The most recent volume in the University of Illinois Press's impressive Music in American Life series, Roots of the Revival focusses on the years immediately preceding the folk boom that gripped the United States from 1958 to 1964, the years of the great “folk revival.” (There was, however, another earlier “revival” during the 1930s and 1940s.) The period before the 1958 release of the Kingston Trio's surprise hit “Tom Dooley” – the song which is usually credited with kick-starting the (second) revival – was no “dead zone for popular folk music in the United States,” Cohen and Donaldson contend, and it is wrong, as many historians and folklorists have done, to write the 1950s off as a decade in which folk music was essentially lost to the excesses of anticommunist hysteria and repression (1). In addition, the authors want to address the interconnections that existed between the folk revival taking place in the United States during the 1950s and the admittedly smaller, but no less vibrant, one that existed in Britain at the same time.

Among the many musicians, promoters, writers, publishers, collectors, club owners, and festival organizers examined in the book, on both sides of the Atlantic, are the Weavers, Ewan MacColl, Paul Robeson, Harry Smith, Odetta Holmes, Lonnie Donegan, Irwin Silber, Harry Belafonte, Albert Grossman, Izzy Young, Shirley Collins, Guy Carawan, and the New Lost City Ramblers, usually with brief biographical overviews and extensive quotations from contemporary publications like Sing Out!, The Hillbilly-Folk Record Journal and Caravan. Unsurprisingly, though, the two dominant figures in the narrative are the indefatigable and extraordinarily influential pair of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Woody Guthrie, with whom Lomax and Seeger are usually inextricably linked, is also present, although not as prominently as one would expect (indeed, unlike most of the other figures in the book, Guthrie is not even given a brief biographical sketch, which is both a surprising and a regrettable omission).

Cohen and Donaldson examine the roots of the folk revival within the larger contexts of postwar American affluence and the creation of a new teenage and youth consumer culture, alongside the rise of the civil rights movement, antinuclear sentiment, and both domestic and international Cold War tensions. These connections could certainly have been pursued more fully, however. For example, the important role played by music with respect to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was formed in early 1958, is glossed over in a few sentences. Nor do the authors really explore the reasons why American folk music was so popular in Great Britain at this time (and the influence does mostly seem to have been one-way, a position which is reflected in the book's own emphasis throughout).

More problematically, while the authors provide numerous well-chosen illustrations of the struggles to define and classify “folk music,” alongside the persistent – and troublesome – desire for “purity” or “authenticity,” they do not really engage with these complex issues thoroughly. Similarly, when discussing the important contribution of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) to the folk revival, it would have been useful to see the authors considering some of the impulses and motivations that lie behind such record collecting and curation. (On this particular issue, see, for example, Amanda Petrusich's delightful Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78 RPM Records (2014)). Indeed, the book as a whole is rich in detail, but a little short in analysis on occasion.

Nonetheless, Cohen and Donaldson succeed in conveying the richness of the folk music scene in both the US and the UK in the 1950s, in what stands in interesting contrast to the rather glum portrayal to be found in Joel and Ethan Coen's 2013 film on the subject, Inside Llewyn Davis. It is a richness nicely captured in the authors' quotation of the Greenwich Village folksinger Dave Van Ronk's view that “the last years of the 1950s were a great time to be in the Village” because it “was not too crazy yet, but there was an exhilarating sense of something big right around the corner. (Incidentally, Van Ronk's memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005), from which the quotation is taken, was also one of the sources for the Coen brothers' film, and Cohen and Donaldson like it so much they quote it twice – on pages 113 and 146.) Specialists may not find a great deal with which they are unfamiliar in Roots of the Revival, but for newcomers, and especially for students, the book provides an excellent introduction to the folk world of the period.