Show #7: ISRAEL YOUNG (IZZY YOUNG) - Full Audio & Transcript
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MEL BERNAM (ANNOUNCER): Here is Radio New York Folk Music Worldwide. A program devoted to the best in folk music throughout the world. Showcasing the top performers and authorities in the field. Now your host for Folk Music Worldwide, Alan Wasser.

ALAN WASSER (HOST): With us today is Mr. Israel Young [a.k.a. Izzy Young], director of the Folklore Center in New York, and an expert on the rebirth of folk music in New York City.

Mr. Young, you've been active in folk music in New York for about 20 years now. What was it like when you got started?

ISRAEL YOUNG, "IZZY" (GUEST): Well, in the early days it was very simple. First of all, we didn't just have folk singing and folk dancing also. The people danced and they sang.

I feel a little bad today that people only sing and very few are interested in the dancing. At that time, there were also very few singers, there were very few recording companies.

People sang only for fun. People didn't think in terms of making a living, since there was no living to be made.

There was one group of people that believed folk music had to be pure. They could sing songs only in the way they were sung in the southern Appalachians, since that was the music they would know.

The music came mainly from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. There was another group of people that believed folk music had a political importance.

Like in the Square dance, instead of saying, "Swing your partner, or swing your corner," they would say, "Swing your union maid."

If you joined either group you were considered a nut or a leftist or a satiric. I'm very happy to say that in those 20 years, there's been a tremendous change.

There were few heroes in that early time. You had people like Richard Dyer-Bennet, who's thought of as a purist, who took a particular kind of song who tried to recreate the idea of a minstrel of America, the idea that existed in Europe in the 15th, 16th, 17th century.

He studied under the last surviving minstrel in Sweden. He came back to America and he taught it to various people. And now he even has his own label.

Now, I think it would be very nice if we could play one song from one of his albums called Greensleeves, which first was written in England around the 16th century. It's mentioned by Shakespeare in one of his plays.

It's used at play party, it's used as a Morris dance. It was used by the Jacobites, it was used by the anti-Jacobites.

It was used for the Queen, against the Queen. It's been used as a children's rhyme, as a game.

ALAN: All right, fine. This is Richard Dyer-Bennet doing Greensleeves.

[Song performance 1 of 4: Richard Dyer-Bennet: "Greensleeves"]:

Lyrics:

Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me out discourteously.
When I have loved you so long,
Delighting in my company.

Greensleeves is my delight.
Greensleeves is all my joy.
Greensleeves is my heart of gold,
And who but my lady Greensleeves.

Greensleeves is my delight.
Greensleeves is all my joy.
Greensleeves is my heart of gold,
And who but my lady Greensleeves.

[end of music]

ALAN: Mr. Young, what happened after Richard Dyer-Bennett and the others got folk music started in New York City?

ISRAEL YOUNG: Well, at that time also, along with the purists, there were people that believed that the city people also have a heart, not just people from the country. It was important to take the material from the country and use it.

In fact, people like Pete Seeger, before the Almanac Singers, that took foreign songs, just like songs from the Spanish Civil War, they sang songs from all over the world. But they also sang southern Appalachian songs.

They didn't care too much about pressing their own personality. The song was important.

They believed that you could have a good time with folk music, that folk music was there for everybody to enjoy. And because of that, Pete Seeger's been one of the primary forces in the modern great rebirth of folk music in America. He's encouraged more people than anyone.

Erik Darling of the Rooftop Singers started out as a student of his, if not an actual student, an admirer. Bob Gibson started out with him.

Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio always gives him great credit. The fact is, hardly a person in the field hasn't not been touched by the ideas of Pete Seeger.

His ideas are very informal. He could take music from everywhere. He believes, just ask anybody, any cultured person in the world believes that there is a interaction between folk music and the cultivating music at that time.

ALAN: What is it that made Pete Seeger so influential? What did he do that influenced people in so many ways?

ISRAEL YOUNG: To perform what Richard Dyer-Bennett did, you would have to be a trained musician. You would have to learn classic guitar, you would have to take voice lessons, develop a ton of qualities.

But Pete Seeger, a lot of people are hurt by this, you could just take a guitar, you could take a banjo, you could strum, play for yourself. If you wanted to go deeper you could go deeper.

Pete Seeger said, "This is not to make you go deeper. If you want to, good, I would help you." He just wanted to play with it and enjoy it.

It's a natural part of the condition. Pete Seeger was always there. I think it will be good if we take an example off an album of his called Nonesuch in which he plays with Frank Hamilton.

Frank Hamilton is a brilliant guitarist from Chicago who's taken his place in the Weavers now, and they've taken an old English tune, Nonesuch, and they play with it for which I think is a very natural thing to do. Now with each generation to take the old material and express it, what it means to them and I think he does that very well in this song.

ALAN: All right, fine. Let's hear that.

[Song performance 2 of 4: Pete Seeger: "Nonesuch" - instrumental]

ISRAEL YOUNG: Pete Seeger can represent that easy-going attitude towards folk music. You can take folk music from anywhere. You can sing a song by Bach, you can sing a song by Irving Berlin, you can also sing a song by from Neil Lee Griffin, Scarecrow of the South.

And in this case, he takes an English dance tune and plays with it, because it's a beautiful melody. He announced to the world that folk music does not belong only to people in the isolated pockets, culture in the South, or North, or West, or the East. There's room for the commercial aspects of folk music and there is also room now for a serious interest or a purist interest.

ALAN: Well, now how would you say Seeger is different from a contemporary group such as Peter, Paul and Mary?

ISRAEL YOUNG: Well, my idea again is that good folk music is good fun. I feel that really good folk music could stand on the stage and has real commercial values.

People that put down commercial music are thinking wrong. There is good commercial music and bad commercial music. The same also with folk music as such. There's good ethnic folk music, and there's bad ethnic folk music.

I think a person today in the city has a, not only a right but a mandate to take the things that happen to him or the things that mean to him are not things anymore that happen on farms because we don't live on farms. We're not working in the coal yards, we're not working the mines, or the butcher, in slaughterhouses.

The natural surroundings today are books and records. A city person is sophisticated because the different responsibilities than a country singer.

When you hear a country singer, you don't think of good and bad. You hear a Kentucky woman singing a hymn, you get a feeling, you get a smell of the people down South. You can see a church. It's part of her body that's singing.

A city singer doesn't have this, but he has a knack for sophistication. He can take material from anywhere, and something from a book, a novel or a film can affect him in exactly the same way that a natural disaster can affect the farm...

ALAN: Are there any songs that have actually come from books at all?

ISRAEL YOUNG: Well, Pete Seeger for example, in his consummate genius, many years ago he picked up a, just a spare phrase in Sholokhov's novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. The idea of Where Have All the Flowers Gone, how the generations regenerate.

Things repeat and he added music to this. He just sang it around, he never plugged it or pushed it just the way it doesn't matter sung in concert.

But then it was picked up by Peter, Paul and Mary, and it became the top song in America. And again to prove the idea that the city music is in coming to the floor, this particular song was picked up by Marlene Dietrich, and it was written as "Sag' mir, wo die Blumen Sind" and that sold about 300,000 copies in Germany.

And now she's so pleased with that she's doing 26 other liners. Here's a simple message, from a not-so-simple person from the city that affects a simple persons and un-simple persons at the same time.

ALAN: Here is Peter, Paul and Mary then, doing Where Have All the Flowers Gone.

[Song performance 3 of 4: Peter, Paul and Mary: "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"]:

Lyrics:

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone, young girls have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young girls gone, gone for husbands everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the husbands gone, long time passing?
Where have all the husbands gone, long time ago?
Where have all the husbands gone, gone for soldiers everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone, gone to graveyards, everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone, gone to flowers, everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone, young girls have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

[end of music]

ALAN: That was Peter, Paul and Mary doing Where Have All the Flowers Gone. And this is Alan Wasser, Radio New York Worldwide, Folk Music Worldwide. We'll be back talking to Israel Young, Director of the Folklore Center in New York just after this message.

(commercial break)

Well, this is Alan Wasser again back at Folk Music Worldwide with Israel Young, speciality is music of the city, folk music in the city.

Mr. Young, we've covered Richard Dyer-Bennet, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Peter Paul and Mary. But it seems to me that we've left out a very important part of modern city folk music, The Kingston Trio. They're different from most groups now doing folk music, aren't they?

ISRAEL YOUNG: They're different in that, they're the first of the modern groups. In 1948, a song, you had the group... the granddaddy group was The Weavers, in which Pete Seeger was a part, and that kept folk music up in a certain area for a long time.

They made songs like Tzena, Tzena popular and the common songs of the South. About five or six years ago, probably longer now, I suppose, a group of kids performing on the West Coast got together, they used to play at parties, they all belonged to fraternities, and they sang just for the fun of it.

So then, after a while people started liking them. They sang for bigger parties, they appeared at the Hungry I in San Francisco and they became an overnight sensation in America.

Now a lot of people applaud this but I think it's all very healthy because they've taken music from all over the world, they've tried to find what it is that makes folk music tick and they have the popular pulse in America.

And they don't sing it in a phony way, really. They sing it the way folk music means to them.

In other words, if they hook it up, that's their life, they hook everything up, the big moneymakers, so they sing like big money-makers sing. Anyway, I think it's perfectly natural and there's room for it.

ALAN: What would you say would be a great example of the way they sing?

ISRAEL YOUNG: Well, there's a song that was originally collected and made popular by Cynthia Gooding, a very fine singer with a small audience but devoted audience.

She's in Spain now studying music still more, and she sang the song La Bamba and the Kingston Trio picked it up from her and they do it in a very wild way, but still you can recognize the original force and power from the music the way Cynthia Gooding sings it.

ALAN: All right, then. Here's The Kingston Trio doing La Bamba.

[Song Performance 4 of 4: The Kingston Trio: "La Bamba" - in Spanish]

ALAN: I'm awfully sorry, but I'm afraid our time is up again and we've been talking to Israel Young, director of the Folklore Center in New York and an expert on the rebirth of folk music in New York City.

Let me just comment again quickly that if any of our listeners want to comment or make any suggestions just let us know you were there, why don't you write in to me, Alan Wasser, or to the show, Folk Music Worldwide, Mel Bernum, and we'll give you the address in a moment.

MEL BERNAM (ANNOUNCER): This has been Folk Music Worldwide. Devoted to the best in folk music throughout the world and spotlighting top performers and authorities in the field. If you have any suggestions, request requests or comments why not write in to Folk Music Worldwide, Radio New York WRUL, New York City 19 USA. This has been a Music Worldwide presentation of Radio New York Worldwide.

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