{"product_id":"when-we-were-good-the-folk-revival","title":"When We Were Good: The Folk Revival","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen We Were Good traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the sixties from early nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy; the Jewish entertainment and political cultures of New York in the 1930s; the Almanac singers and the wartime crises of the 1940s; the watershed record album Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music; and finally to the cold-war reactionism of the 1950s. This drove the folk-song movement  just as Pete Seeger and the Weavers were putting \"On Top of Old Smokey\" and \"Goodnight  Irene\" on the Hit Parade  into a childrens underground of schools  summer camps  and colleges  planting the seeds of the folk revival to come. The book is not so much a history as a study of the cultural process itself  what the author calls the dreamwork of history.  Cantwell shows how a body of music once enlisted on behalf of the labor movement  antifascism  New Deal recovery efforts  and many other progressive causes of the 1930s was refashioned as an instrument of self-discovery  even as it found a new politics and cultural style in the peace  civil rights  and beat movements. In Washington Square and the Newport Folk Festival  on college campuses and in concert halls across the country  the folk revival gave voice to the generational tidal wave of postwar youth  going back to the basics and trying to be very  very good.  In this capacious analysis of the ideologies  traditions  and personalities that created an extraordinary moment in American popular culture  Cantwell explores the idea of folk at the deepest level. Taking up some of the more obdurate problems in cultural studies--racial identity  art and politics  regional allegiances  class differences--he shows how the folk revival was a search for authentic democracy  with compelling lessons for our own time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44966732431413,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674951336","price":42.44,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674951334.jpg?v=1770893399","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/when-we-were-good-the-folk-revival","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}