a right-wing organization issued the publication Red Channels, which named 151 people in the media (including Seeger and other musicians and actors) and listed their alleged communist sympathies (including membership in peace and other democratic organizations). This contributed to a wave of anticommunist paranoia that was earlier exacerbated in 1947 with the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating alleged communist infiltration in Hollywood, questioning the loyalty of actors, directors, and screenwriters. The blacklists that ensued denied employment in the entertainment industry, typically on the basis of being associated with progressive organizations that were fully legal.
Just as quickly as the Weavers had risen to stardom, so nightclubs and organizations were afraid to hire them for fear of a backlash. Folk music, which had strong pro-union and socialist leanings, was driven underground during this era, the high (or low) point of which were hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953–54. Pete Seeger was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and lectured his inquisitors about questioning his loyalty. He was indicted for contempt of Congress in 1957, convicted in 1961, and sentenced to ten one-year terms in prison (one for each question he did not answer) to be served concurrently, but in 1962 the conviction was overturned. In December 1954 the Senate had voted to censure Senator McCarthy.
The release of the six-LP set Anthology of American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smith) on the Folkways label in 1952 was a major event in the reemergence of folk music later in the decade. Consisting of reissues of recordings of a diverse range of American music from 1927 to 1932 (blues, white and black gospel, jug bands, old-time fiddle), the Anthology provided a blueprint for the generation growing up in the 1950s.
The second wave of the urban folk revival was spurred on in part by the Kingston Trio, a clean-cut collegiate group who enjoyed a six-month run at the Purple Onion in San Francisco in the second half of 1957. “Tom Dooley,” a single from their first album, hit #1 on the pop charts in the summer of 1958, leading the album into the #1 slot. Their next four albums hit #1.
The key moment, however, was eighteen-year-old Joan Baez (1941–) guest singing with Bob Gibson at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. She represented a new generation of singers who drew on a diversity of folk material and sang in their own intimate interpretive voices. Baez quickly gained a recording contract with the independent downtown New York–based Vanguard label (turning down an offer from Columbia), hitting the Top 40 with ten of the twelve albums she released in the 1960s (four were in the Top 10). A Time magazine cover story on Baez in fall 1962 announced that the folk revival had swept the nation. She was the first folksinger star of this generation and introduced Bob Dylan (1941–) to her large audiences following the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan emerged as a star at that festival. Peter, Paul, and Mary had just given Dylan his first pop Top 10 chart appearance with their recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which had become something of an anthem for the times. Within a few months they would do it again with Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” (see figures 28 and 29).
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