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Happy New Year and welcome to season two in the American Song podcast series!  It's been a bit since we last got together.  I hope you all are doing well. 

In both the first and second folks waves, many of the musicians were heavily influenced by the times and events that lived in.  During the first folk revival, the most important social issues included the Great Depression, and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.  In different ways, both of these catastrophes laid waste to the dreams and scrapped together  fortunes of the hard-working American people.  Overseas, political revolutions had overthrown ancient monarchies, the latest one being Russia’s Romanov dynasty where powerful winds of change had driven the half starved and long-neglected Russian peasants to revolt, and whose actions were spurred on by ideologues like Marx and Lenin. 

The second folk revival that started in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s was, again, another social movement bent on change, but this time, the causes were different.  The 1960’s have been romanticized in a lot of ways.  It’s difficult today to still feel the thrill, and electric charge of what Beatlemania must have been like, or to experience the ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ pitched emotions that led to student riots and slain college students at Kent State, but they were very real.  Folk music was at the heart of it all.  Just like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie had demanded better treatment for workers, and economic assistance to America’s poor, the second folk revival rallied people behind Civil Rights, Equal Rights for women, and an end to the war in Vietnam war.   A chorus of new musicians, were inspired by, and in turn inspired social change.  Brave young kids, like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Barry McGuire, and  Joan Baez – as well as a few old-timers from the first wave - gave voice to a new generation of Americans who dreamed of better things and better days.

Welcome to season two in  the American Song Podcast series; today’s episode, “The Second Folk Revival – A Passing of the Torch.”

Featured Artists in this Episode
Bob Dylan
Woody Guthrie
the Kingston Trio
Bill & Belle Reed
Joan Baez
Steve Allen and Jack Kerouac
Bonnie Dobson
Simon & Garfunkel
Max Yasgur

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