The Collection

NOT JUST ANOTHER FOLK CONCERT: Recalling the Four Capitals Tour

originally published in the Companion to Australian Music (Currency Press

© Malcolm J. Turnbull
(Originally published in Trad & Now, Winter 2005)

Given the rapidly growing market for 60s musical memorabilia, it is hardly surprising that vinyl relics of “the great folk boom” are becoming more and more collectable. One tantalisingly elusive recording, instantly recognisable by its striking red and black cover, is the LP Australian Folk Festival. Produced by Peter Mann, proprietor of the influential Melbourne record store Discurio, recorded (for the most part) live at the Melbourne Town Hall, and released on Mann’s own esoteric Score label in 1964, Australian Folk Festival (POL 035) brought together a representative sampling of leading urban folk artists of the era. In that regard the LP broke new ground, providing listeners with a durable memento of a (similarly ground-breaking) concert experience, Four Capitals Folk Song.

Promoted as “the first travelling package-deal of genuine folk in this country”, Four Capitals was an initiative of the Union movement, underwritten by a collective of White and Blue Collar Unions and Associations, and staged in five east-coast cities by local Trades & Labor Councils. Mounted to celebrate the first Trade Union Youth Week, and motivated, at least in part, by recent highly successful concert tours by Pete Seeger, Peter Paul & Mary and the popular Danish duo Nina & Frederik, the venture aimed to provide “Australia’s best folk artists” with an appropriate performing platform, professionally-organised, “well-structured” and “polished by good production methods”. The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust volunteered rehearsal facilities and the services of producer Robin Lovejoy. John Baker. Public Relations Officer for the Australian Council of Salaried & Professional Associations (ACSPA), was nominal director and general co-ordinator. Baker was a folk enthusiast who had previously overseen production of two EPs of satirical folksong, Oh Pay Me and Basic Wage Dream, in conjunction with the ACTU Wage campaigns of 1962-3.

At a time when the various folk milieux were much more isolated than they are now, Four Capitals offered east coast audiences an unusual opportunity to see, gathered on a single stage, nine influential singers drawn from the Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane folk scenes. 20 year old classically-trained soprano Tina Lawton, a specialist in British and Anglo-American ballads at the Catacombs coffee lounge and on South Australian TV, represented Adelaide. Margaret Kitamura, who started singing to student audiences at El Toro in suburban Camperdown before moving north, where she was a regular at the Primitif, Alfreda’s Globetrotter and the Folk Centre, and a sometime member of the Union Singers, represented Brisbane. (A striking, witty women of part-Japanese descent, Kitamura grew up on a cattle station so remote that she was well into her teens before she first heard the radio or popular music). The great blues singer Paul Marks, pioneer of both the early Melbourne coffee lounges and the Trad Jazz scene there, and more recently relocated north, was a delegate from the Sydney scene. So were Gary Shearston and Marian Henderson, revered resident artists at the prestigious Troubadour and, at that time, the uncrowned monarchs of NSW folkdom. (The program’s structure was fluid enough to allow Henderson to join the company for the NSW performances only; accordingly she does not appear on the LP which was recorded in Melbourne).

Brian Mooney and Martyn Wyndham-Read, beloved of audiences at the Emerald Hill-Traynors-Reata circuit for their propagation of the Irish and English folk traditions, represented Melbourne, as did Lenore Somerset, a vocal powerhouse well known to the broader public through her renditions of folk songs on TV. ‘Duke’ Tritton, a 78-year old former shearer and AWU organiser, added a touch of authenticity through renditions of his own backblocks compositions. (Venerated as the “real thing” by traditionalists, Tritton was a founding member of the Sydney Bush Music Club and had made pioneer field recordings for John Meredith). Harry Kay (a veteran, in his own right, of The Bushwhackers and The Rambleers) and string bassist John Helman were recruited as backing musicians. Another leading Melbourne performer David Lumsden featured in advertising and the tour program but was forced to withdraw due to work commitments. (“I seem to remember going to the Melbourne concert as an audience member”). Brisbane veteran Bob Michell, Victorian Bush Music Club stalwart Arthur Greig, and Sydneysiders Dennis Kevans, Tina Date and Jeannie Lewis helped out behind the scenes at individual concerts.

Tour director Baker noted enthusiastically that the presentation served as a bridge “from shearing shed to skyscraper”, from convict chains to songs of “angry young men wanting to set free the buttoned down minds all around them”. Content varied slightly from performance to performance, permitting some leeway in song selection (or making allowances for variables such as Henderson’s absences), but reviews and rehearsal notes indicate that the concerts generally incorporated the following: – After a short prologue on Industrial folk song (spoken by Shearston, sung by Marks and company, and climaxing with ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’), the first half of the program traced the development of the Australian transportation, bushranger and saltbush song traditions, underlining their linkages to Irish rebel ballads and American work songs and blues. (“We were always on stage together … We sat in a horseshoe.

People got up and did their bit and then sat down”). Mooney offered ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ and an inspired ‘Foggy Dew’. Wyndham-Read joined him for ‘Roddy McCorley’ and solo’d on ‘Ben Hall’. Kitamura rendered ‘Jim Jones’; Henderson ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ and ‘Euabalong Ball’; Lawton led an ensemble take on ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Harry Kay played a medley of bush tunes on harmonica and accordion; Tritton sang his own material in what was described as “archaic bush style”. The first half concluded with a bravura bracket of American work songs by Somerset, a couple of brilliantly-executed blues by Marks, and a crowd-pleasing group ‘We Shall Overcome’.
Dramatically dressed in black, her guitar held high, Kitamura opened the second half (‘Songs of Our Time’) with a stark bracket which included Ewan MacColl’s ‘Lag Song’. Shearston dissected the Voyager disaster, lightened the mood a little with ‘Far Side of the Hill’ and

Don Henderson’s witty ‘Basic Wage Dream’, and touched on civil rights with his setting of Kath Walker’s ‘We Want Freedom’. Recapitulating the Union theme, Marks, Lawton and Wyndham-Read teamed for a sprightly ‘Work of the Weavers’; Wyndham-Read and Mooney dueted on the Behans’ ‘Filling Knife’; Henderson (when available) led ‘Which Side Are You On?’. The evening closed with protest songs, a reprise of the ‘John Brown’s Body’ theme – and (as the era dictated) the National Anthem.

For the performers, the tour was a demanding eight day “jaunt” which commenced with rehearsals in Sydney the weekend of August 1 & 2. Monday found the company “jetting” into Brisbane – somewhat to the bemusement of one conservative local journalist who noted that male members of the ensemble “wore jeans” and were “long-haired, bearded or both” and that “both boys and girls walked across the tarmac in high-heeled boots”(!) The first concert was nothing short of a triumph, however. “The most moving, polished and sincere exhibition of folk songs Brisbane folk followers have heard”, enthused the Courier Mail. “If ever Australian artists brought the realisation that we should use Australian talent instead of overseas entertainers, it was last night”.

Tuesday evening found the company at sold-out Melbourne Town Hall where the show was taped by Peter Mann. Then back to NSW and Newcastle City Hall (following a particularly rough flight by light plane) and the Savoy Theatre, Wollongong. The tour concluded (“to tumultuous applause”) at the Sydney Conservatorium on Saturday, August 8. Along the way individual performers were pressed into publicity and promotion (“I remember Tina and I being taken to sing for unionists at the Newport Railway workshops”, notes Lenore Somerset), and the itinerary also lists possible lunchtime gigs at Sydney University. Brian Mooney remembers talk of taking the show on to Adelaide “… but it didn’t happen for whatever reason”.

The show was not without its critics. Don Henderson, writing for Music Maker, declared bluntly that the tour suffered from “amateur musical society” production values (notably the decision to dress Duke Tritton “up for the part” of shearer). Other reviewers targeted “disastrous lighting” and a “stagey” format which (arguably) inhibited some of the performers. Such critical carping was more than offset by Henderson’s acknowledgement that “the singers are here and ready” or by Craig McGregor’s declaration that Four Capitals “proved quite conclusively … that Australia now has folksingers who can reinterpret the old Australian ballads, adopt overseas idioms and create their own topical songs with great validity and power”. So successful was the enterprise that Charles Higham (in a dissection of the folk coffee lounge scene for the Bulletin), speculated that the impact of the “Four Capitals exercise” had been such that tours were likely to become “the future answer for folksingers”. (Higham was way off the mark, in fact, as the subsequent financial failure of the multi-performer Pan Pacific Tour and New Lost City Ramblers tour would indicate. Four Capitals clearly benefited from its timing at the peak of the folk boom).

“A great event”, according to Shearston; “a pleasant, lovely tour” according to Brian Mooney. Martyn Wyndham-Read recalls:

“I seem to remember that we did this tour almost at the last minute, as Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were supposed to be doing these dates but had to cancel due to illness. John Baker organised it as he had already booked all the halls … I remember well that Duke Tritton was on the tour and I got to know him and I really liked him, his stories and songs. The last concert … was a grand affair with so many so-called ‘dignitaries’ invited … we all had a celebratory drink before [it], some partaking more freely than others and Duke was one of those who partook freely … As he was singing ‘Shearing in a Bar’ he got so carried away he started to shear an imaginary sheep – to the total amazement of the dinner jacket and tiara-clad audience, but he won them over and had a terrific reception. He was a great man and I was pleased to have known him”.

Mooney’s memories are tinged by sadness at the death (in an air crash in Kenya) of Tina Lawton only four years later.

“John Baker had an odd sense of humour. He booked Tina, Martyn and I into the Temperance Hotel in Sydney. Now Tina didn’t drink [but] Martyn smuggled in a bottle of whiskey and we had a session with that … I still remember her singing ‘Every Time I Hear a Songbird’. It was beautiful”.

“I have never been very political”, reminisces Lenore Somerset, “but I was very proud to be part of it all ….

…My dad, all his life, was a railwayman who swore by the union. The pay [on Four Capitals] wasn’t much but I would have happily paid just to be in it. I can still remember the thrill of singing at the Conservatorium in Sydney … Paul [Marks] sat next to me on the plane and practised marvellous guitar runs the whole trip”.

In hindsight the Four Capitals tour was a phenomenon of the early 1960s, the product of an unsophisticated era when folk music was still something of a novelty for Australian audiences, its rapidly accelerating popularity notwithstanding. Certainly the show’s format now seems dated, its content contrived and a bit simplistic, the whole exercise overly theatrical and unnecessarily self-conscious. (Baker and Lovejoy were determined, for instance, that the company be able to compete visually and vocally with international ensembles, as seen on TV; they stressed that the “girls” must be “more attractive than, say, their American and English counterparts”, and that Mooney’s Irish or Wyndham-Read’s English images should be accentuated).

At the same time, the program was a major and important platform for some of the finest Australian folk artists of the era. The small sampling of performances captured on Australian Folk Festival testifies eloquently to the calibre – and durability – of those artists. In particular, Mooney’s ‘Foggy Dew’, Marks’ ‘Black Brown and White’, Somerset’s ‘Ox Driver’s Song’ and Lawton’s ‘Buttermilk Hill’ remain timeless. With Shearston unable to appear on the album because of his contract with CBS, his ‘The Voyager’ was rendered, in fine style, by a youthful Trevor Lucas. Just as he had found the tour “much the best thing of its kind … so far done in Australia”, so folklorist Edgar Waters quite rightly deemed the resultant LP “the best thing of its kind that has so far been done here”.

SOURCES:
Everybody’s Magazine, 23 Sept 1964
Music Maker, Sept 1964
Australian Tradition, Sept & Nov 1964
Courier Mail, 4 Aug 1964
Brisbane Telegraph, 3 Aug 1964
Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Aug 1964
Australian, 24 Oct 1964
Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964.
Four Capitals Papers (kindly made available by Lenore Somerset)

THE GREAT FOLK REVIVAL – Some Issues, Debates and Controversies

originally published in the Companion to Australian Music (Currency Press

© Malcolm J. Turnbull
[This article was previously serialised in Drumbeat and reprinted in Cornstalk Gazette]

Like countless other young aspirants, I discovered folkmusic through the radio and television. I was around 11 years old at the time, living in Hobart (a couple of years before my family transplanted itself back to the cultural void of Tasmania’s north-west).  I can still recall watching the British TV program Hullabaloo one Saturday night, and being struck by the eccentric manner in which the female member of a singing trio shook and tossed her long blonde hair as they performed. The trio was Peter Paul & Mary. The song was ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’, civil rights-style. Only a few months later, the trio toured Australia for the first time; they were at the peak of popularity. Their songs were played frequently on radio, and one of their concerts was telecast, over two weeks, by the prime-time youth-music show Bandstand. I still recall the thrill I felt as I first watched and heard them perform a gloriously stirring new song, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, by one Bob Dylan.

    It was the height of the U.S.-led folk boom, the reverberations of which could be felt even in remote Tasmania. Folksingers and folksongs (ar least popularist versions of them) were everywhere – PP&M aside, local radio playlists encompassed the Singing Nun and ‘Dominique’, the Kingston Trio’s ‘Hope You Understand’, The Rooftop Singers’ ‘Walk Right In’, ‘The Love Come a-Tricklin’ Down’ by the Womenfolk, Pete Seeger’s ‘Little Boxes’, ‘Don’t Let the Rain Come Down’ by the Serendipity Singers, ‘Saturday Night’ and ‘Green Green’ by the New Christy Minstrels . Joe & Eddie surfaced several times on The Danny Kaye Show; the aristocratic Danish couple Nina & Frederik had a regular five minute segment on the ABC. There was even a half-hour weekly series from Canada, Let’s Sing Out, recorded live on college campuses and hosted by Oscar Brand. (Let’s Sing Out provided many young Australians with an introduction to legendary performers like Jean Ritchie, Carolyn Hester, Gordon Lightfoot, the Simon Sisters, John Jacob Niles, Josh White and Ronnie Gilbert).  Meanwhile the  record departments of Myer and Allans in Hobart had their popular folkmusic wares well on display. Browsing  amongst the record covers, one might find  relative esoterica like Vanguard’s Newport Folk Festival series, or albums by The Rooftop Singers, The Limeliters, Ian & Sylvia, Odetta and Joan Baez.
  
 Pretty early in the process of absorbing what was on offer from the American folk scene, I became aware – thanks primarily to television – that there were folksingers in Australia: antipodean clones of  The Kingston Trio and The Weavers, white disciples of Leadbelly and Josh White, would-be Seegers, Baez soundalikes, altos booming out Odetta standards, even a handful of Dylanesque folk-poets. (The singer-songwriter explosion was still to come).Tasmanians tuned in en masse to watch the final of the Starflight International talent quest on Bandstand in 1964, specifically to barrack for local girl Patsy Biscoe. Around the same time, a weekly series Jazz Meets Folk, recorded in Sydney, teamed jazz musicians with folk artists Marian Henderson and The Green Hill Singers. Lenore Somerset made an early appearance, singing ‘Banks of the Ohio’ and ‘The Ox-Driver’s Song’ on Adelaide’s Country and Western Hour, a show which would continue to provide a showcase for Australian musicians throughout the decade.  A talent quest televised live from the Hobart Town Hall, was won by a male duo singing and playing ‘500 Miles’; a sister act came in second, performing ‘Jesus Met the Woman at the Well’. (I think they called themselves ‘The Jones Sisters’). Bandstand, again, proved its worth by airing several Australian folkmusic specials in 1965, although there was not too much “Australian” about the content. Much the same might have been said about another series, Dave’s Place, which aired in southern Tasmania late in 1965, and was compered by Dave Guard, former member of the legendary Kingston Trio. For me, the most memorable of all the TV offerings of the folk boom was a two part program on the ABC consisting of highlights from the Newport Folksinging Festival, held at Newport Beach in January 1965. By the time the Newport program aired, The Seekers had become an international phenomenon. Their records were everywhere and, occasionally, records by lesser luminaries (Glen Tomasetti, Gary Shearston, Denis Gibbons and Lenore Somerset, and, a bit later, Doug Ashdown, Tina Lawton, Sean & Sonja and The Twiliters) also made their way into stores and libraries.

The stereotype of the folksinger, intoning deep and meaningful songs, entered popular culture during this period. Then – and since – the image and the genre have come in for their fair share of satire, accusations of naivete and pretentiousness – even ridicule. Suggesting that folkmusic enjoyed great popularity “because its composition and performance required no talent whatsoever”, Australian comedian Barry Humphries invented the character Big Sonia, complete with Roman sandals, lank black wig and microskirt. Big Sonia entered the stage with a guitar, announcing that she would like “to sing you a little song that is still sung by some of the oppressed half-caste inbred inhabitants of the enslaved catnip spinners in south-west Kentucky”. The monologue concluded with a song, the chorus of which went: “It’s no joke, no joke Goin’ folk, Oh no” [A Nice Night’s Entertainment: Sketches and Monologues 1956-1981, p.104-106]. In 1964, at the height of the boom in Australia, Sydney journalist Charles Higham contributed a scathing (albeit – and in hindsight – quite amusing) survey of the national folk scene to the Bulletin [14 Nov 1964]. Taking his lead from a similarly snide assessment of the American folk scene which had appeared in Time a couple of years earlier, Higham mercilessly scrutinised the coffee-house scene and found it distinctly wanting. (Where Time had featured Joan Baez on its cover, the Bulletin used a photograph of singer Tina Date). He paid particular attention to the scene’s leftist political orientation. The article outraged the folk community and (temporarily, at least) united it – a rare event indeed, as the folk scene has been divided by debates, disputes and rivalries, major and minor, throughout its history. This paper is a (somewhat subjective) re-examination of some of the key controversies and issues which coloured the evolution of the revival during the 60s. 

At the outset, it should be noted that there has been (and is) considerable disagreement among scholars as to the duration and character of the phenomenon. The word “revival”, itself, is dismissed by some authorities, among them folklorists Ralph Rinzler and Sandy Paton, and French historian Jacques Vassal [Electric Children, p.89], who strongly prefer the term “folk arrival”, i.e. urban awareness of music which had never ceased to be “a vital factor in the lives of the rural folk …”. American music critic and historian Robert Shelton similarly employs the phrase “arrival – revival” while David DeTurk & A. Poulin have labelled the movement the “folk renaissance” [The American Folk Scene, p.28, 38]. “Only a corpse needs reviving … the Folk movement is certainly not dead”, once declared the late Scots-Australian songwriter Harry Robertson. The late Melbourne writer and musician Glen Tomasetti much preferred to talk of a “folk boom”, noting (correctly) that, before and after its period of mass popularity in the early 1960s, there was a constant core audience of folksong enthusiasts. U.S. academic Neil Rosenberg refers similarly to the “great boom” or “sonic wave”, arguing that it was only one phase (albeit the largest one) in a broad and ongoing process. Even so, he acknowledges the strong consensual view that the cultural movement of the late 50s/60s has come to be known as the revival. Rosenberg’s colleague Alan Jabbour suggests that the term “revival” has a deeper relevance, implying a revitalisation of “symbolic values” more than merely a revival of  “specific artistic artifacts”. In their enthusiasm for folkmusic (observes Jabbour), participants in that chapter of the movement:

… sought out – and created – a music to express simultaneously our quest for cultural roots, our admiration of democratic ideas and values, our solidarity with the culturally neglected, and our compulsion to forge our own culture for ourselves. In both the music we embraced and the passions with which we embraced it, our movement was not unlike a religious revival, which consciously selects and intensifies certain cultural values while casting its present endeavours within the framework of the traditions of the past [Transforming Tradition, p.xii-xiii, 2]    

    Graeme Smith is one of a number of analysts who divide the great revival/ arrival in Australia into two parts – the period from c1950-1963, characterised by widespread collection and preservation of folksongs; and the “second wave”, after 1963, characterised by performance, generally in coffee houses, pubs and concerts [Meanjin 44(4), 1985, p.486; see also Smith’s Singing Australian, p.23-40]. At an international level, some writers bracket the era with the chart success of The Weavers’ ‘Goodnight Irene’ in 1950 and Bob Dylan’s final (electric) performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Elsewhere the folk years are seen as having started with either Harry Belafonte’s Calypso hits or (more usually) the success of the Kingston Trio’s recording of ‘Tom Dooley’ in 1958, and having concluded with the advent of folk-rock in the mid 60s. In some instances, the term “urban folk revival” has been limited to the period (usually defined, in Australia, as 1963-65), when popular folkmusic was at its most conspicuous on radio hit-parades and television, and when that popularity was substantiated by the proliferation of places offering folksinging as entertainment. Bruce Pollock [When the Music Mattered, p.9-10] locates what he wryly dubs “the urban folk scare” firmly within the time-frame 1960-63 (encompassing the Kennedy administration), although he stresses the ongoing vitality of the folk scene with the expansion of the peace and civil rights movements and the flowering of folk-poetry. (Indeed, Joe Klein [Woody Guthrie: a Life, p.430] identifies the emergence of political singer-songwriters, working initially in the Guthrie tradition, as a second wave of the “great boom”). My own research favours a more comprehensive time-frame. In my view it can be argued that the Australian urban folk revival encompassed the period from 1960 (a milestone internationally with the election of President J.F. Kennedy) to 1972 (and the election in Australia of the Whitlam Labor government, the end of conscription, and the repatriation of the last of the Australian troops who had been sent to support Uncle Sam in Vietnam). “[A] decade so full of change, protest, acceptance and an awakening of consciousness, a decade perhaps without parallel in the previous history of humanity” [John Molony, Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia, p.248-9].

For Australians, on one hand it was a time of national prosperity and the ascendancy of political conservatism. The Liberal-National coalition Government, led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies since 1949, would continue in power (under Harold Holt, John Gorton and Billy McMahon) throughout the period under review, aided significantly by fundamental splits within the opposition Labor party. DLP preferences would ensure Australia endured conservative rule for a record 23 years; Menzies et al were also aided immeasurably by persistent economic well-being. The post-war housing shortage was over; work was plentiful; suburbs were expanding with four-fifths of the white population (10 million) living in cities or larger country towns. Television had arrived in 1956 (in time for the Melbourne Olympic Games). Even what Australians ate was becoming more varied, while a more relaxed approach to living in general was reflected in liberalised hotel opening hours. As Geoffrey Blainey has observed: “The contraceptive pill … gave sex a new freedom … Cheaper cars brought a new mobility to the young and the prosperity enabled them to leave home earlier” [A Shorter History of Australia, p.213].By 1965 the national birth rate was at its lowest since the middle of World War II. By the end of the decade the concept of Equal Pay for Equal Work had been formally ratified by the Federal Arbitration Commission.

The years 1960-1972 were also, of course, marked by youthful militancy and increasingly violent attacks on, and questioning of, the conservative status quo. In 1963 Charles Perkins led a series of Freedom rides through outback NSW in a bid to alert the wider public to the plight of the aboriginal population, and in 1967 a Referendum finally enshrined the right of Australian aborigines to vote; four years later Neville Bonner took his seat in the Federal Senate. The Women’s Liberation movement gained momentum, with expatriate Germaine Greer becoming one of its most publicised spokespersons internationally. Bans on novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Lolita were lifted but wowsers had a field day over the satirical magazine Oz. The Voyager disaster claimed 85 lives; drought devastated the eastern states as did bushfires in Victoria and Tasmania. Victorian Premier Henry Bolte sanctioned the judicial murder of Ronald Ryan. Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency in response to anti-apartheid demonstrations over the South African rugby tour. Over-riding all other issues were intensifying concerns over conscription and Australia’s involvement in Vietnam, peaking with mass attendances at moratorium rallies in 1970/71 and the election of Gough Whitlam in 1972. It was against this panorama of conservative complacency on the one hand, and increasingly vigorous assaults on injustices and inequities on the other, that the Australian folkmusic industry evolved. As an alternative to “packaged culture”, folkmusic provided the vehicle through which baby-boomers could comment on current events and issues, or express their dissatisfaction with “the bland, comfortable, safe suburban lives that their parents had created for them”. [Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good, p.319]

Robert Shelton has noted the centrality of the stereotyped and ubiquitous coffee house as a medium for the performance of folksong during the folk boom in America. In his view, the coffee house and mass gathering at folk festivals were characteristics which distinguished the folk boom from earlier and later revivals (or other phases in one all-inclusive folk revival) [The Electric Muse, p.31-2]. The crucial importance of the coffee house/lounge to the boom as it manifested itself in Australia can be cited as clear confirmation of the extent to which local developments reflected the state-of-play in America. Unlike Britain, where live folkmusic emanated primarily from pubs from the outset, the U.S.-style coffee house – in a variety of guises – was the model generally adopted in Australia: The Reata, the Troubadour, the Jolly Roger, Traynors, the Shiralee, the Catacombs, the Folk Hut, the Primitif, the Last Straw, the Wild Goose, the Cotter, the Tavern, to name just a few. (Coffee house is a convenient generic term which encompasses a range of cafes, small restaurants and music clubs where folksingers performed, either as the establishment’s chief reason for existence or as entertainment auxiliary to the business of providing food and drink to paying patrons). Although the tastes and enthusiasms of performers and patrons alike altered (and, in some ways, matured) as the various state folk scenes evolved, there is no question that, in embracing the coffee lounge concept so wholeheartedly, Australian folkies initially emulated and subscribed primarily to urban American manifestations of the revival. “The coffee lounges really did not have much to do with the Australian strand of the revival”, assesses Keith McHenry. “Yes, this really was the birthplace of the ‘cultural cringe’”, observes Warren Fahey. “ … [I]t was a common sight to see a duffle-coated youth warbling a never-ending bracket of American songs in an American accent …”. In Australia – as in the United States – audiences were primarily student-based and, by extension, middle class. Well-educated young adults, white, initially (at least) apolitical and generally city-bred, immersed themselves (or dabbled, at least) in treasure-troves of rural music, the blues, labour anthems and topical song. In Britain, by contrast (according to a 1960s survey), nearly 70% of folk club members described themselves as manual workers, and only about 5% as students.

The cult of “American-ness” similarly permeated the early Australian folk festivals. One of the best-publicised festivals traded on the connection, the promoters staging it at Sydney’s Newport Beach. This would have come as no surprise to contemporary analysts; as Molony has noted [p.349], “America was everywhere present but especially in popular music”. The domination of prime time television, cinema and the radio Top Forty by American entertainers, and extensive foreign (particularly American ownership) of manufacturing and mining, reflected the erosion of traditional ties with Britain and increasing  political (and cultural) dependence on the United States. By the 1960s phrases like the “fifty-first state” or the “Coca-colony” were in wide circulation. It is hardly coincidental that when Australia adopted decimal currency in 1966, dollars and cents replaced pounds, shillings and pence. The Australian-American alliance, forged during World War II and solidified through Australian involvement in Korea and local conservative assaults on communism during the Cold War, reasserted itself in the purchase of American rather than British defence equipment and the establishment of U.S. communications bases at North-west Cape, Nurrungar and Pine Gap. While Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ slavish devotion to Britain, Westminster and the monarchy ultimately rendered him ridiculous, his conservative successors proved no less servile during their “ritual visits” to Washington. “All the way with LBJ”, intoned a fawning Harold Holt, as he commited a 300% increase in Australian forces for South-East Asia. “We’ll go a-waltzing with you”, an unblushing John Gorton subsequently promised President Richard Nixon. As the decade progressed, however, involvement with America in Vietnam ultimately turned “the Americanisation of its newest province” sour. Vietnam became “the focus for growing radical opposition to government foreign policy and to the larger Australian social values that surrounded conservative hegemony” [Stephen Alomes, A Nation at Last, p.173].  Ironically, at-home resistance to the Vietnam conflict took its lead from America, the Peace movement here readily adopting the rhetoric (and music) of its U.S. counterparts.

 “Coffee house/lounge” is a convenient generic term, shorthand for the range of cafes, small restaurants and  music clubs where folksingers performed, either as the establishment’s chief reason for existence, or – more often – as entertainment auxiliary to the business of providing food and drink to paying patrons. By and large, these coffee lounges were unlicensed (i.e. liquor was not served – at least not officially), and the artists performed without amplification, often for a fixed proportion of the evening’s takings. Intimacy was the watchword. A degree of exoticism was also implicit. “By going to coffee lounges, we were embracing some international culture”, Fiona (Laurence) White recalls of a period when most Australians thought of spaghetti as something that came in a tin (with meatballs) and when anything other than instant coffee was suspect or pretentious. Any sense of showbiz was anathema. The artists (at least in theory) favoured minimal artificial distance between performer and patron. By contrast, pub folk clubs were just that – gatherings of folksingers and patrons in hotels, sometimes in upper rooms or in ancillary bars; in general, performances there were amplified, often because of the artists’ need to compete with background noise. Folkmusic was never unknown in hotels. Lenore Somerset, The Twiliters, The Green Hill Singers and other artists (usually those disdained by the folk establishment as commercial entertainers who were milking the folk revival) worked in hotel cabaret and floor-shows, at venues like Lennons in Brisbane, throughout the boom, and coffee lounges were being eclipsed by pub folk clubs in Sydney as early as 1966.  The vogue of the folk coffee- house/lounge was largely confined to the period 1963-65, although intense pockets of activity remained visible throughout the decade.   
   
The international folk boom had ended – to all intents – by the end of 1965. Similarly, audiences for Australian artists performing folksongs dwindled around the same time. Individual performers managed to keep their profiles before the TV audiences with a steadily decreasing number of appearances on The Country & Western Hour or one-off specials like The Restless Years, but new opportunities were limited. Some former folkies found it necessary to move into other musical genres if they wished to remain professional entertainers. Others continued to do the rounds of the (declining) coffee lounge network, some retiring or moving on to other interests as performing platforms became fewer. There were exceptions, of course – PACT Folk in Sydney gave a solid boost to a number of aspiring singer-songwriters and Traynor’s and the Brisbane Folk Centre welcomed substantial weekend crowds for several years after counterparts like the Troubadour or the Folk Hut had closed. There was a late flowering of interest in regional Tasmania, and Canberra activity peaked at the beginning of the 1970s. By and large, though, the centrality of the coffee lounge to organised folkmusic activity in Australia was a 60s phenomenon. From the end of the decade (slightly earlier in Sydney), folkmusic emanated increasingly from pubs.    

It can be (and has been) speculated that the international explosion of interest in folkmusic reflected – in part – the sorry state of mainstream pop music by the start of the 1960s. With Buddy Holly dead, Jerry Lee Lewis banned from the airwaves, Chuck Berry in prison, Elvis Presley in the army, and Little Richard recently “born again”, rock’n’roll had been drained of all energy and “danger” [Pollock, p.16]. Simple, grass-roots music seemed an enticing alternative to the synthetic pap which dominated radio playlists and the record market. There were other factors, of course. Pete Seeger [The Incompleat Folksinger, p.11] has suggested that the desire to listen to or perform folksongs was related to (a) a growing interest in tracing one’s cultural roots and national heritage, and (b) an upsurge of enthusiasm for do-it-yourself activities in an increasingly mechanised post-war world. At a deeper level, Cantwell [p.319] and Shelton [p.8-9] maintain that the folk boom grew out of a generalised malaise which afflicted urban youth in the 1950s. Children born in to the [American] middle class, 1941-50, confronted “a society in which the automobile, the television, the research laboratory, the transcontinental market, and the retail franchise … would begin to displace the railroad, the radio, the factory, the regional market, and the local business …”.

As with any widespread trend or vogue, the folk boom’s demise was being trumpeted almost from its beginning. Pessimists were predicting the bubble would burst as early as 1963; well before folk fever peaked in Australia. A steep and rapid decline in the number of coffee lounges offering folksinging during 1965 was clear evidence that public interest was waning. “The popularity which is fashion always dies”, recognised Glen Tomasetti at the time:

The younger brothers and sisters of the people who sat in coffee lounges two years ago may be this year in discotheques … More Rambling Voyaging Searching groups may be singing in closer harmony to electric guitars next year than this year. The prevalence of the beat is even persuading some old non-singing devotees that folksingers really should abandon straight time and free unaccompanied singing. [Australian Tradition, June 1966]

The downturn reflected the broader sweep of musical history, including the shift of popular taste towards British rock, and the emergence in America of folk-rock – a melding of genres at the hands of Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, et al. At the same time, more prosaic local factors like audience aging and liberalised licensing laws ensured that the folk coffee lounges were speedily supplanted by alternative gathering-places. In Victoria, for instance, the end of 6 o’clock closing meant that people were able to meet socially in hotel bars for longer, and more convenient, periods. As each year passed, more and more youthful folkies found themselves legally able to enter pubs. In Sydney, the mid-decade influx of a highly influential group of British and Irish migrants, intent on recreating the atmosphere of the pub folk clubs they had left behind, facilitated the shift of focus from venues like the Troubadour and the Pigalle to the Hotel Elizabeth and the Maitland & Morphett. The Sydney example was emulated, in time, in Melbourne with the Dan O’Connell and Fogarty’s Union. The 1970s saw the proliferation of pub folk clubs, as the norm, throughout Australia: the Barley Mow in Brisbane, the Kingston in Canberra, the Loaded Dog in Perth, the Traitors Gate in Adelaide, the Bothy and Bottom Pub in Tasmania. Other pubs, while not formally hosting a folk club, offered entertainment by folk musicians, usually musical groups. (The fact that the legal drinking age in Tasmania was 21 throughout the period under examination might be cited as an important factor in the relatively late emergence there of the pub folk club. “Back then, of course … it seems so long ago … women weren’t allowed in public bars, only in lounges”, remembers Alex Myers). By and large, the nexus between hotel bars and folk clubs has persisted ever since.  

The intimacy, ambience and general innocence of the folk coffee lounges at their best are recalled with almost universal affection by former participants. The qualifier “at their best” should be stressed though. The concept and the reality were both subject to criticism at the time, and it cannot be denied that many of the lounges fell far short of the ideal. While conceding the importance of the Troubadour and Traynors in bringing folkmusic to the attention of the public, folklorist Edgar Waters was a particularly trenchant critic. (Decades later Glen Tomasetti still recalled with some bitterness his jibes about patrons exuding “the smell of adolescence” and flocking to listen to “living room sopranos”). In Waters’ view, run-of-the-mill establishments in Melbourne rated among the most unpleasant coffee lounges in the country, employing singers (and clearly exploiting them) purely as background noise – “a kind of in-the-flesh muzak”. Rowdy or inattentive audiences were an occupational hazard in even the best-regulated venues. From time to time, the artists fought back. Fiona Laurence once stopped in the middle of a lengthy Scottish ballad and threatened: “If you can’t be quiet, I’ll sing another ten verses”. The blunter Mike O’Rourke was well-known at the Outpost Inn for demanding that noisy patrons “fucking shut up”!  

Few singers expected to get rich playing the lounge circuit, and most of them were too unsophisticated, too idealistic or too dependent on the nightly income to make ends meet, to complain about being “ripped off” by unscrupulous business operators.  Even some promoters and cafe proprietors who valued folkmusic as more than simply a money-spinning crowd-pleaser were sometimes guilty of underpaying the artists. (Garry Kinnane and Judy Jacques were once recruited to sing at the Ballarat Show, and were amazed to be paid five or six times more than they earned over a night at a lounge. Lynne St John was similarly surprised when she and comedian Doug Kennedy were hired to perform at the Moynana festival at Port Fairy, flown down on a DC3, chauffeured around like celebrities, and paid 30 pounds a piece to sing from a float in the parade. Jim Kenny, of The Coachmen, remembers the trio’s amazement at receiving 25 pounds for performing three songs at a Gas & Fuel Co. luncheon). Sydney promoter Jim Carter was frequently late settling accounts, for instance; while on one legendary occasion in Melbourne restaurateur Tom Lazar (reportedly) simply refused to pay a prominent singer for a night’s performance. (Having run up a bill at Tattersalls Hotel on the understanding the money would be forthcoming, the performer in question brooded on the injustice of the situation and retaliated by hurling a brick through the front window of the Little Reata).

While the quality and diversity of menus varied enormously from venue to venue, there is general agreement that the coffee served in the lounges ranged from poor to “abominable”. Almost uniformly dimly or discreetly lit and invariably filled with smoke, many of the lounges were poorly ventilated, grotesquely decorated (“intolerably chi-chi”), and stocked with furniture which sorely tested the patrons’ endurance. According to Waters, seating was generally “so uncomfortable that the singer would have to be Huddie Ledbetter in his most exciting form to tear my attention away, even for a minute or two, from painful sensations in my backside” [Australian, 20 Feb & 5 June 1965].
       
Undoubtedly our memories of the lounges are steeped in nostalgia and romanticism. Yet, in my view (and the view of many of the artists active at the time), the good folk coffee lounges were the best possible public forum for the performance of folksong, ensuring there were minimal barriers to communication and interaction between singer and patron. As Don Carless has noted, “People actually wanted to hear you”. In this regard, the pub folk clubs – in the main – were a vastly inferior alternative. Listening to music there was almost invariably subordinate to socialising. Amplification was de rigueur; even then groups of musicians had much more chance of being heard above the general hubbub than did solo singer-guitarists. As a result, semi-electric bands and multi-member acoustic ensembles, specialising in fast-paced jigs and reels or bush ballads, tended to dominate the pub scenes and to attract good-time audiences which enjoyed meeting and mixing against this upbeat background. Inevitably, performers found themselves competing to be heard over patrons who had become loud and obnoxious after a few drinks. Sometimes they might have to struggle to be heard over radio or TV coverage of horse-races. Glen Tomasetti, who had probably played a broader range of venues than most of her peers, shook her head with disbelief after her first encounter with one of the early Melbourne pub clubs and vowed “Never again”. Denis Gibbons made a similar decision after a punishing evening spent trying to charm a bar-ful of revellers at the Monash Hotel. Peter Laycock was knocked out one night at the St Andrews hotel by a drunk who had taken exception to something he sang. More than one veteran soloist found him/herself asking “Why am I putting myself through this?” as a heartfelt bracket was ignored by a crowd otherwise occupied. The milieux were similarly off-putting for many patrons, accustomed as they had been to the relative sobriety of places like Traynors. Even though he now strongly prefers listening to music in pub settings (and he still regrets not having been old enough to be part of the bohemian scene inhabited by his father Noel at Tattersalls), Mick Counihan remembers being “turned off” folkmusic for years after witnessing “Irish yobbos” in force at one Melbourne venue.

At times, boorishness on the part of the audience was more than mere rudeness, and reflected polarisation within the folk community over what was kosher musically. I remember one evening at the Dan O’Connell in the ’70s when the audience sat responsively and courteously as a male and female duo performed traditional Scottish and English songs, then talked noisily through a bracket by one of the country’s finest song-poets (notwithstanding repeated hushing by m.c. Richard Leitch). Perhaps because there has always been a stronger affinity between pubs and the stereotypical hard-drinking, macho traditional singer than between pubs and the world-weary, introspective poet, singer-songwriters (and their intensely personal analyses of human relationships or the sorry state of the world) were among the hardest-hit by the general change of locale. Like many of his peers, Tasmanian singer-songwriter John Lavery had found venues like the Ad Lib and the Brumida Folk Inn extraordinarily hospitable settings within which to try out and fine-tune his latest creations. In the pubs, no-one appeared to be interested: as a result, Lavery effectively ceased songwriting and moved into traditional music. An exasperated Neil Gardner concluded a bracket at one such hostile venue by declaring he had “one more pearl to cast”.

The pubs could be particularly intimidating – sometimes soul-destroying – for the youthful newcomer. Keith McHenry notes that the demise of the old-fashioned folk coffee lounge created a vacuum. The pubs failed singularly to encourage or nurture new talent,  a duty which their forerunners had often fulfilled creditably. (It should be remembered that the 1960s was a unique time for would-be-performers because of the unparalleled availability of performing platforms. In addition to coffee lounges, folksingers were acceptable entertainment at schools, kindergartens, church socials, fundraising evenings, parties and anniversary celebrations, service clubs, religious services, old peoples’ homes, masonic and civic dinners, Christmas get-togethers, etc. Glen Tomasetti once played at a dinner for the Institute of Chartered Accountants. The organisers clearly would have preferred to engage a stripper, but conceded that a singer of topical and satirical songs would be more generally acceptable).

Clearly my criticism of the pub scene is too sweeping. I have been present on many occasions when pub crowds have been every bit as responsive and indulgent to performers as in the old coffee lounge days, and when artists and patrons have bathed in the magic of the evening and have gone home “on a high”. (The monthly concert offerings by Folk Victoria at the East Brunswick Hotel, from the early 90s until late 2005, are a prime example). Duncan Brown notes that – back then – soloists like Danny Spooner, Mick O’Rourke, Dave Brannigan or Peter Parkhill invariably got a respectful hearing at the Dan O’Connell or Fogarty’s Union, while Bernard Bolan maintains that a strong innate discipline prevailed at venues like the Hotel Elizabeth in Sydney.

Typically, a loud-mouthed, outsized Pom would introduce the artist and stress the tradition that “You don’t talk during the performance”. The culture was self-policing. You would talk only to whisper endearments to a loved one or to tell him/her “I’m having a heart attack”.

Bolan suggests that  coffee lounges could be overly self-indulgent on occasion. Still pub folk clubs were generally less receptive than the lounges to the lyrics or poetry of folkmusic or less conducive to intimate interaction between singer and audience. (As early members of the traditionalist band Finnegan’s Wake, John Lavery and Neil Gardner once tested and confirmed their hypothesis that the pub folk club audiences in Hobart paid little attention to the words of songs: no-one noticed when they adapted the opening lines of the Irish lament ‘Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye’: “With your guns and drums and tits and bums”). It seems significant that, at the time of writing, rumoured attempts are being made to get back to “the way things were at the start” in some pubs. Pioneer gatherings at the Hotel Elizabeth and Fogarty’s began as informal come-all-ye’s in back rooms, with performers generally seated in a circle, passing around a guitar and singing unaccompanied. Danny Spooner notes that venues like the Guildford Folk Club, run by Duncan Brown in central Victoria, and the Ringwood Folk Club, run by the VFMC, are welcoming, determinedly inclusive and intent on recapturing the simplicity of the early 60s.
               
The tradition of debate which exercised or preoccupied sections of the folk community during the boom, and has continued to do so ever since, has encompassed questions of the validity of traditional music vs. composed music “in the folk style”, the place within the folkmusic tradition of protest and topical songs, and the acceptability (or otherwise) of commercial folk (in particular American products of the boom years) as compared with so-called “pure” folk (during the period in question, mainly home-grown or Anglo-Celtic music). At the outset there was concern among collectors and scholars that popularisation of the material would debase and ultimately destroy it. “Some collectors who regretted the neglect of folkmusic now regret its performance”, wrote Glen Tomasetti. “People understandably miss the cause when it is won and reproduction grieves those who knew the original” [Australian Tradition, June 1966].  In some quarters a particularly dim view was taken of singers who made money (some even earning a living) from  folksinging, or of places (like the Troubadour or Traynors) which employed them. John Manifold, for one, dubbed the modern “professional folksinger”  a “contradiction in terms”; declaring that his liking for folksinging stemmed from the fact that the “genuine article” was a non-commercial and amateur activity, “not dependent on the Persian apparatus of concert-agencies, hall-bookings, box-office, union rules, publicity, journalism, and free drinks for the critics”. Folksongs which gained mass popularity were likewise suspect [Adult Education, Dec 1963]. 

In the long run, fears about the corruption/ destruction of folkmusic mostly proved groundless. At the other side of the boom, Ian Turner assessed:

The folk wave has been good for folklore generally. It is annoying, true, to listen to the homogenised plastic product produced by many of the pop-folk singers, but the appearance of PP&M and others in the charts has enlarged tremendously participation in the specifically Australian field.

In Turner’s view, the most important outcome of the revival was the “extraordinary enlargement of the audience for folksong”. Materially, it had provided jobs for singers and had enabled them to learn and grow as artists. Entrepreneurs had responded to public demand by bringing in international celebrities. Tomasetti elaborated:

The fact remains that more people sing than did ten years ago. More people know about folksongs and the values they imply … [F]or so many people to be singing and playing, with or without formal instruction, and for the activity to be around songs which extend human sympathies, is a good, even a grand and glorious thing.

“Large numbers of interested people [have] seen through the smarm and seen a heritage of fine music”, concurred Declan Affley; while Martyn Wyndham-Read expressed satisfaction that “we have been left with a tremendously hard core of people who are really interested – it’s beaut” [[Australian Tradition, June 1966 & Aug 1969; Albert Sebastian, Sept 1966].

   
A detailed analysis of the debate over defining folkmusic, its vagaries, history and ramifications, could well occupy a book in its own right and is clearly outside the scope of the current study. Jill Stubington has provided a valuable summary in her essay for the Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore [p.142]. What follows, therefore, is a brief recapitulation of some of the issues – and anomalies. Fundamental disagreement existed, at least in the early 60s, between traditionalists intent on preservation, and broader thinkers who believed that contemporary ballads, union songs, protest anthems, etc., were an integral part of the folk process. Zealots on both sides of the divide sometimes defended their viewpoints with considerable vigour. (Glen Tomasetti was once reduced to tears by the fury with which one arch-traditionalist attacked her defence of topical songs). Writing at the beginning of the boom, Wendy Lowenstein suggested that only time would resolve the question of the “folk process”. She conceded that “no art can stand still, be it folk art or any other” [Adult Education, Dec 1963]. Fellow folklorist Edgar Waters clearly felt that the traditionalists/purists “had God on their side”.

The exponents of “trad” are almost to a man romantic, radical and nationalist. They cherish the home-grown popular culture and rubbish the cosmopolitan mass-cult; they are for the masses against the classes; they idealise the good sense and sensibility of Jimmy from the Wire Fence and Posthole Joe.

By contrast, Waters caustically highlighted the incongruity and superficiality (even hypocrisy) of well-heeled young Australians performing modern protest songs (most of them American) in urban comfort.

A young white Australian, say, sings a song of social protest against racial discrimination in a coffee shop in Sydney or Melbourne. His audience of other young white Australians applaud. They feel good. He feels good, and gets a quid or two into the bargain, to make him feel even better. No one is any the better or any the worse in Montgomery or Moree. But then neither will anyone hit the singer or his audience on the head, or throw bombs at them, or even call them a mob of nigger-loving bastards. Have you heard The Mindless Trio at the Never-Mind? (The Instant Coffee Shop with the Instant Folk Singers!) You get all the satisfaction of way-out protest without having to think what you are protesting about! Protesting is good fun with the Mindless Trio. Come along and make believe you’re serious at the Never-Mind! [Australian, 15 Aug 1964, 10 April 1965]

    Martyn Wyndham-Read was among the revival singers who lamented the fact that some of their contemporaries were so preoccupied with contemporary music that they were in danger of forgetting the traditional. “You go up to one and say ‘Can you sing me Barbry Ellen?’ and they’ll say ‘Is that one of Tom Paxton’s?’ or ‘Who wrote that?’”. Even Gary Shearston, one of the first and most important popularisers of Australian topical material, would lament that the revival had been flooded by endless Dylan imitators.

While conceding the worth of songs by Don Henderson, Harry Robertson and Ken Mansell, Declan Affley would be gloriously contemptuous of obscurantist singer-songwriters who modelled themselves after Dylan at his more surreal:

You Know Who has graduated from the realms of comic-strips and become enamoured of Kultcher … In the absence of someone to tell him otherwise he assumes that genius is the art of being incomprehensible, settles down to write mammoth dirges consisting of vague unconnected phrases to be sung “en whinge”, the whole to be interpreted with inspired sucks and gurgles on a tinny harmonica. [Australian Tradition, Aug 1969]

On the other hand,  Alex Hood (second to none in his own affection for the songs of the bush and outback), insisted : “What counts is what is going on now, the music that’s being created now. This is the folkmusic of the future”. Some of Hood’s peers were more outspoken, accusing traditionalists of ignoring a living music for a dead one. As they stressed, every folksong had been composed by someone at some point in history. Pointing out that songwriters of the 16th century did not have the option of copyright, Harry Robertson once informed a symposium on the issue: “If we define folkmusic as only that music which has been passed around through the original folk tradition, then folkmusic was dead”. (Thirty years on, there is irony in the fact that so few of the topical songs of the 60s – or, indeed, of later decades – are remembered).
  
Authenticity became a god within the traditionalist camp. Elderly bush balladeers like Duke Tritton, Simon McDonald and Sally Sloane, were venerated as “the real thing”, simple people unsullied by city ways, passing on an unspoiled tradition which they had lived. Respect for revival performers depended on the extent to which a folksinger could cite familiarity with, or a real working knowledge of the traditions (including trades and occupations) he/she drew on. Working class affiliations or antecedents were an important consideration. So were the process by which a singer had acquired his/her songbag (oral transmission from genuine sources being much the preferred mode), and the style of singing. Don Henderson, Brian Mooney and A.L. Lloyd had enviable claims to credibility because they had worked – first hand – throughout rural Eastern Australia. (Lloyd, even so, was the object of criticism, by an intensely orthodox sector of the Bush Music Club, for allegedly tampering with, or personalising, the songs he had learned in the outback. Mike Wilkinson was once pounced upon by members of the BMC for daring to sing the “Lloyd version’ of a particular song).  Martyn Wyndham-Read had spent time (albeit only a few months) working as a jackeroo in South Australia. Danny Spooner and Declan Affley, likewise, propagated songs they had learned working in the real world of Thames barges or the merchant navy. Elsewhere Marian Henderson was at pains to stress her working class credentials to the Bulletin: “My grandfather was a wheelwright and another grandfather a blacksmith. So, I feel … simpatico with them. I feel half-way bush, half-way city. Folksongs combine country and city elements”. Appearance was also a factor: Mooney and Affley reportedly looked “disconcertingly like the stereotype[s] of the romantic, handsome, black-haired Irishman … [and] the nobby, quirky, red-haired Irishman”.

One-eyed traditionalists could be remarkably inconsistent in their yearning for authenticity. Early ensembles like The Bushwhackers prided themselves on their fealty to a perceived tradition, yet it could well be countered that instruments like the lagerphone were unorthodox innovations, or that a singing bush band itself was without historical precedent.  Lionel Long was the bete noire of many Sydney folkies who believed that his rather saccharine presentation of bush songs was a desecration. Yet unlike most of his more acceptable contemporaries, Long could actually claim to have spent substantial time in shearing sheds and on outback stations. By contrast, Leonard Teale, who had worked in radio and theatre from childhood, was once described approvingly (by Edgar Waters) as sounding “like a man who might have shovelled dung in his younger days; and like a man who might occasionally have leaned on his shovel, thinking and talking seriously about this and that”. Alex Hood, who was credited with sounding more like a genuine bushman than any other professional singer, confessed (with some amusement): “I’ve never shorn a fucking sheep in my life”. As a newcomer to the mid-60s Melbourne folk scene, Fiona Laurence drew on Scottish songs she had learned in childhood from her Gaelic-speaking grandmother. She was nonplussed when she found herself criticised for not singing “orthodox” Scots songs – by which the folk establishment seems to have meant Ewan MacColl’s repertoire. At one point, recalls Duncan Brown, there were strong demarcations within the Melbourne folk pub scene, one pub being belligerently Irish, another just as determinedly Scots-English.

Part-and-parcel of the enchantment with authenticity was the belief that certain ways of singing were more appropriate/correct than others. In the lead-up to the revival, the now-legendary split within the Sydney Bush Music Club (which saw the demise of The Bushwhackers and the defection of Alex Hood et al to form The Rambleers) arose out of a bitter dispute over the acceptability of musical arrangements and vocal harmony. (Chris Shaw remembers the passion with which people took sides on the issue: the late Chris Kempster suggested that the acrimony lasted up to the 1990s). Sean & Sonja subsequently sang far too smoothly and politely (and were “too Peter Paul & Mary-ish”) to suit the tastes of reviewers like Edgar Waters or Craig McGregor, and there was general agreement that hillbilly or Irish rebel accents, or operatically-trained vocals, sounded out-of-place when applied (say) to Australian bush songs. Virtuosity could be suspect, with audiences and fellow-performers wary of singers or instrumentalists who seemed “too good”.

 Honesty was at issue here – and the implication that commercialism automatically entailed a lack of honesty. Mick Counihan contrasts performers who “took their music seriously enough to play with taste, style and passion” with those who took it as “mediocre mainstream pop”. Unusual among the 60s identities I have interviewed in my research into the revival, he retains little affection for the folk scene or performers of the period. Dismissive of Shearston, Henderson, Somerset, Lawton and other high-profile Australian folk artists, he recalls having been particularly contemptuous of international superstars Peter Paul & Mary. (Hence, he was somewhat disconcerted by the trio’s charm and willingness to assist a young journalist when he interviewed them for Go-Set. He remembers a subsequent interview he and Peter Dickie had with Bob Dylan at Essendon airport – and Dylan’s responses to the idiot questions posed by other reporters – as a valuable “education in the inanity of Australian journalism”). For another singer, Cris Larner, it was all a question of sincerity: “Do you really know what you’re singing about? Does it get to your guts?”. Larner cites Danny Spooner, Tina Lawton, Brian Mooney and David Lumsden as singers who elicited a gut reaction from the listener. “They were not pretending”. For her, what they played and sang was “the first music I’d heard that said something about experiences I could relate to … It was down-to-earth stuff”.

Of course, no amount of sincerity or genuineness could make up for musical ineptitude. Some ideologically blameless singers were just “not up to the mark” technically. The late Denis Gibbons argued that too much has been made of the essential simplicity of folkmusic and that, far too often, mediocrity or downright ineptitude has hidden under the veil of authenticity. Gibbons was adamant that vocal training had its place: “any singer benefits from greater range, flexibility and placement of voice”. Nor was amplification necessarily a bad thing: “some songs are so exquisite that they must be barely whispered” [Folksay, 1, 1966, p.30]. Inevitably, the emphasis on natural, unstudied singing resulted in the evolution of alternative stylisations. Perhaps unconsciously, performers would lower their voices when singing blues, toughen up their accents for Australian material, or acquire traces of  “Americanese” for Appalachian ballads. In the same way that the singer-songwriter vogue would unleash scores of Dylan imitators, so the Anglo-Celtic sub-genre attracted a rash of performers who slavishly modelled their sledgehammer vocal style after Ewan MacColl (sometimes to the point of singing a capella with one hand cupped over an ear). “There was a sense of frozen antiquity”, argues Mike McClellan. “Simply doing no more than repeating styles and methods of singing that emerged in the past … [in some cases] repeating the technical inadequacies of very simple, primitive performers … To ignore [all that had come since] was to stick your head in the sand”. Glen Tomasetti, whose whole performing career had been predicated on lack of pretension, once conceded that listening to tapes of impromptu group performances of the era could be mildly harrowing (so starkly was musicianship often sacrificed to sincerity). She recalled her own discomfiture when her young daughter announced that she intended to become a singer – a natural singer, however, “not like you”.

Another battlefront (albeit a relatively minor one) was the question of appropriate accompaniment. Some purists, like John Manifold, insisted that folksinging was legitimate only when done a capella. The guitar was an agent of commercialisation. For others, simple guitar accompaniment might be acceptable, but they firmly resisted the employment of backing instruments. (They had a particular aversion to anything electrified. Bernard Bolan remembers the “ripple of horror” which passed through the audience when Mike O’Rourke walked onstage carrying an electric guitar at one of the early festivals). While the overly-orchestrated arrangements favoured by Lionel Long and (on occasion) Denis Gibbons were generally deplored, more liberal souls acknowledged that, tastefully employed, back-up players could add significantly to the quality of a performance, live or recorded. One point of contention among the early coffee lounge performers centred on the merits of the nylon vs steel-strung guitar.

Songwriter and guitar-maker Don Henderson once observed that Australian folkies seemed to have a “strange aversion” to steel strings. Garry Kinnane, who had studied under Carl Ogden, remembers that Tomasetti, Wyndham-Read and Mooney all believed firmly that the Spanish or classical guitar was the more fitting instrument to accompany folksongs. Steel strung guitars were associated with hillbilly or C&W music – and, by implication, with American commercialism. More prosaically, nylon strings were easier to play and learn on. Many singers had turned to the Spanish guitar with relief having endured “aching hands and blistered fingers” trying to manipulate cheap, high-actioned “fruit boxes”. In Henderson’s view, however, a top quality Maton, Martin or Gibson was potentially “easier to play than a nylon-string guitar” and offered infinitely more scope to the instrumentalist. He cited the “harplike effect” achieved by Paul Marks or Marian Henderson’s ability, “on a good night”, to make “those little wires sound like an organ”. “Imagine Chris Daw or Les Miller playing some of their slick sliding stuff on anything else but steel; it would sound like Segovia plaiting spaghetti” [Music Maker, July 1964].
   
Increasingly attracted to American and contemporary music himself, Kinnane quickly made the transition to a Dylan-style Gibson and found it the perfect complement to David Lumsden’s 5 string banjo. Lumsden & Kinnane performed regularly as a bluegrass duo at Traynors in its first year: during the same period Trevor Lucas went a step further and became one of the few Australian 12 string guitar specialists. Within a short time (and as the artists’ playing improved with years of practice), steel-string guitars became more and more common (indeed, the norm) and nylon-string guitars became increasingly associated with novices or the sterotyped “lady folksinger” (Date, Lawton, Biscoe). The 12 string guitar also caught on, with Doug Ashdown, Greg Ferris, Keith Potger, Phil Cunneen, Lenore Somerset and Robyn Smith (Archer) among its more conspicuous exponents. The fact that, for many years, Martyn Wyndham-Read has opted to play a steel-strung instrument indicates that this particular aspect of the debate was never more than a passing point of contention.  

Occasionally the purists found themselves victims of their own pedantry. Denis Gibbons once received a blistering letter from the Bush Music Club in Sydney, demanding to know the provenance of a song he had recorded, and accusing him darkly of “interfering with the text”. Gibbons confounded his critics by maintaining that he had learned the version in question from his father-in-law, an itinerant bushman in South Australia. (In fact, Gibbons confesses, the source was a Burl Ives record). Kath Lumsden, whose traditionalist credentials were impeccable, once deliberately “sent up” the more inflexible members of the folk establishment by launching into the Eartha Kitt standard ‘I’m Just an Old-fashioned Girl’. On another occasion (despite husband Arthur’s misgivings), she sang the American country song ‘Spanish is the Loving Tongue’ at the Bush Music Club and was gratified by the response. As she had correctly anticipated, most listeners were much more concerned with the beauty of the song (which she had learned from tenor Joe Sibella) than with its orthodoxy.

 Well-entrenched intercity rivalry sometimes coloured the debate. A solid section of the Melbourne fraternity was dismissive of the Sydney scene. “Melbourne always had a better live scene than Sydney”, claims Mick Counihan. “It was a key centre for music from the late 19th century. ‘Marvellous Melbourne’”. Counihan remembers flubbing his verse during a full-cast singalong of ‘The Overlander’ at the Songs of Peace and Love Concert at the Myer Music Bowl, and feeling deeply embarrassed because he had let down the Melbourne side in front of Sydneysiders. In the eyes of Melbourne folkies, Sydney represented folkmusic as popular entertainment: it was the home of Bandstand, Just Folk, Dave’s Place, and the big Newport hootenanny.  Sydney had stars. Lionel Long was the major butt of criticism, but at other times Gary Shearston and Tina Date were accused of adopting unfolk-like airs and graces, and the dire label of  entertainer was applied to Sean & Sonja, Leonard Teale, clone ensembles like The Liberty Singers, The Green Hill Singers or The Kinsfolk, or interstate acts who “hit the big time” in the harbour city, notably Doug Ashdown and The Twiliters. The Adelaide scene was also mildly suspect. The Wesley Three were disdained as far too slick and preoccupied with musicianship. Even the highly-regarded Tina Lawton became something of a tall poppy thanks to regular appearances on national television.

Melbourne, by contrast, claimed to have a monopoly on the “real folksingers” – the Tomasettis, the Mooneys, the Spooners, the Wyndham-Reads, the Lumsdens, etc. In reality, Melbourne had more than its fair share of  folksinger-entertainers at different levels on the commercial spectrum. Denis Gibbons, Lenore Somerset, Shirley Jacobs, The Idlers Five, The John Gordon and Helen Driessen Trios, or (of course) The Seekers, were far too well known or widely-exposed, by virtue of the media and entertainment networks, ever to be considered kosher. Kingston Trio or PP&M imitators might get short shift at places like Traynors (although they might well be found at less high-minded venues like the Heavenly Crumpet, Capers, Cafe Edouard or the Colonial Inn), yet even more acceptable figures like Lynne St John often had to counter accusations of commerciality, partly because of  their concerns with appearance and presentation. Notwithstanding acknowledgment by Jim Carter, Frank Traynor, Don Carless, etc., that the performer had a duty to his audience, dressing up to play was widely viewed as a concession to “showbiz”. So too was attempting to cater for the mood of the crowd. John Graham was regarded, by some,  as “a bit of a charlatan”  because of his determination to polish his performances and reach a wider public than was likely with the “take it or leave it” approach adopted by other folksingers. “There was a strong delineation between ‘the faith’ and those seen as ‘exploiting’ it”, remembers Jim Kenny. Squance & White who specialised in American music, and were outspoken in their enthusiasm for rock groups like The Beatles, sometimes found themselves blacklisted by the more rigid concert organisers.   

No matter how strongly the dedicated folk-archaeologist might stress the importance of the song over the singer, some artists (including some of the most committed and ideologically sound performers) could not fail to become drawcards in their own right. Definite hierarchies of performers existed at Traynors and elsewhere within the national coffee lounge circuit, and inevitably some artists started to take themselves too seriously. There were occasional prima donnas. Grumbles by performers about “having to go on first” were an occupational hazard for concert organisers. Some of the latter-day singer-songwriters who played at Traynors could be unnecessarily precious in this regard. (I recall an ugly scene at a Tasmanian concert a few years after the period under review: a number of respected local artists found their sets drastically shortened because the leader of a popular mainland Celtic ensemble was demanding extra stage-time and threatening to “punch up” m.c. Richard Leitch if it was not forthcoming). Denis Gibbons, who was frequently called upon to compere concerts, remembers one instance when a singer proved particularly objectionable about opening the program. Gibbons finally conceded and agreed to go on first instead. He “got his own back”, however, by leading off with his own rendition of one of the man’s big hits. Another popular male folksinger, who harangued Gibbons about his place on the bill at the Lord Mayor’s Variety show in Brisbane, also found himself outmanoevered. Gibbons reluctantly agreed to allocate him a more prominent spot on the program, and then slotted the belligerent singer in directly after an exotic dance specialist. (The man’s bracket was punctuated by repeated calls to “bring back the bellydancer”).
   
As an alternative to the blandness of mainstream pop, and preoccupied as it was/is with the realities of people’s lives, folkmusic demanded to be taken seriously. That seriousness, and the tendency of the coffee lounge patrons towards earnest intellectualism and idealistic humorlessness, were quickly pounced on by critics and satirists: “Folk song has become a solemn cult with some of its afficianados”, observed Edgar Waters in late 1964: Charles Higham went further:

Sullen college boys in regulation sweater, jeans and suede boots, eyes dead under cowlick hair, huddle in groups, reverently. They stare, whisper between sips of coffee, and never smile. Austerely removed from them, pale girls with waist-length hair occasionally exchange a blind, meaningless glance. The way they look, you’d think the sun had never shone … The atmosphere in these places is usually joyless and naive. Customers sit there hour after hour in conditions of total discomfort, almost mute, glum, and fixedly staring into space [Higham, ‘The Folk People’, Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964].

    The description is obviously exaggerated. At the time, it was hotly contested by Gary Shearston who assured Higham: “I don’t spend an entire evening’s performance ‘protesting’ myself and all the other unwashed. In fact, we have a pretty good time singing songs from the four corners of the earth” [Australian, 4 Nov 1964; Bulletin, 14 & 28 Nov 1964]. Still it is a fact that “the deep and meaningful” were a vital part of folksong’s appeal. If anything, “bleeding in each others’ wounds” intensified as singer-songwriters moved beyond the protest and topical song into musical analyses of their own lives (Leonard Cohen-style) later in the decade. John Lavery laughingly remembers the tendency of some youthful artists to inflict an endless succession of intense ten minute dirges on long-suffering audiences. (“No-one could ever accuse us of  being entertainers”). It seems reasonable to assume that the subsequent popularity of traditional dance music in pubs, and the distinct lack of interest in lyrics which was characteristic of the Anglo-Celtic vogue, were something of a reaction to years of relentless exploration of the human condition. It is refreshing, therefore, that many instances can be cited of performers who refused to take themselves – or their music – too seriously.

Instead of delivering (as expected) an outraged musical dissection of Australia’s cultural philistinism, Gary Shearston surprised patrons at a fundraiser for Oz magazine by launching into a raucous version of ‘Long Tall Sally’, and then teaming with Tina Date for a mock-mournful rendition of ‘They’re Moving Father’s Grave to Build a Sewer’. Peter Laycock remembers that Martyn Wyndham-Read revelled in telling jokes to hapless fellow performers just as they were about to walk on stage. Denis Gibbons was once recruited for what amounted to a vice-regal command performance at Government house. The evening was heavily structured, each set precisely timed and rehearsed, and the entire program subject to strict protocols. The Governor himself was supposed to punctuate the proceedings with requests for particular items. He imbibed rather too freely however, and hopelessly muddled his cues. Gibbons also gleefully recalls jamming with country singer Kevin Shegog in the window of a Launceston department store, and feeling quite smug when a sizeable crowd gathered outside. The pair was understandably deflated when the onlookers promptly disappeared. They had simply been waiting for a bus. Late in the decade, English-born singer-songwriter Bernard Bolan deftly (and quite brilliantly) pricked the pomposity of the Sydney folk scene with such comic gems as ‘The NSW Folk Federation’.

As Warren Fahey recalled in a recent issue of the magazine Trad & Now [June 2006],  the revival was underscored by strong connections between the folk scene and the political left. “The Leftist orientation of the modern singer of folksongs is proverbial, and Australia is no exception”, wrote Craig McGregor at the time [People, Politics and Pop, p.152-3]. Some 60s performers came by their enthusiasm for folklore via their parents’ involvement in socialist or bohemian circles. Peter Dickie, for instance, learned the truth about the Peekskill riots in childhood and grew up deeply conscious of the Cold War. Paul Robeson was an early hero. Dickie and other budding performers like Lyell Sayer, Mick Counihan, Bill Berry, Jeannie Lewis, Chris Kempster and Shayna Bracegirdle (Karlin) had early exposure to political music courtesy of the Eureka Youth League and the songbooks of the Australian Student Labor Federation. Alex Hood was a communist from childhood. David Lumsden grew up hearing his socialist parents performing Australian songs to the Bread and Cheese Club and the Henry Lawson Society, and surrounded by recordings of American blues and the Almanac Singers. Chris Shaw remembers accompanying her parents to Bush Music Club Singabouts at the Esperanto or Building Workers Halls, and Folklore Society meetings discreetly convened at CPA headquarters “somewhere in Castlereagh Street”.  Peter Laycock “fell in with lefties” at school and university in Adelaide and first started singing at Labor Club functions. (One of his contemporaries was future Premier Don Dunstan). In Melbourne, Laycock and like-minded compatriots like Tomasetti were deeply involved in that city’s highly political artistic and intellectual sub-cultures. Songs by the likes of Don Henderson, Mike Leyden and Dorothy Hewett, and their performance by ensembles like Daw Hood & Henderson or The Radiation Quartet, were features of the revival well before the boom. (Some of these songs were collected by Chris Kempster and Mark Gregory, both members of The Radiation Quartet, in the ground-breaking roneo’d songster Songs of Our Time, circa 1964. The publication is now a rare collectors item).

Consequently, it is unsurprising that the coffee lounge and the folk community was frequently targeted for Communist affiliations. Charles Higham, for instance, did not hesitate to do so, noting that folksong featured regularly at Peace Congress rallies, Hiroshima day functions and CND meetings.  His survey of the Sydney coffee lounges included a profile of a girl singer (possibly Tina Date) “in a skintight black leotard, knees clasped close, face bare of makeup, huge vacant eyes peeping through the curtain of reddish hair or closed in rapture … Her voice is clear, high and sweet as she sings about Engels, Marx and Trotsky” [Higham, p.24-5]. Marian Henderson recalls the dismay she felt at learning she was under investigation as a security risk. Being sacked from a well-paid singing job at the Oceanic Hotel because she had performed on a Peace Congress platform dramatically highlighted the vulnerability of the socially-aware folksinger:

People were scared. I was scared. I was trying to support myself and my son. I was trying to keep my music clean. Every concert I sang I had to balance my program so there was something for everyone. So no finger was pointed. I found that the best way to deliver protest songs was to add humour to them.

(Decades later, Jeannie Lewis claimed to have been dogged by the label “left-wing folksinger” ever since the mid-60s). In their infancy, Traynors and the Brisbane Folk Centre were both subjected to claims that they were Communist havens. The police raided another Brisbane venue, FOCO, looking for evidence of subversion and (recalls Anne Infante) there was tacit understanding within folk circles that the activities of a number of Queensland singers were being monitored by ASIO or by minions of the Bjelke-Petersen regime. Coffee lounge and club owners were at pains to counteract publicity which they believed was inaccurate, one-sided and bad for business. In Melbourne, Frank Traynor was able to enlist the aid of a sympathetic ABC television producer who profiled the club positively on a current affairs show. The segment depicted Trevor Lucas at his parents’ home and Glen Tomasetti in suburban comfort. Brian Mooney’s Carlton loft provided a bohemian touch. (Mary Traynor remembers that Mooney’s attempts to tidy the loft could not prevent the cameraman from lingering on rows of empty bottles neatly lined up against the wall). In Brisbane, Stan Arthur had less success trying to shame B.A. Santamaria into publicly retracting his attacks on the BFC, although Santamaria privately (and reluctantly) agreed that popular songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ were not – in themselves – subversive. During the boom, a number of high-profile performers of  “more conservative hue” shied away from the politicisation of folksong. (“There was a definite stratum of people who did not want to be involved in protest music”, recalls David Lumsden). Clem Parkinson’s controversial song-attack on the Victorian government over the King Street Bridge reactivated old traditional vs contemporary tensions within the Victorian Folk Music Club; while Denis Gibbons, a life-long conservative voter, was prominent among members who resigned from the VFMC because it was becoming too political. An explosive meeting at which the strongly conservative Maryjean Officer deplored “Red” infiltration signalled the end of the Folklore Society of Victoria.

Higham once described a typical folk boom audience as consisting of  “well-heeled surfies”, well-fed aesthetes, “bland stockbrokers’ daughters”, “smooth university assembly-line products”, “young execs and their girlfriends”, “pink-cheeked GPS boys” and students (the “incomeless scions of the cushy professional groups”). Derogatory as the description was, the peak folk audience was essentially (and undeniably) middle class in make-up and, as such, somewhat wary of anything which veered too far to the Left. Accordingly, there was some degree of compromise musically, at least in the early 60s. The late Chris Kempster has noted:

In the left-wing movement we’d sing anti-war songs and Ban-the-bomb songs … parodies and all, but we didn’t sing them anywhere apart from left-wing gatherings ’cause we didn’t think that anybody else wanted to hear them [NLA Interview].

    Michael Darby, the Sydney boy-wonder who founded the Folk Attick, blatantly censored any performance there he regarded as too outspokenly political. Elsewhere, righteous indignation about social inequities or the arms race was acceptable only so long as it did not cut too close (geographically at any event). Protest songs were O.K. provided they remained universal and reasonably non-specific. Pleas for international peace and understanding, or mild warnings against nuclear proliferation, were most common. Topical anthems like ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’, ‘If I Had a Hammer’, ‘What Have They Done To The Rain’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or ‘Turn Turn Turn’ were sufficiently defused by their mass popularity to fit snugly into the repertoires of clean-cut ensembles like The Wesley Three, The Twiliters, The Idlers Five and The Seekers. Occasionally, group members would craft their own innocuous songs along the same lines. Idler Paul Nisselle’s ‘God Looks Down in Mercy’ dealt with fears of man-made Armageddon, while Seeker Bruce Woodley’s ‘Come the Day’ looked forward to an era of world-wide brotherhood. Paul Marks hated protest songs but had no qualms about recording the civil rights perennial ‘We Shall Overcome’. Martyn Wyndham-Read was similarly unimpressed with topical music yet he included Ed McCurdy’s timeless peace-plea ‘Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream’ in his repertoire at the Reata. Even Denis Gibbons once recorded Phil Ochs’ tongue-in-cheek ‘Draft Dodger Rag’, retitling it ‘National Service Blues’ as a comic comment on the conscription debate. (Interviewed in 1999, Gibbons claimed to have no recollection of ever having recorded the song). For a short time the money-making potential of protest song was milked by the “commercial public relations boys” –  witness the international success of Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’ when message songs were “in”. Again, such hit songs usually tended to be less controversial than universal, or were emasculated by overexposure. “These songs were captured by the establishment”, Harry Robertson once lamented, “and … once protest song is for cash it ceases to be protest” [Australian Tradition, June 1968].

The situation changed dramatically once singers and songwriters moved beyond the abstract or international to focus on issues directly affecting ordinary Australlians. It is significant that the consolidation of opposition to conscription and the Vietnam war paralleled the drift away from folkmusic of the largely conservative mass audience. With Australian government policy specifically under attack by vocal and growing sections of the public (and with protest singers leading the fight), folkies found themselves under pressure to affiliate with one side or the other. To be anti-conscription, anti-Vietnam, pro-protest and pro-social change meant indentifying forcibly with the Left: to be anti-protest, pro-conscription and pro-Vietnam was to ally – inevitably – with the Right. The performers who worked hard to remain apolitical were those who sought a wider profile and audience as commercial folksinging entertainers and were thus doubly beyond the pale as far as folk politics was concerned. David Lumsden recalls that contempt for them increased as Vietnam escalated. Ken White remembers that a number of artists had trouble getting work because they were seen as “insufficiently political”. (White, who had “his fingers burned at a Freedom from Hunger fundraiser”, insisted that he was not going to be used by any political organisation; a stance which occasionally brought him into conflict with musical partner Graham Squance).

On one side were singers who crusaded (or at least actively sympathised) for an end to Australian involvement in the war. Tomasetti was active in ‘Save Our Sons’ and, following the lead of Joan Baez, fought a legal battle over her refusal to pay that percentage of her income tax which would go towards defence; Counihan was one of the first people arrested at an anti-war demonstration; Shearston’s protest credentials hindered his being able to settle in the United States. Danny Spooner cites performing at the great Moratorium march in Melbourne as one of the high points of his singing career. On the other side were those artists who joined concert parties to entertain the troops in South-east Asia: Doug Owen, Phil Cunneen & Irene Petrie, Patsy Biscoe, Tina Lawton, Peter Harries, Lenore Somerset, The Twiliters and Sean & Sonja. Somerset later judged the experience “the most satisfying period” of her career: “Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the war, these boys were there and ready to give their lives – many did”. Travelling, performing for the boys, and being day-to-day in Vietnam were “good for the soul”, she noted recently.
      
 The high-profile Shearston was at the forefront of the singing radicals. His second LP Songs of Our Time (1964) teamed Seeger, Dylan and Ewan MacColl material with several socially conscious Australian songs. Don Henderson’s ‘Basic Wage Dream’ commented satirically on the 1964 Basic Wage campaign; Dorothy Hewitt’s ‘Atomic Lullaby’ (music by Mike Leyden) was in gentle contrast to Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ on the same theme; ‘We Want Freedom’ was Shearston’s setting of a poem by aboriginal writer and activist Kath Walker.  Shearston’s own ‘Who Can Say’ was a question song along the lines of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or ‘Where Have all the Flowers Gone’:

Who will listen to words of war
Then plant a seed and cry “No more”,
Who will help the seed to grow
By banning the mushroom’s murdering glow?
The trees grow on toward the sky,
But the flowers at its feet wither and die.
  
The material was topical and thought-provoking, but it was not until Shearston’s third LP Australian Broadside that he ruffled conservative feathers by taking a stiletto, as writer or interpreter, to specific at-home issues. ‘The Ballad of Edgar Cooke’ (words by Michael Thomas) was an understated but powerful indictment of capital punishment dedicated to the last man hanged in Western Australia. ‘Weevils in the Flour’ by Dorothy Hewitt targeted environmental destruction by giant multi-national corporations like BHP. Kath Walker’s ‘Son of Mine’ continued to explore the plight of the Australian aborigine. ‘Do You Know Barry?’ was a wry attack on far-right U.S. Presidential candidate Goldwater. ‘Sydney Town’, co-written with radical author Frank Hardy, was a comic thrust at life and culture in the country’s largest city. Shearston’s response to Australia’s worst peace-time naval disaster, the sinking of the Voyager by HMAS Melbourne, was the most controversial track on the album:

You’ll tell me of a reason, you’ll tell me of a cause,
You’ll say these things happen in defence for coming wars.
But will your age-old reasons now make you realise
That ships must sail the seas for peace before another dies?

Arch-conservative B.A. Santamaria ranted furiously at ‘The Voyager’ in the Catholic press, accusing Shearston of having betrayed the men who died on the Kokoda Trail during World War II. Shearston was unequivocal in emphasising his commitment to pacifism and his belief that “armed forces everywhere should be done away with”:

The Voyager song was written two days after the disaster out of a complete feeling of helplessness and frustration that eighty-two men had lost their lives rehearsing for this thing called war which was supposed to have ended twenty years ago for all time …
    Surely we know by now that wars must be a thing of the past and that future infringements and squabbles must be settled by international conference and not international sling-shot games with ballistic missiles. A stockpile of 320 billion megatons of TNT in nuclear weapons is proof enough [Bulletin, 28 Nov 1964].

Shearston underlined his disgust at the introduction of conscription in 1964 with his cynical ‘Conscription Ramp’ (“There’s always trouble in the air with elections coming round O”) and the more subtle ‘Twenty Summers’, words by Mona Brand (“Now Johnny must shoulder a gun and be going, And fighting some people he’d rather be knowing”). Introduced by Menzies at the end of 1964, conscription legislation (two years army service for 20-year old males, selected by lottery) first impacted on the folk scene when Sean Cullip received his call-up notice early the following year. Cullip attempted to fight the notice in court on the basis of the effect two years out of the limelight would have on the duo’s future rather than on more philosophical grounds. He stressed the irony of the situation: “Sonja and I are very much against war and killing although we’re not protest singers”. The magistrate acknowledged that army service did constitute hardship for the couple but not exceptional hardship, and Cullip’s bid for deferment was dismissed. The innate unfairness of the legislation was glaringly highlighted when Kerry White, lead singer with another popular commercial folk act, The Twiliters, successfully gained deferment.  Being able to have their army service deferred while at university enabled twins Peter and Martin Wesley-Smith to continue in The Wesley Three at weekends and holidays. However, deferment restrictions put paid to the brothers’ desire to take a year off and try their luck in show business full-time. (By the time Peter completed his Ph.D., the call-up was no longer a factor). Wayne Garton’s call-up notice spelled the end of promising Perth trio The Wayfarers. Another casualty of the lottery, Graeme Denholm, was promptly replaced as a member of The Idlers Five. At a grass-roots level, the Lonesome Road Folk Club in Melbourne’s industrial west failed to survive the simultaneous conscription of three of its young organisers. As it turned out, the folk bubble had already burst in Sydney by the time Sean Cullip started his two year stint in 1966. He and Sonja managed to reunite in 1968 as a middle-of-the road pop-folk cabaret act playing the Leagues Club and Hotel circuit (and several tours of South-east Asia) until 1974. Cullip himself remembers the army years as positive in many ways, although he expresses relief that his abysmal rifle range record prevented him being sent to Vietnam. He saw his two years out in clerical posts.

In the main, initial opposition to conscription – even from within the folk community – was fragmented and half-hearted. Leonard Teale was adamant that building up the defence forces was crucial to national security: “Here we are with ten million people and 900 million to the north … Of course, we’re in terrible danger and I want to get our defence forces increased” [Higham, p.25].  Trevor Lucas, by contrast, was just as strong in his anti-war position. Lucas, who recorded Shearston’s ‘The Voyager’ as well as another song of the same name by Garry Kinnane, informed the Melbourne Sun [17 Aug 1964]:

I believe I’d be a conscientious objector if total war came, and if I ever had time to make a choice. When I was in the school cadet corps, an instructor demonstrated the Bren gun, pointed to a group of kids playing in the park, and said: “This gun would stop them all within seconds”. If social protest songs help rid people of ideas like that, then I’ll keep on singing them.

Conscription ultimately became a non-issue for Lucas who embarked on a lengthy visit to Britain on New Year’s Day 1965. General perspectives on army service changed, however, as Australian involvement in Vietnam intensified and as the Government backed down (in December 1965) on its promise that no conscript would have to serve in South-east Asia. The first conscripts left for Vietnam in April 1966; the first conscript corpse was flown home a month later.

A silent vigil outside the American embassy in Melbourne appears to have been the first organised demonstration against the war. Subsequently 40 academics petitioned Menzies on the matter, and in December 1965, the Songs of Peace and Love concert at the Myer Music Bowl was the first major response of the folk scene to the training of young Australian boys to kill and be killed for a conflict in which Australia had no direct interest. The concert, which attracted a crowd of 10,000 people, was mounted by the Vietnam Day committee. Speakers included Dr Jim Cairns. (Rumours that celebrated U.S. activist Dr Benjamin Spock was to appear proved unfounded). Most of the performers were strongly motivated politically. David Lumsden, Peter Dickie and Mick Counihan drew on their families’ involvements with the Peace movement, trade unionism and the Left; Mark Gregory was a young veteran of Charles Perkins’ Freedom Rides; Phyl Vinnicombe was an up-and-coming songwriter whose compositions included the anthem-like ‘Seasons of War’; Lynne St John was a young semi-commercial folksinger who believed in donating her services to Peace functions; Shearston, of course, was the country’s best-known performer of topical songs; and Tomasetti would go on to become a valued spokesperson for ‘Save Our Sons’. While decidedly not protest singers, Brian Mooney and Tina Lawton were seen as friendly “fellow-travellers” (hence the anger of her peers when Lawton subsequently joined a concert party which toured army bases in Vietnam). Anti-war concerts were subsequently mounted by the Artists and Players Forum at the Princess Theatre; folksingers and TV personalities (including cast-members of Bellbird) playing to packed houses. In Sydney, the revue Stage Vietnam, an innovative mix of film, dance, slides and folksongs performed by Chris Shaw, drew capacity houses throughout its 16 week season in 1966-7 – notwithstanding token bids by NSW police to stop the show. Folksingers performed from the back of a truck at a major peace rally in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens and, at the climax of anti-war fervour, the legendary Moratorium march in May 1970. By then, 400 Australians had been killed in Vietnam, 250 of them conscripts. One and a half million Vietnamese were dead or injured.
 
By mid 1966 the Government and the Labor opposition were increasingly divided over the conscription issue and Vietnam. Conscientious objectors were beginning to make national headlines and resistance to the call-up ballot (including the establishment of an underground network of safe houses) was solidifying. The ‘Save our Sons’ organisation was formed that year and, in the lead-up to the Federal election, a recording of  Tomasetti performing ‘The Ballad of Bill White’ was sold and distributed at political meetings and rallies. (White was a NSW teacher who had refused to comply with the draft). Another record, an EP of political songs written by Phyl Vinnicombe, Clem Parkinson and Tomasetti and performed by a hastily-convened quartet (Vinnicombe, Tomasetti, Mick Counihan and Peter Dickie), was also recorded as an ALP fundraiser. The record never reached the public. Tomasetti has claimed that its contents were “too strong”. Counihan contends that disagreement between Tomasetti and ALP politician Clyde Holding over remuneration of the artists resulted in the EP being shelved. In Tomasetti’s view, the shelving and subsequent disappearance of the record were a great pity, as it included some important material, particularly the Vinnicombe compositions ‘Jimmy is a Soldier’ and ‘Seasons of War’. Counihan, by contrast, believes the record was “terrible” and is grateful that it never materialised. Interestingly – given the large attendances at ALP functions – he believes it would easily have outsold most other recordings released during the folk revival.

 Performers and activists alike were deeply disillusioned by the failure of the anti-conscription/ “Bring our Boys home” election campaign. The Government was returned with a  substantially increased majority. It did not take long for the resistance to regroup, however. As historan Barry York has observed, between 1967-70 “Activism seemed a daily occurrence. There were so-called wild riots in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and even Canberra! It was a time of ‘street theatre’, public meetings in suburban halls, petitions, letters to editors, draft-card burnings, rallies, all the protester’s stock-in-trade” – and it was happening all over the world” [‘War against War’, in Staining the Wattle, p.241]. A number of singer-songwriters determinedly perpetuated the overt protest tradition. Tomasetti released another EP of topical material, The Future is in Your Hands, on W&G, and later in the decade published a set of her own compositions under the title Songs from a Seat in the Carriage. (The carriage referred to was that of the evil Marquis St Evremonde – oblivious to the sufferings of his fellow countrymen and blithely ignorant of what the future held – in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities). Her best-remembered song is ‘Don’t be Too Polite Girls’, written (to the tune of ‘Flash Jack from Gundagai’) in the Equal Pay for Equal Work campaign. Phyl Vinnicombe recorded an EP (for W&G), Dark-Eyed Daughter, four songs for the Aboriginal Advancement League. After taking a hiatus from protest-singing and writing with two extraordinarily well-researched albums of Australian bush songs, Shearston re-entered the topical fray with a vengeance with ‘The Lost Soldier’ and ‘Old Bulli’. Set to the traditional tune ‘Lord Franklin’, ‘The Lost Soldier’ concluded starkly: “Oh, in Vietnam, Ronnie Field had died; He was not a violent man, she cried  … And she told us all as she closed her door: He should never have fought in this terrible war”.

Shearston recorded ‘We Are Going to Freedom’ with members of what became ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission) and the song was adopted at the Council’s 1966 Federal conference. ‘Old Bulli’ attacked safety conditions within the mining industry. Fears of legal action by BHP resulted in the song being deleted from the LP Gary Shearston Sings His Songs – and the end of a furious Shearston’s contract with CBS. On Abreaction, which he subsequently recorded for Festival, he caustically parodied Australia’s subservience to Uncle Sam in classic cowboy & Indian terms: “Now all the way with Chief Warcloud is the promise you’ve given to me, and Snake-in-the-Grass and Screaming Eagle will be your security” [  ‘Last Night I Had the Strangest Delirium Tremendous’]. Although, in hindsight, the bulk of Shearston’s 60s output cannot be classified as protest, he was branded by Australian Broadside and ‘Old Bulli’, so much so that he was declared an undesirable alien by American authorities and refused entry to the U.S. where he had been offered a contract by Peter Paul & Mary’s management team. (Shearston opted instead to settle in Britain where he had a major hit with the Cole Porter standard ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ in 1974. He returned to Australia at the end of the 1980s).  

Meanwhile, Don Henderson, gravitating between Brisbane and Sydney recorded One Out with The Union Singers. Straight-out topical material emanated from writers as diverse as Clem Parkinson, Lyell Sayer (‘The F111’), Ken Mansell (‘The Westgate Bridge Disaster’) and John Lavery (‘The War Song’). By mid-decade though, songwriters were feeling increasingly constrained by the limitations of the protest sub-genre. The prolific Ken Mansell suggested that such (negative) songs had little appeal for audiences more keen to listen to The Beatles. Martyn Wyndham-Read claimed that the majority of protest songs were mere broadsheets sorely lacking in the poetic quality of great traditional ballads. Shearston sent-up what he saw as the banality of some protest songs with a tongue-in-cheek ditty which castigated two-chord accompaniments, “the cultivation of abstract words to an end” and “the cultivation of semi-incoherence as a virtue” [Australian Tradition, March 1966 & Dec 1967]. Mick Counihan insists that, by and large, Australian protest songs of the era were not “music to move the spirit”. Most of them were “politically dumb songs of the ‘Mother, don’t let your babies grow up to be imperialist fodder in Vietnam” ilk. (Harry Robertson once suggested that the “over-exposure of imported protest songs submerged the identity and reduced the effectiveness of Australian protest songs”). Mary Traynor disagrees strongly, maintaining: “even the trite material of the period had something to say … It was a time when we were questioning war, how we were being conned by government”. The staunchly pro-protest Tomasetti has argued that attempts to devalue such songs ignored the fact that protest “affirms aspects of life at the other extreme from the thing being opposed … smiling babies, flowers, crops, dancing, skies empty of all but clouds and work whose end is neither deception nor death”. “I never think a song can stop a war”, Phyl Vinnicombe [Lobl] once wrote, “but if it makes people more sensitive and more responsive to peoples’ thoughts, this is a help in itself” [Australian Tradition, Dec 1967 & June 1968].

 No study of the great revival would be complete without brief reference to its darker side. The revival played itself out against a backdrop of the national and international events of the 60s, and its participants were products (sometimes victims) of the era. The majority were teenagers and young adults, brought up within the blandness and relative stability of the 1950s, and trying to come to terms with rapid social change and shifting conceptions of their own place in the wider environment. Traditional folkmusic and contemporary songwriting within the folk idiom appealed directly to deeply idealistic, emotionally vulnerable young people, some of whom found themselves overwhelmed by the contradictions of the 60s. Don Ayrton’s was a tragic case. Tortured as he was by a drug habit he had acquired while working in South Africa in the 50s, and beset by alcoholism, his premature death was greeted by his friends with a mixture of sadness and relief. (Brian Mooney remembers that permission was obtained for Ayrton’s ashes to be scattered  in Queensland rainforest and that a tape of Mooney singing ‘The Parting Glass’ was planned as a feature of the ceremony. On the day, the tape recorder refused to function on cue but, uncannily, just as the mourners were walking away from the grave, the tape started, seemingly by itself).   Undoubtedly the intimacy and introspection nurtured and encouraged by the folk scene contributed to a high incidence within the community of mental collapse or ongoing psychiatric illness. In some cases, the failure ever to recapture the magic, innocence and simplicity of the period (at its best) has left permanent scars. For some, the loss of  star status or public recognition in the wake of the folk boom, and/or envy at the success of other artists, have resulted in long-term resentment.

Particularly glaring has been the high incidence of problem drinking or alcoholism among 60s performers. Where drugs were much less in evidence during the boom than they would be later in the decade (and subsequently), alcohol was always a part of the social and party scene surrounding folksinging. The coffee lounges themselves were predominantly – and officially – dry but Traynors performers, for example, would often “hang out” at local pubs between sets, and it was not uncommon for some of them to be “rather too primed” by the last bracket of the evening. “Booze” subsequently became a non-detachable adjunct to performance with the move to pub clubs. Overindulgence in alcohol might be deemed characteristic of socialisation in general in Australia, and (as Bernard Bolan suggests) our estimate of its impact on the folk community has been coloured somewhat by the premature deaths of identities such as Ayrton, Colin Dryden and Declan Affley, or the admission by other well-known heavy-drinkers that they are lucky to be still living. Even so, informed sources recall that “everybody associated folkmusic with drinking” and that the male folksinger (in particular, the male traditional singer) faced considerable pressure to live up to the “mighty drinker” stereotype. Audience members who enjoyed sitting around the bar with a charismatic larger-than-life performer, imbibing his songs and stories along with the ale, usually failed to realise that the singer probably went through the same well-oiled social ritual night after night. “There was no way [such a singer] could not become a drunk”. Inevitably he would “write himself off” and have to be taken home, usually by his wife or long-suffering woman partner.

For all the romantic mistiness which surrounds our recollections of the 60s, there is no denying that the lot of the folksinger’s partner could be pretty tough. Taken further, the 60s was clearly a less than ideal time for women and minority groups, and the folk scene unblushingly perpetuated inequities. While some commentators believe that coffee lounges like Traynors served as a social and sexual leveller, others shudder at memories of the insensitivity – even exploitation – which went on there. The fact that the Troubadour, for instance, “was full of 16 year old sheilas who thought ‘bearded Australian bushman’, that’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen”, seemed reason enough for Don Henderson to turn up nightly and try out his latest song creation [NLA Interview]. Possibly it was asking too much of Byronic folk-poets not to take advantage of adoring young girl fans, yet being defined and dismissed merely as being “with the singer” was an inexcusable devaluation – albeit one typical of the times. The scene was indisputably male-dominated. (Glen Tomasetti once debated with fellow-feminist Wendy Lowenstein the inherent contradiction in promoting male singers and songwriters in Australian Tradition). Lynne St John suggests that women singers worked within distinct parameters; opportunities for them to record, for example, were quantitatively fewer than for men. Tomasetti, Shirley Jacobs and Somerset were among the few Melbourne women who recorded significantly during the period in question. (The devaluation and lack of acknowledgment of women’s contribution to the 60s revival seem to have persisted. A few years ago a workshop celebrating women pioneers of the Australian folk scene, at the National Folk Festival, was cancelled due to lack of interest). Blatant sexism and homophobia were glaringly apparent within Anglo-Celtic milieux, seemingly “to be expected” of the cliched, macho, beer-drinking traditionalist balladeer. (Even 35-40 years on, very few gay folksingers are “out” in Australia). There were only token acknowledgments of indigenous issues (isolated song contributions by Shearston, Leyden, Vinnicombe and Kitamura, or occasional redirection of concert funds to the Aboriginal Advancement League) or of green issues (although Frank Povah’s ‘Electricity Blues’, attacking the damming of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, did predate the ‘Save the Franklin’ campaign by 15 years).

Tasmanian singer-songwriter John Lavery concedes that the liberality of the folk community had its limits. In hindsight, subscription to a free love ethos often simply became an excuse to exploit someone, while, to a large extent, issues of gender or sexuality “were not on the table”. Yet Lavery and other veterans believe the community (and 60s youth in general) should not be judged too harshly. Within context of the very conservative Australia of the time, “we were open-minded”. Particularly in remote outposts like Tasmania (argues Lavery), youthful folksingers and activists represented the first wave of dissent. Unlike the major mainland metropolises, there was no readily accessible radical sub-culture. Older bohemians were few and a bit too eccentric and unapproachable for most conservatively-reared fledgling free-thinkers to draw on. “We seemed to be the first … we were all so young … We were very much babes in the wood, finding our feet”. Vietnam – and associated questions of war and peace – rightly dominated the agenda. Many young activists were displaying considerable courage by opposing Federal Government policy (and their elders) and totally rejecting the values they had been brought up with. Accordingly, also taking on board women’s lib, gay and land rights, and green issues was something of a quantum leap, beyond the capacity of most kids of the time. In fairness, it should be stressed that people who were involved with folkmusic in the 1960s have frequently been in the vanguard of social change in the years since 1972.        

In researching the history of the 60s revival  (over several years), I have enjoyed the enormous privilege of speaking with many key players of the era, and of sharing their memories of the folk scene in its heyday. I am acutely aware that the interview process
sometimes entailed invoking people’s personal demons: the spectres of unrealised dreams and lost ideals, general disillusionment, marriage and relationship breakdowns, alcoholism, mental illness. With surprisingly few exceptions, even so, veteran performers and former audience members have tended to recall the period nostalgically and with affection. Not least of the charms of that time was the camaraderie which developed between people from diverse backgrounds who shared veneration for (and immersion in) the music. Such communion encompassed the local and interstate performing networks, with aspiring singers and guitarists taking their lead and inspiration from more established performers. Hearing Glen Tomasetti first turned Adelaide country singer John Fulton-Stevens to folksongs, for instance. Lyell Sayer started singing and playing in public after attending the Emerald Hill concerts, and consciously patterned his style after Martyn Wyndham-Read. Peter Laycock acquired the basics of guitar technique and a working songbag of Australian ballads from the eminent collector Ron Edwards and, in turn, allowed 16 year old Trevor Lucas to learn from his performing experience. Tasmanian singer Ian Clarke’s lifelong passion for folkmusic was first nurtured by hearing Declan Affley, Alex Hood and Margaret Kitamura on the mainland. Dave Brannigan was “turned on” to folksong by hearing Brian Mooney sing ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ at Traynors.

On occasion, this communion extended itself to international celebrities,  as canny entrepreneurs cashed in on the folk boom by bringing out the biggest names in the industry. Away from home, many of the stars sought out the society of like-minded individuals and local artists found themselves mixing socially with their peers and idols at Traynor’s, the Troubadour, the Folk Hut, the Folk Centre, or at parties around town. In some cases enduring friendships were established. Singer Peter Dickie remembers shaking hands with the legendary Josh White and wondering what other (immortal) hands White must have shaken in his lifetime. Dickie swapped songs with Lou Gottlieb of The Limeliters and Bill Svanoe of The Rooftop Singers one evening at the Workshop in Melbourne, and later spent a day showing Judy Collins around Melbourne. The great gospel singer Brother John Sellers significantly boosted the career of Gary Shearston by insisting that his young protege share the bill with him at the Troubadour. Melbourne poet Martin Smith and his wife Rosie got to know American musicians Leslie Grinage and Bruce Langhorne when they toured Australia with the New York Ballet; through them they became close friends with Odetta. The Smiths also played host to the Clancy Brothers during a gloriously “mad week” in 1965. Paul Stookey taught John Fulton-Stevens claw-hammer guitar one night in Adelaide while Tina Lawton’s family befriended a homesick Peter Yarrow. Mary Travers relaxed by riding horses at Judy Jacques’ property on the outskirts of Melbourne. Graham Squance came to the rescue with his own instrument when Bob Dylan’s guitar was damaged en route to Melbourne.

 Due acknowledgement and reference should be made also to the contributions of a number of nurturing non-performers to the folk scene. Restaurateur Tom Lazar was responsible for folkmusic being featured at both the Reata and Little Reata. Frank French, who established the Pigalle in Sydney, later reactivated PACT Folk. Tasmanian enthusiast David Paulin co-ordinated a series of concerts and minor festivals in Northern Tasmania and founded a shortlived folk club as late as 1971. Probably the most influential of the enthusiasts was Peter Mann, proprietor of the specialist Discurio Record store in Melbourne. Mann, who was active in the Peace movement, organised Pete Seeger’s first visit to Australia, imported crucial reserves of recorded music from Britain and America, and went a step further, producing and releasing a series of LPs by Australian artists: Affley, Mooney, Wyndham-Read, Spooner, Lumsden, McIntyre, etc.

For many of us – the so-called baby-boomers – the time and music represent our youth. “We enjoyed ourselves. We weren’t driven by a compulsion to make millions”, observes Tasmanian singer-songwriter Mike Raine, expressing pleasure that, in many cases, bonds forged between participants then continue to resonate 30-40 years later. “A wonderful time – my formative years”, “a time of hope … a lovely period”, Martyn Wyndham-Read and Glen Tomasetti have recalled respectively, echoing the sentiments of most of the artists I interviewed. (Interviewed in 1999, a few years before her death, Tomasetti cited the immense satisfaction she felt at being able to earn enough money in an evening’s playing at the Cafe Ad Lib or elsewhere to buy groceries and feed her children the next day: “Singing for my supper”. In her view, the coffee lounges were ideal venues for the performance of folksong because they fostered intimacy, warmth, naturalness, spontaneity and ease between artist and audience. Peter Laycock concurs: “It never got any better than that”, he notes of playing to enthusiasts at the Ad Lib).  “I generally loved it all”, recalls Lenore Somerset. “I never saw a hand lifted in anger towards a player or a patron during the folk years”, remembers Adelaide entrepreneur and singer John Fulton-Stevens. Melbourne club organisers Don Carless and Mary Traynor agree that, by and large, died-in-the-wool folkies were “great people” and that the folk era was characterised by its overall decency. (So much so that incidents like the misappropriation of proceeds from the West Gate bridge fundraiser, the theft of Gordon McIntyre’s guitar after a Town Hall folk evening, or the theft of some of Tomasetti’s most treasured records during a party she hosted, are still seen as glaringly uncharacteristic). “There were very few assholes”, assesses Danny Spooner.

[In addition to printed sources and recorded interviews held by the National Library – cited in the text – this paper draws on my own interviews & conversations  with David & Lynne Lumsden, Danny Spooner, Brian Mooney, the late Denis Gibbons, Martyn Wyndham-Read, Gary Shearston, Marian Henderson, the late Glen Tomasetti, Phyl Lobl, John Lavery, Neil Gardner, Alex Myers, Beth Sowter, Bernard Bolan, Anne Infante, the late Wendy Lowenstein,  the late Stan Arthur, the late John Fulton-Stevens, Jim Maguire, Mick Counihan, Keith McHenry, Ken & Fiona White, Don Carless, Peter Dickie, Mary Traynor, Garry Kinnane, Ian Clarke, Lyell Sayer, Mike Raine, Peter Laycock, Cris Larner, Ian Parossien, Sean Cullip, Jim & Anna Kenny, Duncan Brown, Dave de Hugard, Kath Lumsden, Chris Shaw, Peter Wesley-Smith, Dave Nicholson, Mike McLellan & Mark Gregory]

KEY PLAYERS ON THE SYDNEY COFFEE LOUNGE SCENE

My thanks to the contributors to this collection, particularly Brian Grayson and Libby White (nee Gillespie). Contributions welcome.