Why, Oh, Why? – Michael J. Kramer

Finishing up our overview.

Because it marks a crucial moment in the American past when vernacular culture and mass culture, or what we might call the culture industry, collided.
Because it gives us a window into the ways that everyday lives, art, and power (political or otherwise) collided in the decades after World War II.
Because it helps us understand certain ghosts that remain with us: youth culture of the postwar decades, the intersection of culture and politics around popular forms of music (or what rock critic Robert Christgau calls “semi-popular” music), the nature of community and individualism in postwar America, and the long-running social, even religious, legacies (it is a revival after all) of accepted, and challenged, norms in the US.

Its archive is at Northwestern, but much more than that.
Probably the first major festival of the postwar years.
The importance of California as the new epicenter of American life after World War II: defense industry (By 1945, 1/2 of personal income in CA came from Fed Govt), Hollywood, population movement, popular imagination of the Golden state, paradise, the new (and a forgetting of the old? Or not?).
The importance of Berkeley, Cal the crown jewel of perhaps the best public higher education system ever, a center of bohemianism as well as of Cold War research culture and power.
San Francisco Bay Area a strong labor culture, even Communist Party, a strong liberal politics, undercut by conservative traditions. And a strong bohemian culture.
Different ethnic makeup of Bay Area: much higher Latino population, Asian population, connections to Pacific Rim and Mexico and trans-Pacific ocean culture.
The philosophical thrust of the festival, concerned with building community and powerful shared experience through music.

Raises many issues about how we “do” history that lurked in the folk revival itself:
the collision of technology and tradition
the relationship of audience and performer
the question of change and continuity in a new medium that draws upon age-old methodologies of historical inquiry
the issue of copyright, intellectual property, as compared to public ownership of culture
learning and community
the official meets the vernacular or casual: constraints and freedoms
Digital history as a new way to create interpretation out of evidence using new kinds of tools, interactivity, design, etc.

-Vernacular vs. Commercial: Rock n roll vs. folk?

-Is a musical genre looking toward the past or the future, roots or branches?

-Appropriation, intellectual property, where economics (capitalism especially) meets culture

-The politics of culture

-Romantic nationalism