A long-standing interest for me is what has been called the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, also named the “Great American Folk Scare” by Dave Van Ronk, an apparent reference to the way McCarthyites saw a communist under under bed or at least in front of every microphone at a coffee house.
In the eyes of some, the folk revival seemed to come out of no where and then suddenly disappear the moment the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. Of course, it neither came out of nowhere nor did it particularly disappear. In fact, many of the same people who were rock n’ roll sensations in the 1960s got their start playing acoustic music or folk music in any number of configurations before the Beatles were the Beatles.
Consider the Mamas & the Papas: John Phillips was previously with a folk trio called the Journeymen, Denny Doherty was also in a folk trio called the Halifax III, and Cass Elliot was in a similar kind of folk act called the Big 3. John Sebastian actually grew up in Greenwich Village, the epicentre of the folk revival and was heavily involved in the club scene there, notably as a harmonica player before going on to be a part of The Lovin’ Spoonful. One of my favourite pieces of trivia is that Peter Tork of the Monkees was fully engaged in the Greenwich Village folk scene before becoming a TV star.
The list goes on and what makes the point pretty obvious is that there was a need to invent catagories like American Folk-Rock and British Folk Rock to help us better understand how things developed. If you want to take a deeper dive, Richie Unterberger has two great books that cover the territory: Turn, Turn, Turn: The ’60s Folk Rock Revolution, and Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight From Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock.
The Folk-Rock genre is a beautiful thing, both in its American form and British incarnation. Certainly The Byrds (David Crosby, Gene Clark,, Michael Clark, Chris Hillman, and Jim McGuinn) were among the first to pioneer the folk-rock sound with songs like “Mr. Tamborine Man” and this classic version of Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn.”