Searching for Roots: Discovering Electric Blues in White America (BK-53)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the interest in folk music and its roots in rural America and the European Continent reached a high pitch as thousands of young adults crisscrossed America documenting folksongs and sharing authentic music. Folklore societies sprung up at many major campuses. This was a folk revival, one that has not been repeated since. But old English and Scottish ballads were not the only music discovered during this time. There was another even more indigenous music that needed no revival. In fact this music was very much alive and probably playing somewhere just across town, separated only by a racial curtain: modern city blues. This article is about the heyday of folk music in the late 1950s and early 1960s and something about how white America discovered the blues.