The Berkeley Folk Music Festival, 1958-1970
FAIN: MD-277035-21
SUNY Research Foundation, College at Brockport (Brockport, NY 14420-2997)
Michael Jacob Kramer (Project Director: June 2020 to April 2023)
Development of a website with interactive essays, podcasts, and a curated archive on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival.
By digitally investigating a crucial, but little-studied folk music festival that took place annually on the flagship University of California campus between 1958 and 1970, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project helps diverse audiences explore the history of the folk music revival within the broader context of the post-World War II American past. An NEH DPP Discovery Grant will allow us to set the stage for dynamic multimedia curation. The curation includes: a top-level of "bespoke" interactive storytelling introductory narratives; a customized WordPress platform for deeper inquiry; an audio documentary podcast series with contributions from younger musicians; and thematic tagging of an open-source, digitized, 36,000-object archive. Taken together, these will help the public encounter and grapple with the hopeful, yet fraught legacies of race, ethnicity, gender, class, region, heritage, and cultural representation within the folk revival milieu.
Associated Products
Berkeley Fold Music Festival Project (Web Resource)Title: Berkeley Fold Music Festival Project
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: Social media feed featuring the over 10,000 images in the BFMF digital repository on Twitter (3,000-plus followers), Facebook (500-plus followers), and Instagram (400-plus followers)
Year: 2021
Student Assistantship Mentorship (Staff/Faculty/Fellow Position)Name: Student Assistantship Mentorship
Abstract: Undergraduate research mentorship teaching the student how to conduct research and produce products with the research that has been conducted.
Year: 2021
Berkeley Folk Music Festival (Web Resource)Title: Berkeley Folk Music Festival
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: Blog of news, features, talks, and other information about the BFMF project
Year: 2021
Primary URL: BFMF.net
Primary URL Description: Description of the project, the festival and it's impacts
Digital Public History as Fold Music Hootenanny: Part 1 - Finding the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project (Blog Post)Title: Digital Public History as Fold Music Hootenanny: Part 1 - Finding the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: This three-part series proposes that digital public history can deepen our study of the American folk music revival and cultural history in the United States. Conversely, it also contends that the folk music revival—with its hootenanny sing-alongs and sense of collective action—offers intriguing democratic models for digital public history. Part one explains how my research on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project got started as a digital public history endeavor when I discovered a little-used archive of over 30,000 artifacts at Northwestern University’s Special Collections Library. Part two presents the shared effort among librarians, archivists, students, and participants to curate the material digitally. Part three provides a preview of where the Berkeley Folk Music will go next.
Date: 1/27/2022
Primary URL:
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/part-1-finding-the-berkeley-folk-music-festival-Primary URL Description: Explains how Dr. Kramer's research on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project got started as a digital public history endeavor when he discovered a little-used archive of over 30,000 artifacts at Northwestern University's Special Collections Library
Blog Title: Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 1—Finding the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Website: History@Work: National Council for Public History Blog
Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 2—How We Created the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project (Blog Post)Title: Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 2—How We Created the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: This three-part series proposes that digital public history can deepen our study of the American folk music revival and cultural history in the United States. Conversely, it also contends that the folk music revival—with its hootenanny sing-alongs and sense of collective action—offers intriguing democratic models for digital public history. Part one explains how my research on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project got started as a digital public history endeavor when I discovered a little-used archive of over 30,000 artifacts at Northwestern University’s Special Collections Library. Part two presents the shared effort among librarians, archivists, students, and participants to curate the material digitally. Part three provides a preview of where the Berkeley Folk Music Project will go next.
Date: 2/3/2022
Primary URL:
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/part-2-how-we-created-the-berkeley-folk-music-festival-project/Primary URL Description: 2nd in the three part series on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival discussing the shared effort among librarians, archivists, students and participants to curate the material digitally
Blog Title: Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 2—How We Created the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Website: History@Work: National Council for Public History Blog
Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 3—Toward a Multimodal Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project (Blog Post)Title: Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 3—Toward a Multimodal Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: This three-part series proposes that digital public history can deepen our study of the American folk music revival and cultural history in the United States. Conversely, it also contends that the folk music revival—with its hootenanny sing-alongs and sense of collective action—offers intriguing democratic models for digital public history. Part one explains how my research on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project got started as a digital public history endeavor when I discovered a little-used archive of over 30,000 artifacts at Northwestern University’s Special Collections Library. Part two presents the shared effort among librarians, archivists, students, and participants to curate the material digitally. Part three provides a preview of where the Berkeley Folk Music Project will go next.
Date: 2/10/2022
Primary URL:
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/digital-public-history-as-folk-music-hootenanny-part-3-toward-a-multimodal-berkeley-folk-music-festival-project/Primary URL Description: The third part in the series that discusses where the project will go next.
Blog Title: Digital Public History as Folk Music Hootenanny: Part 3—Toward a Multimodal Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Website: History@Work: National Council for Public History Blog
The Singer of Folk Songs: Jerry Garcia at the 1962 Winter Berkeley Folk Music Festival & Rethinking Folk Revival Modes of Interpreting Traditional Music (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Singer of Folk Songs: Jerry Garcia at the 1962 Winter Berkeley Folk Music Festival & Rethinking Folk Revival Modes of Interpreting Traditional Music
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: In the photograph, Sam Hinton—oceanographer, illustrator, songwriter, folk singer, folk thinker—speaks of folk music tradition in the futuristic Pauley Ballroom at the University of California, Berkeley. Hinton is likely introducing Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, the Greenbriar Boys, Jean Ritchie, and other featured performers at the December 1962 Winter Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Sitting upright and attentive, front row center, is a familiar-looking beatnik. He listens intently to Hinton, who is perhaps drawing on ideas from the previous day's workshop "Learning to Sing Folk Songs—Tradition and Imitation," held with esteemed folklorists Ralph Rinzler and Charles Seeger, and also building on his 1955 Western Folklore essay "The Singer of Folk Songs and His Conscience." The young man is none other than aspiring folk/bluegrass musician Jerry Garcia. This and other newly discovered photographs of Garcia at the 1962 Winter Berkeley Folk Music Festival ask us to revisit how the young musician absorbed ideas from the folk music revival, particularly what an "imitator" could do with traditions not his own. These ideas would stay with Garcia for the rest of his life and career. Taking in Hinton's words, singing along with the Georgia Sea Island Singers at a "Fireside Sing," hanging out with Rinzler, Ritchie, and other performers and attendees, Garcia encountered debates about what it meant to try to incorporate folk music styles into one's very being rather than merely present them as antiquated museum specimens. Garcia's Zelig-like presence at the 1962 Berkeley Folk Music Festival raises important questions about race, class, region, and authenticity as they moved through vernacular musical expression in the early 1960s, particularly in Atomic Age California; this helps us reconsider what a transmitter of tradition could be within the disorienting context of postwar America.
Date: 4/12/2022
Conference Name: 2022 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference
The Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Northern California Counterculture (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Northern California Counterculture
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: The understudied Berkeley Folk Music Festival offers a new origin point for the late 1960s Bay Area counterculture. At it, participants joined together in a more egalitarian approach to having "serious fun" through temporary festive community in the face of looming death and destruction, from social ills and injustices at home to the Vietnam War across the Pacific (in fact San Francisco was a key way station to the war zone) to nuclear apocalypse (just above the Greek Amphitheater in the Berkeley Hills, after all, was Livermore Labs, from which the nation's nuclear research program was directed) to environmental woes to other problems. How might diverse participants come together in appreciation of cultural heritage and tradition as part of seeking out new ways of living, relating to each other more humanely, and offering more democratic visions of what a public university's spaces of learning and conviviality could support? At the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, we glimpse a Bay Area counterculture in formation, one whose content and form challenges cliched portrayals of the counterculture as a reckless, anarchic, Dionysian bacchanal. Instead, the counterculture appears more like the one social critic and Berkeley resident Theodore Roszak noticed in his best-selling book, The Making of a Counter Culture: an attempt to imagine alternatives to an alienating "technocratic society."
Date: 9/30/2022
Primary URL: engage.northwestern.edu/sfconference/
Primary URL Description: Describes the conference
Conference Name: Contested Legacies: The Counterculture After Fifty, Northwestern University
Mance Lipscomb’s Silhouette: Region, Race, Expertise & Digitization at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Mance Lipscomb’s Silhouette: Region, Race, Expertise & Digitization at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: This talk asks if digital history tactics of inquiry help us to see—and hear—these historical processes more vividly. Which is to say, when all we have is the archival silhouette of an immersive but ephemeral sonic and sensory event, how do we recover and study its legacies and meanings most effectively and evocatively? From Mance Lipscomb's silhouette to ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger's hearing aid to Georgia Sea Island Singer Bessie Jones' silver brocade to Sam Hinton's nose flutes to Jesse Fuller's fodella to Jerry Garcia's gaze, we shall consider some ways we might grapple digitally with musical festivity way out West at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival.
Date: 10/14/2022
Primary URL: www.whatmusicfestivalsdo.ca/mance-lipscombs-silhouette-region-race-expertise-and-digitization-at-the-berkeley-folk-music-festival-project-a-presentation-by-michael-j-kramer/
Primary URL Description: Description of Dr. Kramer's presentation regarding discussion of if digital history tactics of inquiry help us to see and hear historical processes more vividly.
Conference Name: Curating For Change: The Work That Music Festivals Do in the World Conference
The Berkeley Folk Music Festival and Digital History, and organizer for Digital Cultural History Roundtable Panel (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Berkeley Folk Music Festival and Digital History, and organizer for Digital Cultural History Roundtable Panel
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: Digital history is typically associated with the use of statistical analysis at scale to address the macroscopic, cliometric, structural, and aggregate dimensions of history; cultural history more typically focuses on finely grained inquiries into microlevel topics through the use of close reading of artifacts, explorations of individual agency, and attention to theoretical intricacies of interpreting the past. Where do the two approaches meet, if they meet at all? This virtual roundtable presents five-minute videos from each panelist, focused on their research and its implications for digital cultural history, followed by an opportunity for extended conversation among panelists and participants.
Date: 4/3/2022
Conference Name: Organization of American Historians Conference
Taking a Virtual Folk Music World Into Virtual Reality: Revising Humbead’s Revised Map of the World Virtual Reality Demo in Google Tilt Brush (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Taking a Virtual Folk Music World Into Virtual Reality: Revising Humbead’s Revised Map of the World Virtual Reality Demo in Google Tilt Brush
Author: Michael Kramer
Abstract: Humbead’s Revised Map of the World reimagines the globe from the perspective of the West Coast folk scene and emerging hippie counterculture. First printed in 1968, with subsequent iterations produced in 1969 and 1970, it was created by Rick Shubb and Earl Crabb, two Bay Area folk music aficionados. In this demonstration at the 6th Annual RIT Frameless Labs XR Symposium on Friday, November 19th, participants can explore the map in Google Tilt Brush. Exploration and potential collaboration by technologists and anyone interested in the project is heartily welcome. Overall, through interdisciplinary interaction and development, the goal of the project is to enter into the map as it gets revised yet again into a virtual reality object through which—and in which—we might better perceive, investigate, and explore the contents and meanings of Humbead’s Revised Map of the World, the 1960s folk music revival, and post-World War II American cultural history as a whole.
Date: 11/19/2021
Conference Name: 6th Annual Rochester Institute of Technology Frameless Labs XR Symposium