Folk Singing: Sibyl with Guitar

FOLK SINGING

(See Cover)

Anything called a hootenanny ought to be shot on sight, but the whole country is having one. A hootenanny is to folk singing what a jam session is to jazz and all over the U.S. there is a great reverberate twang. Guitars and banjos akimbo folk singers inhabit smoky metropolitan crawl space; they sprawl on the floors of college rooms; near the foot of ski trails they keep time to the wheeze and sputter of burning logs; they sing homely lyrics to the combers of the Pacific.

They are everybody and anybody A civil engineer performs in his off-hours

iV f°Ik bins of the Midwest. So do debutantes, university students, even a refugee from an Eastern girl’s-school choir. Everywhere, there are bearded fop singers and clean-cut dilettantes. There are gifted amateurs and serious musicians New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis Denver and San Francisco all have shoals of tiny coffee shops, all loud with basic sound—a pinched and studied wail that is intended to suggest flinty hills or clumpy prairies.

Not even the smaller cities are immune. Johet, Ill., for example, has a folk cave appropriately called The Know Where Fort Wayne, Ind., has a place called The fourth Shadow where people squat on the Hoor and sip espresso by candlelight over doors that have been made into tables Strings are jumping at The Jolly Coachman in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Incredibly Omaha, just across the river from Council Bluffs, has two places. The Third Man and The Crooked Ear where queues sometimes run to a hundred head, and the varied clientele—as in all cities—not only have beards, berets, and half-acre sweaters with turtle necks, but also thin-striped ties and no-extra-margin lapels. When something is that big in Omaha, Daddy, it can be said to have arrived.

Cult & Industry. Removed from its natural backgrounds, folk singing has become both an esoteric cult and a light industry. Folk-song albums are all over the bestseller charts, and folk-singing groups command as much as $10,000 a night in the big niteries. As a cultural fad folk singing appeals to genuine intellectuals, fake intellectuals, sing-it-yourself types, and rootless root seekers who discern in folk songs the fine basic values of American life. As a pastime, it has staggeringly multiplied sales of banjos and guitars; more than 400,000 guitars were sold in the U.S. last year.

The focus of interest is among the young. On campuses where guitars and banjos were once symptoms of hopeless maladjustment, country twanging has acquired new status. A guitar stringer shows up once a week at the Princeton University Store.

The people who sit in the urban coffeehouses sipping mocha Java at 60¢ a cup are mainly of college age. They take folk singing very seriously. No matter how bad a performing singer may be, the least amount of cross talk will provoke an angry shhhh.

These cultists often display unconcealed, and somewhat exaggerated, contempt for entertaining groups like the Kingston Trio and the Limeliters. Folk singing is a religion, in the purists’ lexicon, and the big corporate trios are its money-changing De Milles. The high pantheon is made up of all the shiftless geniuses who have shouted the songs of their forebears into tape recorders provided by the Library of Congress. These country “authentics” are the all but unapproachable gods. The tangible sibyl closer to hand, is Joan Baez.

Her voice is as clear as air in the autumn, a vibrant, strong, untrained and thrilling soprano. She wears no makeup and her long black hair hangs like a drapery, parted around her long almond face. In performance she comes on, walks straight to the microphone, and begins to sing. No patter. No show business. She usually wears a sweater and skirt or a simple dress. Occasionally she affects something semi-Oriental that seems to have been hand-sewn out of burlap. The purity of her voice suggests purity of approach. She is only 21 and palpably nubile. But there is little sex in that clear flow of sound. It is haunted and plaintive, a mother’s voice, and it has in it distant reminders of black women wailing in the night, of detached madrigal singers performing calmly at court, and of saddened gypsies trying to charm death into leaving their Spanish caves.

Impresarios everywhere are trying to book her. She has rarely appeared in nightclubs and says she doubts that she will ever sing in one again; she wants to be something more than background noise Her LP albums sell so well that she could hugely enrich herself by recording many more, but she has set a limit of one a year. Most of her concerts are given on college campuses.

She sings Child ballads* with an ethereal grace that seems to have been caught and stopped in passage in the air over the 18th century Atlantic. Barbara Allen Child 84) is one of the set pieces of folk singing, and no one sings it as achingly as she does. From Lonesome Road to All My Trials, her most typical selections are so mournful and quietly desperate that her early records would not be out of place at a funeral. More recently she has added some lighter material to create a semblance of variety, but the force of sadness in her personality is so compelling that even the wonderful and instructive lyrics of Copper Kettle somehow manage to portend a doom deeper than a jail sentence:

Build your fire with hickory—Hickory and ash and oak.

Don’t use no green or rotten wood,

They’ll get you by the smoke.

While you lay there by the juniper,

While the moon is bright,

Watch them jugs a-filling

In the pale moonlight.

That song is a fond hymn to the contemplative life of the moonshiner, but Joan Baez delivers it in a manner that suggests that all good lives, respectable or not, are soon to end.

The people who promote her records and concerts are forever saying that “she speaks to her generation.” They may be right, since her generation seems to prefer her to all others. If the subtle and emotional content of her attitude is getting through to her contemporaries, she at least has an idea of what she is trying to say to them and why they want to hear it. “When I started singing, I felt as though we had just so long to live, and I still feel that way,” she says. “It’s looming over your head. The kids who sing feel they really don’t have a future—so they pick up a guitar and play. It’s a desperate sort of thing, and there’s a whole lost bunch of them.”

Mobile Start. Joan Baez (she pronounces it By-ezz) was born on Staten Island. Jan. 9. 1941. But both her parents were foreign-born. Her mother was English-Scottish, the daughter of an Episcopal minister and professor of dramatic art who migrated to the U.S. Her father was born in Mexico and was also a minister’s son. He arrived in the U.S. at the age of seven when his father was sent to work with the Spanish-speaking community in New York City. The two met at Drew University, in Madison, N.J., where he discovered an interest in physics and made it his life’s work. His academic career has been highly mobile, taking him to various universities and cities ranging from Los Angeles to Buffalo to Baghdad to Boston and, most recently,

Paris, where he is now a consultant for UNESCO.

Along the way, young Joan and her two sisters learned some memorable lessons in bigotry. When Dr. Baez was doing military research in Buffalo, for example, he thought it would be a pleasant experience to settle in a small and typical American town. He chose Clarence Center, N.Y. (pop. 900), where the senile old man who was their next-door neighbor scowled at Joan’s dark Mexican skin and said: “Niggers.” The Baezes in turn called the neighbor “Old Bogey.” To keep Old Bogey confused, they sank a plug spout into a telephone pole outside his house and hung a maple-syrup bucket on it. “We knew that he would be full of contempt for our supposed ignorance of maple tapping,” says Dr. Baez, “but we knew that he could not resist peeking into the bucket. We were in stitches of laughter, peeping from our window when he would come by, look around furtively, and peek into the bucket. Then we began to put things in the bucket, water and so on. He was astonished. Poor Old Bogey.”

In Redlands, Calif., Joan found a situation that cut deeper than one old crank. The Mexican schoolchildren there play in separate groups from the “whites.” Observably, the dominant tone of Joan’s personality changed from ebullience to melancholy. Her 13th birthday came, and she said something she would repeat often: “Mummy, I don’t want to grow up.”

She went to high school in Palo Alto, walked barefoot on the campus, got A’s in music and F’s in biology, studying only what appealed to her. She bought a Sears, Roebuck guitar and also sang in the school choir, but there were no particular stirrings of a future career, least of all in folk singing. The music on the phonograph at home was Bach. Mozart, Vivaldi. Her voice at the time was. by her description, “straight as a pin.” She would stand before her bathroom mirror, jiggling her Adam’s apple with her forefinger, in an effort to induce a vibrato—with no idea how stunning it would be when it eventually came to her.

Resentful Stones. After she finished high school, the family moved to Boston, where her father had picked up a mosaic of jobs with Harvard, M.I.T., Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, and the Smithsonian Institution. They had scarcely settled when Dr. Baez came home one night and said, “Come, girls, I have something to show you.” He took them to Tulla’s Coffee Grinder, where amateur folk singers could bring their guitars and sing.

Joan was soon singing there and in similar places around Boston. She spent a month or so at Boston University studying theater—the beginning and end of college for her—and she met several semi-pro folk singers who taught her songs and guitar techniques. She never studied voice or music, or even took the trouble to study folklore and pick up songs by herself. Instead, she just soaked them up from those around her. She could outsing anybody, and she left a trail of resentful steppingstones behind her.

She sang in coffeehouses in and around Harvard Square that were populated by what might be called the Harvard underworld—drifters, somewhat beat, with Penguin classics protruding from their blue jeans and no official standing at Harvard or anywhere else. They pretended they were Harvard students, ate in the university dining halls and sat in on some classes. Joan Baez, who has long been thought of as a sort of otherworldly beatnik because of her remote manner, long hair, bare feet and burlap wardrobe, actually felt distaste for these academic bums from the start. “They just lie in their pads, smoke pot, and do stupid things like that,” she says.

They were her first audiences, plus Harvard boys and general citizens who grew in number until the bums were choked out. She was often rough on them all. She ignored their requests if she chose to. When one patron lisped a request to her, she cruelly lisped in reply. When another singer turned sour in performance, Joan suddenly stood up in the back of the room and began to sing, vocally stabbing the hapless girl on the stage into silence.

Sometime Thing. She made one friend. His name is Michael New. He is Trinidad English, 23 years old, and apparently aimless—a sulky, moody, pouting fellow whose hair hangs down in golden ringlets. He may go down in history as the scholar who spent three years at Harvard as a freshman. “I was sure it would only last two weeks as usual,” says Joan. “But then after three weeks there we were, still together. We were passionately, insanely, irrationally in love for the first few months. Then we started bickering and quarreling violently.” Michael now disappears for months at a time. But he always comes back to her, and she sometimes introduces him as her husband.

In the summer of 1959, another folk singer invited her to the first Folk Festival at Newport, R.I. Her clear-lighted voice poured over the 13,000 people collected there and chilled them with surprise. The record-company leg-and-fang men closed in. “Would you like to meet Mitch, Baby?” said a representative of Columbia Records, dropping the magic name of Mitch Miller, who is Columbia’s top pop artists-and-repertory man when he isn’t waving to his mother on TV.

“Who’s Mitch?” said Joan.

The record companies were getting a rude surprise. Through bunk and ballyhoo, they had for decades been turning sows’ ears into silk purses. Now they had found a silk purse that had no desire to become a sow’s ear. The girl did not want to be exploited, squeezed, and stuffed with cash. Joan eventually signed with a little outfit called Vanguard, which is now a considerably bigger outfit called Vanguard.

Cats & Doctors. Somewhere along the line, Joan Baez’ family became Quakers, but Joan herself is not a Friend. “Living is my religion,” she says. She practices it currently on California’s rugged coast. She has lived there for more than a year, including eight months in the Big Sur region in a squalid cabin with five cats and five dogs. The cabin was a frail barque adrift on a sea of mud, and sometimes when Joan opened the front door, a comber of fresh mud would break over the threshold and flow into the living room. When she couldn’t stand it any more, she moved to cleaner quarters in nearby Carmel.

She does not like to leave the area for much more than a short concert tour, for her psychiatrist is there and she feels that she must stay near him. He is her fourth “shrink,” as she calls analysts, and the best ever. Mercurial, subject to quickly shifting moods, gentle, suspicious, wild and frightened as a deer, worried about the bugs she kills, Joan is anything but the harsh witch that her behavior in the Cambridge coffeehouses would suggest. Sympathetic friends point out that her wicked manner in those days was in large part a cover-up for her small repertory. She could not have honored most requests if she had wanted to. Actually, friends insist, she is honest and sincere to a fault, sensitive, kind and confused. She once worked to near exhaustion at the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston.

Segregation & Sentiment. Like many folk singers, she is earnestly political. She has taken part in peace marches and ban-the-bomb campaigns. Once in Texas she broke off singing in the middle of a concert to tell the audience that even at the risk of embarrassing a few of them, she wanted to say that it made her feel good to see some colored people in the room. “They all clapped and cheered,” she says. “I was so surprised and happy.”

She is a lovely girl who has always attracted numerous boys, but her wardrobe would not fill a hatbox. She wears almost no jewelry, but she has one material bauble. When a Jaguar auto salesman looked down his nose at the scruffily dressed customer as she peered at a bucket-seat XKE sports model, she sat down, wrote a giant check, and bought it on the spot. Wildly, she dashes across the desert in her Jaguar, as unsecured as a grain of flying sand. “I have no real roots,” she says. “Sometimes, when I walk through a suburb with all its tidy houses and lawns, I get a real feeling of nostalgia. I want to live there and hear the screen door slam. And when I’m in New York, it sometimes smells like when I was nine, and I love it. I look back with great nostalgia on every place I’ve ever lived. I’m a sentimental kind of a goof.”

A Singing Map. With that much capacity for nostalgia, it is a paradoxical wonder that she is not more interested in folk history. “I don’t care very much

about where a song came from or why

or even what it says. All I care about is how it sounds and the feeling in it.” True, it is of only academic interest that a song called In the Bright Mohawk Valley migrated west from stream to stream, new title to new title, until it settled down in the Red River Valley as a Western woman’s torch song for her cowboy-errant. Similarly, a British ballad called The Unfortunate Rake, about a soldier dying of syphilis, went through several mutations before it traveled to Texas and became the national anthem of the trackless range, The Streets of Laredo.

But more significantly, as Anthologist Alan Lomax says in the opening line of his Folk Songs of North America, “the map sings.” Anyone who takes the time to seek out the anthologies or listen to some of the field-taped recordings sold by the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song will get an unmatchable focus on the fine detail of American history. What is more, the folk songs bring it back alive. The West, for example:

Oh, don’t you remember sweet Betsy

from Pike Who crossed the big mountains with

her lover Ike, With two yoke of cattle, a large yellow

dog, A tall Shanghai rooster and one spotted

hog.

Something called Kansas Boys offers the discouraging word about prairie architecture that Home on the Range left out:

Come all young girls, pay attention to

my noise, Don’t fall in love with the Kansas

boys . . . Some live in cabins with a huge log

wall,

Nary a window in it at all, Sandstone chimney and a puncheon

floor,

Clapboard roof and a button door . . . People who squatted on Government land were engaged in a clumsy bet against bureaucracy, but they sang:

Hurrah for Lane County, the land of

the free, The home of the grasshopper, bedbug

and flea.

I’ll sing loud her praises and boast of

her fame,

While starving to death on my government claim.

If they did not happen to be in Lane County, they were usually bright enough to substitute their own whereabouts.

Cowboys liked to think they were beholden to no one. The Lone Star Trail is full of defiance in the saddle:

I’ll sell my outfit just as soon as I can;

I won’t punch cattle for no damn man.

But they frequently ran out of guts when

the sun went down and, according to

Poet-Anthologist Carl Sandburg, stood

around in circles with their arms draped

across one another’s shoulders, moaning

Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie

Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me,

Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the wind blows free.

Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.

So it went for every other part of the country as well. Anyone within earshot was invited to

Drop a tear for Big Foot Sal

The best damn cook on the Erie Canal, and the timber drover Bigerlow was lofted into song as the Old Ironsides of all Great Lakes barges. Labor songs, in fact, not only chronicled the building of the nation but also played a part in the actual work, from the winch-hauling shanties of New England sailors to the rhythmic songs of the free-swinging lumberjacks of the great Pacific Northwest. There was even a song that helped people put up rail-and-post fences. And in the most often repeated labor song of all—wherein John Henry, the Negro Paul Bunyan, works himself to death trying to compete with a steam hammer—the onslaught of the machine makes itself felt as it never could in a thousand pages of conventional history.

Battles & Skirmishes. Folk singing today is a multilateral practice. It is on one hand art, on another entertainment—terms which are not mutually exclusive, except to the purists. In the purists’ severe canon, which holds that it is not art unless it is faintly boring, there are three categories.

The Commercial category—also labeled the Impures or the Popularizers—is led by the Kingston Trio, which is probably the most scorched threesome since Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Humbly describing themselves only as “folk-oriented” singers, they crack jokes and sing songs that only vaguely resemble the old straight sour mash. When purist critics seek an example of everything that is corrupt about folk singing, they always pick on the hapless Kingstons. First off, the trio has made as much as $30,000 a week, and this is unforgivably crude. Next, they smooth down, harmonize, and slicken the lyrics, embellishing the whole with gimcrack corn. But, carping aside, the Kingstons are accomplished entertainers, and many of their critics, Johnny-come-latelies to purity, forget that they probably would never have heard of folk music if they had not been first attracted by a heel-stomping ditty rendered by the Kingston Trio.

Competing with the Kingstons for all those filthy gate receipts are other groups like the Limeliters, Peter-Paul-and-Mary, and the Chad Mitchell Trio, whose most celebrated number is an imitation folk song called The John Birch Society:

Join the John Birch Society, there is so much to do.

Have you heard they’re serving vodka

at the W.C.T.U.?

And the Brothers Four:

Frogg went acourtin’ and he did go

To the Coconut Grove for the midnight show . . .

Burl Ives, who also did much to engender the present interest in folk singing, has long since been dipped in taint, chiefly because of his popularity. Harry Belafonte, embalmed in his riches, goes right on even though he has long been called Harry Belaphony by folkier-than-thou types. Harry has committed several crimes. Mainly, he has made plenty money. Also, he is backed up by an orchestra large enough to support Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Hard Times. At the other extreme are the Pures, the Authentics, the Real Articles—singers who are above criticism because they are living source material. Most are nameless, or at least obscure, an important characteristic for true greatness in the field. Kentucky’s Jean Ritchie, 39, is perhaps the best-known authentic. She comes from a town called Viper, in Perry County, and she sings without accompaniment in a pancake-flat voice the songs her mother taught her while she wiped the dinner dishes.

Frank Proffitt, 49, is the most interesting contemporary authentic. His first LP album was made via tape recorder in his cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It includes straightforward lyrics like these:

I didn’t have no hog to kill,

I went and set me up a little bitty still.

It’s hard times on the Beaver Dam Road,

Hard times, poor boy.

Proffitt lives near Beaver Dam Road in Watauga County, North Carolina. His voice is flat, coarse, aloof and unsentimental. Close your eyes and you can smell the corn mash in the still and see the heat waves over the road. Proffitt makes his own fretless banjos, cutting down hardwoods and killing groundhogs to get his materials. Years ago, he sang a song called Tom Dula for a visiting folk scholar. It was later recorded by the Kingston Trio as Tom Dooley. If any one event touched off the present folk boom in popular music, that was it. The Kingstons have sold more than 2.6 million copies of the song and many other singers have recorded it, too. Proffitt’s reward has been approximately zero dollars, zero cents.

Hard times on the Beaver Dam Road.

Great Names. Much backbiting, infighting, frontal assault and crossfire occur in the vast middle ground occupied by the Semipures, the Adapters, the Interpreters. Joan Baez, being the most celebrated of them just now. is the one most under attack. By other singers, disorganized coffeehouse groups, and organized critics like the editors of the Little Sandy Review (folk singing’s self-appointed “conscience”‘), she is sniped at for her failure to study, for not training her voice, for using folk material to express her own feelings, for singing nearly everything sadly. If she were to study zealously, take voice lessons, disguise her emotions, and sing like a revivalist, she would be blasted for tampering with nature.

Like Joan Baez, the big names in folk singing belong in this middle group. Many of them have been songsmiths in their own right, and all have been devoted to creating and re-creating folk music with feeling rather than negotiable embellishment. Chief among them was the late Huddie Ledbetter, a felonious Negro known as Leadbelly, who is folk singing’s one immortal. He was so great he was almost authentic. He spent much of his career behind bars for murder and other pastimes, but on both sides of the walls he was a natural, whooping primitive, shouting in primary rhythms with a voice as clear and incomprehensible as an echo.

After Leadbelly. names like Woodrow Wilson (“Woody”) Guthrie and William L. C. (“Big Bill”) Broonzy are the ones to drop in folksville. Both were drifters who wrote songs, sang them, made no money, and tended the flame. Guthrie, 50, who has been terribly ill with a nervous disease for the past eight years and is now at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, is an Oklahoman who never held a job more than a week or so. always needed a shave, and sang for anybody who cared to listen—timber workers on the edge of the Great Lakes, sharecroppers in the South. Today’s young folk singers show a widespread predilection for Woody Guthrie songs, especially Hard Travelin’ and This Land Is Your Land.

Darlings & Buddhas. Big Bill Broonzy died in 1958. Mainly a blues singer, he was the unwashed darling of purist fans, but he had short patience with all the folk curators who insist that a true folk song has to be of unknown authorship and come down through the oral tradition. “I guess all songs is folk songs.” he said. I never heard no horse sing ’em.”

The tradition of Broonzy and Guthrie is being carried on by a large number of disciples, most notably a promising young hobo named Bob Dylan. He is 21 and comes from Duluth. He dresses in sheepskin and a black corduroy Huck Finn cap, which covers only a small part of his long.’ tumbling hair. He makes visits to Woody Guthrie’s hospital bed, and he delivers his songs in a studied nasal that has just the right clothespin-on-the-nose honesty to appeal to those who most deeply care. His most celebrated song is Talkin’ New York—about his first visit to the city, during the cold winter of 1961, when he discovered “Green Witch Village.”

But the current patriarch of folk singing is Pete Seeger. A Harvardman who quit college to wander through the country collecting songs. Seeger has sung at least 50 LP albums. In 1949 he organized a group called the Weavers that won a tall reputation for quadripartite purity. Seeger commands so much respect among folk singers that the only criticism ever leveled against him* is that he can’t carry a tune. But that gives him the seal of authenticity. His voice sounds as if a cornhusk were stuck in his throat.

Eclectics & Elegants. In the great miscellany of contemporary folk singers, there is something for everybody. Arty eclectics such as Theodore Bikel and Richard Dyer-Bennett sing anything from anywhere with a lofty and cosmopolitan distinction. Jean Redpath sings the songs of her own Scotland with plaintive elegance; Miriam Makeba. an extraordinarily popular nightclub performer in this country, conveys the passion of the African chants she learned as a girl in South Africa.

The great Odetta, born Odetta Felious in Birmingham, is currently under fire for doing a blues album that is closer to jazz than folk. But she remains one of the best folk singers going; her brawny female baritone can run through a wider variety of mood and matter than most singers would dare attempt. The best bluegrass (a polite synonym for hillbilly) is being done by Nashville’s Lester Flatt. Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, cultural descendants of Tennessee’s Carter Family, whose records—made in the ’30s—are still the standard canon of bluegrass. Scruggs is the world’s most famous banjo picker, and his swift style is often imitated. “I’d like to be able to do it,” admits North Carolina’s Frank Proffitt in a reserved drawl, “and then not do it.”

Parody & Power. There are. in fact, so many active professional folk singers that hootenannies often turn into games of king-of-the-mountain. as eager youth, male and female, storms the stage. In Greenwich Village’s Folk City, dozens of album jackets hang from the ceiling like Christmas cards, and nearly all the names and faces they display are triumphantly obscure. Every other crow alive is a folk singer who has made at least one album. In response to that sort of popularity, a parody was inevitable.

High on Variety’s bestseller chart last week was something called My Son the Folk Singer by Allan Sherman. The melodies are truish, and the words are Jewish. Greensleeves becomes Greenbaum. Matilda becomes My Zelda. who “took the money and ran with the tailor.” Another fellow has lost his best salesman and his business is failing. It could be that there are other factors involved, but “Gimme Jack Cohn and I don’t care, gimme Jack Cohn and I don’t care . . .”

Folk singing may be a fad just now, but it will never roll off like the Hula Hoop. As its long history demonstrates, it has staying power. It is something that people who are constantly bathed in canned entertainment can do for themselves. At its best, it unpretentiously calls up a sense of history. It shines with language in which short words and images go long distances, upstream all the way against the main currents of polished grammar. And, un-pontifically. it dusts off the sturdier and simpler values of American life—some of which are against the law:

You just lay there by the juniper, While the moon is bright, Watch them jugs a-filling In the pale moonlight.

* Harvard Professor Francis J. Child’s five-volume The English and Scottish Popular Ballad’s published between 1882 and 1898, is still the definitive anthology in its field. Folkupmanship absolutely requires that a ballad be referred to a Child 12, Child 200, or Child 209 rather than Lord Randal, Gypsy Laddic, or Geordic. * Except by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which cited him for contempt of Congress some years ago when he refused to answer their questions about his performances before Communist-line groups. He was finally convicted in 1961, but last May the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision. While the case was under review, Joan Baez dedicated a song to Seeger in every concert she gave. Folk singing has always been closely allied with social protest and liberal politics. “There’s never been a good Republican folk singer,” says Joan.