Think Ethnic: American Folk Music, the Popular Music Marketplace, and the Ethnic Other, 1958–65

From 1958 through 1965, popular interest in folk music skyrocketed the United States, especially amongst college students. Prevailing scholarship tends to speak of the folk revival, rather I contend it is better understood as three concurrent revivals: anthropological, political and popular. As it unfolded, cities and major universities each had their own folk music scene, and these scenes tended to favor certain artists or methodologies. For example, Greenwich Village was dominated by a scene that maintained ties to the old left, while the university folksong clubs tended to elevate a multi-cultural anthropological appreciation of folk music. Meanwhile, nightclubs and television variety shows favored clean-cut, middle-class performers who played folk songs in a modern, pop idiom. Historians have characterized the revival as a movement of college aged enthusiasts who discovered a connection to their rural past, broke free from the constraints of modern society, or found a sense of authentic expression amidst the existential dread of the Cold War. My research focuses on how folk music popularizers used folk music and group participation as a means to inculcate Cold War Values, particularly middle-class respectability and upward mobility, which wrapped global history into a single American narrative.

The anthropological and political scenes during the folk revival fostered new ways to think about White and non-White culture. While artists experimented with different source material, they also transgressed expressions of racial identity. The transversions of these old divisions needed new language. Over the course of the boom performers and media critics altered how they used the term “ethnic” to act as a shorthand for this dividing line. “Ethnic” became an oppositional category to the White, middle class. The term encompassed both non-White culture and White rural culture. By the end of the revival, “an ethnic” indicated a White person who defied their class and race by singing non-White music or rural White music in a non-modern style. It was not just about the songs the artists played; the term also included an aesthetic valence. Performers described in this way did not dress in modern clothes, such as The Kingston Trio, or the dark suits and ties of the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Limelighters. Ethnic described artists who neither adapted material to popular standards, nor dressed in modern fashion. Ethnic was the linguistic too that cutting a division between the White middle-class and everyone else. In this way, the anthropological and political folk revivalists found a common enemy in the popular folk artists. Further, this division encouraged the grouping together of all non-White ethnicities; they were all similar in their status as non-White. In this process “ethnic” definitionally comes to mean non-White. Reciprocally Whiteness, as a non-ethnicity, operated invisibly.