Long out of print, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down is a classic in the history of American popular culture. The books tells the story of the folk music community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from its beginnings in living rooms and Harvard Square coffee houses in the late 1950s to the heyday of the folk music revival in the early 1960s. Hundreds of photographs and dozens of interviews combine to re-create the years when Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and a lively band of Cambridge folksingers led a generation in the rediscovery of American folk music.
"A lavish, comprehensive portrait of a particular place and time that shaped so much of the folk music community today. . . . A masterpiece of oral history [that] demands a position on any folkie's must read list." - Folk Alliance Newsletter
Eric von Schmidt is a historian and graphic artist, who as singer/songwriter has recorded seven solo albums. He has also written four children's books and numerous articles. Author of Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters, Jim Rooney is a producer for Forerunner Music Group.
Excerpt
In the aftermath of the afternoon raindance inspired by the Farinas, everbody was in a good mood and up for the closing of the festival. Pete Seeger opened the concert and instead of singing, played a tape recording of a baby crying. It was the first cries of John and Penny Cohen's child, and Pete dedicated the program to this new citizen of the world, asking what kind of world that baby would grow up in and what the singers that night would sing to that baby about. Seeger's own view seemed to be that they would sing that it was a world of pollution, bombs, hunger and injustice, but that PEOPLE would OVERCOME. And that theme was taken up by Seeger's old friends from the Weaver's days, Ronnie Gilbert, who sang Dylan's "Masters of War" and a Phil Ochs song about freedom. Theo Bikel had also sung the same Ochs song the night before. It would appear that Seeger's program to the new baby was working out as he had hoped. The old guard was singing to it in the words of the younger writers, but the message was the same.