On Stage & Screen: Bards, balladeers, and bounders

 BY:Jonathan Spencer

It can be said that the great American folk singer has never quite found a home on Broadway. With the exception of Woody Guthrie’s American Song, few of the stories of these iconic figures have made it to the stage. Sure, there is The Balladeer in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins, humorist Will Rogers in The Will Rogers Follies, and assorted other folksy narrators scattered throughout theater history. But it is the medium of film – both major studio pictures and documentaries – that have contributed the lion’s share of interpretations of the lives and legacies of folk musicians to the indelible image bank of our popular culture.

The most relevant example for our purposes is the biographical film Bound for Glory, which examines the life of Woody Guthrie.  The 1976 movie was directed by Hal Ashby (Shampoo, Harold & Maude, Being There) and starred David Carradine, Melinda Dillon, and Ronny Cox. Adapted from Guthrie’s autobiography, this biopic covered a few pivotal years in the folk singer’s life, beginning with his migration westward from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.  After a long, hard journey to California via boxcar and hitchhiking, Woody (Carradine) witnesses a gathering of hundreds of workers scrounging for a few ill-paying harvesting jobs. When singer Ozark Bole (Cox) arrives to both entertain and urge the workers to unionize, Woody joins him in song, fleeing with him after thugs break up the assembly.  He lands a job singing with Ozark on the radio, and the two become partners in union agitation.  Unable to commit in his personal life as he finds his political voice, Woody brings his family west, but his wife (Dillon) can't tolerate Woody's wandering ways.  Reluctant to sell out his ideals for a lucrative career, he hits the road again, bringing his songs of freedom and protest to a nationwide audience on his own terms.  Despite critical praise and nominations for several Oscars, including Best Picture, Bound for Glory did not enjoy much success at the box office.

A fictional film featuring a crossover between politics and folk singing is actor/director Tim Robbins’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. This mock documentary chronicles a Pennsylvania state senate race between wealthy, conservative folk singer Bob Roberts (Robbins) and his incumbent opponent (Gore Vidal).  More a cautionary tale of how the media affects elections than an outright political satire, the movie follows Roberts as he campaigns across his state performing right-wing songs about evil drug users, lazy poor people, and the triumph of traditional family values over 1960s rebelliousness. By manipulating the rebel folk-singer image, in this case Bob Dylan, and flipping it upside-down, Robbins seemed to be making a statement about what wins elections: entertainment over substance.  

Another movie that mixes politics and balladeers is Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957).  Loosely based on the off-screen persona of TV personality Arthur Godfrey, the film follows the meteoric career of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a folksy, guitar-playing wanderer who is plucked from obscurity – and an Arkansas jail -- by local radio talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) and winds up hosting a wildly popular variety program on national television aimed at rural America.  Rhodes is loaded with down-home charm and humor on the air but full of contempt for his fans once the cameras are turned off.  He soon becomes drunk with power and the tool of right-wing, isolationist politicians. But in the end, he is destroyed by his own vitriol and the medium that made him famous – live TV.  Jeffries, who has become more and more dismayed by Rhodes’ behavior, catches him making abusive comments about his viewers as the credits roll on his variety show. Realizing the monster she has created, she simply turns up the volume on his microphone.

A truer picture of the folk-singing movement can be seen in documentaries such as The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time, a 1982 tribute to the first folk music group to break through to a wider and more commercial audience. Formed in the late 1940s by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert, The Weavers made history with their recording of the Leadbelly song "Goodnight, Irene" in 1950, which stayed on top of the pop charts for an astonishing 13 weeks. In 1952, the group hit a roadblock in their career when they became entangled in the anti-Communist fervor of the Joseph McCarthy era and were blacklisted.  However, they made a stunning comeback with a New Year's Eve 1955 concert at Carnegie Hall, which became their most popular recording. For this film, the original quartet reformed in 1981 and performed a final show at Carnegie Hall.

The plot of the above-mentioned documentary may sound a bit familiar to some movie-goers. That may be because it was the inspiration for Christopher Guest’s 2003 “mockumentary” A Mighty Wind, which chronicled a fictional folk music reunion concert at New York City’s Town Hall. The film parodies the folk-music scene of the 1960s and the iconic performers who made it all happen: duo Mitch & Mickey (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara) are in the vein of real-life performing couples of the time such as Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash and Sonny & Cher; The Folksmen (Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer) call to mind The Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul & Mary; and the New Main Street Singers (featuring John Michael Higgins and Parker Posey, among others) are a dead-on parody of the New Christy Minstrels. All the clichés of the folk era are skewered with abandon but in the final analysis a certain admiration for the object of their satire bleeds through.

And finally, other documentaries – real ones this time – have been made about folk legends such as self-styled balladeer Ramblin' Jack Elliott, an important transitional figure between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan (2000’s The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack); Pete Seeger, the former Weaver whose solo career was a heady mix of anti-war and protest songs and pure and simple folk artistry (1972’s Pete Seeger... A Song and a Stone); and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter (1991’s A Vision Shared), the troubled blues singer whose work inspired a generation of folk singers – as well as the man who brought it all into focus: Woody Guthrie.