Throughout the previous year or so, I had been gradually edging closer to my objective. The first nibble was an offer to record two songs for an anthology called Our Singing Heritage, to be issued by—of all companies—Elektra Records. As I remember, this offer came by way of Paul Clayton, who was pulling together a varied crew to present a reasonably well rounded picture of traditional American song. My contributions were an old Christmas carol, “Mary Had a Baby,” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” I chose “Nobody Knows You” because, of all the songs I was doing in those days, that was my mother’s favorite—which always puzzled me, because Bessie Smith was by no means considered a respectable singer and should hardly have appealed to Grace Van Ronk, the backbone of the Rosary Society. It is only with the experience of age that I have come to have a glimmer of a hypothesis: Any number of friends of mine from the roaring sixties—alcoholics, druggies, sex maniacs, complete social lepers—have gotten married, built careers, moved to the suburbs. They keep up some of their old friendships, but there you are, sitting in the living room with them, and you hear them remonstrating with their children, telling them to stick to the straight and narrow, and to “just say no” to pretty much everything that could give a young person pleasure. I sit there, smothering my guffaws, and I have to think: we’ll never know about our parents, either, will we?
As for Paul Clayton, he was one of my closest friends and also something of a mentor at times. There can have been few singers as unlike one another as Paul and myself, and yet he had a considerable influence on me, as he had some years later on Bob Dylan. He was a brilliant man and had thought through a lot of musical questions very carefully. His voice was a smooth, midrange baritone, almost a Burl Ives sound, which was not usually to my taste, and while he could play quite effective accompaniments on guitar or dulcimer, he was not an expert instrumentalist. His great strength as a musician was that he phrased marvelously, quite unlike anyone else. He had a very personal way of reading a lyric, and gave you the feeling that he was talking to you directly, so you listened with an attention you would not have paid to another singer. In that sense, he had the same sort of skill that Frank Sinatra had, though in a totally different style.
Paul was also a folklorist and collector of songs in the field, and made some quite important finds. He was the first person since the 1920s to record Pink Anderson, one of the great old medicine show guitarists and singers, and he also found a blues guitarist named Etta Baker and innumerable ballad singers. He had a unique repertoire of songs that he had come across on his collecting trips in the Appalachians, and I learned several of them, including the version I do of “Duncan and Brady.” God knows where he collected that, but I never heard another version like it, with that great refrain “He’s been on the job too long.” It is one of a kind, and I have to wonder whether it was at least partly his own work. Paul was a serious folklorist, but when it came to his performance repertoire, he had no qualms about combining verses from different songs and changing words around to suit his taste. He had a beautiful thing called “I’m Going to Georgia,” which I am quite sure he had done more with than just collect. And he had found a song called “Who’ll Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone,” which he changed to “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons”—not a masterpiece, but it got to be a great point of contention later on when Dylan copped the melody and a couple of lines for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
Paul was one of the most delightful human beings I have ever met, a marvelous guy to go out and have a few drinks with and argue about whatever came to mind. At that age we were prepared to debate almost anything. For example, after the Kingston Trio hit, a bunch of folksong collectors and singers filed a class action suit against them for all the supposedly “public domain” material that they had slapped their names onto. A few of these songs had actually been written by professional folksingers like Cynthia Gooding, and a lot of the others had clearly been collected in specific versions from particular sources—Frank Warner had acquired “Tom Dooley” from a banjo player named Frank Profitt, and even if Profitt had not written the song, it was certainly his version that the Trio had made into a number-one hit. So there was this huge suit, and one of the trio made some comment that got widely quoted to the effect that “Jean Ritchie should wear looser shoes and eat more roughage.” It was adding insult to injury, and we were all righteously incensed. Jean and Frank Warner were not exactly our people, but when you put them up against the Kingston Trio, we were in full solidarity with them. As someone who had collected a lot of material in the field, Paul was hotly engaged in this debate, but he was also pretty funny about it. He had put his own name on a good many of his arrangements of older songs, and began saying that his motto was “If you can’t write, rewrite. If you can’t rewrite, copyright.”
Like all of us, Paul had strong political opinions, and he had spent some time in Cuba, so when Castro and company were in the Sierra Maestra, he decided that he wanted to get up a bunch of volunteers, call it the Patrick Henry Brigade, and head over there like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. That was when I took to calling him “Pablo.” I remember one night sitting around at the Village Gate and telling him, “Well, I can go along with you up to a certain point, but what we really need to do is to take the Patrick Henry Brigade up to the Sierra Catskills and liberate Grossingers, and turn it into a folk music room.”
Paul was quite a character in other ways as well. He had a collection of walking sticks—it was one of his passions—and he wore some pretty extraordinary getups. I remember once a friend of ours had borrowed a book from him—a rare volume titled The Short History of Sex Worship—and had failed to return it. After dunning this fellow off and on for a few weeks, Clayton lost his patience and developed a scheme to deal with the situation. (I don’t know if this actually came to fruition, but I certainly like to think it did.) As it happened, the borrower was one of the few of us who was respectably employed; he had some sort of job where he worked at a desk in a sea of desks in this huge office. So one day Clayton put on shorts, sandals, a pith helmet, two or three overcoats one over the other—this was in the middle of summer, mind you—and took one of his most ornate Malacca walking sticks. Then he went charging down to this office, ran up to the man’s desk, and started pounding on it with his cane, screaming, “Where’s my Short History of Sex Worship?!”
Occasionally I would see Paul with Phil Perlman, who weighed a good 300 pounds and was the first man with a ponytail I ever saw outside of a pirate movie, and it was quite something to watch the two of them walking down the street, wearing these bizarre outfits, to the awe and amazement of absolutely everybody. Back then, most of us dressed pretty conservatively. Not only was it the 1950s, but we were paranoid about the beatnik connection—I remember myself onstage saying, “Please excuse the sunglasses.”
Paul used to bill himself as “the world’s most recorded young folksinger”—the “young” had to be in there because of Pete Seeger—and he had already made well over a dozen albums. A lot of them were thematic collections: Songs of Love and Marriage; Songs of Hate and Divorce; “Hunt the Cutty Auk” and Other Auk-Hunting Ballads from the Inner Hebrides . He sometimes had to stretch a point to find material that would fit these programmatic slots, and a certain amount of garbage was laid down, but some really nice stuff was done as well, and he was recording like a madman. For a while there, every time he needed a few bucks, he would go to the library and thumb through some obscure folklore collection, then go up to Moe Asch at Folkways Records and say, “You know, Moe, I was just looking through your catalog, and I noticed that you don’t have a single album of Maine lumberjack ballads.”
Moe would say, “Well, I guess that’s a pretty serious omission. Do you know anyone who can sing enough of those to make a record?”
And Paul would say, “Well, as it happens . . . ”
Paul was originally from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the old whaling port, and he had a huge repertoire of s
ailing songs he had learned from his grandfather. He had recorded some of these on his own, but in 1958 he or Moe—or maybe it was Kenny Goldstein, who had produced a lot of his records—decided that he should do an album with a group, singing mostly unaccompanied, the way the songs would actually have been done on the ships. He rounded up a gang of the usual suspects: me, Bob Brill, Roger Abrahams, and Bob Yellin, a good singer and bluegrass banjo player who could also do some nice, simple picking of the sort that a sailor might have done while relaxing between watches.
We held our rehearsals at the Village Gate in the afternoons. Art D’Lugoff had just opened the club and was having trouble obtaining the necessary license to hire entertainment. He was a Jew in an Italian neighborhood where liquor licenses had traditionally been acquired only by becoming somebody’s son-in-law, so everything he did in that place had to be done two or three times, because the other bar owners had the inspectors coming back again and again. D’Lugoff is a very ballsy man, and he stuck to his guns, but they harassed the shit out of him.
It being a brand new place, Art was more than happy to have some people in there, so he invited us to do our singing in his downstairs room and even supplied pitchers of beer to fend off dehydration. The only problem was that after a few pitchers, we were so well fended that our attention was apt to wander, and after a diligent hour or so of “Haul on the Bowline” and “Santa Anna,” we would find ourselves harmonizing to “Friggin’ in the Riggin’” or “D’Lugoff Fill the Flowing Bowl.” Then other singers would drift in, and shortly the whole thing would devolve into impromptu barbershop octets or dodecatets, and on to the usual arguments about politics and the future of folk music. Finally, it was time to make the record, and we had only eight songs worked out. We went into the studio and, aided by a goodly supply of Demerara rum—very appropriate to the material—somehow improvised our way through enough songs to fill out the album. We traded off leading the chanteys, with everybody joining in on the choruses, and I suspect we sounded more genuine, and certainly more enthusiastic, than we might have with more practice. The LP was issued as Fo’c’sle Songs and Chanties, by Paul Clayton and the Fo’c’sle Singers, and has remained in the Folkways catalog. I still think it is one of the best records I have ever been involved in making, though it attracted very little attention then or since.
My next recording venture was less satisfactory. By that time, I was living in Gina Glaser’s old apartment on MacDougal Street, a sixth-story railroad flat that she had left to me when she went off to Europe. It consisted of three tiny rooms, and I was sharing it for much of the time with Sam Charters, a friend of Bob Brill’s who had recently come up from New Orleans. Sam would shortly emerge as one of the most important figures in the blues revival, because he was the first person to take the trouble to really research blues history. Before that, blues had been treated pretty cursorily, either as a primitive form of jazz or as a corner of the folk tradition. Sam wrote a book called The Country Blues, which had an effect that still resonates today. To begin with, he actually went to the libraries and pulled out copies of newspapers from various black communities in the 1920s, so he had some idea of how that music had been treated at the time. Who would have thought that there would be big advertisements for records by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton in the Chicago Defender ? But there they were. So Sam put blues research on a serious basis, and as a result of his work and the work of other people standing on his shoulders, we now know more about that music than any of us would have dreamt possible before he wrote that book. Also, he was the first person to stop assuming that the people who had made those records were dead. If he had not found an obituary of, say, Blind Willie Johnson, he saw no need to assume that Blind Willie Johnson was dead—and when he went to see if he could find Blind Willie, he missed him by only a year or so. A lot of other people were still alive, and he found some of the old jug band players in Memphis and recorded an album of them for Folkways, then tracked down Lightnin’ Hopkins, still going strong in Texas. Sam hunted these guys up and wrote about it, and that started everybody else off on the trail of older, vanished singers. He is a marvelously prescient man and has one of the best sets of ears of any critic or music producer I know.
Sam also fooled around with music himself. He sang, played some guitar, some trumpet; he had been involved in the trad jazz scene out on the West Coast and had spent time in New Orleans interviewing the older jazz musicians there. We used to play together at parties, messing around with jazz stuff, which I was not getting much chance to do on the folk scene, and some jug band songs. Right around that time, an English singer named Lonnie Donegan got a hit playing a jug band version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” so there was a brief flutter of interest in the style, which the English called “skiffle.” As a result, we ended up with a deal to make a skiffle record for a label called Lyrichord. We put together a group that included Sam’s future wife, Ann, on washboard and one of our trad buddies, Len Kunstadt, on kazoo, and rehearsed a bunch of tunes—I recall a truly unique version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I still maintain that we were a pretty good band, but no one would ever know it from that record. Those were the days when stereo recording was still a neat new gimmick, and Lyrichord decided to wrap up two hot trends in one package by making an album called Skiffle in Stereo. The problem was that back in the mono days, there had been no need to separate musicians onto different recording tracks, and hence microphones were designed to capture the full range of sound in their area. We were still using this old microphone technology, so to get separation, they had to put all of us in different rooms, and for the same reason that there were no directional mikes, there was no such thing as recording with headphones. The upshot was that each of us could just barely hear the two nearest players, but none of us could hear the whole band. We were constantly getting away from each other, and the result included some of the most appalling moments I have ever heard on record. To crown the whole debacle, I pulled rank on my lesser-known associates, and the band was billed on the album cover as The Orange Blossom Jug Five with Dave Van Ronk. Talk about the punishment fitting the crime . . .
Far from teaching me a lesson, this experience just whetted my appetite. I wanted my own record, and I decided that the key was Kenny Goldstein. Kenneth S. Goldstein was a serious folklorist, then working toward his Ph.D., but he was also a freelance producer. He had produced records by Pat Foster, the Kossoy Sisters, and all sorts of other people, along with a bunch of Clayton’s albums, for Folkways, Riverside, and Tradition, which aside from Elektra were about the only labels on the scene at that point. I figured if he could record them, he could damn well record me, so I got on his case and pestered him mercilessly. He kept telling me, “You’re not ready,” and I kept thinking, “Ready, schmeady—I need that LP so I can get some work, or I won’t live long enough to get ready.” I bugged him and bugged him, until eventually he must have concluded that a Van Ronk record would be a lesser evil than Van Ronk. The poor man caved completely and brought me out to his place on Long Island, where he had a little recording studio in the basement. I think we did the whole record in one session, though it might have taken two. Basically he just sat me in front of a microphone, and I sang a couple dozen of the things I was performing at that point, and that was that.
Hindsight being what it is, I have to say that Kenny was right and I was not ready to make that record. I have always referred to it as “Archie Andrews Sings the Blues,” which about sums up my feelings. I was still essentially a living room or Washington Square singer. I did not know the first thing about using a microphone, and my singing sounds high and forced. I continued to play some of those songs, and to play them in the same key, so I was not really singing higher than I did later, but it does not sound like the same voice. I developed more control and I learned a lot more about phrasing, how to come in ahead of or behind the beat. As for the guitar playing, it makes me want to crawl under a rug. I have often thought how nice it
would be if I could buy the master of that record and use it for skeet shooting. (There were also other problems: When the album came out, someone at the San Francisco Chronicle gave it a nice review in which he described me as “a very promising young black singer.” Kenny immediately wrote a letter to the paper, giving him the horselaugh, with the result that when I played San Francisco a few years later, the guy came down and gave me one of the nastiest reviews I have ever received in my life.)
All of which said, I was right as well: having a record out made an immediate difference in terms of getting jobs, and the fact that it appeared on the Folkways label gave me the equivalent of the Good Folksinging Seal of Approval. This was the label that Woody Guthrie was on, that Leadbelly was on, that Pete Seeger was on. Moe Asch could be an exasperating man, and he would never pay you ten cents if he could get away with five, but he really loved the music. That was the most important thing to him, and we all knew that, and we loved him for it. In all the years he kept that record company going, he did not cut anything out of the catalog. Every album that he made was like one of his kids, and he loved all of them, including some of the most cockamamy things you ever heard. There was one, Sounds of a South American Rain Forest, and it turned out that this was a complete put-on, that it was Frederic Ramsey and a friend standing in the shower and making bird noises—but Moe kept it in the catalog. So that was the label I wanted, even though I was well aware that I would not make a lot of money from it.
As it happened, Moe paid me a couple hundred bucks, which was very welcome, and over the years I managed to hit him up for handouts from time to time, but on the whole I always found his accounting mysterious, to say the least. It must have taken a fair amount of financial wizardry to keep that operation afloat for all those years, and I am convinced that, rather than chain himself to the legal niceties of his contractual agreements, he was cooking his books with the élan of an Escoffier.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 11