DVD Review Essay: Always Been A Rambler. The New Lost City Ramblers. Dir. Yasha Aginsky. Arhoolie Foundation, DVD 204, 2009. (Available: www.arhoolie.com)

Popular treatments of that period of the late 1950s and early 1960s referred to as “the American Folk Revival” tend to focus on the protest singing of figures like Joan Baez and how, in the case of Bob Dylan, this transformed into a style of original songwriting inspired as much by the poetic ramblings of beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg as the topical songs of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Indeed, Dylan became so strongly associated with the folk revival of this period that his electric performance with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is often considered to be one of its bookends, the other being when the Kingston Trio’s collegiate-lite version of the folk ballad “Tom Dooley” topped the popular music charts in 1958, bringing the revival to mainstream audiences. Far from representing a distinct beginning and end, however, the “folk boom” of 1958-1965 (see Rosenberg) was part of a much longer process of folk revivalism within American history that can alternately be demarcated by major political and social events, in this case the witch hunts of the McCarthy era and the senseless violence of the Vietnam war. The transformation of protest songs into folk rock is also only part of the story. A history less often told is how this period of intense interest in “folk” music led a subset of urban revivalists to seek a sense of history and rootedness by turning to older stringband traditions as an alternative not only to what they perceived as the postwar void of American culture, but also as an alternative to the popularized and politicized forms of folk music current at the time. It is worthy of note that this development became significant in Canada as well. In Vancouver during the 1970s, for example, a group of counterculturally-inclined youth who were turned off by the purism they saw at work in the Vancouver Folk Song Society decided to establish their own club, the Pacific Bluegrass and Heritage Society, which has been the centre of a thriving bluegrass and oldtime music scene in that city for over thirty years. In addition to nurturing local bands like Highrise Lonesome, Redgrass, and Viper Central, members of this and similar clubs have contributed to the development of regional festivals and workshops which are now part of a network that spans the entire country. At the vanguard of this North American “traditional music movement” was a Greenwich Village-based trio called the New Lost City Ramblers, originally consisting of Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley, with Paley later replaced by Tracy Schwartz. The Ramblers took as their musical point of reference not the political folk songs of blacklisted activist Pete Seeger and his comrades but commercial “hillbilly” recordings from the 1920s and 1930s which channelled, to paraphrase Greil Marcus, an older and weirder world of American music that defied simplistic notions of folk music (Marcus 1997). As gathered on Harry Smith’s three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, released in 1952 by what was then a local New York record label called Folkways, these old 78s became the basis not just of a new emphasis on sound and style, but would be a catalyst in the grassroots revitalization of stringband traditions across North America . Yasha Aginsky’s DVD documentary Always Been a Rambler (2009) speaks to this history on a number of levels, animating a story that has largely been told only piecemeal in studies of this period and scattered across the liner notes to the many records the New Lost City Ramblers made for the Folkways label in the late …