Urban Pioneers: A Concert of the 1960s Folk Music Revival in Utah. January 24, 2007.
You could say that this concert is happening tonight because of an idea enthusiastically expressed by Bruce " Utah" Phillips during an interview that fellow-1960s folksinger Polly Stewart was conducting with him at his home in California eighteen months ago.
That interview came about in turn because of Polly's observation that virtually nothing was included in and early manuscript of the anthology Folklore in Utah, edited by Dave Stanley (Utah State University Press, 2004), about the urban folk music revival in Utah. Upon reflection she realized that the writers could not be blamed for not including much about the folk revival, for there was nothing to include. There was no documentary record anywhere, only these few archival scraps.
The urban folk music revival of the 1960s in Utah, a significant period culturally and historically, was almost completely ephemeral, fated to disappear with the artists who had participated in it unless somebody created a documentary record through oral-history interviews and the recovery and preservation of historic photographs and memorabilia.
Polly therefore initiated in 2004 an openended documentation project to collect and preserve oral histories and materials. Her first interviews were with Rosalie Sorrels and Bruce "Utah" Phillips, and these were reported in an article in the Summer 2006 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, "Urban Pioneers: The Folk-Music Revival in Utah, 1959-1966." Documentation of tonight's concert is another outcome of the project.( Introduction from the concert program)
Watch Video: Urban Pioneers Reunion Concert
Read News Articles about the revivalists
The Revivalists
THE '60S FOLKSONG REVIVAL THAT CAPTURED THE WORLD'S ATTENTION ALSO PLAYED OUT IN UTAH. MEET SOME OF THE U ALUMNI WHO HELPED DEFINE AN ERA.
by Linda Marion
"The lines were long, stretching out the doors of the auditorium at Highland High School in Salt Lake City on a brisk evening in January 2007. Gray heads bobbed up and down as patrons purchased tickets and made their way into the ample auditorium, occasionally stopping to peruse event memorabilia along the way.The occasion was "Urban Pioneers:' a concert-reunion featuring many of the musicians who had participated in the folk music revival that took place in Utah and throughout the country in the late '50s and '60s. (See "Urban Pioneers" in the Winter 2006-07 Continuum.) The decidedly over-55 crowd-those who had experienced firsthand those tumultuous times-had come to re-experience the music and recapture the moment. "
Read full article at Marriott Digital Library.
