Traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the late fifties and sixties. Cantwell, professor of American studies at UNC Chapel Hill and a banjo/guitar player himself, analyzes the ideologies, traditions and personalities that created the folk revival and explores the idea of "folk" at the deepest level, showing that the revival was a search for authentic democracy. Surprisingly, he rejects the political connection with the earlier Communist folk movement described in Denisoff's book. "What is most interesting about the revival," Cantwell claims, "is not its political affiliations, but the absence of them. ... It was ... the supression of the earlier political affiliations that enabled the folk revival to flourish as it did, outside any sectarian context. Nothing was more tiresome, once the revival was in full swing, than to endure the contributions of some antediluvian communist songster with a bag of 'banker and bosses' union songs, stirring as they must have been in their time, who imagined that the labor movement of the thirties had come back to life." Exciting reading, a little difficult sometimes for all of its cultural studies lingo.