Cantwell — When We Were Good

Author: Robert Cantwell
Title: When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
Year: 1996
Type: Academic book (Harvard University Press)

When We Were Good: The Folk Revival is a book by Robert Cantwell, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, published by Harvard University Press in 1996. It argues that the most interesting feature of the folk revival of the early 1960s was its lack of political affiliation and its participants’ wish to be good, and it builds that argument around one image from the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, the singers who linked arms on stage to sing “We Shall Overcome”. Cantwell traces the revival’s sources through nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, the Jewish entertainment and political culture of 1930s New York, the Almanac Singers and the Cold War, during which the music moved into schools, summer camps and colleges. Cantwell describes the book as a study of what he calls the dreamwork of history. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing it in the New York Times, praised its prose at its best and objected to its long, unwieldy sentences and its narrow reading of the Cold War.

Cantwell, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, describes the book as an attempt to construct the context of a single image from the 1963 festival, in which Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary linked arms with the Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to sing “We Shall Overcome” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”.¹ He writes that the book is not a history of the folk revival.¹ Its conclusion is that “what is most interesting about the revival is not its political affiliations, but the absence of them. For we were good, and wanted to be.”¹ Harvard University Press published the book in 1996, and its description calls it a study of the cultural process itself, “what the author calls the dreamwork of history.”²

The publisher’s description traces the revival’s sources through nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, the Jewish entertainment and political cultures of 1930s New York, the Almanac Singers and the wartime 1940s, and the Cold War. Folk music had served labor, antifascist and New Deal causes, and in the 1950s, under the McCarthyite reaction, it moved into what the description calls “a children’s underground of schools, summer camps, and colleges.”³ Cantwell devotes a chapter to the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), compiled by Harry Smith, and writes that “in the developing culture of the Anthology,” “a new kind of history has begun to form, a kind of aural hologram.”¹

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing the book in the New York Times on April 25, 1996, wrote that at its best Cantwell’s prose is “subtle, playful, witty, ironic, profound and eloquent.” He also found some of its sentences long and unwieldy and called its interpretation of the Cold War narrow.¹

Key contributions

• The folk revival read through a single image, the linked arms on the Newport stage in 1963, and the context that produced it.
• The thesis that the revival’s distinguishing feature was its lack of political affiliation and its participants’ wish to be good.
• A long lineage for the revival, running from blackface minstrelsy through the Jewish entertainment culture of 1930s New York and the Almanac Singers.
• An account of the 1950s, when the McCarthyite reaction moved folk music into schools, summer camps and colleges.

See also

• Greenwich Village folk scene — the New York scene of the revival
• Dylan at Newport — Bob Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 festival
• Romancing the Folk — Benjamin Filene’s 2000 history of the people who collected and presented American roots music
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music