Folk, Folkum and the New Citybilly

Woody Guthrie, the saline singer and balladmaker from Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, once auditioned at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. It was in the early 1940s, and folk music was still limited mainly to the folk itself in rural areas and small towns. A few sophisticated field collectors, academicians and sanguine propagandists for the Left were aware of its prickly existence, but the general public either ignored folk music or regarded it all as squawking exotica. The Belafontes and the Kingston Trios had not yet applied detergent to the folk roots and become millionaires in the process of dilution.

The billowy lady in charge of the Rainbow Room looked at the scraggly Mr. Guthrie, puzzled over his wild singularity, and said brightly, "I have it! Pierrot! We shall dress him in a Pierrot costume. One of those darling clown suits! It will bring out the life and the pep and the giddy humor of his period. Isn't that simply a swell idea?"

Woody asked the way to the men's room, ducked into an elevator and, as he recalled in his autobiography, Bound for Glory: "When we hit bottom, I walked out onto the slick marble floor whanging as hard as I could on the guitar and singing.... I filled myself full of the free air and sung as loud as the building would stand."

Well this Rainbow Room's a funny place to play

It's a long ways from here to the U.S.A.

By 1949, the Weavers were organized, and while they didn't play the Rainbow Room in costume, they did make the hit record charts the next year with Goodnight, Irene. Burl Ives, Josh White and Richard Dyer-Bennet had already established a folk salient in several of the more intimate night clubs, and their prospects were considerably gilded by the Weavers' success. In the next decade, Harry Belafonte, Theodore Bikel and a motley roster of other minstrels accelerated popular acceptance of folk material. The swift ascent of the Kingston Trio in 1958 heralded a further rush of emulators, and the folk fever has continued to rise ever since.

In the early stages of the transmutation of folk music into show business, a fan walked up one night to Lee Hayes, a grizzled charter member of the Weavers, and said, "You guys sure got a great act!"

"It's not an act," Hayes growled. "It's real."

By 1963, however, the percentage of "real" folk music in the hundreds of LPs in that genre and in the scores of night-club jongleurs who specialized in what they call folk expression had become conspicuously small. There was even an Ivy League Three singing work songs at the Blue Angel in New York; and Billboard, the voice of the commercial music industry, pointed out in accurate if dispiriting language: "Vocal groups -- particularly those in the folksy collegiate category -- are registering strong sales appeal, both on albums and singles."

A saddened though now richer folk singer of quality, Glenn Yarbrough, recently keened when asked his reaction to the spiraling fortunes of the ebullient but hoked-up Limeliters to which he belongs: "The only thing that success has taught me is that success is meaningless. An audience is like a lynch mob. Three years ago they were walking out on me. Now that they know we've been on the Sullivan show, they come and cheer." Another Limeliter, Alex Hassilev, said of his colleagues: "They want to have commercial success and still be above it. And that's having it just a little too good."

Even the church-based Negro gospel groups have begun to discover in the past few years that their heated witnessing is folk singing and is therefore negotiable on much more lucrative terms than they had ever imagined. Mahalia Jackson, the first gospel singer to make a major breakthrough into integrated, secular audiences, has retained the unalloyed passion she hurled at exultant Baptists in the years before she appeared on the Dinah Shore show. But Miss Jackson has nonetheless now allowed Columbia Records to package her more "palatably" on occasion with boneless studio choirs and cotton-candy violins.

As a definitive sign of big show business' embrace of this shouting branch of the folk, Clara Ward and her gospel troupe are now regular headliners in Las Vegas. The Ward Singers and other gospel units have also become familiar on the college circuit and in the big-city folk clubs.

In her latter, non-Las Vegas activities, Miss Ward may well cross paths with Pete Seeger, who has been proselytizing among the young -- from kindergarten to college -- for many years. To most of the more solemn urban converts to folk music, Seeger is still a paradigm of forthright musical honesty. The young citybillies, who attend and play in the coffeehouses where the folk acolytes hold their services, scorn the Limeliters; Peter, Paul & Mary; the Kingston Trio; and the Brothers Four. But Pete Seeger is bathed in a nimbus of virtue as one carrier of the tradition who has not sold out to the Yahoos. As a person, Seeger deserves their plaudits, because he is remarkably guileless and idealistic. As a performer, however, Seeger is more a nimble cheerleader than an excavator of the marrow of folk feeling. It is Seeger's continuing stature as a folk guru that symbolizes the confusion of standards today even among the hip folk audience.

An extremely rare flicker of heresy at the gospel as transmitted by Seeger appeared in the British Jazz News during a Seeger tour of England a couple of years ago. Peter Clayton, a chronic freethinker, wrote: "It was when he turned to attack that log that I began to feel uneasy. He had flung off his jacket by this time and, picking up an ax not quite as long as his banjo, he sang a work song to the rhythmic accompaniment of his own chopping. The chips, significantly, flew everywhere. This ought to have been authentic, but somehow it had the embarrassing tameness of a Zulu warrior exhibited at a fairground." The reviewer hastened to proclaim his sympathy with Seeger's catechism of universal brotherhood and his persistent refusal to answer questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee; but he added sadly: "This thin figure who stood and played banjo and 12-string guitar, who blew a little wooden pipe, who threw his head back and sang slightly Leftish songs for two hours in the Albert Hall's yellow spotlight was being judged by his audience on these, rather than on musical, grounds. But it was in any case all so pathetically naive.... Incidentally, why did he bother to tell the crowd they sounded wonderful [singing along with him]? They sounded quite as dreadful as any other English crowd self-consciously singing; a sort of uncertain half-Gregorian chanting."

And yet not all the audiences are self-conscious nor are all the performers on the expanding folk carrousel limited to the folkum style of the Kingston Trio or the earnest pamphleteering of Pete Seeger. It is, in fact, the growing diversity in the current folk farrago that makes this phenomenon so absorbing and increasingly difficult to compartmentalize. On the one hand, for example, a stiff, angry Negro from Detroit, Bill McAdoo, performs with grating tonelessness as he transmogrifies the work song Jumping Judy with such leaden lyrics of his own as:

I will never drop that bomb

I will never drop that bomb

I will never drop that bomb

And blow this world to Hell.

But there is also Bob Dylan, a 22-year-old wanderer, originally from Minnesota, who has somehow assimilated a rainbow of styles from archaic Negro blues to acrid white mountain wailing, and has emerged as a penetratingly individual singer as well as an expert harmonica whooper and guitarist. Dylan, the most vital of the younger citybillies, looks at first like a fawn at bay; but when he starts to sing, the slight boy in the black corduroy cap, green jumper and blue corduroy pants draws his audiences into his stories as if he were an ancient bard.

Like most of the citybillies, both the commercialized and the comparatively "pure," Dylan is often ironic "I went down South a couple of years ago," he says in his hesitant drawl, "and hung around chain gangs looking for folk songs. I never heard any singing, though." Dylan is also serious, though not pompous in the manner of some coffeehouse aesthetes. In his Talkin' New York, a blues done in the wry conversational manner of one of his idols, Woody Guthrie, Dylan tells of looking for work in Greenwich Village one day and of being instantly dismissed ("You sound like a hillbilly. We want folk singers here."). He then looks quizzically at his audience, as if wondering whether to level with them, and finally says, "I never create anything. I just record what I hear. I run around with my eyes and my pencil."

One of the pervasive preoccupations among the committed young folk audiences and performers which Dylan has recorded is their nuclear pacifism:

will not go down under the ground

Because someone tells me that death'scomin' round.

I will not carry myself to die.

When I go to grace my head will behigh.

Let me die in my footsteps

Before I'll go down under the ground.

The fierce opposition to nuclear testing and the fervent support of racial integration that characterize most citybillies does not, of course, necessarily extend to the majority of the huge popular audience for folk music. Most of the public for Harry Belafonte; Theodore Bikel; the Brothers Four; Peter, Paul & Mary; and the Kingston Trio are either average teenagers, delighted to be in tribal vogue in music as well as in dress, or they are young marrieds about to assume the proportions and attitudes of comfortable burghers but using glossy folk music as a last link to what they conceive of as unfettered youth and earthy virility.

It is also likely that much of this larger audience has turned to folk music of a sort in recent years out of boredom at the mewling childishness of American popular music which has been increasingly directed to subteens since the mid-1950s. In a previous generation, many of these listeners might have preferred jazz for their post--Hit Parade kicks, but jazz is becoming as unsparingly challenging and complex as contemporary classical music. Much of modern jazz requires too much concentration to appeal to a broad audience and, accordingly, the average jazz album still sells under 5000 copies -- with exceptions such as the work of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Enroll Garner -- while the Kingston Trio can sell a million copies of the single Tom Dooley. At least 5 of their 16 Capitol albums, moreover, have been purchased by more than a million of the citizenry. As Richard Dyer-Bennet notes, somewhat caustically, "Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio have found a repertoire and a manner that have enabled them to cross into the pop field, and their recordings are quite correctly listed by Schwann in the popular-music section of the LP catalog."

It is among those singers and instrumentalists who have not "crossed over" -- and among their audiences -- that the durable meanings of the folk ferment of the past few years can be found. It is there, too, that the future, if any, of American folk music is being shaped. The authentic rural prototypes are dying and most of their progeny are becoming -- through radio, records and television -- as eclectic as city folk. Texas sharecropper Mance Lipscomb, a recently discovered repository of vintage Negro folk traditions, is proud, for example, to be finally recorded, and his albums on Arhoolie and Reprise are treasures of ethnic lore. His granddaughters are also impressed at the attention the old man is getting, but they prefer collecting the releases of Ricky Nelson.

The survival of folk music from now on will depend increasingly on performers who have seldom seen, let alone milked, a cow, and whose first exposure to the folk ethos came from books and recordings, not from grandfather ruminating over the dulcimer. Can folk music be transplanted and continue to grow? Who, moreover, will be in charge of the orchard, and who are the customers to be?

Many of the folk consumers of the next few decades are now being diligently oriented in kindergartens, elementary schools and summer camps by young teachers whose enthusiastic avocation is folk singing and collecting records. Lou Gottlieb, a Ph. D. in musicology before he helped organize the Limeliters, observes with uncharacteristic awe: "My seven-year-old knows more folk songs all the way through than I did at the age of 27." Pete Seeger, the Mr. Chips of this pedagogical movement, adds: "The kids I sang to at summer camps are now asking me to sing on campuses whose student governments they're now part of. Now, if only they can get themselves elected to Congress."

Folk-music clubs are burgeoning in high schools; and for collegians, there are enclaves of coffeehouses in most of the larger cities where folk music -- and only occasionally jazz -- provides the rites for initiation into hipness. The initial attraction for many of the young converts is not the music "Most of the folk fans on campuses," Lou Gottlieb points out, "come from departments other than the music divisions. It's the words that draw them. Only later does the value of the music make itself felt."

In both the Anglo-Saxon ballad tradition and Negro blues -- two of the main, intermingling streams of American folk music -- those words magnetize by the elemental passions they state and the pungent clarity of their metaphors:

Says I, my dear, lay close to me

And wipe away them tears.

Then I hauled her shift up over herhead

And I wrapped it 'round her ears.

We was all right in the winter time

And in the summer, too;

And I held her tight that livelongnight

To save her from the foggy, foggydew.

I got to keep movin', I got to keepmovin',

Blues fallin' down like hail, bluesfallin' down like hail,

And the days keep on worryin' me,for a hell-hound on my trail,

Hell-hound on my trail, hell-houndon my trail.

Not all folk lyrics, to be sure, are evocative. There are banalities in the blues and gray patches in Appalachian ballads. By and large, however, the words of the songs do strike closer to actual emotions, frustrations and sensual pleasures than do the soggy euphemisms of pop ballads. As for the commercial folk groups, the citybillies complain with varying justification that the most popular of them weaken the impact of the tunes they sing by the slickness of their style and by their frequent penchant for inserting gag lines into even their most mournful material. "I find myself suspicious," says Pete Seeger of such units as the Kingston Trio, "of their inability to sing a song straight. Many of them can actually do a very good job as far as singing goes, but at some point in the song they have to louse it up just to let the audience know they are not so naive as to take it seriously."

A further source of attraction in (continued overleaf)Folk, Folkum(continued from page 96) straight folk material comes from a strong need among the urban young for some kind of roots, some kind of communal identification, however ingenuous it may appear to be. As scores of sociologists, academic and amateur, are ceaselessly pointing out, ours is in part a society of alienation -- alienation from traditional mores and self-alienation. The young who seek refuge in the coffeehouses are even more skeptical of their parents' accommodations to life than their parents in turn were of the compromises of their elders. Many also feel impotent or at least highly doubtful of their ability to direct their own future. If Sir Charles Snow, hardly an alarmist, predicts Armageddon within 10 years unless the arms race is curbed, it is not unremarkable that even the nonpacifists among the young share a kind of floating anxiety.

Folk music, despite the pietism of Pete Seeger, offers no cure. The British critic Peter Clayton has noted Seeger's characteristic assumption that folk music has magical potency: "' I'd like to knock down all the walls between people,' Seeger said, forgetting apparently that 'people' of some sort or other had made the walls in the first place."

But if folk music is no counter to power politics, it does provide some of its listeners and performers with a sense of sharing, if only a sharing of kindred protest against the suffocating present as well as a vicarious affirmation of what seem to have been the uncomplicated values and direct emotions of the folk past.

Some of this moralistic immersion in folk music is as sentimental and as musically shallow in its way as the adolescent love plaints of Paul Anka. Shel Silverstein has told in The Realist of walking through Washington Square, the Greenwich Village fount of amateur folk singing: "This one 18-year-old kid is sitting there with his guitar, and on the guitar is a sign that says, this machine fights for freedom. This is too much -- an 18-year-old with a freedom-fighting machine. It's a goddamn guitar, is what it is. It's a guitar, and it don't fight for nothing -- it plays. Unless maybe...he hits with it."

Similarly, when Washington Square was temporarily closed to folk singers in the spring of 1961 and a civil liberties demonstration by the citybillies turned into a riot, Lenny Bruce observed calmly, "Mayor Wagner was simply expressing a musical fact. He didn't mean they can't sing. He was just pointing out they can't sing."

In its use by the student movement for equal rights in the South, however, folk music has shown during the past few years its capacity to strengthen the morale and communicate the emotional urgency of workers for specific political and economic goals. On an individual basis, moreover, out of the banjo pickers from the Bronx (one Washington Square regular prefers to be addressed as Texas Weinstein) and the Barbara Allans of San Francisco, a few boldly personal continuers of the folk tradition are emerging. In addition to Bob Dylan, there is Joan Baez, a shy, slim, implacably uncompromising 22-year-old who served her apprenticeship in the coffee-houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is now a major box-office attraction on the concert circuit -- when she chooses to work. Only moderately interested in money, Miss Baez spends most of the year reading, sketching and nurturing assorted animals in her Carmel, California, home. She will not play night clubs (the audiences are not sufficiently attentive) and she will appear on television only on her own terms (an extensive solo spot with no orchestral background and no distracting sets).

Musically, Joan Baez' is the most arresting voice of all the city folk singers. Using a disciplined, luminously clear soprano, she specializes in Anglo-American ballads with some admixture of Spanish tunes, Negro songs and country music. By contrast with Miss Baez' seemingly effortless lyricism, such a self-conscious performer as Odetta sounds rigid and choked and gives the impression of auditioning for a part as the Earth Mother in a Paddy Chayefsky play.

By avoiding the "fake ethnic" approach of many citybillies, Miss Baez, as one of her admirers has pointed out in The Reporter, "does not pretend to have been a Negro or a British maiden broken by a feudal lord. What she gives are her own feelings about these people. She's like a passionate biographer; and more than that, she makes these songs contemporary by identifying with their emotional content as herself -- as Joan Baez in 1963. In that way, her audience immediately identifies with her. She's not imitating the Earth Mother. She's one of us who happens to sing beautifully."

Miss Baez, however, does have critics among the purist citybillies. The monthly conscience of the folk field, The Little Sandy Review, warns her that she has not learned enough about the authentic singing styles of the various folk forms to which she applies herself. "She is not a folk singer," says the bristling publication, "since she neither sings nor plays in traditional style -- nor does she perform traditional versions of folk songs."

This kind of criticism is at the core of the fierce debate among urban folk singers as to which of the aspirants can qualify for certification as a true singer of folk songs rather than an exploiter. Alan Lomax, the prodigiously energetic collector in this country and abroad, has edited several books -- most recently, Folk Songs of North America (Double-day) -- which have provided much of the source material for many apprentice bards. From his position as dean of the restless, heterogeneous undergraduates in folk music, Lomax insists that years of study and practice of ethnic models are necessary before a city folk singer can presume to offer his own contribution as a performer.

Sandy Paton, a folk singer and owner of Folk Legacy Records, agrees: "There are too many night-club singers learning songs from other night-club singers and never bothering to learn anything about the music they are 'interpreting.' I doubt that they even listen to the Library of Congress material, much less spend a little of their 'ill-gotten gains' to seek out a real ballad singer and sit at his knee awhile. By the time the music has passed through several citybilly interpretations, it but vaguely resembles folk music, taking on the nature of 'pop' or 'art' music instead."

Directly opposed is Dominic Behan, younger brother of Brendan, a novelist and a robustly uninhibited singer of Irish folk tunes. Behan declares that the emphasis on the ethnic approach forces a young singer into a phony accent and otherwise restricts his spontaneity. "Open your mouth," Behan proclaims, "and whatever your voice is like, sing! And to hell with the ethnicists! Folk song is not the special preserve of the few but the undeniable heritage of the many."

Increasingly, the majority of the more conscientious urban folk singers are taking a middle course. They would agree with Peggy Seeger, younger sister of Pete and a more persuasive singer than her brother. Miss Seeger points out the obvious fact that it is impossible for a city-born singer to project himself into the narrow range of experience of the echt folk singers. Instead, he "must rather consciously adapt the music to his own needs. Every city singer in the present-day American scene goes through a period of adaptation through which he flits, musically speaking, from one song genre to another -- from Negro work songs to foreign songs to party games to humorous songs, and so on...with his instrumental style adapting itself accordingly. And out of this experience, if the singer is a creative one, will come a personal musical style which will of necessity be an amalgam of the musical stages through which he has (continued on page 168)Folk, Folkum(continued from page 98) passed, however mutually opposed they have been."

The result of this broad-based approach has been the emergence of what can be termed eclectic specialists -- performers who, after exploring many segments of the folk heritage, have decided they can best fill their own needs from one or more particular styles. The New Lost City Ramblers, for example, have become expert in the repertoire and styles of such recording country bands of the 1920s as the Skillet Lickers, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Buckle-Busters and Dr. Smith's Champion Horse-Hair Pullers. Until fairly recently, to most ethnicists among folklorists, these antic models were dismissed simply as early illustrations of commercialized folk. But the New Lost City Ramblers -- along with many of their contemporaries -- have discovered that if a citybilly is to function on the belief that folk music is not static, he must widen his definition of the folk music of the past as well as that of the present.

John Cohen, a New Yorker who is one of the Ramblers, has pointed out how citybillies can contribute to making folk traditions more meaningful: "In our wanderings through old-time music, we have had the advantage of current musical developments as a point of perspective on the old music. In listening to the many diverse musical sounds of country music from the Twenties and Thirties -- we know which ideas lasted and developed into today's music, which styles were a carry-over from a still earlier period, which died out or disappeared. From all these a clear sequence is emerging. More and more we find certain attitudes in today's country musicians whichwill be considered 'folk' 20 years from now, just as some of the commercial singers of 30 yearsago are considered 'traditional' today."

Other city folk have looked for stimulation to such more recent strains of mountain music as the bluegrass bands, composed of such virtuosi as the Foggy Mountain Boys led by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs who specialize in swirling, polyphonic improvisations on unamplified string instruments. It was Earl Scruggs from Flint Hill, North Carolina, who revolutionized Southern banjo playing by developing a three-finger picking style -- instead of the conventional two-finger, claw-hammer way of playing -- which made possible a much swifter, smoother and more melodious banjo style. Now there are such city masters of the Scruggs technique as Bob Yellin, a product of New York's High School of Music and Art and City College. Yellin taught himself the Scruggs approach so well that he has twice won a purple ribbon on the home grounds of the surviving country musicians -- the annual Old Time Fiddlers Convention in Union Grove, North Carolina.

Yellin now records as a member of the Greenbriar Boys, a city-based bluegrass band which, like the New Lost City Ramblers, has formed its own style after a thorough absorption of the traditions of an initially alien territory and people. Yellin, it should also be noted as an index of the scope of some citybillies, is also a specialist in microwave electronics.

The searching urban folk performers do not, incidentally, limit their quarrying to records and books. Some still go out into the field to corral the few remaining aged informants in the South whose families have transmitted variants of British ballads and archaic dancing tunes for generations. There is also a growing move to invite the authentic folk to the city for occasional concerts sponsored by the new generation of apprentices. Among such visitors in the past couple of years have been Horton Barker, a blind ballad singer from Chilhowie, Virginia, who is in his 70s, and Frank Proffitt, a venerable carpenter from Reese, North Carolina. In a few instances, a member of a rural singing family has settled up North, become a professional folk singer, and introduced city colleagues to a wealth of vintage material. A primary example is Kentucky-born Jean Ritchie, an extraordinarily lucent animator of the Anglo-Saxon ballad tradition.

Occasionally a citybilly will pattern himself first after a single performer rather than a regional style. Jack Elliott (Elliott Charles Adnopoz) was born in Brooklyn 31 years ago. While still in his teens, Elliott attached himself to Woody Guthrie, hoboing around the country with the Oklahoman. Eventually, Elliott came to look, talk, walk and sound like Guthrie. In recent years, Elliott has found his own way of folk expression, ranging through twanging mountain songs, his own adaptations of Guthrie's talking blues, Negro material and British ballads with a wry assurance and the thrust of an unmistakable individualist.

An intriguing project for further expansion of the citybillies' range of sources has been advanced by Alan Lomax in Sing Out, a bimonthly organ of the urban folk movement. "The truth is," Lomax challenged his readers, "that the Southern mountains, though there is still much to be discovered there, have received a disproportionate amount of attention. The great and almost entirely unknown field in America is situated precisely in the areas where most of the young singer-students live. That is, in the big cities of the United States -- in the folk-song traditions of the many non--English-speaking minorities in this country.... We know something about the folk musics of the Spanish people of the Southwest, the French of Canada, the Germans of Pennsylvania and the Yiddish group of New York; but in spite of many folk festivals and some work by scholars, little is known about the musical traditions of millions of other Americans who come from Italian, Hungarian, Wend, Syrian and scores of other backgrounds.... It remains for the young professional of this generation to tell the whole story of our folk culture. I can promise you that by collecting and mastering some neglected corner of the vast world of folk song, you will find the key to the whole field."

In any case, while eclectic specialists such as Bob Dylan, Jack Elliott, the New Lost City Ramblers and Joan Baez take over the foreground of the most viable sections of the city folk movement, such earlier professional minstrels as Burl Ives and Josh White are now regarded by the citybillies as of only peripheral interest, mainly as an indication of the unformed tastes of urban folk audiences 20 years ago. Ives spends most of his time now as an actor and appalls the coffeehouse hipsters by making such popular hits as A Little Bitty Tear. White has long been a prisoner of his own style, substituting rhetorical trickery for emotional substance. Moreover, as The Little Sandy Review caustically observes, "White may well be the only folk singer in America who hasn't learned a new song in the past decade."

White, as a matter of fact, was one of the first conscious "popularizers." When ex-convict Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) came north in the 1930s, he startled folklorists and the tiny nonspecialist audience for folk music by his raw power. And, as Alan Lomax has observed, more than any other singer, Leadbelly demonstrated to those who would listen "that America had living folk music -- swamp primitive, angry, freighted with great sorrow and great joy."

But Leadbelly, Josh White was convinced, was far too unpolished for the then barely beginning night-club circuit for folk performers. Accordingly, White smoothed out Negro folk material and in attracting a broader audience than Leadbelly, he became the forerunner of such latter-day experts in glossing folk songs as Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio. "I wanted people to understand what I was singing," White has explained. "Most city audiences just couldn't make out what Leadbelly was saying." In the process, however, of carefully adapting his style and material to the anticipated limitations of a wide public, White became seduced by his audience as the Weavers, to a lesser extent, have been in recent years. "The trouble with the Weavers and the Kingston Trio," says Ewan MacColl, the brawny Scottish folk singer and collector, "is that they've mixed it all with molasses and it doesn't come out very tasty."

Significantly, an increasing audience exists now in such rooms as Gerdes Folk City in New York, the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, the Second Fret in Philadelphia and occasionally the Gate of Horn in Chicago for folk music without molasses. These listeners are becoming sufficiently grounded in comparative folk history and techniques to enjoy both ethnic performers such as blues singer Lightnin" Hopkins and the more uncompromising of the citybillies. The popularizers and the sleek folk "acts" meanwhile work the posh supper clubs such as the Blue Angel and the hungry i and so far have the majority of the college-concert bookings. A few performers are able to straddle the differing camps. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, for example, a roaringly irreverent quartet of Irish singers, have the natural showmanship to hold the chic audiences but are also sufficiently authentic and unbowdlerized to retain the loyalty of the citybillies.

There is yet another direction -- making "art" music of folk songs -- and the most accomplished craftsman in that vein is Richard Dyer-Bennet. It is his credo that "the city-dweller who wishes to sing folk songs professionally has access to training in the arts of poetry and music and he should make use of all means to cultivate the conscious art of minstrelsy." The objection to Dyer-Bennet among some citybillies is that in thus refining folk style, he diminishes the passion and immediacy of the original material.

Up to a point, the citybillies do agree with Dyer-Bennet that "civilization has doomed the true folk singer who by definition depends on direct oral tradition for his music. Fortunately, there is a vast treasury of the old songs in books and manuscripts and on recordings and this material will always be available to us."

Such city singers as Bob Dylan, Jack Elliott and the New Lost City Ramblers part sharply, however, with Dyer-Bennet's implication that folk music is, therefore, no longer a living process, that it is an ossified artifact to be dissected by musicologists or rubbed to a high polish by such remarkably disciplined artisans as himself. The "true folk singer" is indeed disappearing, but the citybillies emphatically support such dissident scholars and folklorists as Charles Seeger, former president of the American Society for Comparative Musicology, and the father of Pete, Peggy and Mike Seeger -- the last being a member of the New Lost City Ramblers and a brilliant instrumentalist in the country tradition.

"Watch the concept labeled 'the folk,'" says Charles Seeger. "Rather than say 'the folk is dead' and attempt to keep folk singing alive as something quaint, antique and precious, let us say 'the folk is changing -- and its songs with it.'... Better than to lament the loss of ancient gold will be to try to understand its permutation into another metal which, though it might be baser, may still surprise us in the end by being nobler."

Whether the ancient gold will indeed be transmuted into something nobler is seriously open to question, but the weight of current evidence is shifting to the side of those performers and listeners who are convinced that even though the folk -- in the traditional sense -- are dying, folk music can continue to live boisterously and change more unpredictably than ever before.

Looking at the future of folk music from a worldwide perspective, the British folklorist and singer A. L. Lloyd points out: "There is a crisis in folk song, a crisis reaching to every corner of the world where traditional music is to be found alive. The animal is changing its shape; its behavior is no longer easily predictable; the watching folklorist, at least in our part of the world, is filled with dubiety, perplexity, dismay. Even in regions where folk music seemed to have remained unchanged for centuries, suddenly innovation begins to have more prestige than tradition. The once 'classical' balladry of the Appalachians is transformed by hillbilly and the rock. In the Balkans, the great spring ritual dances become a stage show rehearsed after factory hours.... The opening of a bus route to a Macedonian village may bring an entirely new musical style into the neighborhood. The sudden availability of unfamiliar instruments -- factory-made guitars in the Congo, alto saxophones in rural Western Rumania -- may lay the foundation for other new folk-music styles."

And in this country, the citybillies multiply, choosing their guides from a wide spectrum of stylists -- from Library of Congress informants to bluegrass bands at the Grand Ole Opry. As a few among them evolve into strikingly personal performers, some try hard to withstand the temptations to dilute their styles in order to make it big. "The public may demand this and that," says Joan Baez, "but if you don't want to give in, you don't have to."

Looking on, meanwhile, with increasingly keen interest are the new collectors, the functionaries of show business. A year ago, through Columbia, where he records, word of Bob Dylan came to the Music Corporation of America, then still a talent agency. A member of that organization's dark-suited, coolly proficient staff set up a Dylan audition for the Ed Sullivan show. Dylan, who had previously turned down an evening's work at the Blue Angel because he felt alien in the room, was uneasy. All the way up from Greenwich Village, where he lives, to the CBS-TV Production Center on West 57th Street, Dylan mumbled variations on, "I don't like to push my music on anyone."

Dylan's discomfort increased as he passed the cop on the door at the CBS entrance. The guard eyed the rumpled, tieless youngster with evident distaste and suspicion, staring after him until the elevator door closed. In a huge rehearsal hall, six men sat and listened to Dylan talking the blues, harshly mourning over lost wanderers, and singing mockingly of the seduction of Pretty Peggy-O. They were obviously bewildered by his raw, craggy style.

"He's sure different," said one noncommittally. "Yeah," the other agreed with care. As Dylan prepared to leave, his escort from MCA conferred briefly with the Sullivan men. Dylan and the agent left the building, Dylan now staring as hard at the cop as the cop glared at him.

"They said," the agent told Dylan, "that they've never heard anyone like you before. They need time to decide what you are."

"Huh?" said Dylan. "I was right in front of them. They either like me or they don't."

"It's not that simple," said the man from MCA. "They figure you're far out, but they don't know yet whether you're the kind of far out that sells."

"I guess they think I'm cute and funny," said Dylan. The man from MCA didn't answer. Dylan nodded goodbye and wandered down to 42nd Street to visit the flea circus and see the man from Borneo again. From there he proceeded to McGowan's Bar in the Village. "Well," he told a friend after several drinks, "I've almost got myself revived. But I'm not going back up there again."

"They'll call you," said the friend. "You wait."

"Maybe," said Dylan. "But they ain't going to tell me what to sing."

"Maybe not," the friend answered.

"They may wait for you to start changing by yourself."