What was the folk revival?

The folk revival was a mid-century Anglo-American movement that treated songs as things you could learn, share, and stand behind: voice and guitar, coffeehouses and festivals, traditional ballads next to new protest songs. Joan Baez’s 1960 “Donna, Donna” is the revival’s most famous meeting with a Yiddish theater (ייִדיש טעאַטער) lyric — an English cover that made a 1940 stage song a freedom anthem.

After the war, singers in the United States and Britain reached for older songs — British ballads, spirituals, union tunes, and pieces borrowed from other languages — and put them on records that sold. Newport (1959) and the Vanguard and Elektra catalogs were the circuit. The revival was not a folk culture; it was a way of performing one. That is why Baez and Donovan sit here, not under klezmer (כּלי־זמר) : they sang an English Dona Dona, not a wedding dance.