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could hear water running. She grinned at me conspiratorially. ‘Guess who’s in the shower! Dylan!!’ What, in the spring of 1964, when His Bobness was king of the folk world, could I say? I joined the happy one-night couple for a monosyllabic breakfast and hit the road.
    By the spring of 1964, Dylan and Baez had become folk’s royal couple, uniting the rival New York and Boston camps with their musical energy while becoming sexually potent icons of popular culture. Folk music had come a long way from its origin as an offshoot of left-wing politics. When Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie arrived in the ’40s to lend authenticity to the ‘people’s music’, its popularity surged. It got a bit too popular for the McCarthy-ites in the early ’50s after Pete Seeger’s Weavers got to number one with ‘Goodnight Irene’. Subpoenas were issued and warnings whispered to radio and TV networks about communist influences. Folk music went into a long Eisenhower-era decline.
    In 1957 the Kingston Trio found a song about a hanged killer named Tom Dula on an Appalachian field recording and their slick version topped the charts and brought folk music back from the wilderness. In the early sixties, the civil rights activism of the Kennedy era needed a better soundtrack than corporate pop; protest songs, mostly by New York-based singer-songwriters, provided it.
    In Boston, things evolved differently. The spark that lit up the local scene was Joan Baez’s barefoot appearance at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Singing a duet with the hokey Bob Gibson, she brought the house down, triggering a boom in guitars, long hair and black turtlenecks back in Massachusetts. In my first year at Harvard, I saw her riding a Vespa with her boyfriend through the slush of the Cambridge winter, grinning wickedly with that beautiful dark mane trailing behind. She radiated sex and humour, not earnest politics. The pleasure she took in her own voice was sensual, her choice of songs based on the beauty of the melodies and the way they told of a world of wild (but often doomed) women and free-spirited, dangerous men.
    The scene that flourished in the ripples of her success was full of eccentrics, visionaries and travellers. Around Harvard Square, people were always going off to or coming back from India, Mexico, North Africa, Paris, London or Japan. They soaked up Zen, flamenco guitar, Rimbaud’s poetry and new ways of getting high. Everyone bought the blues and country music reissue LPs emerging in the wake of Harry Smith’s masterful Anthology of American Folk Music compilation. In cheap apartments in old wooden houses they taught themselves a particular Appalachian banjo or fiddle style, or figured out how Bukka White tuned his National steel-bodied guitar. New Yorkers like Seeger and the Weavers gave music from all over the world – often learned from Alan Lomax’s field recordings – the same chirpy strum and hearty harmonies, as if that proved all men were brothers. The Cambridge scene was drawn more to differences than to similarities.
    The wildly divergent personalities and tastes of Smith and Lomax were central to the two approaches that would clash so memorably at Newport in 1965. Lomax was a bear of a man, a skirt-chaser, completely sure of himself and his theories about the inter-connectedness of music across cultures and continents. Travelling from Mississippi prison chain gang to Italian tobacco fields with his tape recorder, he had developed a thick hide and a bullying manner. Smith, on the other hand, had become a collector of recordings of traditional music almost by accident. He was a homosexual who made experimental films, spoke several Native American languages and smoked frequent joints. His vast record collection almost buckled the floor of his apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, a few express stops downtown from Lomax’s sprawling West Side apartment. New York folk singers were more comfortable with the earnestness of Lomax’s