1960s, Dylan, folk music & me ...

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. (Come to think of it, I'm much more successful at being a complete unknown than he is.) 

For one of those Facebook conversations, I assembled this musical still-life photograph, which brought back more memories, eventually hypertext-assisted into this blog post. But I started out slow, drawn back into playing old songs from those books for the living room furniture. For instance, I couldn't believe that the 1963 M. Witmark and Sons portfolio of songs from Dylan's second album (purchased new, when $1.95 was a non-trivial sum for a high school kid) 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 Eb -- without suggesting use of a capo. "Girl of the North Country" was in Ab. (I still have never mastered the Db chord fingering it suggested, although the Eb 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, where Dylan played it, and I see pencil notes indicating that 16-year-old me was already figuring out the harmonica solo! Unfortunately, or fortunately, my voice couldn't hit the high notes in that one, which may be why I backed off on the idea of singing it in a 1964 "hootenanny" at my high school. Or maybe I was just chicken. It was a Catholic high school, better at teaching grammar than progressive politics, although mimeo copies of "The John Birch Society" were circulating thanks to one teacher, making me a Chad Mitchell Trio fan. 

I did sing San Francisco Bay Blues in that hootenanny, with the guitar and the harmonica, and some classmate introduced me saying I sounded "something like Bob Dylan, but that's not a bad thing." Actually, I learned the Jesse Fuller song from a transcription of a Ramblin' Jack Elliott performance, not from Dylan, and I don't think the emcee had never heard me sing or play; I think he was just judging by the hardware around my neck.

Thanks to Jeannie Brand-Derienzo, another Facebook friend, for sending me that mint copy of her dad Oscar Brand'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 singing historical satirical songs like, "A dollar ain't a dollar anymore" and "The Dodger Song," which still seem quite timely. (Feel free to join in while you read the rest of this. The lyrics are on those two links, one an Aaron Copland arrangement, but I prefer Oscar's singing below.) I also have several of Oscar's books and song collections.

I never did get to meet Oscar Brand, or even see him in person, but his books, records and broadcasting career were a huge part of my 1960s folk music education -- and I appreciate his work even more recently, thanks to YouTube's sharing of clips from his Canadian television show, "Let's Sing Out," with guests including musical heroes of mine who I never saw on American TV, including Dave Van Ronk, Joni Mitchell and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Oscar's WNYC  radio show "Folk Song Festival" is online in bits and pieces too, including clips from his 1961 interview with a very young Bob Dylan, making up stories about his past.
But over the years coffee houses (The Exit in New Haven, the Sounding Board in Hartford), plus bars, clubs and concerts did give me a chance to hear -- and even meet -- some of those musical heroes in person. And get on stage myself. At Pinewoods, along with the banjo lessons with Paul Brown, I took classes with the great Irish sean nos singer Joe Heaney, Janette Carter (founder of the Carter Family Fold here in Virginia), west coast oldtime music encyclopedia Hank Bradley,  singer and dance caller & teacher Sandy Bradley from Seattle, the Horse Flies from Ithaca, and more. Some of those other Pinewoods faces have reappeared in other states and other decades, including a hammered dulcimer player I met at a Blacksburg jam session who figured out we had been "campers" at Pinewoods that same week some 35 years earlier. 

That banjo had hung on the wall for a dozen years before I took learning it seriously, first from books by Pete Seeger and Peggy Seeger, then some recorded lessons by the late Happy Traum, whose Homespun Tapes banjo course I won in a photo contest at Pickin' magazine. My entry was a picture of Connecticut fiddler Will Welling at a New England Fiddle Contest in Hartford. Will gave me a copy of his tune book in return for a copy of the picture, and I had it in my guitar case when I went to Pinewoods, which was also where I acquired my first mandolin and started to pick tunes out of that book over the coming weeks -- and years.

But guitar with Hank Bradley and banjo with Paul Brown were my official instrumental classes at Pinewoods in 1978 or '79. Paul played more fiddle in the next class I took with him, with Terri McMurray playing banjo and banjo-uke, and both of them sharing wonderful stories about the old-time musicians they had learned from in the '60s and '70s. That class was in 2015 at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, West Virginia. (Paul and I had a lot of catching up to do come including two journalism careers, his with NPR, mine with newspapers and magazines. And now he's writing his own thoughtful newsletter about public affairs, while I dither around on Facebook and three intermittent blogs.)

I emphasized Paul in the Facebook post this longer essay 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 the two-week stay at Pinewoods also included folksong classes with older singers I admired, my first Appalachian clogging class with Bob Dalsemar (teacher) and Ruth Pershing (teacher, caller, and dance ethnograper), and meeting lots of new friends and dance partner. 

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 probably has never appeared 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 a romance going with someone I met at Pinewoods. But the music pulled me in another direction -- grad school in anthropology and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, which I started at the rate of a course a semester, my tuition paid by the newspaper where I worked -- whose generous fringe benefits probably helped keep away unions for 200+ years. 

After a couple years of part-time study at Wesleyan, I'd been at the Hartford Courant for 11 years, and was able to "retire" the year the paper was sold to a chain. I cashed in my employee stock so that I could finish off my studies full-time, including a 10-week research summer in County Mayo, Ireland, meeting great folks like John Hoban. To learn some jigs and reels, and accompany 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 in 2008. I still use the strings with his picture on the package. Greg Ryan, from New York, was my mandolin teacher in Ireland, picking up where I'd left off with classmate Jim Cowdery at Wesleyan. 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 (shown earlier). I was trying to find a photo angle that would put enough pretty sailboats 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 around the corner from Soundings in Essex, Conn., also put me around the corner from the Griswold Inn, which briefly landed me and that old mandolin in a sea chantey singing group (Cliff Haslam & the Jovial Crew). We even played the Mystic Sea Music Festival once, around 1992, before I went off to grad school again, at UNC in Chapel Hill... 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. (Maybe this is the summer I'll get to the Mystic festival's successor, the Connecticut Sea Music Festival, with its roots in Cliff Haslam's Griswold Inn sessions. Alas, it's usually the same weekend as the Mount Airy Fiddler's Convention in North Carolina, which has become an annual ritual for me too.)

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 1930s 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.

It's not entirely relevant to this musical discussion, but (also in a roundabout way) my 1978-83 master's degree in ethnomusicology led to a 1988 master's about hypertext, which is why there are 30 or more links here to Web pages, YouTube videos and podcasts. A late-in-life diagnosis of ADHD may have more than a little to do with it too, and I hope some readers find them as  enjoyably distracting as I did. Onward...