Word: seeger
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...Mary Allin Travers moved as a baby with her writer parents to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she would join the blooming local folk scene in nearby Washington Square Park. In her teens, as a member of the Song Swappers, she sang backup for Pete Seeger and appeared on Broadway in the short-lived folk musical The Next President. She also earned money babysitting; one of her charges was an infant English aristocrat, the fifth Baron Haden-Guest, who as Christopher Guest would direct and star in the 2003 film A Mighty Wind, an affectionate parody...
...consumers in the late '50s, folk music was the Kingston Trio, with their frat-boy élan and their repertoire purloined from Seeger and other traditionalists. Then one man suggested that the genre could be bigger. "The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music," said Albert Grossman, a Chicago entrepreneur, at the first Newport Folk Festival, in 1959. Bob Dylan, whose manager Grossman became in 1962, may have been that prince, but the raspy-voiced kid needed troubadours to sell his message to the masses. Grossman had seen Travers perform...
...1960s, songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." But four-chord, straight-ahead folk music proved, well, boring after a while, and Dylan betrayed the folk pedants by going electric--"Judas!" they cried in England--and the ideology-encrusted hard-liner Pete Seeger tried to pull the plug on Dylan's breakthrough performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival...
...Trio, whose version of Tom Dooley was imitated by the Kingston Trio in their first hit single; the Tarriers (a threesome that included the young Alan Arkin), whose The Banana Boat Song, aka Day-O, was a top-of-the-pops calypso hit; the Weavers, with Darling replacing Pete Seeger in 1958; and the Rooftop Singers, which had a No.1 pop hit with Darling's 12-string-guitar arrangement of Walk Right In. One way Darling wasn't a regimental folkie: his politics were libertarian, of the Ayn Rand stripe...
...just exciting because all of these stations in New York . . . were just all over the record. I thought the rest of the country would be, too. Then everybody started [sending] all this hate mail. To me it was just a song. I would hear Pete Seeger [discussing] the power of music to frighten people and to change people. Suddenly there I was in the middle...