Upon his return to New York in 1959 after a nearly a decade spent based in London, UK, Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...

 produced a concert, Folksong '59, in New York City's Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....

, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood

Jimmy Driftwood

James Corbitt Morris , known professionally as Jimmy Driftwood or Jimmie Driftwood, was a prolific American folk music songwriter and musician, most famous for his songs "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Tennessee Stud"...

; the Selah Jubilee Singers

Selah Jubilee Singers

The Selah Jubilee Singers was an American gospel vocal quartet, who appeared in public as a gospel group but who also had a successful recording career as a secular group in the 1930s & 1940s.-History:...

 and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters

McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...

 and Memphis Slim

Memphis Slim

Memphis Slim was an American blues pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano. A song he first cut in 1947, "Every Day I Have the Blues", has become a blues standard, recorded by many other...

 (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stony Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...

, Mike Seeger

Mike Seeger

Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary...

 (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs

The Cadillacs

The Cadillacs were an American rock and roll and doo-wop group from Harlem, New York; active from 1953 to 1962. The group was noted for their 1955 hit "Speedoo", which was instrumental in attracting White audiences to Black rock and roll performers.-History:...

 (a rock and roll group).

The occasion marked the first time rock and roll

Rock and roll

Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...

 and bluegrass

Bluegrass music

Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...

 were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs," Lomax told the audience. According to the Izzy Young

Izzy Young

Israel Goodman Young or Izzy Young is a noted figure in the world of folk music, both in America and Sweden.He is the former owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, and since 1973, he has owned and operated the Folklore Centrum store in Stockholm.- Biography :In 1957, on...

, owner of the Folklore Center, and chronicler of the Greenwich Village folk music scene, the audience booed when Alan Lomax told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll.

In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music . . . . At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing."

According to the DC Bluegrass Union:

That night back in April of 1959 when Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys played Carnegie Hall (along with Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim, Jimmy Driftwood, and Mike and Pete Seeger, among others). Curtis Cody, who was guesting on fiddle for the Baltimore-based bluegrass band, peeked through the curtains before the start of the show. The elegant hall was packed with Northern folk-music fans, as the first bluegrass group ever to perform at the elegant and historic concert hall - more accustomed to playing in bars in and around Baltimore - paced nervously backstage.

Curtis turned to banjo player Walter Hensley and said, "Walt, I don't think they'll like us a bit." Walt recalls that his legs "were like Jell-O - and we had to play the fastest song we knew." But when Walt, with legs shaking, stepped out onto the stage before the assembled audience at Alan Lomax's Folksong '59 concert, Curtis recalls that "he played something on the banjo, and they tore that place up."

Curtis Cody wasn't alone in his assessment of the band's performance and the crowd's reaction. "There is true folk magic in every note Walt plays," according to Alan Lomax. Neil V. Rosenberg, in his book Bluegrass: A History, reports that "all agreed that of the various groups in the concert, Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys were the hit of the evening." Years later in an article in Bluegrass Unlimited by Tom Ewing, Earl Taylor recalled, "When we would end a number, I knew that it would take five minutes before we could go into another one - that was how much rarin' and screamin' and hair-pullin' there was". The recording of that concert, released as an LP later that year on United Artists (Folksong Festival at Carnegie Hall, UAL 3049), influenced a generation of young musicians and new fans, many from urban areas in the North who were exposed to bluegrass for the first time.

Internet Resources

• Tina Aridas, "Walter Hensley: The Banjo Baron of Baltimore"| in the DC Bluegrass Union