The Newport Folk Festival imagined a more equitable world — can that dream be revived?

Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963. Among those behind him are, from left, Peter Yarrow, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey, Joan Baez (partially obscured), two unidentified people, Charles Neblett, Rutha Harris of the Freedom Singers, and Pete Seeger. Photo by Rowland Scherman/Getty Images

By Olivia Haynie September 30, 2025

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From 1963 to 1966, a team of filmmakers shot nearly 80 hours of footage of the Newport Folk Festival, documenting performances, interviewing attendees, and capturing the festival’s changes as rock encroached on the folk scene. One of the filmmakers, Murray Lerner, made two documentaries from the footage: the Oscar-nominated Festival and The Other Side of the Mirror, which focused on Bob Dylan’s performances. But the rest sat untouched for nearly two decades — until now.

Newport & The Great Folk Dream, the latest documentary from Robert Gordon, director of the documentaries Johnny Cash’s America and Best of Enemies about Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., depicts the festival’s peak years. When Gordon first received the footage from Joe Lauro, CEO of the Historic Films Archive based in Greenport, NY, and the film’s producer, he realized there were many unknown stories to tell about Newport. In addition to nationally-known acts like Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, and Odetta, the festival featured non-mainstream talent like The Moving Star Hall Singers from South Carolina, Irish folksinger Margaret Barry, and the Ishangi Dance Troupe from Nigeria.

“‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ is one of the, you know, for me, one of the classic folk songs of the sixties,” Gordon told me. “Gullah Island artists got up there and sang it in a whole different way as a work song.”

“It was just, like, mind blowing to me and so I wanted to put it at the front of the film so that people like me, who had certain calcified understandings of folk music would have those understandings ruptured very early in the movie.”

With the exception of Pete Seeger, all of the festival’s co-founders were Jewish: George Wein, Albert Grossman, Theodore Bikel and Oscar Brand. Many of the most popular performers were Jewish as well: Bob Dylan, Malvina Reynolds, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, and Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary.

“Jews, no matter how assimilated we are, we’re still outsiders. And that outsider awareness helps us appreciate other outsiders,” said Gordon. “There’s strange bedfellows on the fringes of society. And that’s the most interesting place.”

Gordon’s film shows the effort the organizers put in to find diverse acts. The festival’s director of field research Ralph Rinzler and volunteer Bob Jones traveled throughout Canada and the American South to recruit local performers, such as Cajun French musicians from Louisiana and a group of mill workers from the Cape Breton Islands who performed a traditional worker’s song that involved banging a sheet on a table. All the artists, whether they were mill workers or stars like Seeger, were paid the same rate: $50.

Although Newport is sometimes remembered as an “idyllic world,” Gordon explained, it “had its shade and shadow in it, too.” While the more well-known singers were put up at a large hotel in Newport, others had to make do with boarding houses. One of these houses became the “Blues House,” where mostly Black musicians stayed and held parties. In a scene in Newport, ethnomusicologist and festival organizer Alan Lomax can be seen in one of the houses lecturing a Black gospel choir on how they should sing their music.

Gordon became aware of Lomax’s faults while writing the biography Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. Although Lomax was credited with a lot of early research on Waters, Gordon found that a number of Black researchers had been integral to the work and not been properly credited, which Gordon tried to rectify in his book Lost Delta. Although Gordon thinks one can appreciate Lomax while acknowledging his flaws, he received a lot of backlash from Lomax fans. Finding this Newport footage felt like that situation all over again.

“Our team really debated it for a long time. Like, do we want to include this scene? Do we have to include this scene? And ultimately, we determined yes to both of those,” Gordon said. “It was personality differences and cultural differences that had to be overcome. And that was one, and it was important to show it.”

In an archival interview, John Cohen, who is seen playing with the New Lost City Ramblers, credits folk music with exposing him to a life beyond what he knew growing up in the suburbs of Eastern Long Island. By bringing together people from different backgrounds, the Newport Folk Festival helped galvanize a young generation to the political movements of the time.

The Freedom Singers performed at the festival in 1963 as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC also used the festival to register voters and advertise the March on Washington, which occurred about a month later and featured folk singers like Dylan, Odetta, and Baez.

By 1965, Newport took on a more formal character, introducing press badges and passes, signaling a new popularity that contrasted with the thrown-together, community-oriented feeling it had started with. The landscape of music was also shifting, as epitomized by Dylan’s electric performance at that year’s festival. In 1966, the last year shown in the film, young people who had once dreamed of becoming folk stars now wanted to be rock n’ roll celebrities. The festival went on hiatus in 1969 before Wein brought it back in 1985.

Forty years later, Gordon and his team think there’s a lot to learn from the lessons of the Newport Film Festival, specifically “that art can bring about change and that there’s a place for everybody in a democracy.”

“I think we need a lot of action today,” Gordon said. “And I hope this movie will inspire more artists to inspire more people and bring about more action.”

Newport & The Great Folk Dream will be showing at the Hamptons International Film Festival Oct. 3 and 4.