Customer Reviews

Newport Folk Festival: Broadside 1963

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If you have any serious interest in the Urban Folk Revival of the late 1950s-early 1960s, as well as in roots of the '60s New Left, this is an essential audio document, and a seriously entertaining one as well. Folk Revival Founding Father Pete Seeger and an impossibly young Bob Dylan in a duet... Dylan in a classic antiwar duet with Joan Baez... major young artists unveiled, including Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, before their major record label debuts... labor songs from Jim Garland... civil rights movement classics rooted in the legendary Freedom Riders movement... one of the great pacifist songs, from the nearly forgotten Sam Hinton... and more.

1963-64 were the years in which the Urban Folk Revival came of age, as documented at Newport, and 1965 was the year Dylan famously went electric and burned down the house, for better and for worse, but 1963 was the year the Greenwich Village-based Folk Movement peaked. This recording best captures its heartbeat. Also of great interest: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at The Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965; DVD.

Cautionary note: I cannot vouch for sound quality, etc., on the CD version of this classic album, as my own frame of reference is my old vinyl LP that captured my son Lee's interest and imagination while thumbing through my record collection during his childhood in the 1980s.)

The Newport Broadside/ Topical songs at the Newport Folk Festival 1963: This is a fine live album from the festival. These are the more serious performances gathered in one disk but they fail to hold together in this form. This disk makes a good companion to the "Newport Folk Festival 1963 Evening Concerts Volume 1" (which is sold separately).

First: The worry expressed by the one previous reviewer that the CD version of this 1964 LP might not have good sound quality is not needed: it sounds darn good considering the conditions under which it was recorded.

Second: It is true that '63 and '64 were really the high-water marks of acoustic protest folk revivalism, although the country had not yet turned against Vietnam and had embraced civil rights only tentatively.

Third: The highlights of this CD are primarily the two songs by Phil Ochs, civil rights themed and sung well. (Compare his "Ballad of Medgar Evers" commonly known as "Too Many Martyrs" with Dylan's "Only a Pawn in Their Game." Different emphasis, but equal quality.) Second to that section would be the two by Tom Paxton. The songs done by Ed McCurdy and Pete LaFarge, both of whom I like as singers, are not their best efforts. The rest is kind of OK but not tracks you will play repeatedly.

Finally: Unless you were in the audience in '63, or are a relative of one of the artists, don't pay eighteen bucks for this one. Find a used copy at a big discount. The best work of these singers is available in more quantity at better prices elsewhere, for the most part.