Caravan became our forum, with page upon page of theoretical argument about the correct stance of the modern urban folk musician or listener. Barry Kornfeld was a regular and frequently vituperative columnist, writing under the pen name “Kafka” and calling his column “From the Dead.” Roger Lass, a quite good musician and one of the sharpest tongues in the east, wrote some very controversial pieces, and Roger Abrahams violently disagreed with him, and all the cats jumped in on one side or the other. Lionel Coots, a possibly pseudonymous wag from Richmond Hill, wrote in to inquire whether Rafferty’s appellation “Blind” was based not on a physical disability but on his critical acumen. Altogether, it was a tremendous foofaraw, and looked at one way, a lot of it was pretty silly. But we were defining ourselves. The identity of the folk revival was being established at that time, and Caravan was a critical nexus.
It also served as a sort of club newsletter, with gossip, in-jokes, and commentary about whatever was happening on the Village scene—the March 1958 issue, for example, notes that “Dave Van Ronk, like so many other Village characters, has affected a beard.” There were concert announcements and advertisements for guitar and banjo lessons, which Lee printed free of charge. (The magazine’s cover boasted that it was a “nonprofit, great-cost amateur publication,” and the first half-dozen issues were free. After that, the circulation had grown too large to be paid for out of Lee’s pocket, and she was forced to start charging ten cents per.) Lee was an impressive figure and had a great influence on the scene. She could walk up to Roger Abrahams or Aaron Rennert or me, or even Paul Clayton, that incredibly pigheaded man, and say something and we would listen. She was the pope, the final authority. Izzy thought he was the pope, but in fact his opinions were often not taken very seriously, while Lee’s were. Izzy would say whatever came into his head, but Lee thought everything through very carefully before she said it, and we listened to her in a way we did not listen to anyone else, because what she said made sense. She was a writer, not a musician, so she was capable of a kind of detachment that we were not. (Lee also did me another service: for several months after I got back from my hitch in the merchant marine, she and Larry let me sleep on their couch.)
Running Caravan must at times have been incredibly frustrating. We were all eager to put our opinions in print, but often a good deal less eager to show up when help was needed to collate and staple. So Lee deserves a lot of credit simply for sticking with it and keeping the magazine going. She ran it from August 1957 until the end of 1958, by which time it had become a much more professional-looking object, a small-format magazine that looked a good deal like Sing Out! It had ceased to be a little Village newsletter and was taking up so much of her time that she decided to quit, handed it over to Billy Faier, and shortly started another informal, mimeographed fanzine called Gardyloo (named for the shout that British housewives would give before emptying chamberpots onto the street, from the French “Garde de l’eau!”).
With Caravan, there was finally a place where the arguments that had previously been limited to barroom colloquies could be set down in print. The first Rafferty piece drew some predictably outraged responses and led Lee to add a note to the cover of issue no. 2, to the effect that “the opinions expressed herein (especially those of Rafferty) are not necessarily those of the editor,” and also that “parcels containing small poisonous objects and/or explosives should be marked clearly ‘to Rafferty’ and ‘personal.’” That issue’s lead article was a three-page review of the Café Bizarre show, with a complimentary paragraph about my performance, and I weighed in with another Rafferty column. In good anarchist fashion, I chose a theme guaranteed to perplex those readers who assumed they had my number after the Elektra diatribe—my admiration for Pete Seeger:A few days ago someone handed me the latest copy of Sing Out and told me to turn to Pete Seeger’s column, “Johnny Appleseed, Jr.,” if I wanted to work up a really fine rage. I accepted the proffered magazine and my friend stepped back a few paces and waited for the explosion. There was no explosion. Of course, I disagreed with the article as expected (the contents of same are of no importance here) but I got no satisfaction out of disagreeing with Seeger. I think that the man is really great, in almost every sense of the word, and it saddens me to constantly find myself in the opposition camp every time he ventures an opinion. But when he sings—
Artists of Seeger’s genre are hard to come by in this day and age. He is, in my opinion, taste and honesty personified, and a Seeger concert is a lesson which no singer of folksongs can afford to miss. When he speaks on the stage, his voice rarely rises above a conversational level, and yet he is heard. There is no phony upstaging at all. As a matter of fact, “stage presence” of the Broadway variety is entirely absent. Seeger does not act; he is.
I think that this is the key to his entire greatness. The man has no need to act in order to establish contact with his audience. He genuinely respects the people who are listening to him and refuses to insult their sensibilities with insincere theatrics. And they respond, not to an actor or stage personality, but to the man.
He treats his material in much the same way. I doubt if Seeger considers himself a “folklorist” per se; but rather he looks at folkmusic as a human being, subject to love, hate, enthusiasm, sorrow—in short, all of the emotions with which folkmusic deals. He is not “preserving” folklore but living it, and so are we, and he knows it. He neither sings up nor down to his material but with it. And there is no dichotomy between the performer and the content of his songs. This is the reason why one never gets the “isn’t this cute” or “how quaint” impression from Seeger’s singing. When he sings, all of him is involved. Which is another lesson that many singers of folksongs could profit by.
Again, I can’t say I think much of Pete’s point of view on many subjects. He is forever espousing causes which at best leave me cold. But I can’t say that I think he would be better off without his causes and opinions. However wrong I happen to think they may be, they reflect a genuine concern with the real world which, to my way of thinking, is an indispensable part of a whole person, which I think Pete Seeger is.
The tragedy is that there are almost none like him. He is almost unique and insofar as such people in folkmusic are rare, then it becomes necessary to form “societies for the preservation of folklore”—or perhaps the word should be “embalming.”
Naturally, this piece did not attract as much response as my attack on Elektra, but at least one person took me to task for calling Pete a “real” folksinger. What can I say? He is the man who invented my profession. When his first solo album, Darling Corey, came out, it was like a clarion call: this is the real stuff, played the way it should be played. What is more, I always thought Pete was a much better musician than most people appreciated—including most of his fans. He phrases like a sonofabitch, he never overplays, and he dug up so much wonderful material. Whatever our disagreements over the years, I learned a hell of a lot from him.
In Caravan no. 3, Rafferty provided an article on “The Singing IWW,” a subject dear to my heart, along with a plug for the Kossoy Sisters’ album. They were a pair of identical twins with marvelous, perfectly matched voices, and I still think that was one of the most lovely albums to come out of that period. In the same issue, under my own name, I answered a reader’s request for the lyrics to Wynonie Harris’s R&B hit “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me” and gave high marks to two albums of field recordings, Alan Lomax’s collection of Negro Prison Songs and a Jean Ritchie album in which she presented various traditional English ballad singers, juxtaposing their performances with her American versions of the same songs.
By contrast, Caravan no. 4 noted in the contents page that “Mr. Rafferty has not been heard from,” and the following issue described him as having “disappeared.” Being a regular columnist was getting to feel too much like work, and the pleasure of seeing my opinions in print was not enough to keep me in harness. However, I continued to devote myself to other literary ventures
, acting as editor of a slim, mimeographed folio titled The Bosses’ Songbook: Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent.
The genesis of The Bosses’ Songbook began with Roy Berkeley, who had written a series of parodies of old folk chestnuts in the Almanac-People’s Artists style, but turned around to make them the targets. His masterpiece was “The Ballad of Pete Seeger,” a viciously funny reworking of “The Wreck of the Old 97” that began “They gave him his orders at Party head-quarters, / Saying, ‘Pete, you’re way behind the times. / This is not ’38, it is 1957, / There’s a change in that old Party Line.’” It had a couple more verses, ending with a quip about how the People’s Artists were going on with “their noble mission of teaching folksongs to the folk.” Among Roy’s other gems was “Way Down in Lubyanka Prison” (to the tune of “Columbus Stockade”), which he had composed for the Young Socialist League’s May Day show. He would introduce these songs by saying that they came from “The Bosses’ Songbook,” a capitalist parallel to the IWW’s “Little Red Songbook” of “Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.” (There had been a similarly satiric collection, called Ballads for Sectarians, recorded in 1950 by a singer named Joe Glazer, with songs like “My Darling Party Line” and a reworking of the Admiral’s song from The H.M.S. Pinafore that began “When I was a lad in 1906, I joined a band of Bolsheviks . . . ”)
I put Roy’s efforts together with a few additional songs by people like me and Barry Kornfeld, and Dick Ellington served as publisher—which is to say, he organized and printed the thing. Dick was a friend from the Libertarian League and a fellow sci-fi addict (he was one of a group of sci-fi-reading lefties who called themselves the Fanarchists). He was also a professional printer and got out the League’s paper, Views and Comments . He was living in a big apartment called the Dive up on Riverside Drive, where I crashed on occasion and attended many memorable parties, of which I naturally remember nothing—except that it was at one of them that I first got together with Terri Thal, who shortly became my girlfriend and eventually my first wife.
The Bosses’ Songbook was mildly popular in our circle and caused a fair amount of irritation in others. I was told on good authority that Pete was thinking of suing us, and for our second printing we changed the title of “The Ballad of Pete Seeger” to “Ballad of a Party Singer.” (Dick Ellington remembered this quite differently. He heard that Pete found the song funny and actually performed it a few times, and as proof presented Pete’s order for three songbooks.)
What with one thing and another, my corner of the folk scene was getting a lot more active, and among the new developments was the birth of our own organization, the Folksingers Guild. This was formed in the winter of 1957-58, largely as a response to the screwing we got at the Café Bizarre. After the first two or three concerts, Rick Allmen had the Bizarre up and running, so he did not need us anymore. He was quite an unprincipled man, and he did not pay the performers; he would make an exception for someone like Odetta or Josh White, but whoever else was on the bill was doing it for the “exposure” (which, as Utah Phillips points out, is something people die of ). Those of us who had developed a local reputation, if only from our Washington Square performances, would have cost him a few bucks. No more than a few bucks, but as far as he was concerned, there was no reason even to pay that.
It was cold-blooded exploitation, and that was essentially what got the Folksingers Guild started. We had been promised pay and we were not paid, and we foresaw a big folk boom coming, so we wanted to get a union started forthwith to prevent that kind of thing occurring again. As it happened, the boom would not come for another three years or so—at least to an extent that affected us—but by 1958 it was clearly on its way. The college folk clubs were starting, Harry Belafonte and the Tarriers had some hit records, Elektra was doing good business, and to our way of thinking it could not be long before discerning listeners had got their fill of slick folkfakery and must turn to us, the true keepers of the flame. We had no doubt that we were the cutting edge of the folk revival—though bear in mind, we were in our late teens and early twenties, and if you do not feel you are the cutting edge at that age, there is something wrong with you. Of course we were the wave of the future—we were twenty-one!
As it turned out, we were premature, but we had the basic idea right, and we started the Guild to protect ourselves from the capitalist exploitation that we were sure was right around the corner. I cannot remember exactly how we first got together, but I was in on it from the outset, along with a crew of the usual suspects: Roy Berkeley, again; Roger Abrahams, again; Roger Lass, Bob and Sylvia Brill, Luke Faust, Gina Glaser, Jerry Levine, Judy Isquith, Al Foster, Dave Sternlight, Silvia Burnett, Ben Rifkin . . . We held our meetings at Dick and Kiki Greenhaus’s loft on 17th Street. Dick was a remarkably good guitar player, and Kiki was a modern dancer who also worked as a belly dancer in the clubs on 8th Avenue in the 20s, and they had this big loft where Dick taught guitar and Kiki taught modern dance.
The obvious problem with forming a protective organization for workers in the folk industry was that at that point Rick Allmen was the sole capitalist on the scene, and even he was only rather fecklessly exploiting anybody. We were basically a trade union with no bosses, and we realized pretty quickly that we would have to be our own bosses, and began putting on concerts. That was where Lee Hoffman Shaw came in again, and also Lee Haring. Roy Berkeley and a few other performers were actively involved, but in my recollection we were more in the form of window dressing as far as actually running things was concerned. We attended meetings and made a lot of noise, but the real work—renting the halls, printing up posters—could not be left to the performers. (Years later we were trying to organize a union down on MacDougal Street, and when I told John Mitchell, who was running the Gaslight Café, he said, “You?! You’re organizing a union? If you were a dog you couldn’t organize a pack of fleas.” And he was right.) There were some other people as well: Aaron Rennert was the official photographer and Ray Sullivan did the sound system.
We had a concert committee, and since the main function of the organization was to produce concerts, that became in effect the executive committee. The concert committee would decide who would be on the bill for each concert, and there was a great deal of “Well, we can’t pick so-and-so, because he was on the show before last . . . Why don’t we give so-and-so a chance?” The weighing of the bills was a delicate matter and had to be handled with a great deal of diplomacy, because a lot of egos were involved. There were always at least three or four people on a bill. Somebody would be up there for fifteen or twenty minutes, then would get yanked off before everybody walked out, and we would hit them with the next screecher. As things went on, we occasionally added a somewhat bigger name—Paul Clayton, say—to bring in more people. With Paul you could have a whole bunch of relative unknowns, because Paul could pull. If you were going to book it strictly from within the group, then you would have performers like Roy and myself and Gina Glaser, who had some following—if we could bring down twenty or thirty people each, that was already a big deal. On a good night, the audience might have been as big as two hundred people, but it was often more like ninety, and out of that we would pay the production costs and divvy the rest up among the performers.
Roy recalls that he arranged for the YSL to let us use their hall for our first concert, and with the money from that one we rented a room in Adelphi Hall, on 5th Avenue. Caravan lists what may have been our first concert there, in February 1958, featuring Roy, me, and a “surprise guest,” all for the sum of fifty cents. Once we were a little bit established, we moved over to the Sullivan Street Playhouse, just south of MacDougal, renting it for midnight shows or on nights when the theater was dark. We would have three or four performers, introduced by Jock Root—John Schuyler Root—a very dignified-looking, slightly built man with a little dark mustache. Jock did not play or sing, but he was very well-spoken and traditionally acted as master of ceremonies, and he often presided over our meetings as well
. There was one show, I believe at Joan of Arc High School, where Doris Stone and Pat Foster were on the bill, and while they were waiting in the dressing room, they got into some sort of argument, and Pat went one step too far over the line, so Doris picked up a jar of cold cream that caught him right between the eyes. He was knocked completely unconscious, and poor Jock Root was out on the stage and introduced them to a thundering patter of applause, and nothing happened.
One way and another, the Guild was a way for us to pick up a few bucks, to establish ourselves, and to learn our craft. There were a lot of fans and amateurs involved, but there was a core of people who really wanted to be professional folksingers, and the Guild was essentially our support group. Obviously, some of us took ourselves a good deal more seriously than others. I remember one committee meeting where Paul Clayton threw a beautiful scene. I do not remember what set him off, but he was on his feet, screaming, “I am a professional, and you have to treat me like a professional!” Paul was such a professional that he never actually joined the Guild. He would come to meetings, but he made a very sharp distinction between himself and all of us wannabes, because he had already recorded a bunch of albums. There were a few people like that, who were around and very influential, but who I do not think actually joined. John Cohen would have been one, and I think Tom Paley.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 9