7 / 8
PREVIEW
who went on to domestic and international acclaim, had
formative periods with the City Preachers. The history of
the City Preachers, like that of Ougenweide, begs for a
detailed family tree.
The four or so years that separate the City Preachers from
Ougenweide can be compared in evolutionary folk terms to
the Neolithic and Chalcolithic ages when stone went
metallic. (There is a little poet in me and I want him
evicted.) The Preachers delivered a perfectly respectable,
fairly typical, word-based repertoire for the time and for
West German folk bands. They worthily mixed Negro blues
and gospel by the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White and
trad. arr. with international folk fare from warmer climes
(by 1968 their singer Sibylle Kynast, poor lass, was credited
with singing in 15 languages) and a leavening of socially
conscious material. Some songs were even in German.
Ougenweide was never, it must be stressed, a folk group
‘per se.’ Political ideologies of various stripes had turned
folk music in Germany into beasts of burden. Ougenweide
was at the forefront of turning ‘folk’ into something else,
something acceptable to a new generation weaned on Anglo-
American pop/rock music and weaning off the
‘Liedermacher’movement. How they finessed that is the
story of these two albums.