The enduring myth is that the Beatles and their UK brethren were a much-needed shot in the arm for an otherwise moribund American pop music scene of the early 1960s. The story goes that “the establishment” of the time, musical and otherwise, had run the early breed of trailblazing rock ‘n’ rollers out of town by the end of the 1950s. Elvis Presley got drafted, Chuck Berry went to prison, Little Richard became a preacher, and Jerry Lee Lewis realized too late that his fans didn’t appreciate his marrying his 13-year-old cousin, to name a few.
All that America was left with was the pablum of white bread momma’s boys doing watered-down covers of the greats (case in point, a young Pat Boone). Thereafter, the airwaves supposedly stagnated under a steady diet of dulcified AM pop rock, safe and shallow distractions for a youth market saturated in commercial radio selling plastic ware. Then the Beatles brought salvation.
The Beatles and American Folk Music
America’s Remarkable Folk Music
In truth, by the early 1960s, a thoughtful group of influential artists in the US was already immersed in a genre that was bringing something entirely different and refreshing to the national music scene. The American folk movement was well underway and just hitting its stride culturally and commercially right before the British landed on American shores and arguably messed up a good thing that was happening organically, returning the airwaves to what some might call a more frivolous hit parade.
The American Folk Revival began after World War II, with artists such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s group, the Weavers. It had become commercially viable by the late 1950s with the palatable sounds of the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte, followed soon by Joan Baez, Odetta, and Judy Collins, who were popular on college campuses. The mecca for the revival was Greenwich Village, an artistic and bohemian enclave in New York City.
By the dawn of the 1960s, folk had blossomed into a youth-oriented celebration and a burgeoning musical movement that was gathering serious steam. Youth in ever greater numbers were tapping into a new and inspiring wellspring, celebrating the array of early Americana song styles passed down through the generations, including Appalachian bluegrass, church hymns, Delta blues, and working-man ballads.
Another myth of the time was that British bands in the 1960s taught the US to appreciate its own Black musical traditions. In truth, the folk revival was already celebrating the resurrected blues artists who had recorded decades earlier, like Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson. An important catalyst was the movement’s veneration of the 1950s’ Anthology of American Folk Music. These recordings on Folkway Records served as a musical Rosetta Stone.
For example, by the time he got to Greenwich Village in 1961, Bob Dylan was as well-versed in the blues as he was in the traveling songs of his itinerant idol, Woodie Guthrie. American musicians – albeit in small but growing numbers – were well underway in unearthing roots buried deep in the complex cultural terrain of their creative ancestors.
The latter phase of the folk revival was more than just a newfound appreciation of “real” American music. It was an essential feature in a generational rejection of a false promise. Youth at the time were less than enamored with a vapid consumer culture that their parents were steeped in and eager to pass down, having experienced the dual horrors of an economic depression followed by a global war during the 1930s and 1940s.
In ever-growing numbers, the children of the Greatest Generation were tuning in to the raw, authentic message and melody of the downtrodden classes: folk music, as in “po’ folk”. What it revealed to them was contrasted starkly with what they were hearing on the radio. Already suspicious of the world they were inheriting, they could not help but be drawn to these songs; they were simple, pure, heartfelt, and poignant, with a serious sincerity that showed the current hit parade for what it was: a cultural wasteland of insipid amusement.
This movement was at its peak a year before the Beatles‘ arrival. The New York Times had a designated folk critic, Robert Shelton, who first picked Bob Dylan out of the crowd in Greenwich Village back in the fall of 1961. By the next year, Dylan was beginning to pen songs that were becoming certifiable hits with mass market appeal. An example of how the music was translating into commercial success, folk act Peter, Paul and Mary, who had a debut album topping the Billboard charts in 1962, were covering Dylan’s early work “Blowin’ in the Wind” with great commercial success by the summer of 1963.
By the time Columbia Records released Dylan’s second album in May 1963, things started to really shake out. With this release, the label allowed Dylan to include more of his original material, allowing his true and remarkable voice to emerge, and the effect was dramatic. The release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan simultaneously placed him at the vanguard of the folk revival while also moving him beyond its limited parameters to a more even footing commercially with pop/rock.
Folk music reflected a generation coming of age in an increasingly frightening world. While the Cold War had yet to bring Vietnam to the forefront, the Cuban Missile Crisis had already shown the conflict’s darkest potential, and there was a growing desire for an alternative narrative.
Folk music was becoming a cultural force to be reckoned with, no longer limited to a mere reverential revival. It evolved from old songs performed for anthropological discovery to transcendent new music that lifted the genre to a higher plane and spoke for a generation yearning for a voice that wasn’t contrived for them. Led by Dylan’s quickly evolving vision, the American folk revival was advancing into post-folk: a genre growing beyond respect for the bygone and towards an incantation for better times.
The folk movement had left the confines of the Greenwich Village scene both in place and form. No longer merely interpreting the lost songs of forgotten souls, folkies were writing their own topical songs that spoke both of and to America’s unjust leanings, and their style was sweeping through youth culture, intrigued by the political and cultural implications.
As such, folk music was perfectly positioned to meet the challenges on the horizon and to complement the zeitgeist with its angry, aching songs that ask, “When is it all gonna change for the better?” The stage was set for folk-based music to graduate from the avant-garde and to move beyond merely giving voice to the quiet ghosts of marginalized ancestors. With its inclinations towards protest, it was poised to be the soundtrack and the cheerleader for a social revolution that would eventually uproot and transform nearly every aspect of American life.
With folk at its zenith in the youth market, television broadcasters moved to catch the wave. In April 1963, ABC launched Hootenanny, a live prime-time TV series showcasing the folk scene. It quickly became one of the network’s top shows, featuring a wide variety of contemporary American folk music performed live on college campuses rather than on a soundstage.
Hootenanny was a relatively stripped-down show, featuring acoustic performers on an unadorned stage before an appreciative audience who often sang along with the once-neglected songs of the past. It was a simple celebration of this uniquely American art form, devoid of splashy production, with nothing slick or contrived, only genuine, down-to-earth musicianship.
The music became firmly associated with thoughtful youth steering toward hopeful change in the eyes of the nation when Peter, Paul, and Mary joined Baez and Dylan to perform at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. It was August 1963, and folk had reached a high-water mark, providing the very accompaniment in real time for an event that was viewed as a watershed moment in American cultural and political change.
In the meantime, Dylan’s restless musical soul was already beginning to quickly shift again. After the release of his next album, the consummate folk/protest work, The Times They Are a-Changin’, in February 1963, he began to display a more literary bent. Hanging out with beat poet Allen Ginsberg, he dabbled in free-form prose and poetry, moving away from a clearer message-driven protest style to a more nuanced and personal aesthetic. While he hadn’t reached his commercial peak, his revolutionary brand of songwriting and in-your-face attitude were beginning to have a significant impact on other musical creatives.
Suffice it to say, then, that musical America at this particular moment was moving in a very interesting direction. All of this was happening mere months before the Beatles landed.
The Beatles’ Effect on American Folk Music
In early 1964, the Beatles landed on the East Coast, touching down at the newly renamed JFK airport, blithely unaware of the change they were about to rain down on the other artists toiling below on their songcraft. They were innocents themselves, of course, hailing from a musical backwater, looking only to somehow “make it” in the big leagues in the land from whence their heroes, the likes of Elvis and Chuck Berry, had come. Little did they know they were about to alter the arc of progress for American music.
The Beatles’ impact on both American popular song and culture that year was like an asteroid strike. Virtually unknown in the US only a few months prior, their first performance stateside on The Ed Sullivan Show was in February, and by early April, they’d locked down the top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, a feat unequaled before or since. Most everything else directed at the youth market was blown off the map. American folk and all the new music it inspired – songcraft with heart, thought, and a gravitas to match the times – quickly lost whatever initial foothold it had begun to acquire, commercially and otherwise.
The American public in the early 1960s had been having a hard time deciding their appropriate mood: was this the best of times, with the hope and prosperity of a new decade and a cause to celebrate, or was it the worst of times, calling for serious soul searching and a groundbreaking dialogue centered on social change? The Kennedy administration had fed a new optimism for societal renewal and hope that was not entirely extinguished by the President’s death. Right before the British Invasion, the question was whether the country was in for good times or upheaval.
The Beatles would make the answer obvious, at least for the moment: it was indeed going to be a party. The music industry quickly agreed. As the gatekeepers for popular culture that had been struggling to follow the fickle course of a new youth market with more disposable income than ever in the nation’s history, they now saw a clear path to profits. The record companies were laser-focused on this brand of pop/rock, and all the industry’s resources and attention were drawn to this new sound. Everything else was cast aside with the mantra: give the musical-industrial complex more of this, and nothing else.
The growing audience for folk had to decide which side they were on, and for many, the British invasion was a disappointing development: just more vapid teen frenzy crap that they weren’t going to buy into. It’s a miracle that so many folksters stuck to their guns and drew the line, remaining loyal to fully acoustic expression and dismissing any music that needed to be plugged in. In the end, though, most were swept up in the tsunami of peer pressure and followed the new cool.
Along with the radio and the recording industry, television, the main medium by then, also made it easier to fall in line. Within months of the Beatles’ arrival, Hootenanny was quickly replaced with a new TV show called Shindig!, hosted by a slick Los Angeles radio DJ, Jimmy O’Neil. The contrast was remarkable.
Hootenanny had highlighted young enthusiasts in understated settings, celebrating underappreciated treasures from their country’s past, featuring the art of the people, pure and unsullied by commercialism. Compare that with what abruptly replaced it. Shindig! featured kids tuning in to celebrate shiny new bands, readymade for sale in real time by the recording industry, replete with go-go dancers, the latest fashion trends, and splashy set designs. Authenticity was abruptly replaced with superficiality. For some Americans, it dragged the art form back to mere consumption.
American Folk Music’s Tenacity
Though it may have been denied its due on the pop charts, folk music remained deeply ingrained in the culture of the youth movement as it began to embark on social change. Even after the Brits invaded, in the autumn of 1964 at the height of Beatlemania, a studen,t protest broke out at California’s Berkeley University. Later dubbed the Free Speech Movement, it was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American campus and the harbinger for the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
Once again, folk luminaries were integral to this game-changing cultural event, providing a cheerleading role as the protest dragged on for weeks. Joan Baez turned up to lead the Berkeley students in supportive song, singing “We Shall Overcome” and other protest standards. Nobody there was singing, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” despite the Beatles’ hit being the number one song in the country that year.
Folk music in America remained homegrown, accessible, and even participatory, as it had in its beginnings, when it filled the dimly lit, hard-scrabble shacks of the working poor in the hinterlands. Just as church congregants are inspired by organ music and football fans by marching bands, folk music remained the soundtrack to the burgeoning counterculture. The Civil Rights, anti-war, and free speech movements all shared a common bond in their unquestionable desire to celebrate genuine Americana music over the upbeat rock-inspired commercial pop.
Anyone with an acoustic guitar could lead a group into a collective understanding of what was real and worthwhile. Folk music became a universal musical language of like-minded souls who considered it far superior to sitting in a loud auditorium with a bunch of people screaming over the din of fleeting electrified hysteria à la the Beatles’ concerts. That scene was the thin gruel corporations served up on records and radio, an odious noise for the teen market. There was no mixing of the two camps: you were either a folkie or into popular rock, and with that tribal divide went a whole lot of allegiance, especially as Vietnam’s death maw seeped further into the consciousness of America’s youth.
The Early Beatles’ Dominance
Nevertheless, folk and its protest leanings were increasingly in the minority and overshadowed after the Brits lit up the sky with their infectious reinvention of American rock. Neither the merits nor the message of the folk artists mattered much to many at that crucial juncture when their music was compared with the new brand of pop/rock hitting the airways.
It wasn’t a fair fight. The best explanation for how the Beatles knocked folk off its emerging pedestal, so that all of its best talent immediately abandoned the genre for pop and rock, is one simple word: fun. The very thing that attracted American youth to folk was also its weakness in the face of the unbridled ebullience that was the Beatles and the invasion they led. Folk was “bound up in tribute and tradition”, a music marked by morality, sentimentality, and a romance for a hidden America and its lost era of expression.
Even folk music’s upbeat numbers were played with strict devotion to the movement’s shared orthodoxy and with care not to corrupt them with any modern musical vernacular. It was serious business, and those who were folk’s purveyors performed to recognize the voices of the past. Folk’s attraction was its authenticity; it had to be done just right to honor the downtrodden and forgotten souls who had originally composed it. Moreover, it was a genre long associated with social change. Its celebration was meant to change the world, right the wrongs, and put modern consciousness on a course towards the betterment of society.
The American Folk Revival was sober stuff, and as such, it was hardly surprising when it took such a hit from Beatlemania just as it was cresting in popular culture. By all accounts, the movement was asking people at the most insouciant point in their lives to treat an obscure musical form reverently in an all-out effort to address social ills. Perhaps, then, it was doomed from the beginning; it didn’t stand a chance against the youthful, giddy energy and carefree excitement of the Beatles.
In the end, and from the perspective of most, folk music was easily discarded in seemingly a moment’s time by a nation’s youth suddenly drunk on the impulsiveness of rock’s new sound. With the Beatles’ quick emergence, there was all at once and everywhere a sublime, silly cheerfulness. A freeing sense of abandon served up in a new level of pop/rock that seemed both raw and well-crafted at once, but also, and most importantly, happy.
A 1987 Rolling Stone interview with Jerry Garcia, founding member of the Grateful Dead, provides a revealing account of how quickly a folk devotee could be corrupted in a sudden desire to lighten up musically. Garcia had been a committed folk enthusiast, playing bluegrass banjo for years, long before he formed the Dead. By 1964, however, he was sick of being so serious with the music and was ready to just have some fun. Upon first hearing the Beatles, he thought the music was “sappy”, but his initial rejection of their sound was ultimately overcome by the sheer delight of the persona they radiated, best reflected in their films:
“The (Beatles) movies were the thing that did it more than the records. (A Hard Day’s Night) had such great flow and such great style… Here’s these guys who were plainly having fun. I think that’s the thing that kicked the Beatles off the most on the West Coast,” Garcia said.
Garcia went on to explain that most of the bands that put San Francisco on the map, along with the Dead, had previously been denizens of the coffeehouse folk scene, which took itself very seriously, and the Beatles were a chance to break free of that vibe that he and others had grown weary of.
Garcia’s response to the Beatles’ cultural shift was no doubt experienced throughout the folk legions. The band’s collective aura was a welcome relief to the myriad young musicians who’d been brooding their youth away, surviving on cigarettes and bad coffee in dark, cramped venues (just watch the 2013 Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis to get a feel for that bleak world). The same thing happened to several young men who’d been struggling in folk groups for years and would ultimately form the band the Byrds. After they went to a showing of A Hard Day’s Night, they were convinced overnight to start a rock band, intoxicated by the exuberant pied pipers of Liverpool.
Many of the top acts who defined the new rock era by the end of the 1960s – performing at Woodstock and Monterey Pop – had begun the decade deeply embedded in the Greenwich folk scene, committed to exploring American roots music. Despite their best efforts to remain loyal to the cause, the most talented who had cut their teeth on folk would eventually succumb to the Beatles’ siren song.
The Beatles’ Education in the American Folk Movement
Though the Beatles’ initial foray into the US charts was unassailably brilliant and contagiously so, most would agree that their early stuff couldn’t hold a candle to where Dylan was already taking the art form of popular song. The early Beatles’ songcraft overall was superb, but their banal message, as captured in their lyrics, was their one big weakness at that moment in their development.
Take John Lennon’s lyrics from the bridge to “I Should Have Known Better” off the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night in 1964:
That when I tell you that I love you, oh
You’re gonna say you love me too, oh-oh
And when I ask you to be mine
You’re going to say you love me, too.
Released within months of 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, Dylan would record the album, Another Side to Bob Dylan, that same summer in a single three-hour studio session. It included his newly minted “Mr. Tambourine Man”, and that number didn’t even make the final cut to be on the album. Here’s a taste of the song’s lyrics, nevertheless, for comparison:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
Need more be said?
The soundtrack for their next movie, The Beatles’ HELP album, was also comparatively weak to Dylan’s transformational songwriting on his Highway 61 Revisited album, released at the same time and including his masterwork, “Like a Rolling Stone”. Dylan, by this time, was saying goodbye to what he perceived as the creative straitjacket of folk’s protest music while the Beatles were just becoming aware of the power behind his cerebral voice, with John Lennon imitating Dylan’s style and brilliance in the track off HELP, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”.
The Beatles quickly learned in the face of such artistry that they needed to up their game. As they crested the tumultuous wave of early Beatlemania and came crashing down to earth, reeling from the superficial adulation, they quickly became tuned in to a lot of different contemporary influences, with folk never far behind. During their 1965 tour of the US, they hung with Dylan in New York and relaxed poolside in Los Angeles with the likes of Joan Baez and members of the Byrds, all of whom were folk refugees.
The Beatles’ next albums, Rubber Soul and Revolver, were far more serious and contemplative. It showed that the band had gotten the message and would never come up short again. They realized that love songs, or for that matter, any song, could be so much better with a more thoughtful level of poetry. So began their next of several rebirths, featuring works like “Norwegian Wood”, which explored the fine art of keeping the song’s message secret and speaking in symbolist code, just like “Bobby” had already taught the pop world.
If the Beatles hadn’t made an abrupt shift at that critical mid-decade juncture, their star, which was already burning too brightly, would have extinguished as quickly as it had been lit. After HELP, wherein Lennon can be heard to make a direct plea for survival in the title track – “Help me get my feet back on the ground. Won’t you please, please help me!” – it might have been curtains for them commercially and otherwise.
Popular culture was moving fast, and the ground the Beatles were resting on post-HELP would provide them with a platform from which to vault into a truly epic level of creativity with their subsequent albums, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour. That platform was provided by American musicians who had been immersed in folk music earlier in the decade and were now building on its solid foundation, creating music that was not just jubilant and exploratory but also featured meaningful, transformative messages.
American Folk Music’s Comeback
The powerful authenticity of American roots music could not be suppressed for long, and once the psychedelic period waned in the late 1960s, influential bands such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and others began to (re)explore it. The Byrds jumpstarted country rock with their 1968 release, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, taking their lead again from brother Dylan, who had retreated from the rock circus to rural upstate New York.
Ensconced there, he set out to remind his backup band, the Hawks, of their musical roots, which led to their influential release, Music from The Big Pink, under their new name, the Band, the same year. Dylan himself dipped into the well in short order with his 1969 release of Nashville Skyline, which featured his country-rich stylings of “Lay Lady Lay”. The album was the antithesis of counterculture, just as the 1960s’ revolution was about to come crashing down, starting with a debacle of a free concert at Altamont Speedway outside of San Francisco.
The Beatles’ early catalogue was pure pop genius. However, they would not have reached their true and remarkable creative acme until they had registered the influence of Dylan, the reluctant folk troubadour who, ironically, had eschewed early rock during his teenage years in the 1950s, when he first heard the raw honesty of early American roots music.
Both the Beatles and Dylan ultimately learned the same lesson: whenever musical views work to stymie creativity, whether through pop commercialism or the orthodoxy of folk purism, then free-form expression, the lifeblood of all good music, regardless of the genre, is at risk. Both of these musical forces from either side of the Atlantic complemented each other, eventually settling on a completely unique, very individual path that rejected compromise in favor of constant growth and exploration.
In the end, the core musical idioms that course through Western pop behave like the tides, with a constant exchange within the wellspring that keeps the great river of song on a true course, flowing clean and pure to the constant delight and enrichment of all.
Works Cited
Bob Dylan, Roads Rapidly Changing: In and Out of the Folk Revival, 1961-1965. Rob Johnston, Producer. Absolute Documentaries. 2015.
Mike Gross. “Rodgers Stages Runaway – In Groves on All Fronts”. Billboard. 2 January 1965. via World Radio History.
Jerry Garcia interview. Rolling Stones: 20th Anniversary Special. 1987
Roger McGuinn interview. Rock-A-Steria (YouTube). July 2014.