Folk, Pop and Agit-Prop: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger After ‘A Complete Unknown’
Based on Elijah Wald’s hour-by-hour countdown Dylan Goes Electric!, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a quirky, engaging and (thankfully) never reverential biopic that tracks the journey of Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) from acoustic folk to rock amplification. Its main concern is music and mimesis: to showcase Chalamet performing the Dylan songbook with a fidelity to the original beyond the vocal range of the lip-synching Larry Parks in The Jolson Story (1946) or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).
The imitations are all, as it were, pitch perfect, but they tend to submerge the political dimension to Dylan’s decision to crank up the volume at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. The gesture was not about electricity but autonomy, the desire of the artist to free himself from the restrictive meters and themes of an agit-prop folk tradition. Heard retrospectively, “It Ain’t Me Babe” is no longer just a mean way to dump a girlfriend, but a message to his partisan audience to look elsewhere for a political savior.
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Dylan’s farewell to the folk club is set in relief against the sympathies of two kindred and soon-to-be subaltern performers in his orbit: Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton) and Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro). Dylan, of course, is sui generis, the kind of transcendent cultural avatar who comes along once in a century. Baez and Seeger are more down-to-earth talents, prodigiously gifted certainly, but artists who stayed within their comfort zones, namely the harmonizing of folk music and activist politics. Seeger was shaped by the 1930s, Baez by the 1960s, and both, like Dylan, had a moment of decision that defined their allegiances.
When Dylan ambled into Greenwich Village in 1961, Baez was already a folk music star whose angelic soprano took the rough edges off even the angriest social realist lyrics (the voice is “maybe too pretty,” rasps Chalamet as Bob). For his part, Seeger was a living link to the old guard of Depression-bred folk singers who picked up guitar, banjo, or fiddle to provide a soundtrack for political change. In the film, Seeger is portrayed as a secular saint — serene and good humored, the troubadour as social justice warrior. Unlike the lethal guitar brandished by Woody Guthrie, Seeger’s banjo didn’t kill fascists; it invited them to lay down their arms and sing along.
Born in 1919, Seeger was radicalized by the economic devastation of the Great Depression and gravitated to the extreme edges of the Popular Front, the loose coalition of men and women “on the left,” as the phrase went, who fought against fascism at home and abroad. While still a teenager, he joined the Young Communist League and later graduated to the Communist Party USA (accounts vary on exactly when). In early 1941, Seeger teamed with three fellow militant musicians to form the Almanac Singers, whose ethos determined their playlist. “We get our stuff from the people themselves, that’s where the best music and poetry can be found,” the group told the Daily Worker. They also got their stuff direct from Moscow, changing their repertoire to fit the party line of the moment: first, antiwar and isolationist (until June 1941, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact interregnum) and then fiercely interventionist and pro-Soviet (after June 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia).
In 1948, along with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, Seeger formed a new group, the Weavers, to continue spreading the word in song. In 1949, by his own account, Seeger bailed on formal membership in the Communist Party, but he remained a steadfast fellow traveler, backing the party line in speech and song. In 1950, the Weavers surprised themselves by soaring to the top of the music charts with “Goodnight, Irene,” a dreamy love song with no discernably ideological leanings. They scored follow-up hits with “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.”
The anticommunist atmospherics of the Cold War derailed any further incursions by the Weavers into the pop mainstream. In 1950, frontman Seeger was listed in Red Channels: The Report on Communist Influence in Radio and Television, the blacklister’s guidebook. In 1952, he was accused of being a member of the Communist Party in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The Weavers were yanked off a scheduled appearance on NBC’s Today Show with Dave Garroway. Gigs dried up. Decca Records cancelled their contract.
On August 18, 1955, Seeger received the inevitable subpoena to testify before HUAC. He brought along his banjo and attitude. When quizzed about the allegedly subversive lyrics of the antifascist anthem “Wasn’t That a Time,” (“Our fathers bled at Valley Forge/The snow was red with blood”), Seeger offered to perform the song in the hearing room, but HUAC chairman Francis E. Walter (D-PA) was smart enough to decline. During his testimony, Seeger bravely refused to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. He just calmly and simply withheld his cooperation. “I refuse the suggestion that because my opinion might be different from yours, that I am any less an American than you,” he said. But hadn’t he performed at communist-sponsored events? “I’ve sung and picked my banjo for Americans of all stripes,” he replied evenly, “in hobo jungles and for the Rockefellers.”
In due course, Seeger was held in contempt of Congress and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. In 1957, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on 10 counts of contempt and, after years of legal wrangling, in 1961, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. In 1962, however, a Court of Appeals tossed out the conviction, at which point the DOJ, now under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, let the matter rest. An early scene in A Complete Unknown depicts the zeitgeist shift from the red-baiting McCarthy era to the open air of JFK’s New Frontier. As an adoring crowd outside the federal courthouse building in New York gathers ‘round Seeger and sings along to “This Land Is Your Land,” a lone, die-hard anticommunist protester stands defeated and crestfallen, his “Better Dead than Red” placard at his side.
Yet vindication in the courts did not mean access to the nation’s airwaves. In 1963, ABC tried cashing in on the folk craze with Hootenanny, a showcase for the musical trend of the day, forgetting that many of the most esteemed folk singers were blacklisted. When Hootenanny refused to book Seeger, Joan Baez refused to book Hootenanny. Other radio-friendly folk acts such as the Kingston Trio (who scored a big hit with Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in 1961) and Peter, Paul and Mary (who scored a big hit with Seeger and Lee Hays’ “If I Had a Hammer” in 1962) also boycotted the show, turning down offers of $25,000 to perform, serious money in 1963. Seeger was invited to appear on the second season of Hootenanny, but refused to sign the required loyalty oath. Not until 1967, when the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour broke the embargo (the comedy duo insisted and a reluctant CBS finally agreed) did he return to network television. (In the film, Seeger is shown hosting a non-network television show, as he did for National Education Television in 1965, before the breakthrough on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The show was called A Roomful of Music and some local NET affiliates refused to telecast it.)
Unlike Seeger, Baez was not burdened with the baggage from a romance with American communism in the 1930s. Born in 1941 (so, like Dylan, not a boomer), Baez was raised a Quaker, which meant with a social conscience, and the education took. From high school on, she lent her voice to antiwar causes and civil rights activism. In 1962, at age twenty-one, she was a Time magazine cover girl. “Her voice is clear as air in the autumn, a vibrant, strong, and untrained and thrilling soprano,” rhapsodized Time’s smitten profile. “She wears no make-up and her long black hair hangs like a drapery around her long almond face.”
Soon the intensity of Baez’s political commitments persuaded even skeptics that she was not just a pretty voice and face. In 1965, Variety called her “as fighting a femme pacifist as has come down the folk pike.” In the 1960s, she probably played at more rallies than concerts, but for most of her performances it was a distinction without a difference. In 1969, at the Woodstock Festival, she sang a version of the labor elegy, “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” that was as fiery as anything performed by Jimi Hendrix.
As the body count in Vietnam escalated so did Baez’s antiwar activism, often with draft resister (not dodger) David Harris, whom she married in 1968. By then, no official blacklist existed but she was routinely assailed by right wingers as a treasonous ingrate and tool of Hanoi. Cartoonist Al Capp used his widely syndicated comic strip, Li’l Abner to mock Baez as a communist dupe, caricaturing her as a poseur folkie dubbed “Joanie Phoanie,” who recorded tunes such as “Let’s Congo with the Viet Cong” and “On a Hammer and Sickle Built for Two.” Baez shrugged it off. “I’ve been called a commie-pinko since I was sixteen,” she said. The full chronicle of her personal and political journey is recounted in the documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise (2023), directed by Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor. The union of “music and politics,” Baez reflects, defined her life.
Omitted from the documentary — oddly — is one of Baez’s best moments and one of Seeger’s worst. Though not as mythically resonant as Dylan’s act of defiance at Newport, the incident highlights a significant generational and ideological divide between the two folk artists.
Beginning in 1975, after the North Vietnamese won the Vietnam war, the communists did what they always do: regimented the society and persecuted the dissenters. By the late 1970s, hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled the country by boat and overland, flooding into Hong Kong and Thailand. As the humanitarian crisis worsened, veterans of the antiwar wing of the American left kept mainly silent.
Baez was an exception. In May 31, 1979, in her role as president of the Humanitas/ International Human Rights Committee, she published an “Open Letter to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” in five major newspapers. She reminded the Vietnamese leadership that many Americans had opposed their government’s involvement in the Vietnam war out of “a commitment to human dignity, freedom and self-determination” and that now the same commitment “compels us to speak out against your brutal disregard of human rights.” Baez had approached 350 prominent antiwar activists to sign the letter. Only 84 agreed to lend their names, including poet Allen Ginsberg, entertainer Lily Tomlin, and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary.
Not signing were Yarrow’s partners, Mary Travis and Paul Stookey, which gives a good sense of the internecine warfare Baez’s letter incited among what was once a unified front. The names of Jane Fonda and her then husband Tom Hayden were also absent. The radical lawyer William Kunstler, who successfully defended the Chicago 7 against conspiracy charges in 1970, spoke for the hard, that is pro-communist, left. “I do not believe in attacks on socialist countries, even where violations of human rights may occur,” he said, before accusing Baez of being a CIA agent. Also among the missing names: Pete Seeger. A less conspicuous absence was that of Bob Dylan, who had long since relegated that sort of thing to his back pages. I wonder if Baez even asked him to sign.
Later that year, Baez visited refugee camps in northern Thailand to bring attention to the plight of another group of refugees from communism, what she called “one of the worst situations that’s ever been, historically, anywhere, of people starving to death” — that is, the Cambodian genocide. “Obviously, yes, it is genocide, but even if it weren’t qualified as that, it is of such magnitude we have to respond to it,” she told a press conference in Paris.
Again, Seeger was missing in action. His banjo and voice were now raised in service to the cause of environmentalism and the campaign against nuclear power. From the deck of the Clearwater, a sloop he built in 1969, he spearheaded an extraordinary effort to clean up the Hudson River, perhaps the greatest of his many legacies.
Seeger died in 2014, but he lived to see the nation that prosecuted and blacklisted him atone with a cascade of awards and accolades. In 1994, he received a National Medal of Arts and a full-throated concert tribute as a Kennedy Center Honoree. “Some artists make musical history,” said President Bill Clinton. “Pete Seeger made history with his music.” At the Kennedy Center, Roger McGuinn led the crowd in a rousing version of Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” In 1965, propelled by McGuinn’s electric twelve string, it was a huge hit for the Byrds.
The twilight tributes included Pete Seeger The Power of Song (2007), an irresistible hagiography directed by Jim Brown for PBS’s American Master series. Like the other testimonials, the documentary avoided the more problematic passages in Seeger’s career, when he changed his tune with the speed of a telegram from Moscow and refused to criticize the horrors in the Soviet Union, Vietnam and Cambodia.
In 2007, perhaps realizing he had an atonement of his own to make, Seeger composed an anti-communist, or rather anti-Joseph Stalin, folk song, “The Big Joe Blues” (“He ruled with an iron hand/He put an end to the dreams/Of so many in every land”). Of course, the song would have had more bite had Stalin not died in 1953, but the belated gesture showed that Seeger came to understand his biggest lapse as a folk artist was not trying to pull the plug on Dylan’s amplifier at Newport.
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