Origin Story · Volume 9

FOLK REVIVAL

How a Songbook Nobody Owned Invented the Singer-Songwriter, 1958–1975

Where it sits on the century

19151958–19752030

$14.99Paperback
about 120 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

This is the complete story of the folk revival in about three hours: the Washington Square fountain where the music was free and the police arrived anyway; the two thousand coffeehouses and the campus circuit a blacklisted banjo player wired together when the networks banned him; the twelve-inch LP that changed the unit of ambition from the song to the statement — and quietly multiplied a songwriter’s royalties by twelve; the festival that paid every performer, star or stranger, the same fifty dollars, and what its collapse revealed.

It takes the money seriously, because almost nobody in the story did until it was too late. The arranger credit that put one man’s name on a Kentucky ballad the whole Village had carried. The publisher’s pseudonym that collected for decades on a Zulu composer’s song while his family went without. The manager who was paid from every side of the same transaction. And the counter-revolution: the shift from label-assigned songs to writer-owned publishing, which made this the first generation of popular musicians who kept what they wrote — and, half a century later, sold it for sums with nine figures.

And it answers the question most books about the era decline to ask: how it ended. Not with an electric guitar at Newport — with success, as the confessional album became the industry’s default product and the revival’s collective politics did not survive it.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and it costs this volume more than any other in the series, because this music staked everything on its words. What replaces them is a description of what the writing actually does — where a song speaks as a we and where it narrows to an I, how a verse refuses to resolve, what a singer’s phrasing does to a line.

Format: Paperback
Trim: 5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages: about 120
Chapters: 25 in five movements
Period: 1958–1975
Audiobook: 2h 53m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Folk Revival — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 10
PSYCHEDELIAthe folk circuit’s alumni plug the album-as-statement into the multitrack studio, and the studio becomes the instrument→Volume 8
THE BRITISH INVASIONthe import-shop generation that carried this volume’s ballads back across the Atlantic, electrified→Volume 1
BLUESthe source rack: the collectors, the field recorder, and the first version of every ownership question this book has asked→

Free to read · the opening

How volume 9 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 9 · FOLK REVIVALIntroduction

The Songwriting Department

In 1958, if you were a singer with a record contract, here is how you got a song.

Somebody gave you one. A publisher’s man brought a stack of demonstration discs to your label’s artists-and-repertoire department; the A&R man chose; an arranger wrote the charts; you sang what you were handed, in the key you were handed it in. The people who wrote the songs worked in offices (in New York they were stacked into a few buildings around Broadway) and they were paid as writers, through a publishing system a half-century old. The people who sang the songs were paid as performers. The two trades met at the A&R man’s desk and almost nowhere else. A singer who insisted on recording songs she had written herself was not a rebel; she was a puzzle, and the industry had no filing cabinet that shape.

By 1975, the industry’s default product (the thing its advances, its marketing departments and its press machinery were organised around) was an album of ten or twelve songs written by the person singing them, about that person’s own interior life, owned, in the cases that mattered, by that person’s own publishing company. The office and the stage had collapsed into a single figure, and the business had rebuilt itself around the figure. The word it settled on was singer-songwriter, and the word was a job description, a marketing category and (this is the part histories skip) a property arrangement.

This book is about how that happened, and the strange road it took. Because the shortest way to describe the folk revival is this: a generation of young Americans went looking for the oldest songs in the language (ballads with no author, work songs and spirituals made collectively by people whose names nobody wrote down, a commons of melody and verse owned by nobody) and came out the other side, inside fifteen years, having invented the most author-centred, most ownership-concentrated product the record business has ever sold. They went in singing we. They came out singing I, and owning it.

The introduction runs on for another 5 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 25 chapters · about 120 pages · $14.99

Contents

25 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters

1Sunday in Washington Square
2A Thousand Coffeehouses
3The Blacklist’s Children
4Who Was Actually There

02The Machine5 chapters

5Twelve Inches at Thirty-Three
6The Sleeve Was a Classroom
7The Campus and the Fifty-Dollar Festival
8One Microphone in a Quiet Room
9Why the Records Sound Like That

03The Records6 chapters

101958–1962. The Trio, the Queen and the Kid
111963–1964. The Writer Arrives
121964–1965. The Schism
131965–1968. The Interior Turn
141970–1971. The Bedroom Becomes the Industry
15The Records the Canon Dropped

04The Money6 chapters

16Who Owns a Song Nobody Wrote?
17The Publisher’s Golden Decade
18The Manager Who Owned the Scene
19The Writer-Owned Company
20What a Folk Record Actually Earned
21What These Records Earn Now

05The Ending4 chapters

22What Exhausted It
23What It Became
24What the Story Leaves Out
25The Commons, and Who Fenced It

Free to read · reference

FOLK REVIVAL: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 29 entries, 1958–1975. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1948

June. Columbia introduces the twelve-inch microgroove LP. The machine, twenty years early.

1950

The Weavers’ Goodnight Irene spends thirteen weeks at number one. Red Channels is published; the blacklist machinery engages. Sing Out! founded.

1952

The Weavers, unbookable, suspend work. Folkways issues Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

1955

August. Seeger declines to answer HUAC on First Amendment grounds. December. The Weavers’ Carnegie Hall reunion, promoted by Harold Leventhal.

1956

Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. Belafonte’s Calypso becomes, by the usual account, the first million-selling LP by a solo artist. The Gate of Horn opens in Chicago.

1957

Izzy Young opens the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street. Freight Train charts in Britain under other names; the Cotten credit fight begins. The Old Town School of Folk Music opens in Chicago.

1958

Tom Dooley reaches number one; the boom begins. Club 47 opens in Cambridge; the Kingston Trio’s label discovers the college album market. MacColl’s Radio Ballads begin at the BBC.

1959

July, the first Newport Folk Festival; Baez, unbilled, is the discovery. Four Kingston Trio albums sit in the Billboard top ten in a single week.

1960

November, Joan Baez released on Vanguard, chosen over Columbia.

1961

January. Dylan arrives in New York; the Guthrie hospital visits begin. April. The Washington Square permit confrontation. September. Shelton’s New York Times review; Hammond signs Dylan within weeks. November. The debut album cut in two afternoons; Izzy Young’s Carnegie Chapter Hall concert sells a few dozen tickets.

1962

March, Bob Dylan released; the building calls it Hammond’s Folly. Broadside founded. Dylan signs to M. Witmark & Sons; Grossman becomes his manager. November, Baez on the cover of Time. The Tom Dooley settlement recognises the collectors’ claim. Solomon Linda dies in Soweto.

1963

April. ABC’s Hootenanny launches, blacklisting Seeger; Baez and others refuse the show. May. Dylan walks off the Ed Sullivan Show; Columbia withdraws the Birch song; The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan released. June. Peter, Paul and Mary’s Blowin’ in the Wind sells past three hundred thousand inside weeks; Seeger’s Carnegie Hall concert taped. July. Newport reconvenes as a foundation: every performer on the same fifty-dollar scale; the anthem closes the festival, arm in arm. August. The March on Washington; Baez leads the anthem. November. Newsweek publishes the Hibbing exposé.

1964

January. The Times They Are A-Changin'. It’s My Way! released. Summer. The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun, credited to one arranger, tops both countries’ charts. October, the Halloween concert: the mask remark.

1965

March. Bringing It All Back Home, one side electric, one acoustic. April. Bert Jansch sold to Transatlantic for a hundred pounds. June, the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man at number one; Wilson overdubs The Sound of Silence without telling the duo. 20 July, Like a Rolling Stone released, six minutes and thirteen seconds. 25 July. The electric set at Newport. August. Highway 61 Revisited. The Witmark term ends; Dwarf Music follows.

1966

January. The Sound of Silence at number one. Summer. Blonde on Blonde, the double. 29 July, the motorcycle accident; the withdrawal begins.

1967

Woody Guthrie dies in October. Judy Collins records Both Sides Now; Mitchell’s publishing sits in her own company. December, Songs of Leonard Cohen.

1968

March, Song to a Seagull. Club 47 closes. Both Sides Now reaches the American top ten.

1969

Karen Dalton’s debut released. Newport flinches from the rock year; the folk circuit’s trade listings thin.

1970

February, Sweet Baby James. Cold Fact released and sinks in America. Dylan and Grossman’s management relationship ends.

1971

February. Tapestry begins fifteen weeks at number one. March. Taylor on the cover of Time. June, Blue. Asylum Records founded. After crowd trouble, Newport’s folk festival is suspended, not to return to the island for fourteen years.

1972

February, Pink Moon delivered to Island, by hand, in versions that differ. Flack’s recording of MacColl’s song spends six weeks at number one after its film placement.

1974

November. Nick Drake dies at twenty-six.

1976

April. Phil Ochs takes his own life.

1981–1987

Dylan’s litigation with Grossman over the publishing arrangements runs from filing to confidential settlement with the estate.

1999–2000

The Volkswagen advertisement lifts Pink Moon out of oblivion; the Malan investigation reopens the Mbube file.

2004–2006

The Linda daughters sue over The Lion Sleeps Tonight; settlement restores the name and pays the family, sixty-seven years after the session.

2012

Searching for Sugar Man releases; the Rodriguez royalty question is asked on camera and not answered.

2018

The We Shall Overcome litigation ends with the publisher surrendering the claim; the anthem reaches the public domain it was always said to belong to.

2020–2022

The catalogue sell-off: Dylan’s songs to Universal at a reported three hundred million dollars or more; Young’s half-share, Simon’s catalogue and others follow. The counter-revolution of 1965–72 is priced, at last, in public.

Free to read · where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

A warning particular to this volume, flagged in the front matter and honoured here: the folk revival is the most self-mythologised era in this series. Its central memoir is treated by scholars as a literary performance as much as a record; its most famous evening was revised by its own witnesses for fifty years; and several of its foundational biographies were invented by their subjects while the events were happening. The text has preferred documents (contracts, copyright registrations, court records, trade-press figures) over recollection wherever the two conflict, and has said which accounts changed over time, because the changes are evidence too.

Histories of the revival. Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, the fullest cultural account. Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970, the standard documentary history, and the source this book leans on for the scene’s institutions, circulation figures and chronology. David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street, the Dylan–Baez–Fariña quadrangle, taken seriously as social history. Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!, the book-length reconstruction of Newport 1965 on which this volume’s schism chapter rests, and a model of how to audit a myth.

Memoirs by participants, all to be read as interested accounts: Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the best single account of Village economics and the source for the basket-house figures and the Rising Sun arrangement story; Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, invaluable and unreliable in ways its own critics have catalogued; Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With; Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time; Judy Collins, Trust Your Heart and later volumes; Peggy Seeger, First Time Ever; Ewan MacColl, Journeyman; Shirley Collins, America Over the Water; George Wein with Nate Chinen, Myself Among Others, the source for the Newport pay scale and foundation arrangements; Carole King, A Natural Woman; Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory, cited in this book as an artefact rather than a record.

Biographies and scholarship. David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, on Seeger, the blacklist and the We Shall Overcome registrations; Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man, and Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life, on Guthrie and the hospital years; Howard Sounes, Down the Highway, and Clinton Heylin, Behind the Shades, on Dylan’s business affairs, the Witmark and Grossman arrangements and the later litigation, reported there from the court papers; Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us, on King, Mitchell and the canyon transition; Barney Hoskyns, Hotel California, on the Troubadour, Asylum and the singer-songwriter industry; Michael Schumacher, There But for Fortune, on Ochs; Ian Zack, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest; Andrea Warner’s authorised Sainte-Marie biography, read alongside the 2023 CBC investigation and the artist’s response, all three cited in the text as contested; Colin Harper, Dazzling Stranger, on Jansch and the British clubs; Joe Boyd, White Bicycles, on Newport, the UK scene and Nick Drake; Trevor Dann, Darker Than the Deepest Sea, on Drake and the delivery of Pink Moon; Ted Anthony, Chasing the Rising Sun, the book-length history of one ballad’s money that this volume’s ownership chapter is built on; Rian Malan’s Rolling Stone investigation of the Mbube copyrights, with the subsequent South African court settlement of 2006; the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man and the reporting around it, cited in the text with its own gaps noted.

The trade and scene press. Sing Out!, Broadside and The Little Sandy Review for the movement’s arguments in real time; Billboard, Cash Box and Variety for chart positions, sales reports and the college-market coverage; the Newport Daily News and festival programmes for bills and fees; the November 1963 Newsweek profile of Dylan, and the later confession of the song-purchase rumour’s inventor, for the self-invention chapter.

On the business. The mechanics in Movement Four (the two-cent statutory mechanical, publisher-writer splits, arrangement copyright in traditional material, administration deals) are set out in the industry histories above and in any reputable music-business text; Donald Passman’s standard work remains the clearest general explanation, though it describes a later era. The Tom Dooley settlement, the We Shall Overcome litigation ending in 2018, the Dylan–Grossman suit and its 1987 settlement, and the Linda family’s 2006 settlement are all matters of court record, reported in the trade press of their days. The 2020–22 catalogue sales are cited from contemporaneous reporting in the trade press; the prices are the reported figures, and the text flags them as reported, because the contracts are private.

Where figures are disputed, the size and speed of the Tom Dooley and Blowin’ in the Wind sales, the cost of the early sessions, what actually happened on the Newport stage in 1965, what Grossman’s arrangements entitled him to, what reached Solomon Linda and when, where the South African Rodriguez royalties went, and nearly everything any participant remembered more vividly with each retelling, the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. In the most self-invented era of this series, they are the record.

What this book does not do

This is the volume where this series’ central rule costs the most, so it is worth explaining properly.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none.

It should be admitted at once that this rule costs this volume more than it costs any other in the series, because the music in this book staked everything on its words. Nobody bought a topical broadside for the guitar part. What the book does instead (and after a few chapters you may find you prefer it) is describe what the writing does: where a song speaks as a we and where it narrows to an I, how a verse is built and why it refuses to resolve, what a singer’s phrasing does to a line’s meaning, what a lyric is an inventory of. And there is a second, stranger reason the rule fits this volume: who owned the words (who got to write a name on the copyright line under a verse that had been passing from voice to voice for a century) is one of the actual subjects of this book, and it turns out that quoting these songs was never free for anybody.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Folk Revival. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

One more honesty, particular to this volume. The people in it are the most heavily self-mythologised in this series. Several of them invented their own biographies while they were living them, and were caught; several told a story one way for decades and then told it differently; the most important of them has published a memoir that scholars treat as a literary work rather than a record. Where an account is one person’s own telling, this book says so. Where an account changed over time, this book says that too, because the change is usually more informative than either version.

This is the volume where the lyric rule costs most, and there is no getting around it: these are songs whose entire purpose was their words, several of which changed public opinion. So this book does the other job completely (where the songs came from, who claimed to own them, and what happened when the claim was tested) the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where the revival ignited and what it thought it was doing. What the long-playing record made possible and what it cost. Which records mattered and why. Who got paid, which in this volume means the strange journey from songs owned by nobody to songwriters who owned everything. And how it ended, which was not with a death but with a victory that dismantled the thing it grew from.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism · MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Folk & Traditional · MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-90623-891-7
Audiobook ISBN: 979-8-90623-892-4
Paperback ISBN: not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 9 about?

How a Songbook Nobody Owned Invented the Singer-Songwriter, 1958–1975. In the autumn of 1958 a collegiate trio’s recording of a hundred-year-old North Carolina murder ballad went to number one in America, and the writer credit on the label named nobody in the mountains it came from. That small transaction — who gets to sign for a song nobody owns — runs through the whole strange story this book tells: how a generation went looking for the oldest songs in the language, songs that belonged to everybody, and came out the other side, inside fifteen years, having invented the singer-songwriter — the most author-centred product the record business has ever sold.

What years does FOLK REVIVAL cover?

1958–1975. The volume is numbered 9 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made FOLK REVIVAL possible?

The LP as a statement. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 29,000 words: 25 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 53m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 29 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy FOLK REVIVAL in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.