Happy Birthday To You-
By Lester Lannon
I am devoted to a local
folk station WUMB which is run out of the campus of U/Mass-Boston over near
Boston Harbor. At one time this station was an independent one based in
Cambridge but went under when their significant demographic base deserted or
just passed on once the remnant of the folk minute really did sink below the
horizon.
So much for radio folk
history except to say that the DJs on many of the programs go out of their ways
to commemorate or celebrate the birthdays of many folk, rock, blues and related
genre artists. So many and so often that I have had a hard time keeping up with
noting those occurrences in this space which after all is dedicated to such
happening along the historical continuum.
To “solve” this problem
I have decided to send birthday to that grouping of musicians on an arbitrary
basis as I come across their names in other contents or as someone here has
written about them and we have them in the archives. This may not be the best
way to acknowledge them, but it does do so in a respectful manner.
When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time
From
The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sometimes
Sam Lowell and his “friend” Laura Perkins (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie,
paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially
acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is
one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) whose relationship to Sam was just
described in parenthesis, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in
Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the
New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible.
That later summer heat escape valve is a result of the hard fact that July,
when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is
not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty
blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade
Air Force squadron lost on a spree who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic
marshes.
The
only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days
etched Crane Castle to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind
day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been
doing since there were well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the
summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is
capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a
trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age,
architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the
plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including the various
incantations of the mansion.
Along
the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and
Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by
listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs,
not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off
before being brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont while
listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to
mind, or the significance of some song in their youth. One of the things
that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual
interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having
grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of
that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had
imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in
upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records,
records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts
Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene when she had
moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.
One
hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first
developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody,
everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob
Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through
their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic
although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report
he had heard on NPR. Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would
also know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under
the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs
imitating Woody's style something fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’
Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high
symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a
nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints seen rather
hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if
not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did
not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the
age.
Sam continued
along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection
and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the
people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some
officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under
a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave'
post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with
the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia,
down in Mister James Crow’s Delta. So, yes, that story has been pretty well
covered.”
Laura
said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not
that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about
others, some other folk performers who she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning
when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk things
a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany
where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end
of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the
early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing,
Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University), came into the Village
where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing,
the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II
generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where
the disaffected could put up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like
Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was
too young to know about that red scare stuff except you had to follow your
teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hand over your head if
the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural
straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as
hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours
were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots
under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop
sociology 101.”
“One
of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived
there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had
heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and
well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising
folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian
as well as musician.”
“Here’s
the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that
behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy
who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic
(although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part
was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about
imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated
during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that
folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and
in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits,
the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious.
People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found
refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters
and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap,
toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a
hungry pent-ip market.
Boston
and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other
little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write
songs, could recite poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to
the winos, rummies, grifters and conmen who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or
out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought
into the freeze.”
“Sweetie,
I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that
was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new
talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed
down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1980s Von
Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and
his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will
give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after
the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure
novel that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless
on all that stuff except rock and roll, On The Road which I didn’t read
until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry
reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the
clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz,
people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you
can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by
small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that
there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to
bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge.
Presto,
if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger”
snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not
clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A
goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that very same club
then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap
date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I
told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you
felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.
And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'
Laura
interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them
these days and Sam said yes. And asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to
the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she
had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question
but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I have skipped it to
let him go on with the other Von Ronk story. He continued with the other funny
story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role
as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject
matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people
are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students,
having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent,
breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now
Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly
cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider
language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them
some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part.
That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some
other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate
footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”
Laura
did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come
from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes
turned inside out.
As
Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship
which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that
for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local
folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting
local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that Tom
Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this
gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky
hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von
Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. After
that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to
every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some
issue of the day.”
Laura
laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the
fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer,
“You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor
folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this
gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old
Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”
They
both laughed.
Laura
then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he
passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like
some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for
publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times
over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much
high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember
we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert
at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.
Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to
be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always,
drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the
end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style,
and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk
music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the
story ended.'
As they came to the admission booth at
the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt
Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap
box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way
back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you
were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I
am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it
goes.
