I haven't even seen the A Complete Unknown Dylan-goes-electric movie yet, but Facebook discussions around it and conversations online with 1960s music scene survivors have really sent me down a week-long memory search and musical rabbit hole.
For one of those conversations, I assembled this still life photograph. I couldn't believe that (purchased new, when $1.95 was a non-trivial sum for a high school kid) the 1963 M. Witmark and Sons portfolio of songs from Dylan's second album came with *piano* arrangements, with little chord diagrams for guitar players. I also have the similar volume for his third album.
Guitarists reading this will be charmed to learn that book gave the guitar chords for playing "Blowin' in the Wind" in the key of E-flat -- without a capo. "Girl of the North Country" was in A-flat. ( I still have never mastered the D-flat chord fingering it suggested, although the E flat 7th fingering has come in handy, pushed up a half step.) In any case, these were not keys I could play or sing in, so the book was a fine education in chord transposition.
However, "With God on Our Side" was presented in the key of C, and I see pencil notes indicating that 16-year-old me was figuring out the harmonica solo! Unfortunately, or fortunately, my voice couldn't hit the high note in that one, which may be why I backed off on the idea of singing it in a 1964 or 5 "hootenanny" at my (Catholic) high school. Or maybe I was just chicken. I did sing Jesse Fuller's San Francisco Bay Blues with the guitar and the harmonica, and the MC introduced me saying I sounded "something like Bob Dylan, but that's not a bad thing." Actually, I don't think he had never heard me sing or play; he was just judging by the hardware.
Thanks to Jeannie Brand-Derienzo, another Facebook friend, for sending me that mint copy of her dad's instruction book, which was where I started learning to play the guitar. I think I traded away my original copy, and my first guitar, for my first banjo -- while I was still in high school. I still have an LP of Oscar Brand singing historical satirical songs like, "A dollar ain't a dollar anymore," which I ought to refresh my memory of. (I'm using a blogger app on a Samsung phone to post this, and can't figure out how to embed a YouTube copy of the song, but I can at least link to it. Great sing along chorus, feel free to join in while you read the rest of this.)
The banjo hung on the wall for a dozen years before I took learning it seriously. And then I acquired my first mandolin at Pinewoods Camp, Inc. where I went to take banjo lessons from Paul Brown! I think that was 1978. He played more fiddle in the next class I took with him, which was in 2015 at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, West Virginia. (We had a lot of catching up to do come including two journalism careers, his with NPR, mine with newspapers and magazines.)
I emphasized Paul in the Facebook post that this longer note is partly copied and pasted from, because he and I have a lot of mutual Facebook friends. And his banjo class really was great, but folksong classes with older singers I admired, my first Appalachian clogging class, and meeting lots of new dance partners were also part of the motivation for going to Pinewoods.
Dance partners, especially. Come to think of it, "You'll love it; it's like Club Med in the woods," was a friend's motivating line that did not appear in the Country Dance and Song Society brochures. CDSS was and is a great dance and music community, and I did try commuting from Hartford to New York on Amtrak for most of a year to keep seeing someone I met at Pinewoods, but the music pulled me in another direction -- grad school in anthropology and ethnomusicology, which I had already started at the rate of a course a semester..
I'd been at the Hartford Courant for 11 years, and it was year the paper was sold to a chain, so I cashed in my employee stock and finished off my studies with a research trip to Ireland. To learn some jigs and reels, and a company John Prine songs in the pub, I carried along that mandolin I'd bought at Pinewoods from a great guitar player named John Pearse. It was an old Martin with a broken side he had repaired while working for the Martin guitar company. (He left to found his own company, making guitar strings among other things until his death. I still use the strings with his picture on the package. I kept that mandolin for 40 years before selling it to a friend who still plays it on stage and at jam sessions here in Southwestern Virginia.
Unlike Dylan, I did not take to songwriting or get very good at singing or entertaining audiences, or ever get to play on stage at the Newport Folk Festival. But, ironically, after I stumbled back into journalism, I did wind up on stage at Newport once, in the early 1990s. I was there taking pictures of my favorite harmony-singing trio, The Roches, trying to find a photo angle that would put enough Newport harbor boats in the background to convince the editor of Soundings, a boating magazine, to put the picture on the cover, along with my article about "boats and music." Her reply, "Nope, boats have to be in the foreground on the cover."
But the article and a few pictures did run inside the magazine, and living in a waterfront town briefly landed me and that old mandolin in a sea chantey singing group (Cliff Haslam & the Jovial Crew) that did play at the Mystic Sea Music Festival once before I went off to grad school again... which in a roundabout way brought me here to Southwestern Virginia, retired from teaching journalism, and playing old time music at jam sessions and dances.
No wonder my house and brain are so cluttered with instruments and the musical memories sampled in that photograph. By the way, only the Burl Ives book and the 1940ish Kay mandolin in that picture were acquired "second-hand," but it is all secondhand music, full of memories and history, and that's what I like about it.
