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The Sixties Spectator
Dolan, Not Dylan
A new compilation of right-wing folk—featuring songs like “Join the SDS” and “Fascist Threat”—shows a new side of the 1960s.
(Page 2 of 2)
Freedom Is a Hammer curator Bill Geerhart describes these conservative folk luminaries as “musical counter-revolutionaries,” but the label isn’t quite accurate, really. A revolution had taken place; a cadre of artists did, in Epstein’s estimation, “give birth to a new American tradition…that seized the name ‘folk music’ from its traditional owners and re-made it as politically left-wing.” But songwriters like Dolan, Green, and Vanderlaan sought to answer left-wing New Folk in its own arena, not turn the clock back to a pre–Carter Family era before commoditization or politicization, a time when folk was, as Epstein puts it, “simple music created anonymously and played by and for common people.”
There wasn’t any real subterfuge to the effort: Christian Anti-Communist Crusade founder and author of the 1960 bestseller You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) Dr. Fred Schwarz openly told reporters he was taking “a leaf out of the Communist book” in shepherding Greene’s career. “You’d be amazed,” he continued, “at how much doctrine can be taught in one song.”
This particular “leaf” bears uncanny resemblance to the songwriting philosophy of Joe Hill, the martyred patron saint of political folk who served as a kind of John the Baptist to Woody Guthrie’s Jesus Christ, expounded upon in a 1914 letter to Solidarity, a publication of the renegade Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies):
A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over; I maintain that if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them up in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off of them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science.
Yet despite a musical “cloak” of deft melodies, compositional sophistication, and pure catchiness, these “conservative folk revolutionaries” reached a vanishingly small audience compared to their left-wing counterparts.
Why? It’s simple: In boxing, a counterpunch turns tables and ends fights. The same strike employed in the (popular) culture wars, however, can appear insincere or desperate, whatever its true strength.
Thus, Joan Baez belted out “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” for a rapturous crowd at Woodstock while fewer people than comprised your average Weather Underground quorum likely ever heard Greene perform her playful, slinky anti-appeasement earworm parable “The Hunter and the Bear” about a “moderate American man” who puts down his gun to negotiate with a crafty, duplicitous bear in the woods:
Now they both got what they wanted, please take note,
The bear a full stomach and the hunter a fur coat;
That’s the truth, can’t be denied; for the hunter ended up in the bear’s insides…
He’s on the missing person’s list since he tried to coexist
And Vanderlaan’s Henry-Hazlitt-meets-Old- Macdonald number “One From One Leaves Two” clearly failed to persuade her generation’s hepcats to abandon On the Road in favor of Mises’ Human Action:
Mumble-dee, gumble-dee, my red cow, she’s cooperating now
At first she didn’t understand, milk production must be planned…
But now the government reports she’s giving pints instead of quarts
In a just world, artists who beat the drum for retrograde revolutionary socialism and lionized Pete Seeger—a man who only got around to issuing a (conditional) apology in 1993 for having mistaken Stalin for “merely a ‘hard driver’ not a supreme cruel dictator” (Whoops!)—would garner at least as much scoffing opprobrium as Vanderlaan’s hokey ode to Ronald Reagan (“Modern Paul Revere”) or Dolan’s defense of the House Un-American Activities Committee (“Abolish, Abolish!”).
Truth is, though, no one needs the truth spelled out: This isn’t a just world and not even the catchiest tune could have ever induced then-blossoming white middle-class Baby Boomers to abandon the carefully constructed vision of themselves as proletarian radicals. The New Folk buttressed a tedious artifice Boomers used (and continue to use) to assuage latent guilt over their status as the most pampered, privileged cohort in the nation’s history. The post–New Left left may regard the “common man” more as a ward to be beneficently regulated by a muscular technocratic state than a comrade worthy of equal autonomy, but if any generation internalized the silly maxim “perception is reality,” it is the one currently driving us all into an abyss of endless nannyism and debt.
A young ’60s right-wing folk singer railing against Castro’s tyranny or the totalitarian evil of the dissent-smashing Comintern was, manifestly, “speaking truth to power.” Alas, presuming that New Folk actually preferred rebellion to reassurance turned out to be a bad bet.
That said, Red-hating conservative folk, perhaps predictably, enjoy a certain beyond-the-grave respectability.
“After years of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity,” rock critic Jon Dolan opines in Rolling Stone, “it’s weirdly refreshing to listen to reactionaries complaining about actual communism, rather than the publicly funded roads variety.”
Yes, well…we’ll see what Rolling Stone has to say when the Tea Party Justin Bieber makes his glorious debut.
About the Author
Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator.
Appleby| 2.21.13 @ 7:22AM
I have never heard of any of the people you cite. Oh, and by the way, please stop massing all the "Baby Boomers" into the Hippie Scum; some of us were the first members of our family on either side to attend university and graduate, and we spent the Sixties fighting to get an education while the Hippie Scum were trying to destroy the universities and prevent us from attending classes. Lots of us had GI fathers who had fought against exactly what the Hippie Scum were advocating, and who taught us the arguments we used against them when we had the chance. Yes, I know it's more fun to lump us all into the Proletariat, but some of us who remain stubbornly conservative, and attend the Latin Mass too by the way, were on your side even back then.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.21.13 @ 7:58AM
“…while the Hippie Scum were trying to destroy the universities and prevent us from attending classes…”
While some of the Hippie Scum were trying to destroy the universities and prevent classes from taking place, others were merely trying to take the place over, and were generally quite successful. Using the mantra of Freedom of Speech, they gained their foothold, and once they had control, it was among the first things they jettisoned as they transformed academia from laboratories of thoughts and ideas to indoctrination centers for the Left.
Seek| 2.21.13 @ 1:16PM
Most hippies were apolitical. They were dropouts, not drop-ins.
JimH| 2.21.13 @ 8:39AM
The best commentary on the leftist folk music of the 60’s was by Tom Lehrer.’ We are the folk song army. Every one of us cares. Were all concerned about war and injustice unlike the rest of you squares’.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.21.13 @ 9:27AM
"If you feel dissatisfaction
strum your frustration away
some people might prefer action
but
give me a folk song any old day"
Jim Adcox| 2.21.13 @ 11:39AM
BURMA SHAVE!
Bill8472| 2.21.13 @ 1:35PM
Tom Lehrer:
"All the world is in tune
On a Spring afternoon
As we poison the pigeons in the park.
* * * *
We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment,
Except for the few we take home to experiment..."
A Grin without a Cat| 2.21.13 @ 12:09PM
(while popping gum) It's got a good beat, but ya can't dance to it. I give it a thirty-five.
Bill8472| 2.21.13 @ 12:34PM
When it comes to Dolan's song asking Joan Baez where she was when this outrage or that one took place, I would like to say that although I'm not a great fan of Joan Baez either for her politics or her approach to most folk songs, but she deserves credit for being the ONLY high profile folkie who spoke out against the Khmer Rouge slaughter of the Cambodian people.
She did that at a time when such lefties as William Kunstler refused to see what they could plainly see as a left-wing-engineered disaster and even defended the Khmer Rouge, saying they wouldn't criticize a "socialist" regime.
Seek| 2.21.13 @ 1:21PM
Not every "folk song" has to be political. One of the reasons why Dylan was so successful artistically and commercially is that he revealed his own personal life in non-political ways. His lyrics were stream-of-consciousness perceptions of larger truths.
The conflation of culture and politics as nothing more than partisan warfare is a symptom of a deep problem in our ranks. Conservatism needs to be de-Breitbartized.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 2.21.13 @ 1:41PM
To reinforce JimH's point about, Tom Lehrer also opined to that effect in his work:
"There are innocuous folk songs
but we regard 'em with scorn
the folks who sing 'em got no social conscience
that don't even care if Jimmy Crack Corn"
Ronsch| 2.21.13 @ 2:42PM
My favourite folk song of the 1960s (granted I was only 1 year old when it came out), but, heh...
The Ballad Of The Green Berets
SSGT Barry Sadler and Robin Moore
Fighting soldiers from the sky
Fearless men who jump and die
Men who mean just what they say
The brave men of the Green Beret
Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America's best
One hundred men will test today
But only three win the Green Beret
Trained to live off nature's land
Trained in combat, hand-to-hand
Men who fight by night and day
Courage peak from the Green Berets
Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America's best
One hundred men will test today
But only three win the Green Beret
Back at home a young wife waits
Her Green Beret has met his fate
He has died for those oppressed
Leaving her his last request
Put silver wings on my son's chest
Make him one of America's best
He'll be a man they'll test one day
Have him win the Green Beret.
Bill8472| 2.21.13 @ 6:48PM
I've always thought this one and Ballad of the Green Berets would make a good A side and B side of a record dedicated to the heart of the side-by-side cultures of the 1960s:
Phil Ochs, Draft Dodger Rag:
I'm just a typical American boy
From a typical American town
I believe in God and Senator Dodd
And an keepin' old Castro down
And when it came my time to serve
I knew better dead than red
But when I got to my old draft board
Buddy, this is what I said
Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat
My asthma's getting worse
Consider my career, my sweetheart dear
My poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, and I'm goin' to school
And I'm workin' in a defense plant.
I've got a dislocated disc and a racked up back
I'm allergic to flowers and bugs
And when the bombshell hits, I get epileptic fits
And I'm addicted to a thousand drugs
I got the weakness woes, I can't touch my toes
I can hardly reach my knees
And if the enemy ever came close to me
Well, I'd probably start to sneeze
(Chorus)
I hate Chou En Lai, and I hope he dies
But I think you gotta see
That if someone's gotta go over there
That someone isn't me
So, have a ball, Sarge, watch 'em fall
Yeah, kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without any gore
Well, I'll be the first to go
(Chorus)