Rainbow Quest

For the racehorse, see Rainbow Quest (horse).

Rainbow Quest
Title card
Genre	Folk music
Presented by	Pete Seeger
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of episodes	39
Production
Running time	approx. 60 minutes
Production company	Advertisers' Broadcasting Company
Original release
Network	WNJU-TV
Release	November 13, 1965 (1965-11-13) – 1966 (1966)

Rainbow Quest is an American television series devoted to folk music and hosted by Pete Seeger from 1965 to 1966. It was videotaped in black-and-white and featured musicians from traditional American music genres such as traditional folk music, old-time music, bluegrass and blues.

Each episode opened with Seeger singing his song "Oh, Had I a Golden Thread". The series took its title from Seeger's 1960 Folkways album The Rainbow Quest.

Background

Seeger had been kept off commercial American television for more than a decade before Rainbow Quest. In 1955 he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He refused to answer questions about his political beliefs and associations, telling the committee they were "very improper questions for any American to be asked", and unlike most witnesses he declined to invoke the Fifth Amendment. He was convicted of contempt of Congress, though an appeals court later overturned the conviction. He had also been placed on an industry-wide blacklist that limited his access to the mass media. The blacklist was still in force in 1963, when the producers of the ABC folk-music series Hootenanny declined to book him because of his HUAC appearance.

An opening came through UHF television. American set manufacturers were not required to include UHF tuners until 1964. As a result, UHF stations reached few viewers and drew little advertising. They filled their schedules with inexpensive programming aimed at niche audiences. One such station was WNJU-TV (Channel 47) in Newark, New Jersey, a largely Spanish-language outlet that had gone on the air only in May 1965. According to Joe LoRe, a cameraman on the show, it was the station's general manager, Ed Cooperstein, who sought Seeger out to create a program.

Early broadcasts were titled The Pete Seeger Show. Seeger was the series' main investor and was credited as its producer and host. Sholom Rubinstein, a New York producer from a Yiddish radio background, co-produced the program through his firm, Advertisers' Broadcasting Company. The first episode aired on November 13, 1965.

Production

The program was produced on a low budget funded by Seeger and his co-producer, Sholom Rubinstein. Seeger's wife, Toshi Seeger, given the title "Chief Cook and Bottle Washer" (someone designated and capable of "doing it all") in the closing credits after each show. Toshi actually functioned as the show's director by default due to the fact that she continually made suggestions to Rubinstein that he, in turn, would pass along to the camera operators. Eventually the cameramen simply followed her instructions without waiting for Rubinstein to repeat them.

The shows were unrehearsed and informal, with Seeger and his guests trading songs and joining in unplanned jams.

Seeger devoted one episode to Woody Guthrie, by then incapacitated by Huntington's disease, and another to Lead Belly, who had died in 1949. For the Lead Belly program he screened film of the singer in performance. Other episodes drew on home movies and ethnographic films the Seegers had shot during their travels. On the program that opened the 1967 public-television run, for example, Seeger showed footage of his brother Mike Seeger playing banjo on a unicycle and of a Japanese folk group.

Altogether 39 shows, each running about an hour, were recorded in 1965–66 at WNJU-TV (Channel 47), a UHF station with studios in Newark, New Jersey, serving the New York City area.

The shows were broadcast by Channel 47, primarily a Spanish-language outlet, to a very limited audience because only televisions equipped with a UHF antenna and tuner could receive them, and reception was difficult in an age prior to cable. For a few years in 1967–68, the shows were repeated on public television station WNDT (Channel 13, now WNET), which gave the series its New York public-television premiere on October 2, 1967. The series was also carried by public-television stations in other cities, beginning in San Francisco in July 1967, followed by WXXI in Rochester that December and WTVS in Detroit in January 1968. Seeger said that only twelve or thirteen of the twenty stations needed to recommission the series had carried the reruns.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and Tom Paxton appeared on the first show of the series on short notice because Seeger felt ill, as he explained on camera. Of the Clancy Brothers, only Paddy and Liam appeared, along with Makem. No explanation was given for Tom Clancy's absence from the group. A clip of Tommy Makem singing "The Butcher Boy" during this initial episode appeared in Martin Scorsese's Grammy-winning documentary about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, which focused on his earliest musical influences.

Content and themes

Seeger's guests spanned different styles and backgrounds including blues, gospel, old-time "roots" musicians, international "world" folk performers and crossover folk-pop stars such as Judy Collins and Donovan.

Many of his guests were older traditional musicians he had encountered over three decades of musical and political activity. Though known to folk-revival devotees, some were largely unknown to mainstream television audiences. The program thus preserved filmed performances of aging musicians. The episode with Mississippi John Hurt, for example, is the last known footage of him before his 1966 death.

The historian Simon Buck argues that the program reflects "a strident, if underrecognized, zeal for intergenerationalism" on Seeger's part. He notes that over half of the episodes feature at least one guest in their late fifties or older. This older guest was typically paired with a younger performer.

Examples of such pairings on the show included:

• Georgia Sea Islands singer Bessie Jones with children from the Downtown Community School (episode 7).
• The blind gospel guitarist Reverend Gary Davis with the young folk-pop singers Donovan and Shawn Phillips (episode 23).
• Mississippi John Hurt and the aging banjoist Paul Cadwell alongside the younger Hedy West (episode 36).

This pattern, Buck argues, reads as a deliberate counter to the era's image of generational division. He writes that with its social rather than purely commercial purpose, the show deserves recognition as a pioneer of educational television and a precursor of later intergenerational programs such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street.

Reception

When Rainbow Quest debuted, critics contrasted it with the commercial music programming of the time. Critic Jack Gould reviewed the debut for The New York Times and welcomed Seeger's "long overdue" arrival on television and judged the program "blissfully free of the slightest trace of show business ostentation". He said "Channel 47 alone has the honest article."

In January 1966, The Philadelphia Inquirer called Rainbow Quest an "ultra-informal, shirt-sleeves" show that folk "buffs" would make a weekly "must". It pointed out that host Pete Seeger had been turned away from the popular TV show Hootenanny.

Preservation and Home media

In 1980, Norman Ross, president of Clearwater Publishing in New York, a firm that was primarily a publisher of microfilms and reference books, proposed to publish the series on the then-new VHS and Betamax formats. Ross's company, whose name was eponymous with the nonprofit organization founded by Seeger and the boat at the center of the organization's efforts to clean the Hudson River, was not affiliated with the organization. (Ross had named his publishing company Clearwater in honor of Seeger.) However, when Ross began having the 2" broadcast masters copied onto 3/4" cassettes to be used as dubmasters, it became clear that the studio tapes had badly deteriorated while in the vault. A local video studio, Devlin, reported that the surface of the tapes was flaking off, which had damaged their equipment and resulted in copies that were of very poor quality. Devlin resigned from the job.

Another studio in New York examined one of the tapes and reported that it could be rescued by passing it through a chemical bath several times and then transferring the image to new media. However, they estimated that the 2" tapes would only survive one such pass, and the cost would be $19,500 for the 39 shows, a sum that was far too costly for either Ross or the original producers to justify at that point. On the other hand, the loss of all 39 shows would have been a great tragedy, given the unique qualities of the series.

At the suggestion of Manny Kirchheimer, an independent film maker whose wife Gloria was an editor at Clearwater Publishing, the decision was made to seek a grant for the work and a proposal was prepared under the aegis of The Woody Guthrie Foundation, whose director, Harold Leventhal, was also Pete Seeger's manager. The proposal was submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts, where Bess Lomax Hawes (sister of the folklorist Alan Lomax), who had sung with Seeger and Woody Guthrie, among others, as a member of the Almanac Singers, was one of the key people involved in making the decision. Thus the grant was awarded, the tapes were processed and two new sets were created: 1" tapes that went back into the vault and 3/4" videocassettes that became the dubmasters for Clearwater Publishing, which then proceeded to offer copies of the series for sale.

Because Clearwater's marketing efforts were primarily directed to libraries, sales were sparse through the '80s and '90s, especially prior to the advent of the Internet, and only a few thousand cassettes were sold in total. However, a number of libraries acquired the complete (38 shows) collection, including University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, National University (available only to National University faculty in San Diego), and the Tokyo Folklore Center. During this period Sun Video, owned by Caspar Weinberger, Jr., offered a small selection of the shows to the general public. In 2003 Ross, having sold both Clearwater Publishing and his subsequent firm, Norman Ross Publishing, withdrew from the agreement. A subsequent agreement with Shanachie Records, negotiated by Rubinstein, resulted in 12 of the shows becoming available on 6 DVDs in 2005.

• Johnny Cash and June Carter / Roscoe Holcomb with Jean Redpath
• The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem / The Mamou String Band
• The Stanley Brothers with Cousin Emmy / Doc Watson with Clint Howard and Fred Price
• The New Lost City Ramblers / The Greenbriar Boys
• Judy Collins / Elizabeth Cotten
• Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee / Mississippi John Hurt

However the remaining 27 were no longer available for sale. Two episodes, featuring Tommy Makem, and Cash & Carter respectively, were available on Netflix' streaming service as of December 2011. Sholom Rubinstein died a few years later.

In September 2015 archivist and librarian Karl-Rainer Blumenthal announced that he had uploaded copies of 10 available episodes to the Internet Archive. His blog post, with streaming players for the videos, originally included a footnote stating that "The show has been in the public domain since the 1990s"; he has since edited his comment, noting that he "cannot confidently characterize the copyright status of this work".

Episode list

1. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem with Tom Paxton
2. "Lead Belly" (solo performance by Seeger)
3. Elizabeth Cotten with Rosa Valentin & Rafael Martinez
4. Ruth Rubin
5. Jean Ritchie and Bernice Reagon
6. Malvina Reynolds and Jack Elliott
7. Bessie Jones and Children from the Downtown Community School
8. New Lost City Ramblers
9. The Beers Family
10. Herbert Manana
11. Martha Schlamme & Abraham Stockman
12. Doc Watson with Clint Howard and Fred Price
13. Norman Studer and Grant Rogers
14. "Political Satire" (solo performance by Seeger)
15. Lino Manocchia, Ralph Marino, and Federico Picciano
16. Mimi and Richard Fariña
17. Roscoe Holcomb with Jean Redpath
18. The Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys with Cousin Emmy
19. Sonia Malkine
20. "Woody Guthrie" (solo performance by Seeger)
21. Patrick Sky and The Pennywhistlers
22. Len Chandler
23. Donovan, Shawn Phillips, and Reverend Gary Davis
24. Alexander Zelkin
25. Mamou Cajun Band
26. Frank Warner and film of Frank Proffitt
27. Paul Draper & Coleridge Perkinson
28. Penny Cohen and Sonya Cohen
29. Theodore Bikel and Rashid Hussein
30. Steve Addiss and Bill Crofut with Pham Duy
31. The Greenbriar Boys
32. Judy Collins
33. Jim Garland and Hazel Garland
34. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
35. The Children of the Downtown Community School (return appearance, previously seen in episode 7)
36. Mississippi John Hurt, Hedy West & Paul Cadwell
37. Herbert Levy, K. L. Wong and Hi-Landers Steel Band
38. Buffy Sainte-Marie
39. Johnny Cash and June Carter

See also

• "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

External links

• Mother Jones: The Riff Blog: [1]
• PopMatters: Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest, The Anti-TV TV