Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 5 with Jean Ritchie and Bernice Reagon

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest05

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 2 about Lead Belly

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest02

Pete Seeger's `Rainbow Quest' Folk Music TV Show Revisited: Episode 1 with Clancy Brothers, Tommy Makem and Tom Paxton

https://archive.org/details/RainbowQuest01

Did Corporate Music Industry Journalists Cover-Up Dylan's Post-1966 Artistic and Political Deterioration?

Many fans of the early 1960's protest folk singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, lost interest in his post-1966 singer-songwriting work, after Dylan seemed to become more commercially-motivated than he previously had been; and after he pretty much stopped writing protest folk songs and topical folk songs (except for the post-1966 topical folk-rock songs"George Jackson" and "Hurricane"), with poetic lyrics that reflected artistically the personal, social and political concerns of the civil rights and anti-war Movement activists and supporters who had been emotionally moved by his pre-1966 song-writing and campus concerts.

Yet since the late 1960s, most music journalists and music writers who write for corporate music industry publications like Rolling Stone magazine or the book publishing or newspaper and magazine subsidiaries of the global corporate media conglomerates rarely produce articles or books that evaluate Dylan's post-1966 work in a negative way or present an unflattering image of the pre-1963 Woody Guthrie clone-turned post-1966 multi-millionaire hipster capitalist rock star.

In his 1989 book, Dylan, Bob Spitz, indicated some reasons why most corporate music industry journalists and writers may have tried to cover up Dylan's post-1966 artistic and political deterioration in their writing about Dylan's life and career during the last five decades:

"...Like the ancient court historians, Bob's biographers obediently wrote the story he put in front of them. Otherwise responsible journalists, dazzled by an audience with him, failed to question or examine the accuracy of his statements; incredibly enough, they just printed what he said verbatim. Leafing through the thousands of pages of articles and transcripts about Bob--from Nat Hentoff's New Yorker profile in 1964 to the most recent Rolling Stone interview--one is struck by the sheer number of untruths and epic exaggerations that have found their way into print. Few performers have been more protected by literary sycophants--critics and reputable journalists who either participated unwittingly or have allowed their own fortunes to be so intimately intertwined with Bob Dylan that the work they produced serves primarily as a library of memoir and self-promotion...

"Needless to say, this creates extraordinary difficulty for a biographer. The vast writings that constitute a loosely assembled Dylan archives provides a scant factual foundation upon which to build. Not surprisingly, many journalists refused to lend assistance...fearful that either their past willingness to collude with Bob would be exposed or their cooperation with me would bring recriminations...After this book was in its final stages, I was offered access to Bob as well as permission to explore certain resources under his tight control and to quote from his lyrics in exchange for an agreement allowing him to examine and amend the finished manuscript. Similarly, there were photographers whose work I was denied access until I submitted to this demand. Not wishing to provide yet another literary whitewashing, I refused..."

`We Shall Overcome' Civil Rights Protest Folk Song's History Revisited

The 1960's civil rights movement anthem, "We Shall Overcome", was probably the most widely-sung protest folk song that civil rights movement demonstrators sang at street and church rallies, street protest marches and at their restaurant sit-ins, when they were engaged in acts of non-violent civil disobedience during the 1960's.

In 1901, Rev. Charles Tindley composed a folk song, "I'll Overcome Some Day," to the tune of the "I'll Be All Right" slave spiritual that was derived from the tune of "O Sanctissima," an 18th-century European hymn. Decades later, during a strike by American Tobacco factory workers in 1945, while on a picket line of African-American workers, Lucille Simmons changed the "I'll overcome" lyric to "We will overcome" or "We shall overcome" and sang the "I'll Overcome Some Day" tune more slowly. And in 1947, as "We Shall Overcome," the new version reached Zilphia Horton at the Highlander Folk School, which trained civil rights movement and labor movement organizers and activists in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's.

At the Highlander Folk School during the 1950's and early 1960's, folksinger and civil rights movement activist Guy Carawan then taught the "We Shall Overcome" protest folk song to civil rights movement activists and organizers, including those who were members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] in the early 1960's; and Pete Seeger also began to popularize the "We Shall Overcome" protest folk song during the 1950's and early 1960's.

According to Hardeep Phull's 2008 book, Story Behind The Protest Song, in the late 1950's or 1960's "Seeger's manager Harold Leventhal advised" Pete "that a copyright should be taken out on `We Shall Overcome'" and "it was also decided that the proceeds would be donated to...SNCC;" and since "SNCC's demise" in the late 1960's "proceeds go to the Highlander Research and Education Center."

Story of American Folk Music--Part 1

119th Birthday of U.S. Protest Folk Singer/Civil Rights Movement Activist Paul Robeson

To mark the birthday 119 years ago on April 9, 1898 of U.S. protest folk singer and anti-war/civil rights movement activist Paul Robeson: