smells Like Wild Spirit: Galician Rock Bravú, Between the Rurban and the Glocal

This chapter examines the explosion of Rock Bravú, a popular cultural movement that redefined traditional rural/urban relations and thus remapped modern Galician culture in the 1990s. It examines the convergence between the great indie rock explosion of the Galician movida and the strong Galician folk music revival movement developing in the 1980s, mediated by television. Culturally rooted in the local and the national, Bravú asserted a modern Galician cultural identity developing at the intersections of the old and the new, the rural and the urban, and the local and the global (where the new hybrid realities of the rurban and glocal occur).