Folkways: The Foggy, Foggy Don't

If the attempted Washington Square revolution had succeeded, unregulated folk-singing might have flooded all the parks in all our cities.

—New York Times Editorial

One of the most agreeable and freest entertainments in Manhattan is, or was, to wander down to Washington Square in Greenwich Village on a warm Sunday afternoon and listen to the folk singers. There, on a good Sunday, ten or a dozen guitarists and banjo pickers will be roosting around the edge of a big, ugly fountain playing loudly or softly according to confidence and competition. The songs are love ballads and louder lieder, seditious of maidenly morals and bankerly riches (not because the minstrels hate capitalists or, in some cases, like maidens, but merely because good ballads in praise of chastity or the Federal Reserve System are rare). There is no hat passing; the musicians are well fed, often by their parents. They have come merely to play, to ignore tolerantly the lady tourists with cherries on their hats, and to learn new stanzas of labor songs no laborer ever sang.

The Song Is Ended. This extemporaneous gaiety has been going on since 1943. But this year the Greenwich Village Chamber of Commerce objected that the folk singers were an undesirable element; young men wearing leather jackets and surly expressions had been observed in the crowds. Newbold Morris, a blueblooded liberal Republican who probably wishes by now that he had not been appointed Park Commissioner, decreed that there would be no more singing. His interest, he explained, was in merely protecting the Washington Square grass. (There is some grass in the square, pushing its way up through a mulch of ice-cream wrappers, but there is none within a beer can's throw of the folk singers' fountain.)

Last week the minstrels, usually a mild lot, massed in protest. One of them balanced a bass fiddle on his head. Another carried an inflammatory sign: "We Want to Continue As We Have in the Past." Politely they asked the cops if they could march around the square, and politely they were told that this would be all right, as long as no one struck a law-breaking chord of Greensleeves or Foggy Dew.

As the minstrels began trudging, two champions of the downtrodden appeared, neither one a folk singer: Harold Humes, a 35-year-old writer who is good at writing novels (The Underground City) and miserably inept at ingratiating himself with police; and John Mitchell, a coffeehouse proprietor currently protesting one of Manhattan's customary coffeehouse operating expenses, the police shakedown. (Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm admitted last week that "we have an uneasy hunch that some cops take money.") Humes and Mitchell spoke loudly about free speech, the sorry behavior of police officers, and the logical theory that Village real estate men would like to see all the bohemians migrate to The Bronx.