Venice ’25: Newport & the Great Folk Dream

It was home to stately mansions, like Seaview Terrace (used for exterior shots on Dark Shadows). However, in 1954 the Rhode Island city started attracting hip young visitors when it first hosted the Newport Jazz Festival. George Wein’s Festival Productions diversified with the Newport Folk Festival, which was even less elitist than the jazz festival—or so you would think. The folkies were decidedly lefty in their politics, but some had very strict notions as to what constituted proper folk music—and you’d better believe it was acoustic. This musical bias would be sorely tested in the early 1960s. As it happened, documentarian Murray Lerner shot a wealth of footage of the 1963-1966 Newport Folk Festivals, out of which only a fraction was seen in his film simply titled Festival. Highlights from that unseen treasure trove finally see the light of day in Robert Gordon’s Newport & the Great Folk Dream, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

If you know anything about Bob Dylan, you know the film is building up to the fireworks of the 1965 fest, when Dylan “went electric.” Lerner also produced a later documentary about that pivotal moment. In the early years, most of the angst focused on politics, particularly the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, the Newport Folk Festival offered a rare opportunity for social and cultural interaction between white hill country musicians and black blues and gospel artists.

Wisely, one of the primary [disembodied] interview voices is the of Joe Boyd (author of White Bicycles), who was Wein’s blues producer. He fondly remembers walking through the so-called “Blues House,” where the likes of Skip James and Son House performing informally in each room. Yet, he also hints at the Festival’s deep ideological divide when he recalls board members Alan Lomax and Theodore Bikel would be periodically act scandalized by the professional-grade sound-checks he provided for the performers, because it clashed with their paternalistic, noble-savage-idealizing conception of folk music.

Indeed, it is fascinating to see the kind of authenticity debate in folk that somewhat parallels criticism of Wynton Marsalis’s jazz gate-keeping in the 1990s, except the folk purists were probably more vehement. Regardless, the stacked line-up of blues legends truly blows the mind: James, House, Mississippi John Hurt, Jesse Fuller, John Lee Hooker, Fred & Annie McDowell, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and (controversially at the time) the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (because they were “electric”).

Some viewers might be shocked to see Jose Feliciano also appearing at the Folk Fest, in a radically different context. More questionable, featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie is an oddly distracting choice, considering she had her Order of Canada honor revoked in the wake of reports she falsely claimed indigenous heritage.

Regardless, it is fascinating to watch Newport Folk’s growing pains and purity tests. Ironically, leftist Pete Seeger emerges as a leader of the “conservative” acoustic old guard. Gordon (drawing on Lerner) even-handedly documents this aesthetic clash. Yet, the assembles musical selections (particularly the blues artists) are what really make the film significant. Highly recommended for fans of blues, folk, and traditional Americana music, Newport & the Great Folk Dream screens again today (9/6) at the Venice Film Festival (and should have a long and fruitful life thereafter on the festival circuit).