Pete Seeger, at left, wearing his familiar baseball cap, joins in a square dance prior to a show at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival. Seeger, now 90, will be back at this year’s festival, which begins Saturday at Fort Adams State Park.

Journal Files

Fifty years ago, the first Newport Folk Festival put traditionalists such as Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand on the same stage with The Kingston Trio, a pop act with a chart-topping single and three number-one albums. People were debating then what real folk music was — including on a festival panel at Rogers High School.

Fans were still debating the question six years later in 1965, when Bob Dylan chose Newport for his first electric performance — and in 1985, when the festival returned from a 15-year hiatus with acts such as Los Lobos and Robert Cray; and they’ll be doing it next weekend, when indie-rockers The Decemberists and Fleet Foxes share the stage with Seeger and Joan Baez.

The tension between the traditional and the new, the old favorites and the interlopers, is what festival impresario George Wein calls “a magic combination.” It drove folklorist Alan Lomax and Butterfield Blues Band manager Albert Grossman to come to blows over an insulting onstage introduction in 1964; it drove Seeger to famously wish for an axe to cut the power lines during Dylan’s 1965 show. And it leads some of the fans who cheered Dylan back then to complain about the new generation — in the next breath admitting that they haven’t been in about 20 years. It’s always been there, and figures in the festival’s history say it will always be there — because it’s supposed to be there.

Half a century ago, the original idea was for folk at Newport to take up one afternoon of the already established jazz festival. But Wein, the jazz pianist and nightclub owner who had been producing the Newport Jazz Festival for five years, quickly realized that the folk scene, with Harvard Square as its epicenter, was a much bigger deal than that. Soon, a whole folk festival was put together to be held in Freebody Park, a block behind the International Tennis Hall of Fame, July 11 and 12, 1959.

Seeger was the first act. Brand was the MC. A young Odetta, not yet a legend, was there as well. The bluegrass group The Stanley Brothers played, as did country-blues guitarist Gary Davis and the string band The New Lost City Ramblers. “Newport wasn’t the biggest festival in the world,” Seeger says now, “but it was one of the first to show … you could put well-known people on the same stage with less-known people.”

Through the influence of figures such as Seeger and Ralph Rinzler and Theodore Bikel, all key figures in the folk boom of the ’50s and ’60s who joined the festival’s board in the early years, the festival was an egalitarian, traditional, rooted affair through the next decade. No artist would be paid more than $50 plus expenses, Seeger and Wein say.

“It was utopia,” Wein says now. “But it worked — then. It couldn’t work now. … You need to have somebody whose integrity could not be challenged. And no one ever challenged Pete’s integrity.”

Artists roomed together in dormitories; concert-goers slept on the beach. Robin Wiseman, then a North Kingstown teenager, remembers sitting at a picnic table in Newport in 1964 making sandwiches with folk-blues legend Taj Mahal.

Eventually, the influence of rock ’n’ roll crept into the folk scene. The post-Beatles rebelliousness and thoughtfulness of rock music helped drain the folk scene of young listeners. Bob Dylan’s festival-closing performances in 1964 and 1965 (he first played Newport in 1963) were the legendary symbols of the process.

Doug Hindley, of Lincoln, who was there both years, recalls that in 1964 “the entire city was waiting to see Dylan,” calling him “the power and the man.” “He’s yours,” gushed Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers, introducing Dylan that year as he climbed the stage with his acoustic guitar, already playing “Chimes of Freedom.”

The next year, Dylan tore out of the gate with a breakneck electric version of “Maggie’s Farm.” “Most people were in a state of shock; the others just booed,” says Hindley. “There was crying.” Even though he now remembers the performance as “dynamite; just beautiful,” and Dylan finished with a couple of halfhearted acoustic songs, Hindley and his friends drove back to Cumberland afterward, “and not one word was said.”

Mighty Dylan, Hindley felt, had sold out. No more work shirts and workshops; local fans like Wiseman would no longer run into Dylan on Bellevue Avenue and get invited to a sing-along. The post-electric Dylan wore “Clarabelle the Clown shirts” (Hindley’s term) and went on world tours.

Wein knew that something had changed too. “We lost our prince. And nobody replaced him. …“It was never the same after that. By ’66, I knew that we were having problems.”

By 1970, both Newport festivals were in trouble. There wasn’t the money to put on a 1970 Newport Folk Festival. And when that year’s jazz festival ended in a riot, Wein and Newport parted ways. Wein moved the jazz festival to New York and produced new projects, including the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

When the revived folk festival returned in 1985, things had changed, and continued to change.

Newport, a town that the Navy and the moneyed elite had dominated, was now much more interested in attracting tourism than in the ’60s and ’70s. And Newport wanted the festival back, Wein says — with some changes. There were no more nighttime shows, and the festival would now be at Fort Adams, a state park on a peninsula away from downtown.

The new venue changed the tenor of the festival. Gretchen Lendrum, of Middletown, remembers the old Newport shows as “a 24-hour festival,” with music all over town even after the shows had shut down for the night. The Fort Adams shows are more like a regular concert, she says — “you clap, then you pack up and go home.”

Bob Jones, who had started as a volunteer in 1963, became producer of the folk festival in 1985, and he says that his first order of business was to get as many people from the canceled 1971 festival onto the 1985 bill. “I had no idea whether we’d be able to keep the festival going,” Jones says, but with Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt, the festival sold out. The next year, Jones told The Journal “Maybe we made too much of nostalgia last year but we wanted to reestablish the festival in Newport and now we will find out if we have or not.” While the performers included a 15-year-old Alison Krauss, Jones says, the festival lost money in 1986.

That’s when the festival turned to corporate sponsors to make ends meet. In 1987, the Nestlé corporation was the first to sponsor the festival. As corporate sponsors came and went, the festival’s name changed — from the Nestlé Folk Festival to the Ben & Jerry’s Newport Folk Festival to the Dunkin’ Donuts Newport Folk Festival. “If we didn’t have corporate sponsorship, we wouldn’t have a festival,” Wein says, adding that the high fees commanded by headlining artists and the capacity of Fort Adams (about 9,000) limit the booking possibilities.

Whatever the naming situation, Jones kept varying the bill. “We were certainly moving, not toward the edge, but to a larger definition of folk. I felt that if people came out of the folk scene, maybe never playing it but having a great respect for it, they could be presented.”

The festival was now a for-profit venture with corporate sponsorship, but the promoters looked for ways to replicate the feel of the old festival wherever possible, to mixed results. In the process, they helped create a new sensation in the mix between singer-songwriter folk and radio-ready pop music.

The Indigo Girls maybe never got as big as Bob Dylan, but singer-songwriter Amy Ray says that the Newport festival was similarly instrumental in building their career.

They played Newport nine times between 1990 and 1999 (as well as in 2001 and 2006).

“The audience there kind of loved everybody,” Ray recalls. “It was very embracing. And for a long time it felt like home to us, and the standing gig that we would do. … I knew the history, and … I felt like part of a folk tradition.”

Ray adds that the camaraderie between the artists was reminiscent of what she had been told about the early history of the festival: “The most important part of that festival to me is not when we actually played,” she says.

And while the political involvement of the festival wasn’t as pronounced as in the years when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality were invited guests, Ray says that even in the corporate-sponsored years, there was room to make a difference.

“There was definitely an activist spirit,” Ray recalls. “It wasn’t politicized the way it probably was in the ’60s, [but] whenever we were there, we were talking to people in that way.”

In 2007, Wein sold his company, Festival Productions, which produced the folk and jazz festivals, to a new firm called Festival Network. The new company produced the 2007 and 2008 editions of both festivals, but in February of this year, the state Department of Environmental Management, which operates Fort Adams, revoked the new company’s contract with three years remaining, citing late payments of the state’s cut of festival proceeds.

Wein saw a vacuum in Newport and got back in the game at age 83.

He hurriedly put together New Festival Productions, which was awarded a one-year contract from the state in April — very late in the game in the festival business, and with no corporate sponsor (one has since been found for the jazz festival). And when assembling the bill of what this year is known as George Wein’s Folk Festival 50, he went to the same kind of mix that has worked in the past.

When Festival Network began producing Newport, the most immediate and visible change was an influx of indie-rock bands that had clearly been influenced by the singer-songwriters of the ’70s and ’80s, but had cut their teeth playing electric guitars in bars, rather than acoustics in coffeehouses: M. Ward, Bright Eyes, Ray LaMontagne and more.

When Wein resumed control of the festival, he hired Jay Sweet, who had worked at Festival Network, saying, “He represents a world that I don’t know.” Sweet, who lives in Easton, Mass., and went to high school in Newport, says “I wish there was a better word, but I believe in the brand. I believe in the heritage that Newport brings with it. This is where Dylan went electric and the Pixies went acoustic.”

The bill next weekend includes Seeger, Baez, Mavis Staples, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Arlo Guthrie, as well as young indie-rockers and singer-songwriters such as The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Neko Case, Joe Pug and Rhode Island-based groups Deer Tick and Low Anthem.

Sweet recalls seeing The Decemberists in Boston last year and hearing the song “Sons and Daughters.” “I thought, ‘This could be a Pete Seeger song’ … they also don’t shy away from the darker side of folk tales, which the artists on the early festivals never did.”

Sweet, who is also editor-at-large at Paste magazine, calls this year’s edition “a DIY (do-it-yourself) festival,” and says that that places it squarely in the Newport tradition. He gives the example of singer-songwriter Joe Pug: “He is the epitome of what a folk artist was, is and will be. Someone who says, ‘I don’t have any money and no one’s backing me, but I’ve got this guitar, I got a batch of songs, and I’m going to make enough money here to get to the next gig.’ That, to me, is folk music.”

And the two-day festival, which begins on Saturday, will end where Newport folk began: with Pete Seeger.

He’ll close both days of the festival, including a giant sing-along with as many of the performers as possible. He says he hasn’t been to the festival in many years, and that his hearing precludes him from getting to know many of the younger artists, but this is one of only two shows this year he’s doing away from the immediate area of his Beacon, N.Y., home.

Seeger, 90, who wanted to cut the cord on Dylan in 1965 (because the sound mix was awful, he says), now quotes the advice he got decades ago from his father: “Don’t waste your time arguing about the definition of folk music; it’s a waste of time. Just know that the folk process has been going on for thousands of years, in all fields of endeavor.”

And the process continues at Newport, he says, praising the festival’s “wonderful contrast. Mixing it up!”

rmassimo@projo.com