Newport Folk Festival, Festival Field, Newport, RI, 7-25-1968 to 7-28-1968, Part 1 - Taj Mahal & Elizabeth Cotten

I write this in December 2023. For the past few months, I've put a special effort into posting big rock festivals, since it seems to me those often get overlooked. I just reorganized the "labels" sidebar a bit: if you look under "Various Artists," you'll see eight such festivals I've posted already. Here's the ninth. In my opinion, it's an extra special one, because many of the artists here have few if any publicly available live recordings to their names.

The festival I'm posting this time is the "Newport Folk Festival 1968." At the time, there was a confusing number of Newport festivals. There was a yearly Newport Folk Festival and Newport Jazz Festival. Both were held in Newport, Rhode Island, and both had been happening since the 1950s. But there also was a Newport Pop Festival that only took place in 1968 and 1969. These were held in Southern California, and had no connection with the more established Newport festivals on the East Coast, except maybe they were taking advantage of the name.

Anyway, as you can imagine, the "Newport Folk Festival" tried to focus on folk music. But that was increasingly difficult in 1968, because the folk music movement had largely died out around 1965 and morphed into folk rock. Folk music would make a comeback in the early 1970s with the singer-songwriter movement, but that hadn't happened yet. So in 1968, the organizers of this festival tried to broaden their appeal by including some musical artists who weren't really folk music at all, such as B. B. King, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and Janis Joplin's band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. As a result, it was the most popular Newport festival yet, with about 17,000 people attending over several days. However, the crowd was an uneasy mix of folk purists wanting to see the more traditional acts, and rock fans especially there to see Janis Joplin. 

If you want to know more about the festival as a whole, I highly suggest this Rolling Stone Magazine article, which was written shortly after the festival ended:

The Newport Folk Festival: 1968 (rollingstone.com)

The conflict I speak of was even mentioned in the article's subtitle: "Torn Between Two Worlds."

I don't know how or why, but for some reason it seems the vast majority of this festival was professionally recorded, and has been available in bootleg form for many years. (As far as I can tell, only Joan Baez's set has been officially released, along with a few other songs that have gone on various artists compilations.) It seems previous festivals were recorded too, but all that's in the public domain are the little bits that have made into onto official albums. But while one can find these more extensive 1968 performances here and there if you dig deep, I've never seen them put together in a coherent way until now.

I've taken what I consider the best and most popular sets and made ten albums out of them. (The artists I've leaving out are obscure folk acts you've probably never heard of them, many of them doing gospel music.) Some of the sets were rather short, so in several cases I'm putting two sets onto one album.

This is one such album featuring sets from two musical acts. The first one, Taj Mahal, is a well known blues musician today. But at the time of this concert, his solo career was just getting started. (He'd been in the band the Rising Sons for a couple of years prior to this.) At the time of this concert, he'd only released one solo album, simply called "Taj Mahal," earlier in the year. Some of the acts actually played more than one set at the festival, though generally only one set was recorded. However, Taj Mahal is a rare case where two sets were recorded, so I'll present his set set later, on a different album, since it happened a few days later.

One of his songs, "EZ Rider" got cut off after only about a minute. It so happens that he also played this song in his other set later in the festival. So I used that version to fill in the missing portion. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in the title. That was the last song from his set that we have here, so it's fairly likely there was more to his set that didn't get recorded.

Elizabeth Cotten is an extremely unlikely musical figure. Here's her Wikipedia entry:

Elizabeth Cotten - Wikipedia

She played guitar when she was a teenager, and that's when she wrote her most famous song, "Freight Train." But poverty forced her to begin working as a maid at the age of nine. Eventually, she got married and had children, and gave up playing music altogether. It was only in her sixties that her musical talent was rediscovered, due to the fact that she was working as a housekeeper for the family of famous folk singer Pete Seeger. She finally put out some records, and did some touring. She won a Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording in 1984, and died in 1987 when she was ninety-four years old.

Here's what her Wikipedia entry has to say: "She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as 'Cotten picking.' NPR stated 'her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music.'"

So Cotten is very musically influential, and two of her songs, "Freight Train" and "Shake Sugaree," have been covered by dozens of famous musicians. However, she didn't record or tour that much. Two official live albums have been released, but I believe this is the only bootleg recording of her. I have to warn you that she lived most of her life up to this point as a maid, not a musician, and her vocals here were sometimes off key. The last song though is sung by her granddaughter Brenda Evans, who has a more conventionally trained voice.

This album is 41 minutes long. The Taj Mahal set is 25 minutes long, and the Elizabeth Cotten one is 16 minutes long.

By the way, note that the songs are numbered 001, 002, 003 and so on instead of 01, 02, 03, etc... That's because there are over 100 songs from this festival as a whole, and the numbering of each subsequent album in this series continues where the last one left off.

001 Dark Dusty Road [Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad] (Taj Mahal)
002 The Cuckoo (Taj Mahal)
003 Checkin' Up on My Baby (Taj Mahal)
004 talk (Taj Mahal)
005 She Caught the Katy [And Left Me a Mule to Ride] (Taj Mahal)
006 talk (Taj Mahal)
007 EZ Rider [Edit] (Taj Mahal)
008 Do Lord Remember Me (Elizabeth Cotten)
009 Bye and Bye (Elizabeth Cotten)
010 Freight Train (Elizabeth Cotten)
011 talk (Elizabeth Cotten)
012 Shake Sugaree (Elizabeth Cotten & Brenda Evans)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16038899/NewprtFlkFestivl_1968_01TajMahl_ElizabthCottn.zip.html

The two photos on the cover come from this exact concert. I don't know if the Taj Mahal photo is from this set or the other one he did later in the festival, but I'm guessing it's from this one due to it taking place in the day time. (I think his other set was at night, though I'm not entirely sure.)