Folk Frenzy

When I was young I use' to wait

On Massa an' hand him his bicarbonate

Until one day he chance to fin'

Dat effervescent Ab-Doh line!

Oh, Ab-Doh Pitts! Ab-Doh Pills!

Dey's de answer to all de stomach ills!

No one has tried to sell a pill to these lyrics yet, but any day now, some adman may. The U.S. is smack in the middle of a folk-music boom, and already the TV pitchmen have begun to take advantage of it. Pseudo folk groups such as the Kingston Trio (see SHOW BUSINESS) are riding high on the pop charts, and enthusiasm for all folk singers--real or synthetic--has grown so rapidly that there are now 50 or so professional practitioners making a handsome living where there were perhaps half a dozen five years ago. Last week, in far from mute testimony that folk music is now grown up enough to have its own status symbols, some of the most popular of the artists turned up in Newport's Freebody Park for the city's second annual Folk Festival; others arrived in Berkeley, Calif, for a five-day festival that each day attracted 1,200 ardent fans.

According to experts, the basic cause of the bull market in folk music--which has been coming on ever since World War II--is the do-it-yourself trend: folk audiences, unlike jazz audiences, like to participate in the music they admire. At Newport last week, many spectators brought along banjos and guitars with their sleeping bags and sat around campfires on the beaches strumming far into the night. (In the last three years, U.S. banjo sales have increased by 500%.)

Folk singers come in at least four varieties: the genuine articles, such as Louisiana Convict Pete Williams; the "city-billies," who pick up their materials at second hand but try to retain the original flavor; the "art singers," who transform the materials in carefully stylized arrangements, and the frankly commercial groups, which fit folk lyrics into a pop format. Among folk music's currently popular or promising names:

P: Odetta, a 29-year-old Alabama-born singer who works out of Chicago and has become a favorite with the campus crowd. Originally trained for opera, Odetta first achieved fame with her version of Water Boy, has a repertory of some 200 sad, bawdy and fanciful songs--Bald-Headed Woman, Dark as a Dungeon, Great Historical Bums--all of which she delivers in a dark, handsomely pliant contralto with none of the whisky rawness of untutored folk singers.

P: Theodore Bikel, 36, sings in 17 tongues, is especially known for Israeli songs--Dodi Li, Mi Barechev, Hechalil--which he delivers in a constricted, almost nasalized voice. An accomplished actor (The Defiant Ones, African Queen), he attacks his material with such zest and humor that he has become one of the most sought-after concert artists in the business.

P: The New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of college men, sing a brand of hillbilly known as "Blue Grass." Born in Kentucky, the style calls for a complex string accompaniment--in this case on five-string banjo, fiddle and guitar--and a frenetically fast vocal line unreeled to a foot-slapping accompaniment. The Ramblers learned their best songs--Beware, O Take Care and Hopalong Peter--from such fabled Blue Grass groups as the Buckle-Busters and Dr. Smith's Champion Horse-Hair Pullers.

P: Pete Seeger, 41, quit Harvard to study folk music, has since cut some 50 albums that have made him the hero of the col lege folk revival. Seeger's voice is twangy and his pitch uncertain, but he sings with unequaled verve and a kind of rough-hewn sense of conviction. An ardent leftwinger, he once sang many industrial songs, now is better known for Appalachian mountain songs (Pretty Polly) and Negro classics like I'm on My Way and Takes a Worried Man.

P: The Brothers Four rose to sudden popularity with their recording of Greenfields. Inspired by the Kingston Trio, they often appear in gold shirts and Oxford grey shorts, offer hoked-up versions of such numbers as Eddystone Light and Let the Rest of the World Go By. Perhaps their most unforgivable sin, in the eyes of folk purists, is backing up their arrangements with cymbals and bongo drums.

P: The Weavers--three men and a girl--were organized by Pete Seeger more than a decade ago, and their success has made them the most widely imitated group in the business. Although they compose some of their own materials, they stick closely to folk tradition, avoid the pop styling that some other groups favor. Their most famous numbers: Good Night, Irene and On Top of Old Smoky.

P: Joan Baez (pronounced buy-ezz) is a 19-year-old Boston-born beauty of Mexican-Irish descent who made her first big splash at last year's Newport Festival and has since been tagged as one of folk music's most promising talents. In her soft, clear voice, she sings both ballads such as Barbara Allen and rhythm numbers such as We Are Crossing the River Jordan, bringing to each a fine rhythmic sense and quantities of fresh charm. So far, she is best known in the coffeehouses of Harvard Square, where she sings, she says, to troubled intellectuals with "the Bomb on their minds."

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