Notes to Songwriters

The songs in this section are my selections from various sources. These items are from singer-songwriters of the 1960's and 70's and were learned from concerts or recordings or from print from various song books and folk-themed magazines of the time.
The folk revival of the 1940's and 50's grew out of the successes of the earliest groups to be recorded in the 1920's and 30's when the recording companies recruited performers of traditional music that included The Carter Family, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers and others.
The folk revival as a popular and commercial phenomenon began with the career of The Weavers, formed in November 1948 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert. They brought the songs of Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to the listening public's attention. In the early and mid-1950s, acoustic-guitar-accompanied folk songs were mostly heard in coffee houses, private parties, open-air concerts, sing-alongs, hootenannies and at college-campus concerts. As interest in folk music grew, several commercially oriented groups appeared. Some of these groups were:
  • The Kingston Trio (1957)
  • The Brothers Four (1958)
  • The Limelighters (1959)
  • The Chad Mitchel Trio (1959)
  • Peter, Paul & Mary (1961)
Notable solo performers during this time were:
  • Dave Van Ronk - first recording 1959
  • Joan Baez - first recording 1960
  • Judy Collins - first recording 1961
  • Bob Dylan - first recording 1962
  • Tom Paxton - first recording 1962
  • Phil Ochs - first recording 1964
In the 1960's and into the 70's a number of singer songwriters began to compose songs in the style of either traditional songs or the pop-styled "folk songs" of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Some of these singer songwriters were:
  • Eric Bogle
  • Gordon Bok
  • Leonard Cohen
  • Bob Coltman
  • Richard Fariņa
  • Gordon Lightfoot
  • Steve Gillette
  • Steve Goodman
  • Joni Mitchell
  • Ed McCurdy
  • John McCutcheon
  • Ralph McTell
  • Malvina Reynolds
  • Bill Staines
  • Ian Tyson
  • Jay Unger
Their songs are farther from traditional styles than the legacy songs and tunes but were considered "folk music" at the time. These span a wide range from lyrical love songs to the protest songs of the Vietnam War era.