I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival by Rick Massimo (review)

Journalist Rick Massimo's 2017 book, I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival, asks why the Newport Folk Festival mattered and how its significance has changed over time. Massimo cites oral history interviews that he and others conducted to chronicle the festival's history as experienced by participants both on the stage and in the audience. In 2009, folk legend Pete Seeger climbed a thirty-foot scaffold to enjoy the music above the crowds (173). From the top of that scaffold, Seeger could see a diverse crowd of thousands of music fans: participants who had attended every year, those who had skipped years for various reasons, and newcomers. I Got a Song is the first book-length history of the annual Newport Folk Festival. The festival represents a gem of Rhode Island history and a window into the ever-evolving American folk-music scene.

Originally from Providence, and a longtime staff writer at the Providence Journal, Massimo brings a Rhode Island perspective and accessible prose. He seamlessly interweaves his own interviews of participants with oral histories from repositories such as the Library of Congress, as well as news coverage of the festival from the Providence Journal. Organized chronologically, I Got a Song begins by summarizing the festival's origins. Founder George Wein channeled both his passion for folk music and the determination of his Jewish immigrant family to spur a successful business venture. The festival became Wein's lifework. The efforts of his wife, Joyce Wein, were also integral to the festival's success, from its inception through her death in 2009. As the "granddaughter and niece of slaves," she worked amid broader struggles for racial equality (155). I Got a Song situates the festival within social movements from the 1960s through the present. In 1963, Pete Seeger's "We Shall Overcome" marked a key moment for the festival. Massimo carefully notes that the Weins leaned more on the side of changing hearts and minds than institutional policy change. For Wein, if anything could influence hearts and minds, it was music.

A central claim of the book is that segments of the audience responded differently to American folk music over time and that their reactions represented broader social forces. On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan "plugged in," switching from acoustic to electric instruments (69). Massimo emphasizes this formative moment by piecing together excerpts from oral histories, lyrics, and other primary sources. George Wein reasoned that Dylan "could better express himself and reach more people by going electric; and he felt it necessary to tap into the pulse of popular culture" (74). Peter Yarrow, of the musical trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, countered: "Plugging in, going electric, was tantamount to going commercial—to abandoning the intimacy of the kind of communication that was the essence of folk music, that was shared acoustically (74)." Dylan himself sang, in "Maggie's Farm," that he "got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane" (75). According to producer and writer Joe Boyd, "It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. All around us, people were standing up, waving their arms. Some were cheering, some booing, some arguing, some grinning like madmen" (77). Altogether, the excerpts, which Massimo curated, comprise a pivotal chapter of I Got a Song and of American folk history.

I Got a Song is a model for using oral history interviews of participants to build a story of counterculture and folk music long after the iconic 1960s. In her 2013 "If You'd Told Me You Wanted to Talk about the '60s, I Wouldn't Have Called You Back," Nancy Janovicek argues that scholars who participated in the 1960s counterculture can serve the field best as primary sources (in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], 185-199). Their memories should function alongside other oral history sources. Previous scholarship...