Katrina Morse: I’m speaking with Betsy Siggins, who’s been involved with the folk scene in Cambridge for quite a few years. Betsy, I was wondering if you could introduce yourself and talk a bit about your background and your involvement with the music scene in Cambridge.
Betsy Siggins: I’m Betsy Siggins, and I had the great good fortune to come to Cambridge. I went to B.U. in the School of Fine and Applied Arts, which is not called that anymore--it’s now Drama or Theatre. Joan Baez and I were in the same class together, and that proved to be both the best thing that happened to me and the worst thing that happened to me, because it wasn’t long before we both gave up academics for the folk/Bohemian lifestyle that was just springing up all over Boston campuses and Cambridge campuses. It was new, it was exciting, it was different, it was out of the ‘50s. Most artistic people found the ‘50s very dull and very by the book. People with radical ideas didn’t have much of a place. Politically there had been a lot of people arguing for peace, and they still are. That was probably the touchstone for many of us, was that we discovered early that people could indeed protest in a safe environment. They could say what they felt about war and civil rights and women’s rights. A lot of things just coalesced in the early ‘60s, and we were here. The music scene just seemed to naturally spring up in very small coffee houses. I had a lot of--not a lot--I had enough time in Greenwich Village on the weekends where everybody played an instrument in Washington Square, so I’d been sort of captured by that kind of freedom and that creativity, and then came to school here and found another rather rapidly growing community of musicians. I failed at the accordion because my mother was a piano teacher so I thought I’d play the instrument that gave her the most gas and grief, and that [beeping]--is that you or me?
KM: It’s you.
BS: So I played the accordion, but probably quite badly, for about two years in high school. But the wonderful thing about where I was, and this is all that kind of “it happened, you were there,” and it either influenced you and you moved closer to it or it didn’t influence you and you put it on the back burner. But my mother practiced piano before I went to school in the morning, which means six to seven o’clock in the morning she was doing scales downstairs, playing a lot of Beethoven and Chopin, and upstairs, on my forbidden radio, after nine o’clock at night, under the covers, the airwaves were so clean back there we got WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia, and that was the heydays of Patsy Cline. So at night I would listen to country and western music from the ‘50s, and then I would hear my mom playing a very different kind of music. When I look back on it, that was the bookends for me. I have never strayed, really, from--not that I spent a lot of time on country music--but when I got to B.U. and then Joan and I started hanging out together and there was Jim Kweskin, who was already a brilliant guitarist, doing a lot of old, old standards and then became the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. I met and married Bob Siggins, who had gone to Harvard with three other members of the group--one of them went to MIT. Bob Siggins and Clay Jackson were both--one from Texas and Bob was from Oklahoma--and the thinking at Harvard, I think, was that they ought to pair up a couple of these guys who are coming on scholarship and came from the same area, giving them more of a dialog and a friendship, because they understood that bringing people in on scholarship from the midwest had a hard time mingling with the upper class, east coast students. That began to blend, which is a very interesting part, which is one of the parts that I love. Because of Club 47 there was no economic background difference. People came to the Club in ties and people came in blue jeans and rode motorcycles. It was the music that was the harmonious touchstone in that world. I married Bob Siggins in 1961 and he was of course the banjo player and the lead for The Charles River Valley Boys, and over the next several years, I am sure somewhere in my memory I have learned--every old-time bluegrass and very old-time country music songs are somewhere in my head. That’s all we did all the time except when Bob was going to school or I was working at Club 47, and I had a variety of jobs. Once I was on the board, once I worked in the kitchen, once I was a waitress, once I was the art gallery manager and then became the program person. Either Jim Rooney or Byron Linardos did the booking, but I got to arrange the schedules. Those were heady times for me because I, along with the Club, were being introduced to the incredible variety of music that tells the American story, whether it’s from here or another country. That became a driving interest of mine, and I think that’s where I still stand, is that there’s so much history told through stories, told through song, and that it is an approachable way to get that history. It makes people sing and it makes people feel that there’s a way to get in without a Julliard degree or something that is out of the reach of the common people. There’s a saying that folk music is for the people, by the people, and of the people. I think if you think about that it’s really homespun, it comes from Africa, it comes from all over Europe and the East, the Middle East, and it’s coalesced here a lot because of the immigration issues that brought people here. In as many ways as people have come here they have brought their culture, and with it their music, their food, their dance, their stories, their myths, their politics. It’s been a great opportunity for people to then say “How do I express my difference?” And it comes back through music and story over and over and over again. My hope is that across this country there is room for the new immigrants and their stories, because looking at the curriculum in public schools now, they’re not getting an advantage of knowing American history through its music, or bringing their own music. It’s very specialized and it’s rare, and with the cutbacks it’s more rare, or rarer. Part of what I do and what I want to continue doing is bringing special programs to public schools and to after school programs, to bring this music and keep it alive. As we call it, “keeping the legacy alive.” When I say “legacy” it sounds like a really--it sounds dry as a word, but what I feel about it is that everyone has a legacy, and that if you approach it through music it’s way easier to draw out from people. It’s not like you’re grilling them, it’s not like you’re judging them, but it has kind of a universal feeling. It seems to me that it’s really necessary, to be a full human being, to embrace whatever your roots are, in whatever way makes you comfortable. That doesn’t include everybody. There are people who, for very good reasons, are not interested in re-hashing their past and I honor that as well. Going into Club 47 in 1958 when I was eighteen or nineteen, and marrying Bob when I was twenty and just becoming submerged in bluegrass and old-timey music, and of course the Child Ballads, which many of the women were singing. Fewer of the women were singing blues, but there were women who were white and singing blues. A seminal part of my time there was when--I was very close to the people and still am--Bob Jones, who runs the Newport Folk Festival, and Bob was a kid from West Roxbury. His dad was an electrician. There were five kids. I’m still very good friends with his sister, who teaches the ‘60s at Amherst College. Bob was the ringer at the early Newport Folk Festivals, and then became a director. He got to travel with Ralph Rinzler, who was the instigator of the Festival of American Folklife on the Mall in Washington. I had moved to Washington on the weekend that Martin Luther King was assassinated. There were fires everywhere when I drove in with Ralph. He said “I want you to come live up in my community. It’s ninety-nine percent black, and it’s a lovely, lovely place to be involved with community.” So I took his advice and I moved a block from Ralph, and then I would get to spend my summers working for him at the Smithsonian. Those festivals, I think they’re still amazing. They featured a state each year that would include a Native American tribe from the state. It would include food, crafts, certainly tons of music, woodworking, whatever the state was known for they tried to focus on that and focus on what made that state. Will you turn that off, I’ve got to get some water.
[cuts out]
BS: Where was I?
KM: The Mall and Washington.
BS: Ok. So working for Ralph Rinzler was like going on a picnic. His part was to be very serious about it and convince the powers that be at the Smithsonian that it was relevant and that a festival free to all Americans, because the Smithsonian is free, it just blossomed in him as he began traveling south. He’s the person who found Bill Monroe down in Kentucky, he’s the person who found Doc Watson and the Watson family, who were up in Deep Gap, North Carolina. He and Alan Lomax and my friend Bob Jones would do road trips down to the South, and that’s how the first black blues players came North. We were ready for it. We were astonished by it. I couldn’t watch those artists play more than a couple songs when I would cry. I would feel the lonesomeness, the sadness, the deprived-ness of all southern blacks. I’m sure some stood out. But these guys who were singing in front of churches, on the street, at house parties, rent parties, came with one suitcase, maybe, their Sunday church suit, one overcoat, maybe a hat, and a battered-up guitar case, and they’d get out on the stage there and they couldn’t believe the attendance from the audience. It was worshipful that these men lived and made it through being a black man in the South and had never ever in their lives expected to be on a stage with kids who were thirty, forty, fifty years younger than some of them, to hear their stories. Of course there was no hotel in the Northeast that would let them stay. We were still nicely segregated back in the ‘60s. Elizabeth Cotton, who wrote Freight Train, came to play at Club 47, and one of our board members, Nancy Sweezy, who was a remarkable woman and ran music parties in her house all through the ‘60s, she took Elizabeth Cotton across the street--I think the department store was Corcoran’s--and they would not sell Elizabeth Cotton a white blouse. Nancy was just horrified at that treatment, so she bought the blouse, but they had to make it clear that she was buying it on the pretense that it was going to be Nancy’s with the understanding that it was going to be Libba’s. Again, we were horrified, because we never--you know, we’d lived a very protected life and we had not experienced that. We were young. I don’t know how much was known about the black infantries in World War II, but certainly not as much as we know now, and these guys would end up on our living room couches, and it’s ironic that that’s where they told their best stories and that’s where they felt comfortable, that’s where they got drunk, and they fell where they slept, or they slept where they fell. I can remember Reverend Gary Davis staying with us and he could not take off his overcoat. These were people who were used to waking up with nothing every day. I don’t know whether you’ve seen Scorsese’s music Blues series but it’s a phenomenal piece of documentary on those lives, and it’s so haunting and it’s so sad, yet out of all that sadness and poverty came these incredible, incredible songs. We’re lucky that we had academicians who wanted to record them, make something of them, honor them, and try to get a little money in their pockets. So they became a circuit for the blues musicians to come up the East Coast and play in lots of different cities after a couple years. Then the blues music out of Detroit and Chicago began making its way east, and I still think that’s in large part to the Newport Folk Festival, which at that time was a non-profit foundation. They could afford to bring these guys up, so they were scheduled either before Newport or after Newport at places like Club 47. We were not the only one. Cafe Lena in Saratoga--there were a lot of places. The Village was filled with coffee houses and bars that were producing concerts more and more frequently, ‘till they got like we were. I want to say we were closed on Mondays, but we weren’t. We ran Captain Marvel comic series. We ran a comic and a regular movie from the theatre, like The Third Man, or with the Marx Brothers. So that was Monday night. The gallery was always open to local artists every afternoon. Sundays were these incredible afternoon brunches, where we would get groups from the New England Conservatory. I’m trying to think of the others. Lesley [likely she means Berklee]. Kids who were in the music department would come and practice little quartets on the stage on Sunday. We fed them, they got to practice, and we had classical music. We bought ten New York Times, and I cannot even begin to tell you how many Eggs Benedict I have personally cooked. So there was a community spirit fairly early on that spread to a lot of the other coffee houses in Boston, but the seminal place was Club 47, and it would be hard for me to explain why that is except that it was a magical time and it fell into that little room. We were first on Mount Auburn Street, down near Tommy’s Lunch. The landlady--we had no lease, we had no fundraising abilities, we’d never even thought about fundraising. It cost a dollar to get in and we wondered why we were slipping into debt. We had a landlady who was just ugly. She would come by screaming in the windows, “I’m sick and tired of all these hippies hanging around my place! It looks disgusting!” The cops hated us, because of course all our music was communist and we were plotting the overthrow of America. I think Harvard gave us some stability there because a lot of these kids were then creating music groups in their dorms. Of course there was the Harvard radio station, which has for, I don’t know, fifty, sixty years Saturday morning is Hillbilly at Harvard. It’s still running. I used to work there once in a while when the Charles River Valley Boys were singing. There was another show called Balladeers on maybe Saturday evenings. Tom Rush mainly ran it but I also did some disc jockeying there. We can’t find those tapes. I wish they could, at Harvard, but they moved the radio station in the ‘70s and so a lot of stuff got mislaid. But maybe one day. I know that Hillbilly at Harvard has an enormous collection. They tape every show. The Bluegrass Union of Boston is still going strong, has thousands of members. There was an influx of bluegrass down from Maine and New Hampshire in the ‘60s because a lot of guys from the South had gone north to find work and regrouped and continued playing their music from the South. There’s a bluegrass festival every February that draws two thousand people out in Natick. So there’s pockets of the old, morphing towards new. I was gone, I wasn’t here from 1969 to 1997, so I didn’t know the Donlins very well when they ran Passim. The place in 1997 when I came back was tottering on major, not bankruptcy, but major closing, because then the bill wasn’t five thousand dollars, the bill was 125 thousand dollars because in a trust from the owner of the building where Passim is now, and Harvard University, it was that Harvard would maintain where Passim is now for twenty five years and that Harvard would pay Sheldon Dietz, who owned the building, ten thousand bucks a year. I think that--this is not formal, this is informal. But then when the trust was over, Harvard had to buy the building from him at the original price, twenty five years ago. So that was quite a deal for Harvard. Sheldon’s heirs got what they wanted. It used to be a firehouse. No. The firehouse was where Cambridge One is, the pizza place, right across the street from Passim, and Passim was the stable for the horses for the fire trucks. There’s great literature on that. Go talk to Arthur Krimm or Charlie...Charlie...I can’t think of his name! At the Cambridge Historic...Dammit. I can’t, it’s just not in my head right now. But they run the archives for the City and they’ve got pictures of when it was a fire barn. But the old Club 47 was always--well, I can’t remember what it was before it was Club 47. Bob and I and The Charles River Valley Boys, not purposefully, had moved to Rome for one winter, the winter of ’61...winter of ’60 and summer of ’61, and it seemed that everyone in Rome needed a bluegrass group to play in their restaurant because they were seen as this great novelty act. So you got food and all the wine you could drink. Little by little they started coming over. I only had a one bedroom apartment so I said “You have to find somewhere else to stay. I can’t do all of you.” But it was a very interesting time, it was when lots of people were experimenting with drugs and going to Morocco, and somehow they seemed to have to pass either in or out of my house from either London or Paris. There was a small but very connected group of us there. That summer, July, we drove to London and sold our car, stayed in a pension, and the guys made their first old-timey band music in a record store called Dobell’s Record Store, which was the place in London where absolutely every folk artist hung. They were really cool and, I don’t know, there’s a photograph of The Charles River Valley Boys standing around one little mic, like the Club 47 had, sticking down from the ceiling, and doing this old-timey album. There were some very large, larger than life British musicians who had fallen in love with country and western, real western music from the United States. Cowboy stuff. Jack Elliott was passing through at that time. People who loved Jack Elliott, who were also musicians, passed through Dobell’s. I think there’s probably a book on the history of Dobell’s Record Shop. Then we all came home. The Club had gotten further, deeply committed to traditional music, with a touch of contemporary. I can’t say that, for instance, Tim Harden was a blues player, but he started with somebody else’s repertoire. It’s rare where you meet a musician who is all grown up, artistically, that doesn’t have influences. So the line between traditional and contemporary, for me, is fuzzy and it’s fine because I think you create out of what moves you and it’s why many women learned music from Joan Baez. She did the entire Child Ballad book, which lives in Widener Library, because that’s what she felt moved by. She didn’t become a songwriter until quite late in her career, and I think that was the right thing to do was to sop up tons of other kinds of other people’s writing and tunes and then see where it leads you. There are many people who only do covers of other people. They’re not interested in writing or they don’t think they have the talent to write. It’s all ok with me. Tom Rush is not a traditional musician, but he’s beloved by millions of people, and that list is endless. So when I look back now on the traditional musicians that we cut our teeth on, which were the old blues guys, the country hills people, the mining songs, protest songs, the depression-era music; all of that has given birth to more political, anti-war, environmental, things that touch us today, things that matter to us today. I just did a workshop this morning at a public school with, she’s fourteen years old, and she’s been writing since she was ten, which was shocking to the fifth- and sixth-graders that we did this workshop with. But they were very forthcoming with questions for her, and how did she do this. She said “I don’t know. My mom had a guitar in the house. I was a terrible piano player, I hated practicing, so one day I picked up my mom’s guitar. My dad showed my three chords, and I thought ‘This feels good. It’s not so big and overwhelming as a piano.’” And she said “From that moment on I just started writing, and I don’t know where it came from, but after school I go to my room and I work on something.” This was when she was ten and eleven, and now she is the spokesperson for an anti-bullying campaign, because she wrote some very beautiful, beautiful songs after that girl killed herself in Western Mass, who was being bullied. She’s everywhere now. She’s going to Wisconsin to do fifteen public schools on anti-bullying; giving them the songs, teaching them the chorus, and getting them involved in--there’s, I can’t think of the name, national group--but somehow topical things caught her, and her ears were wide open for it. She’s already in ASCAP and she’s writing with Nashville writers to learn how to co-write. She’s real serious. But she’s got a very high voice and she’s a little girl, so the kids could really relate to her. Some of them shared the fact that they had been trying to write a song. It was just a great moment to see how that, again, opens up the playing field for kids who maybe never think of it, but then there’s that string that gets to them and they think “Huh, she’s not much older than I am, she’s very sweet, and she’s got this career already.” She’s a perfect example of where music goes. The other piece of what I love is where old traditional music is morphing towards, which is all these string bands and old-timey bands, and more and more graduates out of Berklee come with many talents: jazz, old-timey, contemporary folk, and they can juggle them all. The New England Folk Music Archive is opening a music school, The Folk Music Academy, and four graduates from Berklee within the last two years are four of the teachers. They’ve been taught--I don’t know how many colleges have folk music as a major or bluegrass as a major, but Berklee does. They’re all around, they’re everywhere, doing string bands and jazz and anything that will keep their guitar going. For me it’s wonderful to see because I’m getting to be an old broad and I like to see kids doing this. I don’t know what the ratio is of failure to success, but I think being able to play guitar in a room full of friends is good enough. It’s a hard road to become self-sufficient, and I’ve watched an awful lot of kids get out there on that road and after two years they say “You know, I just can’t pay for my gas anymore and I can’t turn out enough CDs to make it pay for,” so they say “I wanted to, but it’s too hard.” There’s not enough money, so there’s a struggle. I think the coffee house and open mics are the places where those people belong, because if they find their community once a week, that’s great. We didn’t have musicians playing in bars back in those days. I don’t know whether it was because most of the musicians were under twenty one. I think that was the drinking age. Is it twenty one now? At some point it was eighteen. Way back in the dark ages. When bars began to be attracted to the blues, both white and black performers were dying to have bands, so when they got a little extra money they realized “I can bring along a bass player or I can bring along a drummer.” That began to be the failing of Club 47 because the blues guys all wanted to play in bars because that’s what they were used to, and they also wanted to drink when the could, and we didn’t have a liquor license. Nobody even thought of a liquor license back then, although they have now and they’ve got one at Passim. It was the pureness of not mixing liquor with music. If we wanted to do that we would sneak into Storyville in Boston and go hear Mose Allison and drool over Mose Allison with fake I.D.s. But slowly it became like there was more money for those guys to make in a bar scene, and that was terribly important to them. Since the crowd was calling for it there was no reason for them to not do it. So we kind of lost our place as a regular blues place. Then other solo artists became duos or trios. The country music that came in from the South, the white country and western music, were always bands, and we were strapped to pay them. We were kind of short-sighted about the entrance fee, and that’s just because we were new and it was new and nobody had, nobody but bars had cover charges and paid for your drinks. People bought coffee, but coffee was about twenty five cents.
KM: So it wasn’t intentional on your part to include as many people as possible?
BS: One, we would never have gotten a liquor license. Cambridge would never have heard of it because we were communists and then we would riot! I think it’s the unfolding of fads, culture, things rise up and things go down. With the economics being the way they are it’s hard not to worry about the smaller shops that are trying to continue to keep the flame going. Passim got a beer and wine license and I think it was very smart of them to. I think everybody who said “Oh no, no, no” have gotten over that, because for the handful of people who said “Boy, I really would love to have a beer with my pizza,” everybody now has the option. What I find most poignant for me is the friendships. Geoff Muldaur is the brother I don’t have. My ties to him are very familial. My ties to Maria and Joan. The list is still quite large. It’s a great source of solace to me now that I’m not at Passim, I’m out on my own, and my heart and soul is in the preservation of that era, building up to this era, of folk music musicians: their stories, their correspondence, their families, and putting it into an exhibit, a teaching tool. There are so many ways to be a community, and I just fell into the right place at the right time. I had a completely screwed up family. This just became family. Having just come back from California where I’ve seen twenty, twenty five of these people again, it’s that old story: you meet somebody from high school and you pick up where your last sentence was. It’s very true and it’s very powerful and it’s very soothing. So to be surrounded by these musicians now, when I’m working on the archives, with a lot of generosity and a lot of goodwill, but I don’t have a salary from it. There’s the next challenge. We have a lovely space over at the Arts at the Armory in Somerville. It’s all about art. And we’re in a recording studio, Hi-N-Dry, where we have a small gallery. We’ll have room for our music academy, picking parties, small concerts, open mic. So I can replicate in many ways the Club 47 model in a smaller way. There’s been fifty years of replications and duplications. A lot, a lot of people have come through the folk routes. Will I have something that will be different and unique? I think the archives are. I don’t know of any other non-profit organization that is going out and just asking musicians to donate, even if they aren’t the top bracket or about to die or a legend in their own time. There are serious musicians out there who will never be asked to join an archive, and part of the mission is to preserve and present. I’m working with Kevin So right now, and people will say “Kevin So, isn’t he a pop singer?” and I will say “Yes, but he just wrote an opera about growing up in China.” Which he did not, his parents did, and they were exiled to America. His father was a doctor in China and he ran a restaurant in Brighton, in America, and it killed him. So Kevin’s story is of great interest to me, and he’s got a major playing of this for producers at Joe’s Pub in New York on Tuesday night. So he’s giving me the lyrics that he first wrote when he was a folk musician, and I’m interested in watching that morph. It’s just one guy out of a whole lot of stuff. I find it interesting and I find that helping younger musicians who I know are in it for the long haul, unless something catastrophic happens, that their story is going to be of interest. So I keep busy. I need some sugar daddies who say “This is a great idea.” What have I missed in your story?
KM: I wanted to ask you about when the Club 47 was just starting out, did it feel like you guys were really starting something new, starting from scratch? I know a that lot of the musicians you had come through, there was this wealth and history of musical genres, but did you feel like there was a foundation of support there or were you really pioneering a new frontier?
BS: I think we felt this was new territory, but that the older musicians gave us a ground. If you build it they will come; well, if you pay their plane ticket they will come, or their train ticket. Yeah, I think it was exciting to go to work every day, and we were as surprised as the audience was, and the audience was--I have that picture of Joan inside the Club where all the Harvard boys are wearing suits and ties. I mean, it’s just amazing, and they were all over the floor. They were this far from her and the stage was about that high. There was one dinky mic hanging down in the middle of the stage. The lighting was just godawful, and yet there’s that serenity in that space. When people like Phil Oaks played, it was edgy, it was real protest music. We were beginning to go to rallies. Joan of course had been brought up as a Quaker and was no stranger to pacifist gatherings, and we drew strength from people like that. They had a courage that was open to us. We were eighteen and nineteen years old. She was well on her way as a well-formed pacifist, and I think that for a lot of us was, it’s safe to do, just know where you’re doing it. And of course then we grew up a little bit and went to the rallies on the Washington Mall and got tear gassed along with everybody else. But those things start somewhere, and if you’re not fortunate enough to grow up in a pacifist, Quaker family, chances are you don’t know much about it until you see somebody as an example of non-violence. We were in the middle of all the early drug days and the LSD days and people doing really crazy things, but fortunately those of us who didn’t die, and there were many, grew to see that part of our lives as where we really started. It wasn’t at birth, pretty much. I wasn’t formed, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was a kid who was in Summer Stock every Summer, but singing in the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan was not my heart’s desire, it was just something fun to do. But it taught me all about Gilbert and Sullivan and it taught me about Summer Stock and painting sets and being in the background and not having to try to be up front. It was both humbling and enlightening, and that’s how I feel kind of about good artists, young artists. There’s a kid named John Fitzgerald out of Okemah, Oklahoma. Right out of Woody’s boots, and yet he’s branched out and he’s stark and sweet and stern. He’s got Oklahoma dirt under his boots, but he’s also attracting an awful lot of people to his story and his music and how he’s going. I think he’s about twenty four. I saw him first two years ago, so he was pretty much a baby. But there’s some of those people, when you go to Folk Alliance, which is never to be missed by me because that’s where all this great music comes together in one place--there are two thousand artists. When half of them are Canadians, I’m in pig heaven, because Canadians got it. They know how to take Canadian traditional music and make it fresh, and I’m all over it. I can’t get enough of it, and I can’t get any of it if I don’t go to Folk Alliance. So for that reason alone it’s a fabulous opportunity, and it’s an opportunity to hear millions of people. There’s not enough time, and you don’t have the connections. You heard a group called Fish and Bird, from Canada. Absolutely great. And they have a different palette that they draw from. I think the closest analogy to that is the kids in America playing old-timey roots music, because in the word “roots” is the implication that there’s a base for what’s being morphed now. But they’re using all the old-timey instruments. They’re adding a cello here and a theremin there, but I think it’s very creative. So what was your question?
KM: I’ll ask you another one. What do you think it was about Cambridge specifically that really made it a nurturing environment for this entire genre to spring up? I know you mentioned the Newport Folk Festival that was drawing artists up here and putting them on a circuit and all of the coffee shops that were creating places for these artists to play. What are your thoughts on that?
BS: It was a magical time. We were a needed ingredient in the ‘60s culture, and Pete Seeger already knew it. The Weavers knew it. Even people like The Kingston Trio knew it, that this was a different sound, and depending on what you did with a song it could be pop or folk. I think that alone attracted a wider audience than anticipated. The Weavers did workers’ protest songs. Pete was banned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he said basically “bring it on.” There again, there was courage. Joan went to Hanoi. It wasn’t a popular move, but she wanted to see the other side. I think when the Civil Rights riots sprang up in the South here, there was music there already and it translated itself north through musicians. The picture of Joan marching in Selma with Martin Luther King is embedded in my head. That was really courageous, and the right thing to do for her. I’m trying to think of other protest singers I was partial to. Well, we were all partial to We Ain’t Marching Anymore, Country Joe and the Fish, and that began to cross over into rock and roll. When Woodstock happened, at the end of the ‘60s, there was a complete--the tides turned over and fell deeply into each other, that folk and rock had a relationship, they were related. Through the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, other than the hard-driving blues out of Georgia and Mississippi, which were white groups, there was this safety in numbers, to step up and be counted. It taught us all at a very impressionable age that we mattered and that as we had more voices, that mattered. I think places like Club 47 gave us the space and the sanctity that no one was going to boo you there. It’s still the same way, nobody boos people there. It’s called a listening audience for a good reason. You’re there to experience the musician’s lifeline. I think it happened in a college town because college students probably already knew about things like Child Ballads and the Weavers, the more popular folk that was around then. Although Pete and the Weavers never sang about bubblegum teenage love, but they had, it was an accepted form of protest music, before most people would have ever called it protest music. It was the labor unions and the miners and the workers. If you look at a book on Depression music, out of the Depression, it’s unbelievable what came out of it. I’m doing a study right now for myself on the Civil War music. Stunning. And there’s tons of information now that wasn’t around when I was eighteen. But the Club made it possible. It certainly gave me a legitimate job. Not a high paying one, but a legitimate job. It was the right mix for me.
KM: And it sort of opened the door, made the space and the possibility for other places to come out.
BS: Absolutely, yes.
KM: Sort of like a snowball effect. Someone just had to start it.
BS: Well, Paula Kelley and Joyce Chopra are the two women who graduated from Brandeis, they’d both been to Europe, and they said “Hey, let’s open a jazz club like they have in Paris.” So it was under the auspices of a jazz club that the Club began, and that’s when the Cambridge police said “No thank you! Get out of here, go to Boston.” And they said “No, no thank you!” The place was raided all the time the first couple of years, and there was some law that you couldn’t charge admission to a night spot if you didn’t have more than two string...I don’t know, two players. It was something about the number of strings on an instrument, that you had to have, which is what made Paula and Joyce turn the place into a non-profit. Some things are just forced right in your face and you either go with them or you say “Ok, this is just too much work.” They were young and feisty and they thought basically “fuck you.” And little by little, now the Cambridge police think it’s nothing. It’s just there, it’s been there for fifty years, and they only get called there once every ten, if that. And I think the Square is richer because of it, and that many a student has gone through Harvard remembering either 47 or Passim as one of their very favorite places in their college lives. I occasionally meet a couple who said “We met here and got married.” That’s cool. If you’re around fifty years, some things like that are bound to happen. Friends in California, for instance, went to high school in Newton. We’re still friends. I didn’t go to Newton High, but they were around the Club. In ’68 when the Club closed because we owed five thousand dollars, that woman said we had to close or she was gonna call the cops and have us all arrested. So I and my friend Nancy Sweezy went to my landlord, who lived down the street from me down near Mount Auburn Hospital, and I said “Help, do you have anything?” And he said “Well, I just bought a building on Palmer Street. If you want to lay the bricks you can have the basement.” There you are. We laid the bricks. He was this funny, funny man.
KM: I know that you lived in New York for several years and were somewhat involved with music there as well, putting on shows, benefit concerts. I wondered if you could talk about the differences you see in the music culture between the Cambridge area and New York, or just Cambridge and other music cities.
BS: Well, in New York I was running soup kitchens and food pantries and programs for homeless people with AIDS, so my music connections were pretty much always about raising awareness and funds for the organizations I worked for. So my life in New York, although you would think it not so, was not so much about music. But it was about that umbilical cord that still stretches from my being eighteen at Club 47, and across the country. In the early ‘90s people didn’t have their own foundations yet. That came later to artists with a lot of money. I could always call them up and say “Listen, I need your help.” They would be there. There were no walls, the management thing--it existed but it wasn’t in the way, it didn’t go in the pile. There was more one-on-one connection. So that was how I used my music friends. During my twenty three years in New York, eighteen of them were running soup kitchens and food pantries, and I would not trade a day of that, not one day of that work. It still is something deep in my heart and [it began as] about poverty and what it does to families, what it does to neighborhoods, what it does to even people who are struggling to get out. It’s really hard. Ending up on the streets with a drug habit doesn’t really push you towards sobriety and a more gentle way of living. It’s easier to be stoned if you’re living on the street. What I’m trying to do in the public school system is to give low-income kids another way. In New York I spent most of my time working in the soup kitchens putting together programs for kids and homeless adults, so the police did the after school PAL programs on the street out in front of the deserted block that I worked on. I had Girl Scouts, I had Boy Scouts, I had Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, I graduated to a twelve-course luncheon for people with AIDS because of the different weight gains, weight losses, the things you’re not able to eat when you’re going through a bout. That just sprung like [toxi?] from a need. If you open a soup kitchen, they will come. Occasionally people would say “I don’t know why you do that. Why do you give food to those people who are just going to sell it for drugs?” I said “And aren’t you glad you aren’t one of them. I give them the food. If they need to sell it for drugs, they’ve got a much bigger problem.” So I let them go and I wish them well. You can’t be in social work services and also have attitudes. You will be out because you will make yourself burn out. But that work is very, very significant in my growth. I went to India once a year and I spent three weeks in New Delhi and around, and I think that’s what opened me up to people who live on the streets all their lives and have kind of a beatific philosophy about “that’s what they were dealt,” and the next time they come back, if they’re good, something better will happen. When you see that up front and personal, you experience something extremely sad and extremely joyful. That was what made me come back and be ready, I guess, to work with people who had nothing. I started out as a part-time volunteer in a senior citizens’ soup kitchen, and the women who ran it, I am forever in her debt, she saw me standing there and she yelled across the room, “What are you doing?” and I said “Well, I think I’m waiting for somebody to tell me what to do.” She said “Don’t ever wait! Pick up a coffee cup.” And that’s how that story started. “Don’t ever wait!” She’s hot shit and she’s done so much for New York kids, she’s just an amazing, amazing woman. She took “no” as an answer from no one. No one. Mayors, they would see her coming and they would go like this, because she would show up at City Hall with like forty homeless children and she’d scream at the mayor “Aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you ashamed? Look at all these children!” She had absolutely no inner voice, but it’s those people that make the moves. I miss that work. I can’t fit it in right now. I’ve had to take a part-time job in Maine. The leaders of this gospel group had some terrible cancer news, so that’s on hold. I’m trying to write grants for them, I’m trying to work on the Cape for an arts organization as a volunteer in their development department. One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to get real change so I can have a salary, and I don’t need much. Right now I’m being paid as a consultant to the film. I’m getting old, balancing all of those plates. And I still feel there’s more to do. I’d like to make this children’s program something that can be replicated, just “get yourself three thousand dollars, here’s the model.” I want to do a coffee table book on the Archives and the history of the Archives, mostly photographs, with paragraphs written by the artists. I want to get this music academy up and off the ground, the open mic up and off the ground. I’m working on a major concert in the winter for this project with Joan, hopefully Mavis Staples, Taj Mahal, Chocolate Drops, Geoff Muldaur, Jim Kweskin, and the Texas Shieks, and Tom Rush.
KM: Will that be here?
BS: Yeah, I’m trying to get Sanders, and getting a date out of Sanders is like open heart surgery. Oh my god. Everybody and their aunt has to have practice time at Sanders. So we keep being put on hold. They want to give us September 10th, but I don’t even know if anybody’s going to be here on September 10th. School has barely started. Anyway. We may have to take it. It’s getting close, and that means more of those people will be booked.
KM: I was going to ask you about big music festivals and shows. There’s a huge folk festival in Newport and I was wondering if there is a market for that here, in the Cambridge/Boston area.
BS: Well, Boston University has their Boston Folk Festival out on their campus in Quincy, maybe? Just below Boston. It’s out near the Kennedy Library. I don’t know whether that’s in June, but it started out as three days, they’re now down to one day. Everybody’s cut back on everything. Newport, this year, has gone back to its non-profit model. After years of trying to make money for all the investors, it always ends up that George Wein, who’s the head of the company, is taking it out of his pocket. It’s not the good old days when everybody who played Newport played for fifty bucks, room and board. Didn’t matter how famous you were. But now there’s so many options, there’s so much competition. I’ve never seen a calendar like Canadian calendar for festivals. I don’t know, fifty? How do you pick where you want to go, and the ones that are successful are already booked like a year ahead.
KM: So now it’s more difficult to develop something like that because there’s just so much competition that it’s difficult to afford it?
BS: Yeah, you have to have money behind it. Harvard University would have to sponsor it, and they’re tightwads. I don’t think they would want to trust their luck in that field. I’ll give you an anecdote of how it does work. It’s the only one I know. The guy from Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, he’s in his fifties. He lives in like Berkeley, California. For the last five years he has sponsored a three day, completely free festival, probably near Haight-Ashbury, some big, big park. It is called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. He pays all of the artists tons of money and gives it to the city of Berkeley. I need me one of those. If I had a bazzillionaire, I could offer all the top acts decent pay, because they have to choose what’s going to pay their rent still. The few that are very wealthy are lucky they can cut back on their schedules rather than having to need more and more and more on their pay. Plus, those, let’s say there’s fifty that make over a million dollars a year. They have their own foundations for whatever’s hit them tragically or things they believe in. I went to Bonnie Raitt and I asked her if she would be on the honorary committee for the Archives. She knows who I am and she knows what I’m trying to do. She had to say “I can’t take on any more charities this year. I’m just floating on them.” And I get it. The ones who are good and caring and in the right political profile are just booked solid. She’s always doing charity work. Always. In California, she and Jackson Browne, that whole contingency. I don’t know that Jackson Browne plays any more if it isn’t for a benefit. If somebody wanted to give me half a million bucks I could produce something in the Harvard Stadium, but I’d be hard-pressed to do so without real money behind it, because it’s not doable anymore. Look how Newport struggles. It’s just amazing. They only fit eight thousand people, two days a week. Tickets are around seventy bucks a day now. Of course, get a seat, you get to be wherever you happen to be when the doors open. I worked that out. I have a friend who’s a photographer who gets into the line at 5:30 and strews out blankets for us. But we always have a booth there with our photographs, and there’s a lot of Newport connections. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to financially keep this up, because if I had some steady income I’d be happy to be here, working on this. We have a house on the Cape and it’s all paid for, so the question is “why are we living here and paying rent?” Because I don’t think I can do this from the Cape, especially in the dead of winter. But the options are very, very few. So you can think about that. Other questions?
KM: I guess I wanted to ask you what you wanted to see more of in the music culture here. What you’d like to see change. What are you hoping for for the future?
BS: Well, I think, in a way, that Passim has gone in another direction--not a bad one, just different--where they’re focusing really on young, up-and-coming artists who are innovative, who don’t cost an arm and a leg, and who know the reputation of the venue and are grateful to have a job there. But we were doing the Legacy Series there--I don’t know if it was that name or not. That was the Jack Elliotts, the Odettas. And the audience--it isn’t there. I’ll tell you where it is. It’s in all the coffee shops around Boston. There’s a Boston coffee house--B.A.C.C.A. is its initials. If you went out to Franklin on a Saturday night, you would see three hundred people in the Unitarian church for Tom Paxton. The older artists, because their audiences have moved to the suburbs. They’re older. Those people are not crazy about driving into Cambridge because there’s a) no place to park and they don’t want to travel at night. Even when you hit fifty and sixty, you think “Well, if so-and-so’s coming to that place next month, I’ll go there. They’re ten minutes from my house.” So I think that the healthier models are out in the suburbs now, because they’ll often just pair an older artists with an up-and-comer as the opener. I really don’t follow Passim’s schedule, but I know that it’s a lot younger. So in a way I think I graduated unhappily from that too. I miss the community, but it’s very young. It’s fifty years younger than I am. My community is the older folks, and a handful of the newer people. I’m very keyed into a lot of the Americana groups. But Chris Smither is an Americana blues player. Mavis is a great rock and roll, gospel singer. Judy Collins, she’s funny. She’s still singing a lot of the old songs, but what she does in her shows, she tells her story. John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonfuls. He lost his voice, he cannot sing anymore. But he can do the history of jug bands in America in a show, and play and talk through a song, and it’s a fascinating evening. It’s wonderful. Jack Elliott will be on the road until he drops dead. But there are hundreds of those people out there that have said “You know, this has been my life.” His daughter who he never connected with has made an amazing film on him. Amazing. She takes no prisoners about why he wasn’t around. He’s very uncomfortable, but he’s so proud of her, because he’s finally grown up. Well, I wouldn’t guarantee it. You know, Arlo’s [Guthrie] another example of somebody who bridges his father’s era with this. Joshua Jr. does the same thing. Not everybody who’s an artist had a kid that grew up to be an artist, but there’s a healthy community of forty-year-olds who are playing--thirty-, forty-, fifty-year-olds. And then there’s Ellis’ group. I hate to say it, but Ellis is forty five, and he’s involved in this film. The next filming is on May fourteen and fifteen. We’re renting a farm in the middle of Massachusetts and we’re having Ellis as the spokesperson as the bridge between the old Passim and the new era. We will have Meg Hutchinson, Andje Djakout, the Parkington Sisters from the Cape, who are five sisters--unbelievable. [Tripping Willy], and a group called Red Heart the Ticker from the depths of Vermont who’re a married couple who play. And a couple of other people, like this little girl, Haylie, who’s thirteen, will be there. So, doing the age disparity in the next generation, and that’s how we want to leave the film. It’s still volatile and vital, and that’s all I can handle. I don’t mean to you, I mean as far as my work plate goes.
KM: Thanks for clearing that up.
BS: It’s full!
KM: You’ve got a lot of plates in the air.
BS: I always do, and I never learn. So I’ve given up learning.
KM: It keeps you young.
BS: I guess!
KM: I did want to ask you, and I wanted to see whether you agreed with this or not, if you had any thoughts on it. I’ve had some people talk about how Cambridge has a really vital musical community, and there’s a lot of talent here, a lot of musical talent, and yet a lot of people think that it hasn’t made a national name for itself in the way that other music cities of a comparable size have. Or musicians that come out of this area and then maybe move on to other areas don’t really, people don’t think of them as connected with this area the way that musicians that come out of other cities do. Like “Oh, that’s a Pacific Northwest musician, or that person’s from Austin, or they’re from Akron, or Detroit” or something like that.
BS: Akron?! What, are you crazy?
KM: I guess I was thinking of the Black Keys. So musicians from Cambridge maybe aren’t connected in people’s mind with being Cambridge area musicians or Boston area musicians. Do you agree with that? Do you see that? Do you have any thoughts on that?
BS: Well one, I think because Boston in itself is a college town, people come from everywhere else, and few of them remain. So the transient population of the college campuses has something to do with people not saying “this is now home forever.” What I still think is striking is the town and gown camaraderie, and I think that’s probably true in Ann Arbor, in Antioch, in Swathmore. The college towns that have an artistic reputation along with whatever else. If you go to Berkeley, everybody’s still smoking dope and playing music on their porch. You think you’ve stepped into a Taj Mahal movie. I miss it. They’ve been playing at someone’s house every Sunday for thirty five years. Everybody brings a dish. Sunday night at the Hoffman’s. There was some of that here in the ‘60s, but when the Club closed it was like a chapter closed, and I moved to Washington D.C., so I was long out of this scene from sixty nine till ninety seven, I wasn’t here. The Donlin’s had no preconceived notion of having a coffee house. They wanted a European book and gift store, made by local, things made by local artisans. Every now and then somebody would come in and say “You got music in here?” And they’d say “No, we don’t. We’re a gift shop and card shop and bookstore.” And this was the ‘70s. It had been McCarthy’s headquarters, between the Club and Passim’s opening, because the word Passim is Latin, meaning “a little from here, a little from there, all throughout the text.” And if you hear that then you get that it’s a book place. Who would ever do that. Bob Donlin had been a raging alcoholic and had travelled with Jack Kerouac, and Ginsburg, and Ferlinghetti, so his idea of a European bookstore was what he was--he got sober, he married Rae Ann. She was, I would say, fifteen, seventeen years younger than he. People kept bugging them about music. They kept saying “Get out of here, we don’t do music.” They’d come back and they’d say “You know, these walls, they’re screaming music. Can’t you hear it?” So I think he just finally gave in, and that was the era of Patty Larkin, John Gorka, some of Ellis, although he was young. That whole ‘80s crowd. And then it practically went under. It was black days. It was the recession of the ‘80s. That’s what almost did them in. They stopped paying their bills. They went to the philosophy that if you left it unopened you didn’t owe it. So when I took over, they owed Harvard real estate $123,000, and Harvard was not pleased and they wanted their money back. The forty seventh anniversary of the Club, which was ’99, maybe, we did a three day event. Two nights at Sanders, and for the first time in about sixty years we got to use the Cambridge Common for an all day children’s event. I wrapped it around Bob Jones, my friend from the Newport Folk Festival, who had, two years before that, suffered a horrendous muscular collapse. It’s got a name. It’s a syndrome. But he stopped breathing, he couldn’t open or close his eyes. He almost died, he was in a coma for three months, and so when he was ready, or ready enough, I went to his family and said “You know, nobody does anything for Bob. Can I?” And they talked about it as a family, and they said “You know, it might lift his spirits a lot.” So as soon as I put the word out to the community, everybody wanted to be on the bill. It was fabulous, and about a month after that event, we walked into Harvard real estate and we handed them a check for $87,000. The didn’t bitch at me again. I think they wrote off the rest of that debt. But I don’t know, unless Dan’s done a different deal with Harvard, they were supposed to start paying ten thousand a month last year to Harvard. It was once two, then it was five, then it was seven, in the fourteenth renovation of the plan. So I would say that Harvard real estate has been more than generous and very kind. I don’t know what it is now, but I have to think that the beer and wine license helps pay the freight. There’s nowhere to grow in that building, which is one of the reasons that the Archives really hit a wall in there. There was no storage, there was no scanning, there was no proper anything. I look back and I think that this was supposed to happen, so that you can get into the world of real archives and into the world of really preserving things correctly. I dragged around fifteen reel-to-reels for fifty years in a plastic bag. I now look at that in horror. Horror. But I didn’t have a plan. So when I was told--I don’t remember who said it, but they said “You need to have other arms to the Club other than just a nighttime venue.” Since what I knew was a non-profit program, they build a music school for sure. The program called Culture for Kids, which I started there, which is, again, it’s an outreach program. It’s smaller than it was when I started, but the music school is doing very well. The other piece was the archive project, but I could never seem to get around to it. There was too much other stuff. Then I began looking around. There was nowhere to store anything, we can’t afford to rent that empty floor in between us, no storage. I think there were certain people who thought the Archives were wonderful, but they had no way to deal with them. There were other people who said “What’s an archive?” When a board member said that to me in a meeting, I knew my days were numbered. In real disgust, “What’s an archive?” Well, they put more business people on the board, and they’re all about the business. That’s not my passion. So I’m really lucky. I’ve gotten the Cambridge Historical Society. I have the Grammy Foundation, which is paying for all those reel-to-reel transfers, at the Harvard Audio Preservation department, which is top of the line. I have a tentative date to go to the Library of Congress and talk with their archives. They want to see how they can help me. That never means money. The guy who runs the Folk Department at the Smithsonian, he too wants to meet with us. So I’ve made my first inroads into being taken seriously. We’re always having programs that reach ordinary folks. I think Crate and Salvage is doing a fabulous job. They had a Governor, or Mayor, in Berkeley, right at the foot of U.C. Berkeley. It’s a derelict two blocks of slums. The Mayor started meeting with the arts organizations around Berkeley. He said “Look, we’re willing to give you these two blocks if you bring in lots of art. So Freight and Salvage got a building that’s just gorgeous. They renovated it. They got a Capo Campaign. They had the Mayor in their back pocket all the time, saying “That’s a great idea, I’ll see if I can connect you with...” and it snowballed like that. They got their three, four, five million dollar renovation campaign. Now they’re running, and they’ve never run music classes. I met with them four years ago and said “This is where the heart is. Your shows are great, but if you’re going to have all that space, here’s some ideas.” I don’t take credit for that, I opened the door to say what we were doing. He was thrilled and he thought there was real potential. Caffe Lena, in Saratoga Springs, is now online with their Archive History Project. Very small place. Lots of New York folk singers, but everybody played there. It’s still going. One girl, who’s a volunteer, just took on the project of making their history archives talk. They’re great. It’s a small project, but it’s a big project. They said “This little archive, oh it’s just going to have Joan Baez in it.” Yeah right. But they’re lovely people, and if you ever want to look on their website, it’s Caffe with two “effs” Lena. Caffe Lena, Saratoga Springs, New York...? Or is it just Saratoga? I don’t know. They just put online, on Facebook I think, their latest version. She and I talk quite often. It’s just nice for you to see how it’s being done. She’s doing it out of love. She has another job in North Carolina. It seems to be the folk music way. Once you get into pop you don’t need money any more, you get it.
KM: Folk music is more of a shoestring kind of operation.
BS: Yeah. And with the cutbacks it’s become almost horrifying, the money thing. “What does folk music do? How many people in the audience? What’s your quota?” The Cambridge Community Foundation turned me down every single year. “You don’t reach enough people.” If I reach a hundred people in an intense, in-depth program, that’s a good day. A thousand dollars would help us. A thousand dollars, and he keeps turning us down. He’s a little fucker and he just likes his favorites. It’s his foundation, he can do what he wants. But I don’t forget. I remember the generous ones. The Cambridge Arts Council has been fabulous to us, supporting all these children’s programs. And ASCAP has just stepped up to the plate, so that’s how I get to move into Somerville, into a school that burned down three years ago. They have nothing. They rebuilt the skeleton but the library burned down. Geez Louise. So, new music, old music, being in it, around it, through it, makes me who I am.
KM: Seems like you’re really concerned with preserving it.
BS: Yes, and getting it out there. I don’t want you to have to go to the library and get on the waiting list to open a drawer with gloves. I mean, I want you to open the drawer with gloves, but I don’t want you to do that process where...poor kids aren’t going to do that. They’re not. They’re intimidated by money. It’s a huge gap, getting huger every day. I want these kids to feel like they own their own history. If you can get them to own their own history, they’re wide open to “what else is going on, who else did that? Why do we eat those foods? What’s the national anthem from the country our parents came from?” I can go on and on and on.
KM: That’s great. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about or anything else you think I should know?
BS: What are you doing with this piece?
KM: Everything is going to be on deposit in the Archives at the Cambridge Historical Society, but there’s also going to be a web presence with hopefully audio clips and accompanying textual clips. Make it browseable and draw people into the collection.
BS: Good. Good!
KM: That’s the main outcome. There might be also some sort of publication. I wrote one article based on one of the interviews.
BS: Where does that live?
KM: It’s on the Wicked Local Cambridge blog.
BS: Oh yeah. Who is it?
KM: Joe McCabe from the Phoenix Landing. Stuff like that. I think writing some papers on it would be interesting. Just raising the profile. Like you say, making it accessible so people are aware that it’s there and can find it easily. There’s a wealth of knowledge.
BS: Just a little vignette about that. I was sitting at the audio preservation lab, several, three months ago, and we’re playing all the tapes and listening to every thing on every one of them. Ten thousand dollars worth of listening. And I suddenly hear a black man talking about dignity. “What is this?” And there are a few songs, and there’s a little piece of paper about this big identifying it and I look at the handwriting and I think “I think this is Bob Jones’s handwriting.” I take a picture of that, I email it to him, I said “Is this you?” And he emails me back “Yes. I was down South with Alan Lomax and Ralph Rinzler and we were in the Mississippi prisons.” Now. Alan Lomax had produced that for a radio show, and I’m sure it’s in some Folkways collection, and I thought “I have no idea how I got that,” but when we transferred it it was just so beautiful. Unbelievable. So between new techniques and old music, there’s a harmony there. I’ve always known Bob’s handwriting. I could have picked another one, or not known. So when those little surprises come up I know there are more. We’ve got tapes of Joan Baez from 1958, ’59. Doc Watson’s first appearance at Club 47. I’ve got twenty four songs. Now, will Mitch let me use them for a fundraiser? I hope so. But they’re gorgeous. It was from a time when he was very shy. He had never been North, and of course he couldn’t see the audience, but he could tell people by their footsteps after twenty four hours. He would stop and tell stories about songs and where he’d learned them from. Now it’s a fast-paced world. You can chitchat or you can play and chitchat, but you can’t talk time and relevance. These were so beautiful. Just remarkable. So I don’t have, but people are sending me. Every now and then I’ll put on Facebook, “Looking for more music from the ‘60s.” And I’ll just get stuff. Now I need another ten thousand dollars to bribe Harvard with.
KM: To digitize them?
BS: Yeah. But I love working on those. The photographs are just about over a hundred now. It’s a real piece of work. We have one guy who, I found him at Riverfest. He just came over three years ago to look at our exhibit. I said “Are you interested?” He said “No, you know, I used to take pictures back then. I said “Really?” He said “Yeah, I was stationed in the Navy and I was in Guam and I was on a submarine, and my job was to run the darkroom, so I grabbed all my negatives before I left home and I brought them with me.” That was a year or two after he had focused on all the black musicians who came through Club 47, and a festival called the Boston Folk Festival, 1969 in Boston. Chuck Berry. It just goes on and on, and everything is labeled in its right place and the negatives are all cared for. Shannon, who is our artistic director, has gone in and brightened all the, painstakingly made these things more dramatic. Gotten rid of all those white spots. So we’ve got a whole blues show. It’s up right now at the Berkeley Coffee House. I don’t know the number--839--
KM: 1369.
BS: --Thank you. I think it’s still up there. Just blues. So people have stuff.
KM: There’s all kinds of stuff kicking around.
BS: I know.
KM: It just isn’t findable and accessible.
BS: Well, you just have to keep publishing and pushing it out on Facebook and stuff.
KM: That’s the beauty of the Internet, really, is stuff like this, you can just get out there like that.
BS: It’s fabulous.
KM: Suddenly the whole world, almost--people who have access to a computer and the Internet, anyway, can experience it.
BS: Yeah. Once Ralph sent me out, one summer, to travel with Mike Seeger. Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers and Mississippi John Hurt. Now, Bessie Jones was as big as this coffee table, and they came from those islands right off of Georgia. They didn’t read. She was in her fifties and she had like five singers with her. And of course Mississippi John Hurt was no spring chicken. We traveled in a big van, it was like 1970, let me guess, ’71, ’72. Ralph had arranged for them to play their first all-white college in Louisiana. Washington University, I think, and he wanted a couple of buffers. One, he wanted a woman, a white women, on the trip to be liaison for the women, and he wanted Mike because Mike did the business. It was the greatest trip. We drank the whole time, and they laughed and laughed and danced in the aisles of this crummy little bus. But they were nervous. They were going to the white world. Since I had been here at the Club he knew that I sort of knew the unspoken boundaries of that. Those kids were so fabulous. They just went crazy for them. For me, it was like standing back and saying “It does work. Music works.” So I didn’t have nearly enough of those. I loved, loved, loved those trips. Now we do it almost all on the Internet, so it removes the personal stories in a way that had been so condensed that you don’t get the richness of a person. I think people do really good jobs at it, but I think that I come from that generation where making a friend was more important than making a production, though I think the Harry Smith Collection, the Smithsonian’s collection--my friend who runs Down East Records in the next town up from Berkeley--Encino?--just go straight out of Berkeley, and the next town--he’s run a record shop called Down East Records for fifty, sixty years, his name’s Chris Strachwitz and he’s a little older than I am so he’s just growing into his accolades and books about him. He just put a book together with four CDs of the growth of his record company. It’s all traditional music. It just came out this spring. Gorgeous. But he did very much, not totally like me, but in the more traditional side of younger folk singers, there’s a chapter on Dick and Mimi Fariña, but then there are chapters on all the old blues guys. I met him in Louisiana when I was visiting the Balfa Brothers, who are a very famous Cajun group. We were in the kitchen and Chris walked in and he was just a punk kid, we was doing research. So he took us out to some Quonset hut dance house. Late at night we drove down. I was with the Balfas, who were white, and I think Dewey was the fiddler, he was seventeen. “You wanna go hear the [Arduans]?” Who are all black. And I said “Let’s go!” We drove down a dirt road with not a street light for it seemed like forever, but of course it was not. We got to this Quonset hut, I mean, it was something else. But I felt fine. I’d seen the Arduans at Newport, and they were all friends because of music again. They stamped your hand and charged you a dollar. The men and women were all dressed up like they were going to Sunday meeting. And the black guys--the men, they weren’t kids--would come over to the three white girls and say “Would you like to learn the two-step?” And we’d say “Yes!” This was like an out-of-body experience--at night, in nowhere in the world, and this harmony and this music and the friendships they had. You couldn’t have scripted it better. It was just beautiful. So I miss doing things like that. I’d like to do more of those. I love to travel. But it costs some money.
KM: That’s true, it does. I don’t think anything will ever take the place of the human-to-human connection and interaction. I guess I’d like to think that the exposure, anyhow, on the Internet, if people know about something that will draw them in and instigate, propel more of the face-to-face interaction.
BS: Absolutely. And the things that are happening now, barring Japan’s total disaster, where all our little parts come from that we never think about ‘till we think about their not being there. I guess the New York Times has an article today on the bursting bubble of the Internet, or computers. That it’s maybe seeing a slump coming. But then I see a slump coming in everything. If you wanted to buy a t.v., tomorrow would be the last day. Or a car, or a Boeing Jet, because the parts come from Japan. So it’ll affect our airlines, it’ll affect a lot, a lot of people’s jobs. It’s already ruined tourism for them. Oh my god. And Japanese coming here. They can’t. I mean, they just don’t have the wherewithal. And I guess it was a trillion dollar business. Huge, huge loads of Japanese going to Hawaii and the West Coast. Not going.
KM: Well, it was really nice speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to participate and talk with me.
BS: I talk way too much. But you’re welcome.
KM: I don’t think there’s any such thing. There’s always editing.
BS: That’s true, you can always cut it right down to the bare bones.
KM: Better too much than too little.
BS: Listen to your back!
KM: I know.
BS: Back trouble? Or is it just sitting in that dumb... |
