It's likely that beyond a few myopic purists, doddering beats, and zealous, tenure-hungry academics, no one even cares about the process that at the end of the '50s sanitized various strands of American traditional music to produce a homogenized pop variant called "folk." The ravenous popular culture born in the first flush of television looked at the new teen market and saw nothing but cash. The sons and daughters of the mushrooming middle class were college bound, where some of them – already questioning a post-WWII America that had produced McCarthy witch-hunts, vicious denial of civil rights for black people, and runaway materialism – were ready for pop music that offered more than just teenage tragedy and silly escapism.

The folk audience was all about – are you ready for this? – keepin' it real. When Bob Dylan, the first folk superstar, made his initial pilgrimage to New York, it was to meet populist troubadour Woody Guthrie, who was dying in a New Jersey hospital. Guthrie was, in the folk imagination, the real article, a man of the people who during the Great Depression suffered the hardships and supported the struggles of destitute Americans. In the booklet that accompanies The Folk Years: A Singers and Songwriters Collection, Greil Marcus quotes Dylan in 1962, as he introduces "Talkin' New York" (which isn't part of the collection) at Gerdes Folk City in New York: "Unlike most of the songs nowadays being written uptown in Tin Pan Alley, this was written somewhere down in the ... United States." Actually, Tin Pan Alley was centered in the Brill Building, which – though farther uptown than Greenwich Village, where the folkies congregated – was in midtown. Dylan's words were part boast, part challenge, and he remained the symbol of those years, even as he retreated from a sound that soon became tame enough to hit the pop charts.