Muddy Waters first played the Newport Folk Festival in 1960.

The Newport Folk Festival will mark its 50th anniversary next weekend with a lineup that includes Pete Seeger and other musicians who performed at the first festival in 1959. This is a look back at the role that the festival played in racial integration in its early years.

It’s an iconic image: A diverse, all-star group of performers closing the 1963 Newport Folk Festival by clasping hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” While the battles of the civil rights movement raged outside Newport, Bob Dylan, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples and more sang a simple song of hope together and held hands, and led the audience to do the same.

That moment has been immortalized in Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary Festival, and festival impresario George Wein calls it “a moment never to be forgotten” in his memoirs. Today, he points out with pride, President Johnson was using the phrase “we shall overcome” in a speech to Congress after the Selma riots. “And that was because of the folk movement. Maybe not the Newport Folk Festival, but the folk movement.”

But integration was important in Newport on stage and off throughout the ’60s. The festival grew up while the civil rights movement was growing, testing and being tested. And while the festival was about music, that very fact meant that it was about something else at the same time.

The first Newport Folk Festival was held in 1959. That was only five years after the Supreme Court decided that public schools could even theoretically be integrated, four since the Montgomery bus boycott. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was still four years in the future; the Selma marches, six.

The tensions of the late ’50s and early ’60s weren’t all in the faraway South, either. Wein says the folklorist Willis James wasn’t allowed into the room Wein had reserved for him at the Hotel Viking. The blues singer Robert Pete Williams, a guest in Wein’s Middletown house, asked where the toilet for black people was. Wein’s 1959 marriage to the former Joyce Alexander, an African-American, was illegal in 19 states at the time.

But not many musicians cared. By and large, Newport was a place for artists of all colors to come together and play, no matter what the atmosphere was back home. Bob Jones, who started at the folk festival as a volunteer in 1963 and since been festival producer since 1985, recalls a black accordion player from Louisiana who played all the time with white musicians, but that didn’t change the way he was treated. “Once the music stopped, there were the normal segregation issues. But when they got north, no one ever mentioned anything.”

He recalls sitting on some steps at an after-concert party with Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters in the early ’60s as they traded songs and stories.

“Monroe asked Muddy, ‘Do you even play in the South?’ And Muddy said, ‘Not really.’ ”

But here they were. “When it came down to it,” Jones says now, “everybody sang with everybody else.”

In 1964, a group of white Sacred Harp singers from Alabama was riding a packed shuttle bus to the festival stage. The Georgia Sea Island Singers, a black gospel group, got on board to find there weren’t any seats.

The men of the Sacred Harp group offered their seats to the women of the Georgia Sea Islanders.

Elene Stovall was on that bus, a 12-year-old girl from Haleyville, Ala. She says that the segregation of the time didn’t reach into her Christian musical circles. “We open our arms to people. That’s just the way we were. That’s the way we are today.… I think there’s something about this music, and music in general, that brings people together.”

Wein recalls his wife directing traffic backstage, telling Southern musicians where to go and what to do. They went along with it, later telling Joyce Wein, “You’re about the finest woman we’ve ever met!,” he recalls.

“Very moving things happened like that,” he says now. “There were a lot of incidents.”

And they weren’t by accident. Wein says he was changing things the best way — the only way — he knew how.

“I never fought [racists], or tried to get them to change their way of life,” Wein says now. “That’s how I did my fighting; by being there.” He recalls the six-year process of getting the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival set up, and the city pulling the plug three times — first over integrated bands, then over unrest in the city, then over Wein’s marriage.

Eventually, of course, the festival went on and is one of America’s cultural treasures.

“I lived my life,” Wein says. “I never wanted to be a rebel. I never thought I was doing anything different by marrying Joyce. I wanted the same kind of respect my father had as a doctor. I wasn’t going to live an outsider’s life; I was part of society. And to this day I still am. And that’s why I’ve lasted all these years. I don’t compromise, but at the same time I don’t tell anyone else they’re wrong. They have to find out that they’re wrong.

“And they’ll find out.”

rmassimo@projo.com