- Format: MP3
1970-1971
One of the interesting shifts in pop music during the early 1970s was a return to the kind of acoustic-oriented songs that had been associated with the folk revival of the previous decade. As a physical alternative to the mounting decibel level of hard rock, as well as an emotional respite from the cultural aftershocks still resonating from the late '60s, the gentler sounds of folk-based music turned out to be just the right tonic for a generation hoping to lighten its load.
Not surprisingly, then, a good number of performers who emerged as pop stars in the early '70s had roots in '60s folk music. John Denver started his career as a member of the folk group the Chad Mitchell Trio, and began to make a name for himself as a songwriter when Peter, Paul and Mary took his Leaving on a Jet Plane to the top of the charts in 1969. Two years later, Denver's solo career took off like that aforementioned jet with Take Me Home, Country Roads, the first of his many folk-tinged '70s hits.
Carly Simon likewise made her first recordings as part of a folk group: the Simon Sisters. She and her older sibling Lucy put music to the children's poem Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod and scored a minor hit with it in '64. It wasn't until 1971, though, that Carly released her first solo album--source of her top-10 debut single, the haunting coming-of-age ballad That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be.
During the heyday of the '60s folk scene, long-haired, guitar-strumming Joan Baez was the very model of the altruistic, cause-driven female folksinger. While she was internationally famous (as much for her strongly anti-war politics as her music), Baez had never had anything approaching a hit single before her dynamic version of Robbie Robertson and the Band's Civil War-themed The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which gave her the only top-10 entry of her distinguished career.
Richie Havens was a veteran presence on the fabled Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit and was known to folk aficionados for his 1968 album Mixed Bag before his crowd-pleasing set at 1969's mythic Woodstock concert finally made him a household name. Highly acclaimed for his unique interpretations of well-known rock and pop tunes, Havens had a sizable hit in 1971 with his take on the Beatles' Here Comes the Sun. (Also on the subject of Woodstock, it should be noted that it was Englishman Iain Matthews and his band Matthews' Southern Comfort who scored a No. 1 U.K. hit with their stirring arrangement of Woodstock, Joni Mitchell's chronicle of the event. Matthews' folk roots ran deep, too; along with guitarist Richard Thompson, he co-founded England's highly influential Celtic rock group Fairport Convention.)
Richie Havens and Joan Baez weren't the only folk-leaning Woodstock performers to score hits in 1970 and '71. Another New York club regular, Melanie Safka, had already recorded her anthemic Beautiful People at the height of the flower-power era in 1969. Her appearance at Woodstock inspired the singer-songwriter to pay tribute to its water-soaked attendees with the equally anthemic 1970 hit Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).
Stephen Stills, who registered a solo hit in 1970 with the high-spirited Love the One You're With, had also been at Woodstock--as a member of the then budding supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash. While many were familiar with him as a former member of Buffalo Springfield (for whom he wrote and sang lead on the 1967 hit For What It's Worth), not many knew he had started out as a folk musician. In fact, it was while he was a part of the short-lived Au Go Go Singers that Stills met future Springfield partners Richie Furay and Neil Young.
Actually, folk music was also very much a part of the backgrounds of several of Woodstock's rock acts. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead--heard here on Uncle John's Band, their autobiographical salute to Dead manager John Cutler--played banjo and guitar in numerous folk and bluegrass bands during the early 1960s. In fact, the Dead themselves grew out of an acoustic band Garcia played in called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions.
Garcia's Haight-Ashbury musical neighbor Janis Joplin cut her teeth as a folk and blues singer in her native Texas before rising to prominence in the late '60s as lead vocalist for the psychedelic Big Brother and the Holding Company. The versatile Joplin was also well versed in country music, however, and it was a country song, Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee, that gave the troubled star a posthumous No. 1 hit in 1971.
Speaking of country music, folk-country singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker authored the classic Mr. Bojangles in 1968, and a few years later the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band turned his heart-touching story of an aging dancer into a memorable top-10 hit. Like the Dead, the Dirt Band had started life as a jug band (one of its early members was Jackson Browne) before gaining fame as pioneering proponents of country-rock, a style that drew heavily on elements of acoustic and folk music as well.
Nimbly blending folk and country music was something that James Taylor began doing quite well in the early 1970s. The title tune of his breakthrough 1970 album, Sweet Baby James, found him imagining himself a carefree cowboy camping out on the open plains--quite a far cry from the true-to-life mental hospital setting depicted in his soft-spirited but sorrow-filled hit Fire and Rain.
Equally gentle-sounding was Sunshine, the only hit for singer-songwriter Jonathan Edwards. This country-tinged tune also featured a good old-fashioned folk protest slant--a slant that was, after all of the tumult of the '60s, still very much a part of early-'70s music. "He can't even run his own life/I'll be damned if he'll run mine," sang Edwards in this song about an individual seeking to escape society's rat race. That same general sentiment about the evils of a society filled with "bad air" also ran through Londoner Cat Stevens' 1971 hit Wild World, a song neatly counterbalanced by his same-year invitation to end all wars by hopping aboard a global Peace Train.
Stopping violence--both human against human and humans against the earth--wasn't only on the mind of folk-related artists of the early '70s, either. In songs such as What's Going On and Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), both stemming from his groundbreaking 1971 concept album, What's Going On, Marvin Gaye bemoaned everything from police brutality in America's inner cities to the ecological brutality taking place throughout the world's forests and oceans. This melding of soul and protest music neatly demonstrated just how far-reaching the folk influence had extended. Powerful stuff, indeed--and without any blaring electric guitars or pounding drums, either.