In his excellent, edifying study Political Folk Music
in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, Lawrence J. Epstein
tells the fascinating tale of the left-wing “free-spirited modern
troubadours” who “envisioned themselves as moral auditors for the
angels.”
Of course, as even the briefest survey of Scientology or the
Department of Homeland Security demonstrates, self-proclaimed
“moral auditors” are rarely all that keen on submitting to audits
themselves, which is probably why when the Associated Press wrote
up Cry, the Beloved Country in April 1969, the
opening paragraph focused squarely on the dissonance of the
artist’s dissent:
Tony Dolan composes and sings folk songs. He also requires that
the girls he dates subscribe to the conservative
magazine National Review.
And this, it seems, is precisely how Dolan—a future conservative
commentator and Reagan speechwriter credited with coining the
phrase “evil empire”—preferred it.
“I’m composing and performing to show that conservatism swings,”
he explained, and, indeed, even setting aside the liner notes
penned by William F. Buckley Jr. (!) and such hippie-antagonizing
ditties as “Join the SDS”:
Join the SDS
Oh, we’ll canonize Alger Hiss
Join the SDS and learn to love the communists
—and “New York Times Blues”:
All the news that’s fit to print, unless of course it’s
anti-communist…
Hey, the ADA blew up the Statue of Liberty
Let’s see, that was on page 106, Column B, I
think
—the fiery “Remember Bloody Budapest” made clear Dolan would
show no quarter to those who were aesthetic contemporaries but
ideological adversaries:
Pete Seeger, you have sung so long about justice and love
for us all, but where were your songs of righteousness when Kennedy
was killed by a Marxist or when they built the Berlin
Wall?
Well, Joan Baez, you sing so soft, you sing about the
falling rain, but where were your songs of righteousness…when
Poland’s youth lay slain?
The Omni Recording Corporation has lifted these and other
provocations out from the dustbin of history for Freedom
Is a Hammer: Conservative Folk Revolutionaries of the Sixties,
a fun, exquisitely packaged 29-track compilation of cultural
oddities featuring Dolan’s work alongside salvos from Baez-esque
operatic chanteuse Vera Vanderlaan and plucky pop-folk songstress
Janet Greene, who left a cushy gig playing Cinderella on a
Columbus, Ohio, television show to record “Commie Lies” and
“Fascist Threat”:
I think I’ll take a little quiz and find out just what
fascism is,
though some may think that it’s extreme to find out what words
really mean:
It has a party rather small that seeks to rule and govern
all
A single leader whom they say everybody must obey
Destroy the government with lies, seize control and
centralize
Very shortly you will see a fascist state monopoly
Although we’ve used the fascist name
Communism is just the same
It’s plain to see these two are twins
And freedom dies if either wins
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.
