Today I'm having a Hootenanny! So sit back, grab your mug of black coffee, don your black beret and get ready to snap your fingers, Daddi-O 'cause here's thirteen of my favorite folk singers. It's a fun festival for you fifties folkie fans and hipster hippie beats.
I fell in love with folk music fairly young. When I was about ten my brand new brother-in-law, Larry, gave me my first guitar and a songbook of Kingston Trio tunes. It was my first real exposure to the folk music that was part of an emerging lifestyle that crossed over from hipster beatniks to hippie peaceniks.
Strumming my first guitar I had a momentary hope of being the next Joan Baez or maybe the fourth member of Peter, Paul and Mary. In the end I was more talented with crayons than a tune and my dreams of becoming a folk singer only ended up giving me calloused fingertips, but those dreams also fostered a love of real folk music that stays with me to this day.
The classic folk singers were Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and many of the Irish groups like The Clancy Brothers and The Chieftans. The next wave would be groups like The Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, The Smothers Brothers, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, followed closely by the likes of Bob Dylan, Donovan and Paul Simon.
Soon after folk music and rock blended together for a new sound called folk rock performed by groups like The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel and The Mamas and the Papas. But no matter what era the music, the melody is still magic and the stories still memorable.
Cool, man, if it ain't beat it's dullsville! Here's a little trivia before you leave the PopArtDiva Beat Cafe today to go buy a set of bongos - the term "beatnik" was coined by none other than columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle when he was referring to the Beat Generation as a somewhat derisive spin on the name of the Russian satellite Sputnik.
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