Gillian Mitchell's The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945–1980 takes as its focus a surge of popular interest in vernacular music traditions that culminated in the early 1960s. Mitchell's study makes use of a groundbreaking comparative approach, considering the revival not only in the United States but also in anglophone Canada. By following this path, the author avoids the nationalistic romance that can be a pitfall for historians of popular music. Indeed, nationalistic romance becomes one of the objects of study as Mitchell examines the implications of nationalism and national politics for the folk music revival in the two countries. Another benefit of the comparative approach is that the folk revival is revealed as a circulating phenomenon whose various local instantiations are never quite unique, but never pale copies of the New York scene either. On the one hand, her discussions of performances, festivals, and music criticism, and the quoted recollections of various interviewees, reveal deep connections between the various sites of the folk music revival. On the other hand, her comparison, in Chapter 4, of two important geographical centres of the revival, one American and one Canadian, demonstrates just how distinctively local history and culture shape local scenes.

The volume is first and foremost a history of the folk music revival. Mitchell's discussion is detailed and knowledgeable, and draws upon an abundance of data gathered from archives, periodicals, and interviews with revival musicians and participants. The author's ability to synthesize this detail in a coherent narrative is truly impressive. Mitchell progresses chronologically, dividing the folk music revival into three periods: a period of intensifying interest in folk music beginning around the turn of the century and reaching its height between 1945 and 1958, the apex or ‘great boom’ of the folk music revival from 1958 to 1965, and a post-revival period, from 1965 to around 1980. Like Robert Cantwell, Mitchell dates the boom period as beginning in 1958, the year of the release of the Kingston Trio's hit ‘Tom Dooley’, and ending in 1965, the year that, according to popular music mythology, Bob Dylan brought the revival to an end by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival.Footnote ¹ In the middle of the narrative, Chapter 4 offers relief from the linearity of the historical account and the generality of the North American focus. The chapter is devoted to a discussion of life in two different folk-music ‘villages’ at the height of the revival – Greenwich Village in New York and Yorkville in Toronto – which covers history, economic activity, performance spaces, and sociability in the two neighbourhoods.

Mitchell argues that a focus on diversity and eclecticism – an idea of ‘unity in diversity’ – was central to the postwar folk music revival (see 67–8). So too was a commitment to progressive leftist politics. A central concern of the early part of her narrative, then, involves finding precedents for these focuses. She notes that in both Canada and the United States folklore studies were not initially very diverse or eclectic; rather, they were dominated by work that identified and celebrated a predominantly British folksong heritage. Mitchell observes a move away from a British centre and towards greater diversity as the century progressed. In the United States Mitchell locates this broadening in the scholarship of John Lomax and Carl Sandburg and in the work of various authors and artists, many funded by the federal government, who were active during the Great Depression. In Canada the move away from a British centre was evident in the work of John Murray Gibbon, who organized festivals celebrating a musical mosaic of immigrant contributions in Canadian culture,and that of Marius Barbeau, who devoted his attention to the folklore of French Canadians and Canadian indigenous peoples. As for the connection between the folk music revival and leftist politics, Mitchell traces it to the American Popular Front movement that emerged in the middle of the 1930s. The American Popular Front aligned itself with a number of activist songwriters, including ‘Aunt’ Molly Jackson and Woody Guthrie, and established initial connections between rural activist musicians and left-leaning urban audiences.

Having identified these historical precedents, Mitchell goes on to identify diversity, eclecticism, and progressive leftist ideology as key characteristics of the boom period of the folk music revival in 1958–65. Mitchell demonstrates the importance of these aspects with reference to musical activities, student activism, music criticism, festival programmes, and participants' recollections of the coffeehouse scenes in New York and Toronto. She positions the boom of the revival historically and socially, as a phenomenon closely connected to the post-World-War-II emergence of a ‘new’ middle class (88) in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada. The author characterizes this new middle class (in terms that are perhaps familiar) as a group blessed by unprecedented economic security and affluence and cursed by social restriction, pressure to conform, and a sense of alienation from its own cultural heritage. All aspects of this mixed legacy had implications for the revival: affluence enabled new musical explorations, social restrictions engendered an aesthetic that prioritized the struggle for freedom and rebellion against conformity, and the new middle class's apparent ‘loss of identification’ with its own culture led its members to search for a sense of ‘cultural and ethnic identity’ in musical alterity (92).

Some of this history seems to repeat commonplace narratives about the 1950s and 60s, though in fairness Mitchell does not adopt any position without some critical distance. For example, the author asks whether the newly affluent and homogeneous middle class that apparently emerged in the United States following World War II was also a Canadian phenomenon, considering evidence that postwar life in Canada was neither as economically secure nor as culturally homogeneous as it apparently was in the United States.

Mitchell describes the end of the folk music revival as a kind of collapse coinciding with a number of attendant musical, social, and political trends. She relates how, after 1965, high-profile folk musicians were increasingly integrated into the burgeoning rock scene, moving out of coffee houses and into stadiums. She suggests that songwriting also changed: musicians stopped penning straightforward songs with political messages, choosing rather to explore inner emotional experiences, rural imaginaries, and fantasy worlds. In the United States these musical transformations had a social and political analogue: they occurred as young people began to feel increasingly alienated from political life, older generations, and American society. A youth counterculture was emerging at this time, accompanied by widespread anger about the Vietnam War and the growing presence of violence in American culture. Estrangement also grew between the communities that the folk music revival had once united; in particular, blacks and whites drew apart as race relations grew increasingly tense during the late 1960s.

Canada, like the United States, saw the rise of singer-songwriters who were ‘retiring, individualistic and sensitively self-revealing’ (146). But unlike in America, where social and political alienation was on the increase, there was a growing sense of optimism and possibility in Canada as the country geared up for the 1967 Centennial. This coincided with an increased interest in, and support for, Canadian folk musicians in the mass media and particularly amongst music critics. In the run-up to the celebrations, folk music and musicians found themselves increasingly conceptualized as a kind of valued national heritage. Thus the political circumstances that attended the decline of the Canadian folk revival seem to have been far from unhappy. In light of this it seems reasonable to ask to what extent the international decline of the folk music revival can be understood as an index of increasing political alienation.

Mitchell makes an important contribution to the historiography of anglophone popular music in Canada by pointing out the connections between burgeoning Centennial sentiment and the emergence of what is often perceived to be a particularly Canadian model of singing and songwriting. From the late 1960s to the present day Canadian critics and audiences have valued the folk musicians and singer-songwriters who went on to international fame around the time of the Centennial, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen. Mitchell perceptively argues that the model of the solo folk singer-songwriter that emerged during this period of heightened national feeling continues both to be highly valued in Canadian music criticism and to be regarded as a particularly ‘Canadian’ model of popular musicianship.

Mitchell ties together her American and Canadian analyses by comparing the ways in which diverging national imaginaries had an impact on folk music during the decline of the revival. The folk music revival, she suggests, was originally a movement in which the nation was a ‘secondary concern’ (167), in that ‘the revival in both countries […] adhered to a very loose definition of nation which embraced and celebrated many diverse kinds of music and cultures’ (167). But as the 1960s came to a close, the nation asserted greater authority in both Canada and the United States, becoming more ‘all-encompassing, and less considerate of diversity and detail’ (167). In Canada, Mitchell connects the growing power, dominance, and singularity of the nation to the massive ideological mobilization that attended the 1967 Centennial. In the United States, she sees the nation emerging as a dominating, reactionary, and intolerant entity, from which many flew, particularly young people who opposed the war. In short, while in Canada a new hegemonic national identity swallowed up regional and individual particularities, in the United States young people rejected a nation whose policies and conflicts alienated them.

As noted above, one of the most valuable aspects of The North American Folk Music Revival is an approach that compares the folk music revival in the United States with that in anglophone Canada. Given this perspective, the author might have made more of the potential of her research to contribute to ongoing discussions concerning the transnational circulation of performers, styles, ideologies, and expressive culture; the transformations these undergo as they respond to different regimes of cultural practice; and the ways in which power structures configure the terrains of circulation and appropriation.Footnote ² Further, given that the folk music revival coincided with a global moment of decolonization, Mitchell might have engaged postcolonial theory more closely, perhaps framing the decline of the folk music revival as one symptom of a global intensification of the negotiations surrounding race, culture, nation, power, rights, and representation.

The latter idea is elaborated in the remainder of this review, which responds to Mitchell's accounts of (a) the growing impact of the nation on the folk music revival and (b) the collapse of cooperation that attended the revival's decline. To begin with issue (a), Mitchell suggests that nation initially played a secondary role in the folk revival; early on, the movement envisaged a ‘unity in diversity’ and embraced the regional, ethnic, and musical variety of the North American continent.Footnote ³ She goes on to suggest that the nation state began to take on a more powerful role politically and socially in the later 1960s, leaving less room for particularity and diversity. Canadian folk musicians were swallowed up by optimistic, future-oriented national ‘dreams’, while American folk musicians retreated from oppressive national ‘nightmares’ (135).

Did the nation initially play such a minimal role in the folk music revival? Even some of the earliest examples of ‘multicultural’ folklore activities had a decidedly national emphasis. For instance, in Canada the earliest musical celebrations of ethnic diversity had a national horizon: the multi-ethnic folk festivals organized by John Murray Gibbon in the late 1920s.Footnote ⁴ Gibbon explicitly framed ethnic difference as national content, perhaps most memorably in a book entitled Canadian Mosaic.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, the early twentieth-century surge of interest in American folklore appears initially to have had a national emphasis. For instance, the state guides commissioned during the Great Depression under the WPA (a federal funding programme) constitute the nation symbolically from its component intra-national units, construing diversity as national variety. Indeed, the folklore efforts of the 1930s have been described as a manifestation of a ‘second nationalism’ in America.Footnote ⁶ In short, early celebrations of diversity understood the nation as a kind of natural container for folkloristic and regional difference. Perhaps the boom period of the folk music revival was more open to regionalism or to a sense of North Americanness, but I cannot help but think that, here too, the nation was the normative horizon against which musical difference came into view. In fact the welcome novelty of Mitchell's comparative and international approach suggests that even the historiography of folk movements has been too dominated by national focuses.

Mitchell also seems to imply an opposition between totalizing forms of nationalism and ideals of ‘unity in diversity’. Yet historically there is evidence that these ideologies coexisted quite happily. For example, as Mitchell points out, John Murray Gibbon's western Canadian folk festivals celebrated a mosaic of cultures even as they excluded Chinese and indigenous communities (48). And while, as was noted above, Mitchell suggests that as Canadian national sentiment became more ‘all-encompassing, and less considerate of diversity and detail’ in the 1960s, it was nonetheless at this time that the federal government became increasingly open to diversity, launching the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and in 1971 instituting a ‘policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework’.Footnote ⁷ If, as Mitchell suggests, nationalism was becoming more totalizing, it was doing so at exactly the same moment that it seemed to be opening the door to diversity and cultural difference. In fact, this was no accident. An ideology of ‘unity in diversity’ – official multiculturalism – was exactly the logic by which the Canadian federal government asserted the primacy of the nation.Footnote ⁸ It may be that Mitchell is aware of these contradictory aspects of national multiculturalism, but such paradoxes probably could have been more explicitly foregrounded.

Turning now to issue (b), Mitchell describes the folk music revival as a movement whose members initially shared a goal of creating a better, more equitable society through a concerted effort that crossed ethnic and class boundaries. She goes on to describe how, as the folk music revival went into decline in the late 1960s, there was a breakdown in cross-cultural cooperation. She describes how black activists in the United States distanced themselves from white activists, whom some of them perceived as at times complicit in their subjugation. Furthermore, she suggests that as the 1960s progressed the problematic discrepancies between the values and ideals of the middle-class whites who made up the majority of the revival movement and those of the people whose musics they engaged became only more apparent.

Mitchell's account is convincing, but perhaps she might have treated the issue more broadly, both critically and historically, on the one hand by taking advantage of what otherwise remains a missed opportunity for comparison and, on the other, by approaching the collapse of cooperation as a manifestation of emergent postcoloniality. Mitchell acknowledges that her volume compares the United States with anglophone Canada only, and indeed calls at the end of the volume for further attention to the folk music revival in French Canada. Bearing Mitchell's apology in mind, the inclusion of French Canada nevertheless might have facilitated certain insights.

For instance, greater attention to French Canada might have enabled a comparison of how, in the 1960s, minority populations in both Canada and the United States increasingly took their own paths as they confronted unacceptable intergroup relations. As noted above, African Americans in the United States increasingly eschewed cooperation with white revival participants, understanding their struggle to be one that they would need to undertake by and for themselves. Accompanying this ideological autonomy was a flowering of new black musical expressions, including funk and, later, disco. Similarly, in Canada the 1960s and 70s saw a dramatic increase in political and musical expressions of Québécois national sentiment. In an interesting parallel with the African-American situation described above (this is in no way to equate the historical experiences of the two groups), French Canadians pursued cultural aspirations that were in many cases independent of anglophone Canada and expressed these in part through music. In both cases, minority populations increasingly sought social and aesthetic autonomy.

The foregoing comparison allows a productive connection to be drawn between musical developments in Canada and the United States and the postcolonial moment of their occurrence. The years that followed the Second World War saw rights extended to communities that had not previously had a voice. But the postcolonial order that emerged in the postwar period was more than this: it was a fundamental challenge to existing structures of representation. Minorities challenged the rights of majorities to represent them politically and artistically, regarding with suspicion the simplistic models of ‘unity in diversity’ that characterized the early years of the folk music revival and emerging Canadian multiculturalism. Increasingly empowered communities rightly perceived that the rubrics of unity under which they were rallied did not always have their interests, ideals, experiences, and aspirations at heart. They responded (and continue to respond) by building worlds that stand apart from – and sometimes in opposition to – dominant and national imaginaries.

A great strength of Mitchell's book is its telling account of shifts in musical practice during the decline of the folk music revival: of a retreat from earlier collective and political endeavours towards highly individuated musical expressions. But perhaps this somewhat melancholy vision might be complemented by another: namely of the wider and less centrally unified array of political and artistic expressions increasingly being given voice during the postcolonial era.