American Folk Music Revival - Ethnicity

Ethnicity

Books such as the very popular best seller, the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (1947), which helped spark the folk song revival, featured a fair amount of material in languages other than English, including German, Spanish, Italian, French, Yiddish, and Russian. The repertoires of Theodore Bikel, Marais and Miranda, and Martha Schlamme also included Hebrew and Jewish material, as well as Afrikaans. The Weavers' first big hit, the flipside of Lead Belly's "Good Night Irene", and a top selling it its own right, was in Hebrew (Tzena, Tzena, Tzena) and they, and later Joan Baez, who was of Spanish descent, occasionally included Spanish-language material in their repertoires, as well as songs from Africa, India, and elsewhere.

The more commercially oriented folk-music revival in North America however, (as it existed in coffee houses, concert halls, and radio and TV) was predominantly an English-language phenomenon, though each of the major pop-folk groups such as the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Limeliters, The Brothers Four, The Highwaymen and others featured a number of songs in Spanish (often from Mexico), Polynesian languages, Russian, French, and other languages in their recordings and performances.

See also: List of North American folk music traditions