Literatura académica sobre el tema "Newport Folk Festival"

Music festivals mattered to the larger development of American live music along multiple fronts in the two decades following the founding of the Newport Jazz Festival. Most saliently, festivals helped to push the business of live music more and more toward large-scale production, laying the groundwork for the arena and stadium rock economy. Because they so often had an aura of idealism surrounding them, however, music festivals could never be reduced to strictly commercial ventures. The combination of scale and singularity gave festivals the aura they would come to possess and made them flash points for contests over cultural values that coursed through the musical styles put on stage. This chapter traces the development of US music festivals from the establishment of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and then into the era of the rock festival in the late 1960s. In jazz and folk alike—and in rock, where the influence of both would loom large—festivals came to stand for a host of tensions that characterized the social role of popular music in the post-war era.

During the 1950s and 1960s, jazz music became solidly entrenched in America’s institutions of high art patronage as the music’s most prestigious venues shifted from popular clubs and ballrooms to concert halls and upscale summer festivals, most notably the Newport Jazz Festival. While for most professional jazz dancers, this period marked a time when the work “dried up,” there were several lindy hop and rhythm tap dancers who managed to access these spaces through their relationships with jazz historian Marshall Stearns. Stearns was a key player in the adoption of jazz history as an academic subject and an advocate for the serious study of Black vernacular dance. This chapter asks why Stearns’s efforts to “legitimize” and institutionalize jazz dance largely failed, given that his similar advocacy for jazz music clearly succeeded. It argues that Stearns’s folkloric conceptualization of “vernacular jazz dance” fell short of the successful “consensus narrative” he built for jazz music in that concertized adaptations of Black vernacular dance practices by choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey were not legible to Stearns as contiguous extensions of the traditional folk and popular dance forms he problematically fetishized as dying folk art in need of preservation. The discursive barrier Stearns built between the worlds of vernacular and concert dance, while intended to safeguard from cultural appropriation so-called authentic or vernacular jazz dance forms, ultimately reinforced primitivist narratives that discursively foreclosed many possibilities for dance as a vital creative partner in jazz music’s present or future.

Abstract As rock ‘n’ roll evolved into the 1960s, gospel vocalizing and stagecraft continued to influence solo artists and vocal harmony groups that evolved from doo-wop to soul and Motown: Ray Charles, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, the Miracles, the Temptations. The Dixie Hummingbirds and black gospel itself evolved against the backdrop of generational rebellion, civil rights unrest, war protest, and assassinations. The trend shifted from quartets to soloists and choirs, the gospel fan base broadening as the music became appreciated both as an art and as roots music form. President Kennedy was assassinated and in 1964, the Hummingbirds made their television debut on the program TV Gospel Time. They performed “Our Prayer for Peace” with a new verse about the assassination. The Hummingbirds adapted to the tastes of the times and remained Peacock’s most consistently bestselling gospel artists. Multiple tracks were recorded and strategically released as singles every few months followed by album collections. Robey sold the Peacock catalog to ABC records. The Hummingbirds had an international following and performed at venues such as Disneyland, Madison Square Garden, and both the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals. Paul Simon invited the Hummingbirds to collaborate on “Loves Me Like a Rock,” which in their own rendition won them their first Grammy. They also recorded with Stevie Wonder. The Hummingbirds suffered a setback in 1976 with the death of bass singer William Bobo. They soldiered on and more than six decades into their career were dubbed the “Iron Men of Gospel.”