In 1954, a classic American eccentric by the name of Harry Smith gathered up a bunch of pre-war 78s of (mostly) rural singers, and compiled them in a series of LPs under the title Anthology of American Folk Music. These recordings subsequently became the Ur-text for the folk revival in the 1950s, which Martin Mull called “The Great Folk Scare” of the post-rock ‘n’ roll, pre-Beatles era of the early ’60s. I won’t get into the Anthology in much detail here; for a terrific in-depth analysis of it and its influence I recommend The Old Weird America by Grail Marcus (you might find an older copy by its original title, Invisible Republic). Instead, I’d like to focus on another compilation that, for me at least, represents an extension of the folk traditions the Anthology’s early fans would no doubt find heretical.

The ’50s folkies were big on ‘authenticity’. To those northern, middle class, well-educated kids, the music of the poor, mostly-southern hillbillies and sharecroppers represented a mythic, idealized America far removed from the Eisenhower era of suburban tract housing, interstate highways, and mass media. They were, for lack of a better word, real.

What was decidedly not real to the folk crowd was rock ‘n’ roll. To them, those early rock acts were loud, gauche, immature pap for the masses. Never mind that the first generation of rockers was made up almost exclusively of rural southerners, the cultural descendants of those same sharecroppers and hillbillies. Elvis Presley and Little Richard didn’t come from Cambridge and Greenwich Village.

I think this contradiction comes down to each group’s take on modernity itself. The northern folkies’ studied rejection of the modern world stands in stark contrast to the southern rockers’ embrace of it. While the folk crowd may have appropriated the music and dress of the dirt farmer, few of them understood the reality of spending ten hours a day behind a mule. To them the Anthology was a message in a bottle, presenting a view of rural American music that was, after all, thirty years out of date, but to the southerners it was a living, evolving culture of which rock ‘n’ roll was just the latest development.

Therein lies the irony: the folkies’ pretension to real life was a shuck – an earnest and well-intended one, perhaps, but a shuck nonetheless. One of the many subtleties of the Anthology they missed was the fact that Harry Smith had exclusively used commercially released records to compile it. These were not field recordings (like what Alan Lomax did); every song on Smith’s compilation was deemed by someone somewhere to have some kind of commercial potential. The performers usually answered an open call for auditions, as was the practice then.

Furthering the irony is the fact that the rock era’s closest analog to the Anthology in terms of form, content, and intention, is Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968. Compiled in the early ‘70s by Lenny Kaye (now best known as the lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group the past 50 or so years), then a music journalist with a special affection for down and dirty garage rock. Like Harry Smith before him, Kaye gathered up a bunch of mostly forgotten singles from the mid-sixties into what was originally a 2 LP set; it has since expanded to a whopping 4 CDs, but for the purposes of this essay we’ll limit our examination to the original set.

Now, some background on the era may be in order. Prior to the 1970s, the music business was still a largely localized phenomenon. There were distinct regional styles, like the sweet soul sounds of Philadelphia and the doo-wop groups in New York. Records were distributed by a now all-but-extinct species of traveling salesmen known as “rack jobbers,” local entrepreneurs who would drive around their territories with a trunk full of 45s and LPs, supplying the drugstores and five & dimes that were the main music retailers back then; the Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do offers a concise, if somewhat sanitized, overview of this process. In addition to whatever hit parade tunes were in demand at the moment, the jobber would carry a fair amount of local product, usually from a small label he had a commission deal with, or maybe a self-produced side from his nephew’s garage band (and nearly everybody’s nephew had a garage band).

Although popular mythology has it that every teenage boy in America ran out to start a band after the Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, that wasn’t quite the case. Rock ‘n’ roll had been around for a few years by then, surf music was the current craze, and you could buy a half-decent electric guitar or drum kit from the Sears catalogue. So plenty of kids already had a band of some kind – during the 2004 presidential campaign, a record that Sen. John Kerry had made with his teenage band around 1961 or so surfaced; Kerry was the bass player, if memory serves.

This is the milieu in which the recordings on Nuggets were made. With a few exceptions, such as Night Time by The Strangeloves (not a real band but some professional studio musicians jumping on a trend), these songs were the work of ordinary American kids, and created for the ordinary American reasons: to impress the girls, make a few bucks, and maybe even hit the big time and escape whatever adult drudgery loomed in their futures. These nascent garage rockers were mostly working class kids who had a lot more in common with those sharecroppers and hillbillies than their more educated folksinging counterparts.

While more than a few groups recorded their own versions of recent rock and soul hits, just as many were writing their own tunes reflecting their own concerns and experiences. For example, The Magicians’ An Invitation To Cry is sung from the POV of a guy who gets a wedding invitation from his ex-girlfriend. Then there’s The Chocolate Watchband’s Let’s Talk About Girls, which is pretty self-explanatory. Probably the strangest is Moulty by The Barbarians, a quiet number with a spoken recitation by the drummer about losing his arm in an accident.

While most of these groups were one (or two) hit wonders, many of the individual musicians went on to bigger and better things. There’s Todd Rundgren (The Nazz’s Open My Eyes), Leslie West of the band Mountain (The Vagrants covering Otis Redding’s Respect), and The Amboy Dukes, featuring a pre-insanity Ted Nugent on a version of the blues standard Baby Please Don’t Go. Al Kooper, who has done everything possible in music from playing organ for Bob Dylan to French horn for the Rolling Stones to discovering Lynyrd Skynyrd, is presented here with the Blues Project on his own No Time Like the Right Time.

I think what makes these records so close in spirit to those old 78s culled by Harry Smith is their methodology; much of what we now consider folk music was based on a few common musical and lyrical themes played out in endless variations by generations of performers. Eventually something like a standard repertory evolved, with each new performer putting their own spin on it. The same thing is happening on Nuggets, just on a shorter time scale. Most of the tropes used – the Bo Diddley beats, the guitar hooks, the frenetic vocalizing – were considered brand-new just a decade prior to most of these records. Except, they weren’t really new; the aforementioned first generation rock ‘n’ rollers, Elvis & Little Richard & Chuck Berry, all adapted their moves from the same cultural stream the Anthology came out of. Each of these scenes – from the old folk 78s, to rock ‘n’ roll, to garage rock, and beyond – are all points on the same continuum, which continues to evolve. Hip-hop is the current iteration, whereas the academic folkies turned out to be something of an anomaly, a cultural dead-end.

Bob Dylan probably understood this better than anyone: to the movement folkies he was a messiah, and then a traitor to the cause when he went electric. Dylan saw himself (correctly, in my view) as a part of that evolving tradition. In fact, he himself became one of the standard tropes used by a Nuggets group – Mouse’s A Public Execution was nothing if not a Bob Dylan tribute/parody/ripoff.

Interestingly, the folk scene didn’t really disappear. After some of the performers started writing their own songs, they became the singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Living things – whether animal, vegetable, or cultural – are going to grow and evolve despite the best efforts of the orthodoxy.