Philadelphia, mid-1960s. The 2nd Fret folk club, located at the heart of the Rittenhouse Square café scene, is alive with music. Onstage, Jesse Colin Young pours his soul into an eclectic setlist. Songs include covers of classic folk and blues tunes, such as “Nobody’s Dirty Business” by Mississippi John Hurt.
As Young finishes his set, an elderly Black gentleman with a wrinkled shirt and rumpled felt cap finds his seat. Patrons did not realize that a master blues musician was present to enjoy Young’s set: Mississippi John Hurt.
Luckily, a young reporter for the Camden, New Jersey, Courier-Post documented the scene. That writer was John Lombardi, who went on to write for Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times.
Introduction
When a 20-something songwriter named Perry Miller changed his name to Jesse Colin Young and began playing gigs in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s, music journalists took notice.
From 1964 through 1966, Young and his music captured the imaginations of newspaper columnists across the United States and Canada. During that period, the folk music circuit of the two countries overlapped. Cultural exchanges occurred with outstanding musicians such as Joni Mitchell.
However, the mid-60s Folk War raged between purists and a new generation of pluralists who experimented with blending folk music with rock and pop. Young gradually changed his sound, incorporating electric guitar and more rock-oriented songs. Audiences reacted, and local music columnists took notice.
Young took the controversy in stride. He was the errant son of a wealthy family who had been expelled from the exclusive Phillips Academy and subsequently dropped out of college to pursue a career in music. His story intrigued a group of music columnists who endorsed Young’s crossover from folk to rock while reporting on the fans’ reactions. These journalists captured an essential shift in American music with real-time reporting and sensitivity to the contradictions of a privileged White singer immersed in Black folk blues.
The Soul of a Country Boy
Music columnists became interested in Young after he released his debut album, the Soul of a Country Boy, in 1964. Some looked into Young’s background, including Linda Norris, who wrote the column “Let’s Look at Records” for the Covington Record:
Jesse Colin Young could qualify as a misfit. He’s a city boy who grew up in the city, lives in the city, works in the city, but loves only the country. Jesse, born in New York, was the only son of a financial executive who attended Harvard Business School. The closest Jesse ever came to the country was during his summers, which were spent in the Adirondack Mountains and on Cape Cod.
His college career began at Ohio State and lasted only one year, as there wasn’t enough time for music and school simultaneously. It was, however, at Ohio State that Jesse first heard such country blues artists as John Lee Hooker and T-Bone Walker. Fascinated, he headed South, playing his guitar and singing the songs he learned.
In 1961, Jesse returned to New York, and in the spring, he rented a house in the hills near the Delaware River. “It was there,” he recalled, “that I spent the summer surrounded by friends who were also pickers and singers. Some of them made up a lot of their own songs, and I began to write songs too, drawing from all of the music I had heard.”[1]
An Urban-Rural Dichotomy
Other columnists noted the urban-rural dichotomy in Young’s music. Henry C. Schwartz, in his column “On the Record” for the Paterson, New Jersey News, wrote,
Music back to the soil and back to the soul is presented as the first album by Jesse Colin Young, a native New Yorker, in The Soul of a City Boy. There is an authentic ring to this program, with more than half of the tunes originals by Jesse Miller, which is Young’s real name.[2]
Schwartz reviewed albums by other “city white blues singers,” including The Blues Project (not the band, but a milestone multi-artist recording by emergent blues-rock musicians), Tear Down the Walls by Fred Neil, and All the News That’s Fit to Sing, Phil Ochs’ first album. Schwartz and other tuned-in columnists sensed the importance of this new wave of singer-songwriters coming just months after the advent of American Beatlemania.
Folk Rock
However, it was the following year, 1965, that the Beatles’ impact inspired a new genre – folk rock. In January, Young and electric guitarist Jerry Corbitt began performing as a duo on the Canadian circuit, eventually adopting the name the Youngbloods. In March, Young released his second album, Young Blood, which featured rock musicians. Columnists praised the album and Young’s vocals.
For example, Grover Lewis of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram lauded the album’s eclecticism:
Showcasing several of his own compositions, Young glides effortlessly from a country soul style … to rhythm and blues attack. … to archaic country blues … to a lilting jazz mode.
And through the [album] performances, the transitions just keep on keeping on, while Young manages to sound like nobody but himself, all the while singing with a visceral urgency and intensity that few seasoned talents can ever hope to command.
Young Blood [is] the most exciting single album by a newcomer we’ve heard in the year since we’ve bent our tin ear to the grindstone of popular music.”[3]
The Sacramento Bee’s record reviewer, Clark Biggs, compared Young to an esteemed Black singer-songwriter:
Oscar Brown and Jesse Colin Young are about as different from each other as two performers can get, and yet they are much the same. One thing is for sure: both are young emerging singer-composers of important if not major stature …
[Young’s] songs range from pure folk to country to blues and what today is considered modern. Some of them swing, but most move slowly, allowing the listener to gain the full impact of the lyrics. But the major item is Young’s voice. It is pure, vibrant, and versatile. He is a Bob Dylan you can understand. Yes, he’s really that good.[4]
Folk Music Purists
“A Bob Dylan you can understand.” Dylan, too, felt drawn to rock music. Three months after Clark Biggs declared Young the better singer, Dylan performed with a rock band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and famously became the target of folk music purists.
As noted, Young played electrified folk music and had incorporated electric bass, guitar, and drums into his backup group. And as with Dylan, folk purists objected.
We see this in Canadian columnist Frank Kennedy’s review of Young at the Riverboat Coffee House in Toronto. The well-known venue played a crucial role in nurturing the emerging singer-songwriter scene. The column shows us the line-up that would become the Youngbloods. Kennedy wrote:
The new revolution in the music business is folk rock. It takes the traditional country folk blues of such masters as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly and pairs it with a rock beat …
One of the originators of the new style is Jesse Colin Young …
Young holds his group together. It would be nothing without him. He is youthfully, somewhat ruggedly handsome. Appearing on stage in a black T-shirt, he stands out from the other three members of the group, who all wear red turtleneck sweaters.
He establishes a mood and makes the best of it. He has a voice that’s as warm and velvety as Elvis Presley’s when Presley is singing at his best …
However, Kennedy wrote, not everyone in the audience liked Young’s new sound:
The couple whose table we shared at the Riverboat Thursday night were dedicated, long-time Jesse Colin Young fans. And they were clearly disappointed. To them, he had prostituted his talent, which they said had been beautiful, traditional folk blues.
But that’s a story that’s as old as music. Play well and starve. Play to a gimmick, and suddenly you’re making money.”[5]
Thus, even though Kennedy liked Young’s new sound, he saw it as a “gimmick” to sell records. But not all reviewers agreed, as folk rock continued to gain respect in 1965.
Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods
As folk rock gained momentum, Young contributed to its popularity. In February 1966, he changed his billing to “Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods.” In addition to Young, who now played bass as well as sang, the band lineup included singer-guitarist Jerry Corbitt, electric pianist Lowell Levinger – known as “Banana” – and jazz drummer Joe Bauer.[6] Columnists began to write about other band members in addition to Young.
Case in point is another Riverboat review by a Toronto columnist:
… this week the beat’s too big for the Boat; Jesse Colin Young and the Young Bloods, a high-powered rhythm and blues group of hit parade caliber, are too powerful …
Corbett plays an intense guitar with a minimum of cliches. Much of his work is highly inventive and exciting to hear … Joe, the drummer, swings wildly but never lets it get away from him, while the electric piano player (whose name is Banana) is very competent and has a kooky comic attitude that should be capitalized on more.
Some in the audience were completely unprepared for what they heard. It represented a radical change from what they expected from the Riverboat … Some accepted and enjoyed it, and some did not; but then, you can’t please all the folkies all the time, no how![7]
Rockin’ the Le Hibou
A few weeks later, the group played a stint at another famed Canadian folk venue, Ottawa’s Le Hibou Coffee House. The club, situated in a restored warehouse with exposed brick walls and tin ceilings, hosted emerging folk rock musicians.
An uncredited columnist in the Ottawa Journal reviewed one of the band’s shows:
The label folk rock notwithstanding, Young and company can play the blues. They can belt them and cry them, and they do it with more legitimate intensity than most young men currently using electric guitar, bass, piano, and drums …
A high point in last night’s performance was an up-tempo version of “See, See Rider,” in which Corbitt, an accomplished guitarist, took the solo space on harmonica. It was a more than enthusiastic version of an old blues.
Young introduced the piece as “a little bit of funk,” and that’s what it was. It hit home, as did most of the performance.
And, refreshingly, the group hasn’t joined the “in crowd” by singing protest songs for the sake of singing protest songs. They play in their own style, and for a group that’s been together only six months, they have a big sound. It’s worth hearing.[8]
“Grizzly Bear”
In the spring of 1966, Greenwich Village’s famed Café Au Go Go sponsored a series of concerts called the Blues Bag. Each show featured a lineup of blues and blues-adjacent musicians. Young played the May 21, 1966, Blues Bag alongside legends like Muddy Waters and the Caucasian upstarts they inspired, like the Blues Project.
By that summer, Young and his backup band were indistinguishable.
And, by the fall of 1966, it was official: Young was no longer a solo artist but the bassist-vocalist for the Youngbloods. The band released its first single in November, a blues-ragtime rocker called “Grizzly Bear.”
The song and the band caught the ear of young journalists such as Loraine Alterman, the designated teen writer for the Detroit Free Press. Alterman wrote one of the first profiles of the Youngbloods and praised their authenticity, noting how the band “came across as sincere, intelligent musicians.” Band members described the group’s evolution from folk to rock:
Young: “The Beatles and the Spoons [Lovin’ Spoonful] proved to us that electric music was out of sight.”
Corbitt: “Until then, there had been some kind of funny prejudice against electric music. The Beatles helped change that a lot.”
Pop Expectations
However, by going electric, the band faced the commercial expectations of pop promoters. Young recalled an audition when they were asked to play other bands’ current hits: “We told him the Rolling Stones did ‘Satisfaction’ just fine, and we intended to do our own kind of music. He kicked us out.”[9]
In an interview with the Atlanta Constitution, Young continued to comment on his transition from folk to rock:
I felt confined. … I always wanted to sing both ends, the tender, pretty songs, and the raw, hard things. I never could get enough out of one guitar to provide a foundation for everything I wanted to do.[10]
And now, with the Youngbloods, Jesse Colin Young had the rock-solid underpinning he needed to take his songs to a new level. His journey from folk singer to rock musician was complete.
Conclusion
A handful of insightful music columnists documented this journey. Their columns reveal the mid-60s clash between purists and pluralists over folk rock, similar to past conflicts, such as the 1940s war between supporters of traditional jazz and modern jazz.
Music journalism has played a crucial role in these debates by supporting emerging musicians like Young, who are instrumental in driving musical innovation.
As the Youngbloods refined their sound into the 1970s, a supportive music press kept them in the public eye despite inconsistent record sales. Not to say the band eluded fame. A 1969 re-release of “Let’s Get Together” made the Billboard Top Ten and became a counterculture anthem.
Jesse Colin Young had come a long way since that night when Mississippi John Hurt arrived early for his set at the 2nd Fret coffee house to see Young perform. They came to be known as “Fathers and Sons,” the first wave of African American blues musicians and the generation of White musicians they inspired.
Young mixed the raw blues of Hurt with all the other sounds in the air at that time, from Beatles pop to bossa nova to R&B. Thanks to the attention of a handful of newsprint music columnists, we can enter the world of 1960s folk coffeehouses and watch Jesse Colin Young become one of the great synthesizers of American music.
To learn more about how music journalists supported the rise of folk rock, see my book, The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason.
Notes
[1] Linda Norris, “Let’s Look at the Records,” Covington Record, July 16, 1964: 1.
[2] Henry C. Schwartz, “On the Record,” Paterson News, May 14, 1964: 27.
[3] Grover Lewis, “Sounds of the Times,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 18, 1965: 36.
[4] Clark Biggs, “Turntable Topics,” Sacramento Bee, April 25, 1965: 128.
[5] Frank Kennedy, “After Dark,” Toronto Star, Sept. 11, 1965: 31.
[6] Jazz and folk music had a longstanding alliance as forms of art music, distinctive from popular music. Folk rock dissolved that distinction.
[7] Michael Sherman, “Michael Sherman’s Folkways,” Toronto Star, March 3, 1966: 24.
[8] Uncredited, “Folk Rock or Not the Music is Good,” Ottawa Journal, March 18, 1966: 25.
[9] Loraine Alterman, “Story of Grizzly Bear,” Detroit Free Press, Nov. 18, 1966: 48.
[10] Betty Carrollton, “Record Roundup,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 3, 1966: 48.
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