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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Watch This: Murray Lerner's 'Festival'
A few weeks ago, in an elongated, procrastinatory trolling of YouTube, I came across this amazing video of the folk singer Odetta performing at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s.
Her performance was absolutely riveting, and after watching it again and again, I knew I needed to see more. The clip, I soon found out, was from Murray Lerner's 1967 documentary, Festival, which he shot at Newport between 1963 and 1965. After tracking down a copy of the DVD, I put it on at home and spent the next 95 minutes in a semi-hypnotic state of joy.
With vintage performances by not just Odetta, but also Bob Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Son House and many more, it is one of the finest collections of early “folk music” and its adjacent culture ever put to film.
Lerner's film doesn't linger on specific performances (in fact, he rarely shows a song in its entirety), rather electing to cover the festival as a cultural and historical document, not just a musical one. In this capacity, he succeeds completely, with interviews of musicians and festival-goers alike, all discussing the importance of folk music to their counter-culture.
Some of their comments on music and society seem quite dated now, laughably so at times, but there's no doubting how important this event was to the people there. It wasn't just about music to these shaggy-haired youngsters; it was about so much more than that. This film stands as an entry point to the tumultuous decade that would usher in civil rights, women's liberation, rock and roll and numerous other sea-changes in American society.
And sure, their talk about changing the world may seem naïve now, even patronizing at times, but there's no denying the importance of the music or the cultural shift it represented.
For more information on Festival, check out this bang-on review at Blogcritics.org and this video interview with Lerner himself.
Bob Dylan - Mr. Tambourine Man (Newport Folk Festival, 1964) by reggaeman22