1 Jeff Todd Titon Box 1924, Department of Music Brown University Providence, RI 02912 [This essay, written in 1987-88, is part of a book entitled Transforming Tradition, edited by Neil Rosenberg, that is forthcoming in 1992 from the University of Illinois Press.] RECONSTRUCTING THE BLUES: REFLECTIONS ON THE 1960S BLUES REVIVAL 1 The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants money to artists and to organizations supporting artists. The NEA Folk Arts Program funds folk artists. One wintry March day in 1981 I was sitting in an office room in Washington, DC with a dozen anthropologists, arts administrators, museum workers, folklorists and ethnomusicologists, and we were voting on grant proposals. I was beginning a three-year term on the Folk Arts Panel, an appointed group that recommends to the NEA which proposals should and should not be funded. We had just had a lively discussion about a certain proposal. Everyone thought the idea was a good one, that the project was feasible, and that the proposing organization was sound. The problem was that the artists were a mixture of traditionalists and “revivalists.” Folk arts did not fund revivalists. Some panel members felt that the presence of revivalists tainted the project and therefore we must not fund it. Others felt that because some of the presentations involved traditional artists exclusively, and because a respected professional folklorist was a consultant on the project, we should fund only that portion that presented traditional artists. The latter position carried the day and the project was recommended for funding at a lower figure with instructions to the presenting organization that Folk Arts money was to be used for traditional artists only. At this point I remembered when I had first heard the term “revivalists.” It was in the late 1950s when I was a teenager. Among the upscale suburban crowd and the bohemian college students and city dwellers, folk music was in vogue; it offered a meaningful musical alternative to rock ‘n’ roll’s vapid insistency. In the late 1950s most folksingers entertained their audiences with a mocking, ironic, “hip” or “beat” stance, a version of existentialism, the popular intellectual philosophy of the day, which viewed the world as populated with anti-heroes. Singing folk songs—meaningful lyrics set 1 This is a revised version of a paper read at a panel on Revivalism at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society, in Albuquerque. The panel was co-chaired by this writer and Burt Feintuch, and it included Neil Rosenberg and Edward D. Ives. I am grateful to Steve Feld, Barry O’Connell, Burt Feintuch, and Neil Rosenberg for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.