Newport and the Great Folk Dream

Murray Lerner's documentary Festival is an incredible snapshot of the folk music scene and burgeoning counterculture movement of the mid-1960s. It drops viewers into the middle of the Newport Folk Festival, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the Newport Jazz Festival, which started five years earlier. Over the most significant and storied years of the festival's history, 1963 to 1966, Lerner's cameras captured the likes of Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Mississippi John Hurt, Donovan, Son House, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Butterfield, Howlin' Wolf, and Bob Dylan, including footage from Dylan's notorious 1965 electric set. Neither a concert film nor a chronicle of the festival's history, the movie is a pastiche that evokes a bygone era. The prickly Lerner always said he had more than 80 hours of footage that didn't make the cut of Festival, from which he always intended to create a follow up. That claim always seemed dubious, but as Lerner approached his '90s he decided to finally allow some other folks to take a look at his archives. The result is this new film from Robert Gordon (Johnny Cash's America, Best of Enemies) full of amazing performances.

Newport and the Great Folk Dream is a much more traditional documentary than Festival, as that's appropriate since we already have Festival and because this is a look-back at history via archival footage rather than a time capsule preserving a key cultural moment. Still, Gordon and editor Laura Jean Hocking don't resort to expository narration and talking heads reminiscing. There are a few audio interviews that seem to have been done for the film—Loudon Wainwright III and music producer Joe Boyd—but most of the folks talking about Newport are speaking to Lerner's cameras back in the day, just like in Festival. Still, the story told by this new movie is a familiar one. If you come to this documentary knowing anything about Newport beyond the legend of Dylan plugging in and getting booed, there won't be much information in this film that you won't already know.

Unlike Festival, Newport and the Great Folk Dream is told chronologically with headings indicate the years each section of performances and interviews is from and a subtitle encapsulating what each year symbolized. The performance clips do not run the entire length of each song, which enables more songs to be included and keeps the film from feeling like a concert movie or a pastiche picture. These performances are thrilling and it's great to see and hear them scanned to 4K from the 16mm negative and mixed for modern cinemas. I've always been astounded by how great the sound recordings from this festival were when so much was done with just a couple omni directional mics on stands. The film doesn't limit itself to the big names, but includes banjo pickin' coal miners, Appalachian log choppers, Georgia gospel choirs, rural fishermen harmony singers, and Canadian weavers all performing their unique folk traditions.