Festival! - Edel Music & Entertainment

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Murray Lerner’s film “Festival” is a cinematic synthesis of four Newport Folk Festivals in which the art of folk music is pictured in transition during its moist crucial years. The range is from Bob Dylan doing “Tambourine Man” and Joan Baez doing “Farewell Angelina,” to country artists like Johnny Cash doing “I Walk the Line” to the Georgia Sea Island Singers. The range is also from the high-priced professionals like Peter, Paul, and Mary to the authentic folk dignity of living legends such as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt. Joan Baez, Donovan, Judy Collins are all on view, as are Pete Seeger, the Ed Young Fife and Drum Corps and numerous others that give a feeling of community with the whole American present and continuity with the American past. Indeed, the long-haired Newport audiences pictured sleeping on beaches and on the grounds and in sports cars and battered station wagons, plunking banjoes and guitars, and swapping tunes between formal concerts, and talking for Lerner about folk music, seem not a rupture with the American past but an expression of a carrying forward of an American idealism and social concern.

Tracklisting:
01 Peter Paul & Mary - If I Had A Hammer
02 Joan Baez - Mary Hamilton
03 Bob Dylan - All I Really Want To Do
04 Peter, Paul & Mary - Blowin’ In The Wind
05 Donovan - And The War Drags On…
06 Judy Collins - Turn, Turn, Turn
07 Odetta - Just Can’t Keep From Cryin’
08 Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry - Keys To The Highway
09 Mississippi John Hurt - Candy Man
10 Bob Dylan - Maggie’s Farm
11 The Staple Singers - Help Me, Jesus
12 Paul Butterfield Blues Band - I Was Born In Chicago
13 Son House - Son House Blues
14 Howling Wolf - You Hear My Howling Early In The Morning
15 Johnny Cash - I Walk The Line
16 Joan Baez - Farwell Angelina
17 Bob Dylan - Tambourine Man