I’m about half-way through Ronald D. Cohen‘s excellent book on folk music in the mid-20th century entitled “Rainbow Quest: The Folk Revival & American Society, 1040-1970.” It’s well-written, well-organized, and well-researched and an excellent introduction to these important years in the development of folk music. In the early going, it covers subjects like the work of ethnomusicologists to undercover the tradition, the political uses of folk songs, and the always thorny issue of commercialization.
If you are familiar with Joe Klein’s iconic book on Woody Guthrie or any number of biographical works about or by Pete Seeger, or even more obscure fare like Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen’s autobiography, much of this terrain will be familiar to you. It’s an interesting time and benefits from extensive coverage.
Many of the performers mentioned in these books, like Guthrie, Seeger, Burl Ives, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, and Lead Belly are better known. One performer who comes up fairly often, though, and about whom I know virtually nothing is Richard Dyer-Bennet.
Bennet was born in 1913 and died in 1991. He was English-born though made His career in the United States. He is usually classified as a folk singer, though he, rather quaintly, preferred the term “minstrel.” At this peak, he gave 50 concerts a year and recorded extensively. His discography lists recordings from 1949 to 1964, not counting re-releases. There is a biography by Paul Jenkins – Richard Dyer-Bennet: The Last Minstrel – published in December 2009 by the University Press of Mississippi.
His New York Times obituary states that he “appeared at the Village Vanguard and other Manhattan clubs in the early 1940’s with such modern pioneers in folk music as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger and Josh White.” Notably, he was the first in his genre to be booked for a major solo concert, which happened in 1944 to a sold-out audience.
His repertoire comes in at about 600 songs, including more than 100 of his own compositions. As for what he sang, the list includes “English sea chanteys, French love ballads, spirituals, cowboy music and Swedish shepherd tunes.”
Critics praised the scholarship of his selections and arrangements as well as his performing skills. His high lyric tenor was not the strongest or richest voice, some critics noted. But they were struck by the clarity of his diction, the precision of his phrasing and the delicacy and feeling of his delivery.
Not to my tastes, if the truth be known, but he certainly played a role.