To the tourists, folk music was simply part of the beatnik scene. Actually, the beats liked cool jazz, bebop, and hard drugs and hated folk music, which to them was all these fresh-faced kids sitting around on the floor and singing songs of the oppressed masses. When a folksinger would take the stage between two beat poets, all the finger-poppin’ mamas and daddies would do everything but hold their noses. Then, when the beat poets would get up and begin to rant, all the folk fans would do likewise. But in the eyes of the media, folk music and beatniks were one and the same.
In 1959 the poets still had very much the upper hand. I sometimes say, and there is more than a little truth to it, that the only reason they had folksingers in those coffeehouses at all was to turn the house. The Gaslight seated only 110 customers, and on weekend nights, there would often be a line of people waiting to get in. To maximize profits, Mitchell needed a way to clear out the current crowd after they had finished their cup of overpriced coffee, since no one would have bought a second cup of that slop. This presented a logistical problem to which the folksingers were the solution: you would get up and sing three songs, and if at the end of those three songs anybody was still left in the room, you were fired.
Over the next year or two, though, the situation changed completely. I am reminded of the old tale of the Arab and the camel: An Arab is in his nice, snug, warm tent in the desert on a freezing cold night, and a camel sticks his head in and says, “Do you mind if I just put my nose inside the tent to get it warm? It’s really freezing out here.” The Arab, being a soft-hearted fellow, says, “Go on, be my guest.” The camel sticks his nose in, but after a while he pipes up again, saying, “Do you mind if I just put my ears in as well?” The Arab allows this as well, and the story goes on and on until finally the Arab is freezing out on the desert and the camel is warm inside the tent. Thus it was with the folksingers and the beat poets. The poor bastards never knew what hit ’em.
Basically, it turned out that we could draw larger crowds and keep them coming back more regularly. This was not because folk music is inherently more interesting than poetry, but singing is inherently theatrical, and poetry is not. Even a very good poet is not necessarily any kind of a performer, since poetry is by its nature introspective—“In my craft or sullen art / Exercised in the still night,” as Dylan Thomas put it. A mediocre singer can still choose good material and make decent music, while a mediocre poet is just a bore. And some of the poets around MacDougal Street were the absolute bottom of the barrel. So gradually more and more clubs phased the poets out and the singers in. It was not an absolute changeover: even into the 1960s they would keep someone like Eddie Freeman around for those occasions when a tourist would come in and say, “Hey, you got any beatnik poets?” They had to have a token specimen, just for the look of the thing, but to all intents and purposes that craze was dead. The poets probably have a quite different take on this history—I suspect their attitude is “We never lost the ball, we just got bored with the park”—but that is how it seemed to me.
When I first got back from California, Roy was the only person I knew who was playing regularly on MacDougal—frankly, one reason I disliked the Gaslight so much was probably because he had the gig and I didn’t, and I was jealous. My turn came soon enough, though. A few months after my return, I ran into Jimmy Gavin, who was back in New York as well, and he told me he was booking the music for a coffeehouse called the Commons. It was right across the street from the Gaslight, and I went down there on Jimmy’s invitation, and there were four or five performers working there, and I became the fifth or sixth. It was what was called a “basket house,” which meant that most of the money for performers came in the form of tips. There would be a basket at the door, supervised by a young woman who would cajole, shame, or threaten the clydes into tossing in a buck or two on their way out, and however many people performed in a night, that’s how many ways the basket would be split. On a good weekend night, you could actually make out pretty well, and the people who were regulars on the bill were also pulling a salary—only $100, $125 a week, but in 1960 you could live on that. As in LA, we worked hard for the money, because being a coffeehouse it did not have to shut down when the bars shut down, so after “last call” at 4:00 A.M., we would get our second straight rush and that would sometimes keep us working until 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 in the morning. I loved walking up 6th Avenue on my way home to bed, watching all the poor wage slaves schlepping off to work.
The Commons was my professional introduction to MacDougal Street and vice versa. Pretty soon I had built up something of a regular following, and in August of 1960 the Village Voice did a big cover piece on me. This might not be worth noting, except for the fact that the Voice assiduously ignored the folk scene. There had been one short piece on Carolyn Hester a few months earlier, but in general the paper was trying to be a community weekly, and a lot of people in the community thought of the coffeehouse entertainers as outsiders, beatniks, and bait for the tourists and trouble-makers that were ruining the neighborhood. The same reporter who did the piece on me had just finished a three-part series on how MacDougal Street had become “a fruitcake ‘Inferno’,” and the beatnik equivalent of Coney Island. Thus, odd as it seems, this was not only the first cover piece on a Village folksinger but also the last. Over the next few years, which are often remembered as the high point of Greenwich Village as a musical mecca, the local press did its best to avoid the whole subject.
The Voice piece was very welcome, naturally, though as with all articles of that period it laid more stress on the “white man singing the blues” angle than I cared for. It began: The occasional wanderer poking around tiny Minetta Street these summer evenings is liable to meet up with a most unusual sound. It drifts from the glass-partitioned back entrance of The Commons coffee house. Now wailing, now dropping on down to a mean, guttural rasp, it is the sound of a man belting out Negro ballads and blues. The voice, however, does not quite have the timbre associated with southern Negro singing. But it is filled just the same with all that smoky, bittersweet funk and jazz common to the musical tradition south of the Mason and Dixon line.
The reporter described me as “hunched over a table, nervously dragging on a cigarette. . . . A certain weariness and the droopy bush of a blond moustache make him older than his 24 years.” After batting around the subject of my ethnicity, the reporter asked if I had spent much time in the South:A tremendous grin breaks out under the walrus moustache. He scratches at his mop of brown hair. “Sometimes I feel like palming myself off as Homer Scragg, the banjo picker from Sawtooth, Arkansas. Actually, I’m from Brooklyn. And that low-down sound in my voice? Man, I’ve got asthma. The worse the weather, the rougher and raspier I sound. It’s great. It hides all the defects.”
The story summarized my basic bio, with some chat about the evils of southern racism and segregation, then ended with a question about my obvious musical growth since the Folkways album. The reporter suggested that I seemed to have developed a “more popular touch.” I hastened to agree:“For years I’ve hung around Israel Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street. I learned a helluva lot about ethnic music from the records and talking to the people there. Izzy, by the way, is the real unsung hero of folk music around New York. But lately I’ve been listening to other stuff—specifically Ray Charles. I think he’s the finest vocalist for jazz or country blues around today. He represents the best of the rhythm and blues. I mean, he swings. I don’t think I can go wrong learning from him.”
Then I was back onstage, singing “Careless Love.”
It was a nice piece, but I got awfully tired of that business about singing “Negro music.” Frankly, I was puzzled by all the fuss. After all, no one had ever suggested that there was anything strange about me singing like Louis Armstrong when I was doing jazz. Copying Louis’s phrasing was standard procedure for jazz singers, white and black. When I listen to my recordings, I hear an obvious debt to Louis, and on those early records to Bessie Smith, as well as to Jelly
Roll Morton, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, and Gary Davis. Except for Gary, that is a fairly standard list that you might have heard from any jazz singer of my generation or of the generation before mine.
There was indeed a racial gap between me and the people who had originally recorded most of the material I was doing at that point, but there was also a large time gap. I was singing songs I had learned from recordings of Bessie Smith made in the 1920s, and musical fashions had changed tremendously in the intervening decades. So it was not just that young white singers were not doing anything like that; nobody had heard anything like that for thirty years except people who were into old music for nostalgic or scholarly reasons, or because they liked the music for itself as an “art form.”
When I first started getting a lot of flak, I tried to counter it as best I could, and one of my strongest debating points was that so few black musicians were still doing that material. There were Sonny and Brownie, Josh White, and very few others. Certainly nobody who was going to work for what they were paying on MacDougal Street. So I would just say, “Look, if I don’t do this music, who will?” A few years later, when Son House, John Hurt, and Lightnin’ Hopkins resurfaced and started touring around the folk clubs, that answer was no longer valid, but by then most people had stopped asking me the question.
In any case, most of the people listening to folk music never thought much about the issue, for or against. The whole debate was a tempest in a teapot, generated by critics who needed something to write about. At the time, though, I got really annoyed by it, because these were songs, good songs, and what color is a song? But all sorts of erudite arguments were being made and ripostes being delivered, and though I was not the only white blues singer on the scene, I was sort of riding point, so a lot of the garbage landed on my head. Then I snapped back in a very surly manner and said some things that, while I do not regret having said them, were an overreaction to the overreaction. Forty years later, on somber reflection, having fully studied the arguments on both sides, I have reached what I believe to be a measured and definitive judgment on the matter: Who cares?
Whatever my tastes, my voice sounded like it sounded. From the first moment I opened my mouth to sing, people did not hesitate to tell me that I had an unusual voice—though that was not exactly the way they usually phrased it. In retrospect, I think that having a rough voice was actually an advantage, because I had to learn how to sing, not simply make pretty sounds. And it fitted well with the sort of material that attracted me, which often was sung by people who did not have pretty voices.
At any rate, the Commons was a turning point for me. Along with providing a regular place for me to play, it was where I met a lot of the people who would become my closest friends and associates over the next few years. The sheer number of people who worked there militated for that: I once counted thirteen performers on a single night. That even included some poets, and we mixed pretty well, all things considered. Bob Kaufman was reading there fairly often, and John Brent, who was better known as a comedian with the Second City and subsequently the Committee, came across the street occasionally from the Gaslight.
One of the best friends I met there was Tom Paxton. The Commons was Tom’s first gig in the city; he was in the army and came in on weekend passes from Fort Dix. At that point he was not yet doing his own material. He was doing traditional folksongs, and he sounded a lot like Burl Ives—I can still hear Ives in his style. He may have already written his first song, or certainly would within a very short time, but that was not what he was doing onstage. From the beginning, though, he was a natural as a performer.
Two or three weeks after my arrival at the Commons, Jimmy decided to pull up stakes and head back to California, because his acting teacher was going out there. Some of the other performers went with him, and what with one thing and another I was shortly the only regular performer left. Then Rod MacDonald, who was running the place, asked me if I would be willing to book the entertainment, since he did not know from folk music; all he knew from was chess. That was fine with me, and of course I hired my friends. I brought Paxton in on a regular basis, Casey Anderson, Billy Faier, a woman named Neila Horne who was a great songwriter and wrote several things I have kept in my repertoire, and the Reverend Gary Davis.
I had met Gary a couple of years earlier through Barry Kornfeld. Barry was studying guitar with him and sometimes acting as his “lead boy” (Gary was blind, and though he could get around his own turf pretty well, he needed someone when he ventured farther afield), and for a while got into the practice of bringing him down to Washington Square on Sundays. Gary would stand there in the circle in the middle of the square with Barry, who would usually be playing banjo while Gary played guitar. The first time I heard him was a shock I will never forget. I still cannot believe the things that man could do. He was unquestionably a genius, and he became my idol, my guitar guru. It took me a while to assimilate any of his techniques, but he was certainly the strongest single influence on my playing.
Gary was in his sixties by that time. He was an ordained minister and had been a street singer and preacher for most of his life. He was from South Carolina originally, but he had come up to New York in the early 1940s, and when I first heard him, he was still working in the streets of Harlem. He also used to preach sometimes in a storefront church, and his sermons were really remarkable. He would set up a riff on his guitar, and then he would chant his sermon in counterpoint to the riff, and when he made a little change in what he was saying, he would make a little change on the guitar. There was this constant interplay and interweaving of voice and guitar, and these fantastic polyrhythms would come out of that—I have never heard anything quite like it, before or since. He was a great singer, and I do not think he has gotten enough credit for that. There were a lot of similarities between his singing and Ray Charles’s, both in voice quality and in the way it fitted with his style of playing. He could shout when he needed to, but he could also be very sophisticated in terms of his phrasing and his use of dynamics.
As for Gary’s guitar style, it was fantastically complicated and has never been successfully duplicated, even by his students. It was ragtimey more than bluesy, and he had unbelievable technique. More important, for my purposes, he was accessible. He gave lessons in his house and also had a succession of lead boys who helped him get around to concerts. The first I recall was a guy named Johnny Gibbon, and then there was Fred Gerlach, Barry Kornfeld, Stefan Grossman, Roy Bookbinder—a whole succession of people who went on to be really fine guitar players.
I never took formal lessons from Gary, but I went over to his house a couple of times and I worked with him as often as I could, and whenever he was playing, I would just sit there and watch his fingers. We used to hang around for hours, and we would talk and I would ask him how to play one thing or another. He used to say, “Well, playing guitar ain’t nothing but a bag of tricks”—which I suppose is true in a way, but he had a very, very big bag. He was only too happy to show me things, and then I would try to play them, and he would cackle when I got them wrong, which was usually. He was an incredibly patient teacher when the mood was on him. Being blind, he had difficulty describing what it was he was doing, so his method was to play a thing over and over again, slow it down so you could see just where his fingers were going, and he would correct you by ear. He did not mind if it took two hours to get one lick across. On the other hand, he could be very irascible and unpredictable at times, so you would work on this lick or whatever it was, and a few days later you would run into him and play it, and he would growl at you, “Man, you’re stealing my stuff.”
He was sui generis, a unique man in so many ways. It was like W. C. Fields used to say about sex: “There are some things better and there are some things worse, but there’s nothing quite like it.” He was sly and sophisticated, he was naive and childlike, he was cheap, he was generous. He was a bundle of contradictions. And his guitar playing was the same way. He would play these incredibly complex,
multipart ragtime compositions, and then turn around and do something like “Candyman,” this little, repetitive song that he had learned as a child in South Carolina. He didn’t often talk about how he learned, but of course Gary had his roots, too; he did not spring like Athena from the head of Zeus. He told me that when he was a little kid, he used to play a guitar someone had made for him out of a cigar box, and there was this guy that used to come through town who they called “the gittar man”—that was the only name they knew him by. He would come around once or twice a year, play in the streets, and pick up some money and move on, and “Candyman” was a piece Gary learned from the gittar man.
Gary was a very astute arranger, and thought his pieces through very thoroughly. He would take a song and analyze it, pick it apart and then reassemble it, sometimes while he was playing. It was an astounding process to watch, and I got a great deal from him, though I did not try to imitate his sound either as a singer or as a guitarist. For one thing, I knew that if I tried I would fail. But anything he did that I could assimilate and use, I would grab it. I messed around with a lot of his songs, and “Candyman” and “Cocaine Blues” became staples of my repertoire. I was particularly attracted to those because he did not perform them himself. Being a reverend, of the fundamentalist persuasion, he did not like to sing secular songs in any public situation. He especially would not sing blues, but any song that was not a religious song was the Devil’s music, and those two songs were particularly sinful. (At first, I did not know that a “candy man” was a pimp, and I could not understand Gary’s reluctance to perform that song. One time, I confronted him about it: “But Gary, that’s a children’s song.” He said, “Yeah, you get lots of children from songs like that.”)
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 16