The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture
Contributions and Contradictions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2808157 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jens Lund (0000-0003-2338-6033), R Serge Denisoff |
| Year | 1971 |
| Volume | 84 |
| Issue | 334 |
| Pages | 394 |
| Publication date | 1971-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American Folklore (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8715 • E-ISSN: 1535-1882 |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/539633 |
| OpenAlex | W2334324273 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
OBSERVERS OF THE SO-CALLED COUNTER CULTURE have tended to portray this phenomenon as a new and isolated event. Theodore Roszak, as well as numerous music and art historians, have come to view the counter culture as a new reaction to technical expertise and the embourgeoisment of growing segments of the American people.2 This position, it would appear, is basically indicative of the intellectual blind men and the elephant couplet, where a fact or event is examined apart from other structural phenomena. Instead, it is our contention that the counter culture or Abbie Hoffman's Woodstock Nation is an emergent reality or a product of all that came before, sui generis. More simply, the counter culture can best be conceptualized as part of a long historical-intellectual progression beginning with the Garden of Eden image of man. The theme of man removed from the state of nature has recurred throughout Judeo-Christian-Greco thought. Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Calvin, and nearly all philosophers and metaphysicians have chosen to idealize an existence prior to primordial man when all was well, and life was simple and free of the social nausea ascribed to us by the existentialists. Socrates urged the young to adopt an ascetic style of life. This sentiment was repeated by early Catholic theologians, particularly Francis of Assisi. The European Romanticists, in the wake of Rousseau, lauded the noble savage. In North America, James Fenimore Cooper exhibited a preoccupation with the hero of the wilderness. The transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau and Emerson, deified the man behind the plow. The force of these arguments led to some action. For example, the writings of such German Romanticists as Joseph von Eichendorff and Nikolaus Lenau produced the Wandervoigeln, a movement
Aesthetics · Art · Folk culture · Folk music · Folk song · Literature · Musical · Sociology · Anthropology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Music History and Culture
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1972 - 2016 (45) |
| Highly cited | No |