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Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, by Ronald D. Cohen. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. $70.00; paper, $24.95. Pp. xii, 364.
If you have ever strummed a guitar, listened to Bob Dylan, appreciated the Rolling Stones' roots in southern American blues, or sung along with college radio stations in your car, you have experienced the echoes of the "folk music revival" of the early 1960s in the United States. This revival marked the time when "folk music" became not simply the expression of small regional or political sub-cultures, but moved to the center of U. S. popular culture. The revival had roots in a variety of social and cultural movements in the first half of the 20th century: the popular anxiety among urban intellectuals that the small communities of the 19th century were being destroyed by urbanization and commercialism; the growth of an American left that found in traditional songs of protest an inspiration for a culture of opposition; and, indeed, the industrial and technological developments that made mass distribution of recorded music a central part of American culture.
Ronald Cohen has already made great contributions to preserving the heritage covered in this book by producing the CD collections Songs of Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs and the American Left, 1926-1953 ( 1996) and the Best of Broadside (2000). In Rainbow Quest he has traced this period in great detail. Beginning in the left-wing world populated by such figures as Woody Guthrie and Pete seeger, Cohen shows how, in the context of the repressive 1950s, interest in folk music emerged with its own history, still connected to the world of the left, but larger and more integrated into the world of mass culture. It is this moment that...