From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Cafe (c) to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the famous folk music revival of the 1950s and '60s. Folk City, by Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen, explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. The musical form blossomed particularly in Greenwich Village, the famed neighborhood that had long nurtured unconventional art, progressive politics, and countercultural trends. But the phenomenon was not inevitable. After all, folk music was largely rural in origins, the songs of peasants in the Old World and then of sailors, cowboys, lumberjacks, coal miners, chain gangs, and others across the United States. How it became urban and modern is a fascinating story, one that involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters, festival organizers, musicologists, agents and managers, editors and writers-not to mention the musicians and their audiences. In this account, Petrus and Cohen capture the exuberance of the times and introduce readers to a host of characters who brought a new style to the biggest audience in the history of popular music. Among the savvy New York entrepreneurs committed to promoting folk music were Izzy Young of the Folklore Center, Mike Porco of Gerde's Folk City, and John Hammond of Columbia Records. While these and other businessmen developed commercial networks for musicians, the performance venues provided the artists spaces to test their mettle. The authors portray Village coffee houses not simply as lively venues but as incubators of a burgeoning counterculture, where artists from diverse backgrounds honed their performance techniques and challenged social convention in the era of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Accessible and engaging, fresh and provocative, rich in anecdotes, interviews, excerpts from memoirs, biographical sidebars, and primary sources, Folk City is lavishly illustrated with images collected for the accompanying major exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 2015.

About the Author
Stephen Petrus is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, where he is the lead curator of Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. He has published essays on twentieth-century American politics and culture and is working on a book on Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 1960s. Ronald D. Cohen is Emeritus Professor of History at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Indiana. He is the author of numerous books on the history of folk music, including Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (2002), Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 (2003), Folk Music: The Basics (2006), Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States (2010), Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 (2011).

Reviews
[The book] has much to offer music researchers and will serve as a key source in helping its readers understand the spaces, ideologies, and connections of the influential midcentury New York folk scene. Thus, whether for general readers, historians, musicologists, or anyone else engaging substantially with the history of American folk revivalism, this book is a welcome addition. * Brian Jones, Society for American Music Bulletin *
Folk City is an excellent book, important not only as a history of folk music but as a significant contribution to urban history as well. * Michael Marino, Popular Music and Society *
One of the strongest aspects of Folk City is that Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen are not unduly fixated on Dylan as the most famous of the Greenwich Village singers, restricting him to a finely inflected closing chapter. Instead the trace the emergence of the folk revival from informal sing-alongs in Washington Square Park, through the rise of socially aware groups and labels such as the Almanac Singers and Folkways, to the emergence of a distinct club scene at Gaslight, Cafe Wha?...It comes close to being a complete social history of a vital, but ultimately tragic moment. * Brian Morton, The Times Literary Supplement *
magnificent ... a rich tapestry. * Liz Thomson, fRoots *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190231026
Author Stephen Petrus
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1080g
Dimensions(mm) 260mm * 180mm * 24mm