“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power. The movie tells the story of the Newport Folk Festival from the pivotal years of 1963 to 1966, and when I say that it “tells the story,” I mean that there’s a surprisingly sharp and resonant narrative at play we haven’t seen before. Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary “Festival” covered those same years, but that film was more of a scattershot folk and blues and country collage.
It turns out that Lerner, who died in 2017, shot 100 hours of footage at Newport, almost all of which got stuck in a vault; it has never been seen before. That’s the footage that director Robert Gordon and his editor and producing partner, Laura Jean Hocking, have drawn from to construct “Newport & the Great Folk Dream.”
The movie presents a far richer, more wide-ranging and ingeniously structured vision of Newport than “Festival” did. That film was fine, but it was never more than fine. The new movie feels essential, and I think there’s potentially a major audience for it, comprised of all the people who have been passionate about American roots music over the decades, but also the new generation of folk-adjacent fans who felt ignited by “A Complete Unknown.” I’m tempted to say: Forget that pesky word folk. This is a movie for music fans of every stripe.
At the beginning of the documentary, there are shots of Johnny Cash, looking lean and hungry, and there’s an oblique but deliberate mention of the year 1965. As soon as we hear that year, we know just what it means, because the whole mythology of Newport is centered on what happened then: the famous Sunday-night set in which Bob Dylan went electric, changing the world of folk music and the world at large.
“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” expands our vision of that moment in two ways. It presents such a broad and exquisitely chosen swath of the music that was there at Newport that it leaves us with a far more profound sense of what Dylan was disrupting. At the same time, the festival was caught in its own state of evolution. The real change had begun at the 1964 festival, the first one to take place after the arrival of the Beatles in America (on Feb. 7, 1964) — and it was Beatlemania, far more than anything Bob Dylan did, that spelled the beginning of the end for folk music as a reigning populist form. Dylan aside, electric instruments were already dotting the stages of Newport — we see Howlin’ Wolf, ax in hand, doing a raging blues number. And the spirit of the crowd evolved in tandem with that.
The famous stately image of Newport is of all those lawn chairs stretching back from the stage in neat rows, almost as if this were a very large wedding. But with each year, the festival began to feel looser, with kids hanging out and drinking, showing up for the party; at moments, women would be dancing barefoot in their brassieres. What had begun as a highly civilized event began to morph, in small ways, into the roots of Woodstock. There’s a performance by Mimi and Richard Fariña at the 1965 festival that’s nothing short of stunning. The song they’re doing is called “House Unamerican Blues Activity Dream,” which sounds very 1950s, but what a groove! It’s like hearing a drugged version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” and the crowd rocks out to it. Even Joan Baez rocks out to it, right up there on stage (Mimi, who beams like Margaret Qualley, was Joan’s sister), and the message is: This is not your father’s folk music…or even 1963’s folk music. This was a whole new thing.
The folk dream, as the movie presents it, was about music of various stripes fusing into a community of spiritual and political power. This was really Pete Seeger’s dream, fueled by his alliances with labor unions and African-Americans, and it’s why he had been dragged in front of HUAC in 1955 (his refusal to name names there made him a hero). At the 1963 festival, Seeger, who was producing the event, made the momentous decision to ask the board to pay every performer the same amount of money: $50. Very radical, and very folk.
The music at that year’s festival embodies that burning idealism. The first full performance in the film is Clarence Ashley & Doc Watson doing “The Coo Coo Bird,” an incandescent down-home number that seems to rise up out of the earth. The Moving Star Hall Singers’ performance of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” is so primal and ancient it sounds like one of the field recordings collected by Alan Lomax (the legendary ethnomusicologist who was one of the festival’s organizing curators) that Moby sampled on “Play.” The New Lost City Ramblers do a bluegrass number that the fiddle player turns into a train-kept-a-rollin’ version of countrified rock ‘n’ roll, and the Freedom Singers just about set “Woke Up This Morning” on fire.
In many ways, the 1963 Newport Folk Festival was a set-up for the March on Washington, the epochal Civil Rights demonstration that would take place just one month later. The 1964 edition builds on that spirit, but the music is more seductively unruly, and more personal. There are still the quavery-voiced sopranos — Mary Travers and Joan Baez dueting on the Civil Rights anthem “Lonesome Valley,” Judy Collins performing a sublime “Carry It On.” But there’s also the anarchic stomp of the Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers, an extraordinary young Buffy Sainte-Marie singing “Co’dine” (about her addiction), music from Egypt and Senegambia and Nova Scotia and native Hawaii, and the ecstatic guitar energy of José Feliciano doing “Walk Right In.”
The folk world saw itself as one of acoustic purity, but suddenly that idea was becoming the horse-and-buggy. It would have been nice if the film let us hear more about the arguments we’re told happened backstage — between Lomax and Seeger and the festival board members. But they were all, on some level, about adjudicating the purity of folk. And it’s got to be one of the greatest ironies in the history of pop music that Dylan, when he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” defined the cutting edge of folk music by laying down a challenge to the old world, but by the time you get to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, it was the folk purists who had to adjust to how much the times they were a-changin’. They were the ones stuck on the “old road.”
“Newport & the Great Folk Dream” makes it clear, in a way that it hasn’t been up until now, that Dylan did not come on and perform his revolutionary electric set in a vacuum. For one thing, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who he arranged to back him up just about overnight (they had a quick rehearsal), were already on the program. More than that, the whole energy of the festival was erupting in a new way. If you still think Peter, Paul and Mary are quaint, just listen to them perform “If I Had My Way.” The intensity is enthralling. The Chambers Brothers, wielding electric guitars, have an infectious funk. By the time Dylan gets up there and plays “Maggie’s Farm,” the stage has literally been set. Loudon Wainwright III sums it up perfectly: “There was some sanctimony about folk music. Like, this is precious and this should not be fooled with, and certainly not fucked with. Well, that night, Dylan fucked with it.”
Folk music was never the same, but not because Bob Dylan played an electric set. It’s because folk music was about community, activism, and a kind of radiant selflessness that allowed people to blend into a holy mass. The ’60s counterculture sometimes pretended to be about that (and occasionally was), but that’s not really what the ’60s were about. The ’60s were about people coming into themselves, sexing and drugging themselves, singing the song of themselves, to the point that they often couldn’t see anything else. The ’60s stood on the fault line between the culture of peace and love and what would become the culture of narcissism.
When Dylan finishes his performance, we hear boos from the crowd. Yet watching “Newport & the Great Folk Dream,” it somehow seems less momentous than we’ve been led to believe. People booed because Dylan, the folk messiah, had let them down. But how could it have been otherwise? The film presents the 1966 Newport Folk Festival as an epilogue, because by then the dream of what folk music was — a force that felt like it could change the world — had come to an end. Rock ‘n’ roll had taken over. The glory of the self had taken over. Yet for one fabled moment at Newport, a moment that only lasted a moment, everyone blamed Dylan the messenger. “Newport & the Great Folk Dream” is a testament to the purity he helped bring to an end, but it’s also a testament to the beauty that remains.
