New book chronicles Newport Folk Festival – The Providence Journal

Rick Massimo, who covered the event for nine years for The Journal, traces the ups and downs of the festival from its beginning to its current renaissance.

There's been a whole lot written about the Newport Folk Festival since 1959, when Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio and a very young Joan Baez played at Freebody Park. Entire forests have been denuded to supply enough pages for the endless descriptions, anecdotes and analyses of the night in 1965 when Bob Dylan "went electric."

Now former Providence Journal reporter Rick Massimo has written the first book to cover the entire history of the Folk Festival, titled "I Got a Song; A History of the Newport Folk Festival." Massimo, who covered the event for nine years, traces the ups and downs of the festival from its beginning to its current renaissance, when tickets are sold out even before the acts are announced.

Massimo, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said the book grew out of a series of stories he wrote for The Journal to mark the 50th anniversary of the Festival in 2009.

The Journal had sent Massimo to New York, where he spent the day with George Wein, the founding producer of the festival (and its older brother, the Newport Jazz Festival). On the train ride back to Providence, Massimo said, he was planning a series of articles, and realized there was enough material there for a book.

And here it is, from the Wesleyan University Press, with an official publication date of Tuesday.

"The book is so valuable to me, I can't tell you," Wein said in a phone interview. "It brings back memories of things I've forgotten about. It's so important that we know our own history. We didn't keep records the way we should have back then, which was a mistake on our part. But we were too busy just trying to put on the festivals."

Massimo pointed out that Wein is a jazz man through and through, with a deep knowledge (and love) for jazz. Folk, not so much.

So, Massimo wrote, over the years Wein has employed four men to serve as his "native guides" to the folk world: Albert Grossman, Pete Seeger, Bob Jones and Jay Sweet.

"He knows what he doesn't know," Massimo said of Wein. "And he knows what he needs to get to make up for that."

"My job in life has been to create things," Wein said. "But I never tried to be a micro-manager. You have to give autonomy to the people who are working for you."

Of the four native guides, Seeger is the most famous and most loved. Jay Sweet, current executive producer for the Newport Festivals Foundation, frequently invokes Seeger's spirit, and the Folk Festival runs a program each day called "For Pete's Sake" to honor the traditions of bluegrass, gospel and roots music.

It was Seeger who presided over the early '60s period that Wein dubbed "Utopia," when every performer played for $50 each, and the spirit of the civil-rights movement was a palpable presence. Utopia was aptly represented in 1963, when Dylan, Baez, Seeger, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul & Mary were among those singing "We Shall Overcome" at the festival finale.

Utopia was punctuated by the night of July 25, 1965, when Dylan split the folk world by playing with a rock band.

Massimo captures the event by assembling an artful collage of eyewitness accounts, fragmented and often contradictory. The crowd booed. Or they cheered. Or both. Seeger wanted to cut the power cables with an ax. Or he didn't. What Dylan did was a horrible sellout. Or it was fantastic.

"It didn't take me long to realize that the range of recollections on the part of the people who were there, that was the story," Massimo said. "It's refracted through so many different lenses, and the fact that there is so little agreement says so much about what happened."

The Folk Festival has had its share of down times in its 58-year history, and from 1971 to 1985 it disappeared from Newport entirely, overwhelmed by the impact of rock and the riots that marred the Newport Jazz Festival.

The festival returned to Newport in the '80s to a different location, at Fort Adams State Park, and a different vibe. For one thing, the music ended by sundown. And the festival acquired corporate sponsors.

If anyone symbolized the festival in those years, it was the Indigo Girls, who played eight times between 1991 and 1999. What's more, they respected the history and communal ethos of the festival.

But by 2006, Massimo wrote, the festival was at a low point. Even the Indigo Girls, who used to generate sellouts, only drew 4,600 people (out of a possible 10,000). In 2007, Wein sold his festivals to an outfit called Festival Network. But by 2009, Festival Network had defaulted on its payments to the state, which owns Fort Adams, and Wein had grabbed the reins again.

One of the few holdovers from Festival Networks was Sweet, who would become the fourth of Wein's "native guides." Sweet has made the Newport Folk Festival a place to be once again, programming hip young choices such as The Avett Brothers, Fleet Foxes, the Decembrists, the Lumineers and Rhode Island's Deer Tick, plus surprises such as Jack White, Beck, and Roger Waters.

Sweet uses the festival's storied history as a draw, and expects the people who play Newport to know they are somewhere special.

"I think the key phrase is 'Let them know you know where you are,'" said Massimo. "If you can play a set that indicates you know you're at a festival that was started by George Wein and Pete Seeger, you will be OK."

Massimo is confident that Wein, 91, has put a structure in place that will keep the Folk Festival (and the Jazz Festival) in Newport after he has gone. The Folk Festival is located on a peninsula on an island, Massimo said, and it will never be a massive happening such as Coachella or Bonaroo. But as long as it maintains its organic, word-of-mouth appeal, it should be fine.

The question of what constitutes folk music was debated well before the Newport Folk Festival started, and continues to this day, and Massimo poses a series of rhetorical questions early in his book: Is it folk if it's played by a professional musician. Is it folk if it's played on an electric guitar? Is it folk music if it's popular? Or not popular?

In Wein's mind, folk music is still being made. "There are young people who want to play acoustic instruments, and they want to sing songs related to what is happening in the world," he said.

Massimo will be at Books on the Square in Providence on July 27, at the Newport Folk Festival July 30, and at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River on Aug. 2.

asmith@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7485

On Twitter:@asmith651

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New book chronicles Newport Folk Festival - The Providence Journal