The Fall of Folk

Much of these singers’ popularity has not survived the generations. Baez produced eight gold albums in the United States, releasing the last in 1975. Odetta, a singer and legend of the civil rights movement, slipped out of the public eye in the late 1960s. Even then, Americans were beginning to move on from the era in which Rosa Parks had expressed faith in the meaning of Odetta’s blues, ballads, and folk music. Occidental College professor Peter Dreier names six singers among the 20th-century activists in his book The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, but just one 21st-century musician in his 2012 Huffington Post article “50 Young Progressive Activists Who Are Changing America.”
Pete Seeger, integral to protest music since the 1940s, sang at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan when Occupy Wall Street demanded economic equity there in 2011. So did Baez and others belonging to her generation of musical political activism. And so did Tom Morello, the only 21st-century singer Dreier mentioned. But although music was significant to the Occupy protestors’ efforts, its energy failed to catch hold. It did not unite activists because, as sincere as these singers were, they could not identify a single, central goal for the movement. In an interview with The New York Times, British critic Dorian Lynskey pointed out that it was much more difficult to sing about “a financial crisis where the villains are obscure and the solutions are obscure.”
Today, Baez, like Young, continues to fight for these causes but seems unable to stir a larger movement. For now, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are among America’s most renowned activist singers: “Same Love,” their single supporting gay rights, topped charts after its 2013 release. Some of the duo’s other songs, such as “Stay at Home Dad” and “White Privilege,” also possess a socially conscious, progressive bent.
Still, the absence of protest songs, and of the direct political engagement that accompanies them, has been notable. Perhaps the change is a societal one. Current movements have often migrated from the public sphere into the private, exploring, for instance, the personal pieces of gender equality that Macklemore does in “Stay at Home Dad.” An article by David Bauder of the Associated Press, for one, attributes the change to a increasingly private experience of listening to music: people spend more time wearing headphones now and less time enjoying songs together. Such an explanation might account for some part of the transition. With protest music, context matters, particularly in America’s recent decades. The singers who popularized protest songs in the 1960s and 1970s identified with folk music, a genre reliant on group engagement.
Their relationship with activism also went both ways. Harvard Kennedy School professor Timothy McCarthy pointed out in an interview with the HPR that in the 1960s and 1970s, protest achieved an “incredibly visible and public” prominence never matched before or after. He believes it is unsurprising that artists responded to this trend. Protest music was not merely a fringe effort with which a few singers engaged. It was a phenomenon integral to popular culture.

In other words, Baez, Dylan, and Odetta were able to perform at the March on Washington in part because, well, the March on Washington existed. Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, an iconic folk group of the 1960s that also performed on that day, later noted the event as the moment when she herself realized the power of song. The protest music that became the group’s focus grew out of that opportunity. “Now music began to inspire America, tweak its conscience,” she recalled in a 2014 PBS Documentary. “I remember being up on the steps of the Lincoln monument and I truly believed at that moment that it was possible, proof-positive possible, that human beings could join together for their greater good … It changed the way we saw the world and our role in it.”