Bridging The Gap At Newport Folk Festival


Jim James at Newport Folk Festival in 2008, photo by Laura Brown

Videos by American Songwriter

“My whole dedication now is Newport… I want both those festivals to go on after I’m gone,” said George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals in the 1950s.

Asked what the legacy of Newport meant to him, Jay Sweet, the festival’s current co-producer, says, “It’s one of those things that when it gets in your blood, it’s hard to do anything else.”

“It’s the original blueprint for every festival going in the country. It’s the very first one. We as an American culture rarely get to have something as authentic and original that we get to claim as our own.”

Sweet would know. He went to high school in Newport, has covered the fest as a reporter for Paste Magazine, and a few years ago was hired by an outside company to serve as a consultant in assessing the viability of buying the festival.

The deal that came about – George Wein sold his company Festival Productions, which produces the Newport festivals among others, to Festival Network in 2007 – went south, so Wein reclaimed Newport in 2009 and installed Sweet as the master of ceremonies.

The year 2009 also marked the fest’s 50th anniversary with performances by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, both of whom performed at the inaugural festival in 1959, as well as The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, The Avett Brothers, Gillian Welch, and Iron & Wine.

Wein says the artists who play the festival today look up to the artists who helped establish the festival so many years ago. “They got in the spirit of what we used to have literally 40 years ago,” he said last December.

Sweet says his goal in programming the festival is “bridging the gap,” hoping to show younger audiences that there’s a direct line between what bands like The Decemberists are doing today and what Fairport Convention was doing in the past.

View Photos from Newport Folk Festival 2008

Sweet also relishes the opportunity to bookend unlikely pairs, such as the 2008 slotting of Richie Havens, the artist who opened the first festival in 1959, followed by a landmark solo acoustic performance by Phish’s Trey Anastasio.

“Folk is a bit of a misnomer,” says Sweet. “It’s a catchall term for things that aren’t easily labeled,” he says – things like gospel, Cajun music, Texas prison songs, and blues.

One new and significant strain in what some people might consider folk music is the rise of Jack White’s Third Man Records, which has released music by many of this year’s performers such as Wanda Jackson, Pokey LaFarge, and Secret Sisters. Third Man will even send their truck, the Rolling Record Store, to Newport this year.

“I think we’ve been running in very parallel paths,” says Sweet of his own career in the music industry and Third Man’s rise as a record label. He says Third Man and Newport are “both into preserving something, shining a light on corners of the music industry that are really important to it’s musical heritage.”

In the 1960s, record labels like Vanguard and Elektra had a symbiotic relationship with Newport Folk, championing many of the same artists, and Sweet says he’s been looking for a modern day record label to fill those same shoes.

Leave a Reply

Makin’ Stuff Up: Chaos Theory