Traditionally, folk music was a rural pursuit, with songs about life, love, death and everything in between passed down orally by communities and families. But that all changed in the 20th century, and the 1960s saw a sea change in the genre.
A fresh flush of interest in folk music began in the 1940s, spearheaded by the likes of Peter Seeger, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie in the US. The 1960s then saw a new crop of folk artists burst onto the scene – think Bob Dylan and Joan Baez – and the folk revival went mainstream.
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These singer-songwriters wrote their own material – bringing a welcome twist to tradition – and some went on to fuse folk and rock music. In the process, they created some of the most iconic songs of the decade.
The best folk songs of the 1960s
The Times They Are A-Changin - Bob Dylan, 1964
Bob Dylan was just 22 when he recorded The Times They Are A-Changin’, an anthem that captures the indelible feeling that change is in the air. He wanted to write ‘a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way,’ he later said, and that’s exactly what happens.
The song owes its roots to the traditional folk music, according to Dylan: ‘[it] is probably from an old Scottish folk song. I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.’
The Times They Are A-Changin’ became the title track of his third album, released in 1964, and has gone down in history as one of the American singer-songwriter’s greatest songs.
We Shall Overcome - Joan Baez, 1963
On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech during his March on Washington. During that same event, folk singer Joan Baez led a 300,000-string sing-along of We Shall Overcome, a protest song that became emblematic of the civil rights movement. Its origins are disputed, but it’s thought the song is based on Charles Albert Tindley’s hymn I’ll Overcome Someday.
In 1947, it was contributed to The People’s Songs Bulletin by the musician Zilphia Horton, who also taught it to folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. Seeger, Baez and other folk singers began singing the song widely – and it resonated with listeners, not least for its stirring, recurring refrain ‘Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe/We shall overcome someday’. In 2010, Baez performed it at the White House for President Obama.
Amazing Grace - Bernice Johnson Reagon, 1965
Arguably, this list could showcase any of the traditional songs recorded by Bernice Johnson Reagon on her 1965 album Folk Songs: The South, in which the 19-year-old brings her remarkable voice – rich and expressive – to songs from ‘the church, the work fields, and the blues’.
Amazing Grace is the best known among them, and hearing Reagon’s unaccompanied version of the globally known folk hymn is a powerful experience. A scholar, singer, composer, organiser and activist, Reagon believed music was a catalyst for social change and spent her life in pursuit of that goal.
In 1962 she co-founded the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that soundtracked the Civil Rights Movement and performed at the March for Washington. A decade later, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, the renowned African American a cappella female ensemble.
Blowin’ in the Wind - Odetta, 1963
According to Time magazine, ‘Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music’. Odetta Holmes was also a huge influence on Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, who recalled that “the first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta … Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.”
It’s fitting then that Odetta was the first person to record an album of Dylan covers, bringing her brilliantly soulful voice to his songs. Her beautiful arrangement of his 1962 protest anthem Blowing in the Wind first appeared on her 1963 RCA Victor album Odetta Sings Folk Songs, which became one of the best-selling folk albums of the year.
Suzanne - Leonard Cohen, 1968
Suzanne began life as a poem and went on to become one of Leonard Cohen’s most popular songs, covered by artists from Nina Simone to Neil Diamond to Nick Cave. No wonder as it’s a masterpiece, fusing rich poetic imagery with a deceptively simple musical accompaniment.
Inspired by his real-life platonic relationship with dancer Suzanne Verdal, the song is a love letter to a woman who feeds Cohen with ‘tea and oranges that come all the way from China’, and together they embark on walks to the harbour.
The vocal line ebbs and flows above a hypnotic guitar and soft female chorus, and the whole effect is intimate and intoxicating. Cohen released it as his debut single and on his 1968 album Songs of Leonard Cohen. It entered Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest songs of all time at No. 284.
The Sound of Silence - Simon and Garfunkel, 1964
‘Hello darkness, my old friend’, begins The Sound of Silence, the haunting song that landed American folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel a record deal with Columbia Records. Although it flopped when it was first released in 1964, a remix the following year sent it to the top of the charts – and shot the duo to fame.
‘I rate it as one of the best songs I’ve written’, Paul Simon told The Smithsonian in 2016. He first came up with the idea for it in the bathroom, so the story goes, where Simon used to retreat to dream and play the guitar in the darkness. The music keeps some of that introspective quality, while its lyrics tap into a sense of social alienation. ‘This is a song about the inability of people to communicate with each other’, explained Art Garfunkel.
The song would later appear on both the opening and closing credits of The Graduate soundtrack in 1967, forever becoming linked with Mike Nichols’ classic movie.
Dirty Old Town - Ewan MacColl, 1952
The singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’, about his home of Salford, in 1949 for the play Landscape with Chimneys and it was released as a single in 1952. Yet the song truly found its moment in the 1960s, as a touchstone of the folk-revival movement in the UK. Later, it was covered by The Dubliners and The Pogues, and it’s become one of folk music’s most famous songs (the tune is also still regularly used as a football terrace chant).
In this love letter to Salford, MacColl offers a snapshot of working-class life in the industrial north, a place of gas works and docks and ‘smoky wind’. His third wife Peggy Seeger once described it as a ‘perfect song’. As she told BBC News: ‘It’s a beautiful melody, just four economical verses, and it has been covered by hundreds of singers each in their own way.’
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