The Mayor of MacDougal Street (8 page)

Those of us in the younger generation, though, had essentially nothing to lose. We didn’t have to worry about somebody pulling a concert hall out from under us, because no one in his right mind would have put us in a concert hall in the first place. We opposed the blacklist for ideological reasons, but it had no effect on our musical careers, because we had no musical careers. So in a sense, the justifiable paranoia that was common in some sectors of the folk music field in the 1950s left us pretty much untouched. In the long run, that was a good thing because it meant we were not cowed. Some of the older performers—Josh White, for example—got to feeling, “Once burned, twice careful,” and tended to shy away from anything that might be construed as political. We were very open about our radicalism, and when the Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar movement came along in the 1960s, we jumped in with both feet. Had we gone through what the older generation went through in the 1950s, I wonder if we would have been quite so gung ho. But I am getting ahead of myself.

B
y 1956 or so, I had worked out the basics of fingerpicking and become a regular at Washington Square. That was the golden age for that particular scene, because a whole new generation of us was coming in but it had not yet gotten so big that it was out of hand.

The regular Sunday musical get-togethers had actually started sometime in the mid-1940s when a few friends took to meeting in the park for loose song sessions. These had grown until the police began taking notice and there were all sorts of arguments, leading eventually to an inner core of musicians arranging to get regular permits. Naturally, a lot of us despised the idea of needing an official permit, but it did have one advantage: the rule was that everyone was allowed to sing and play from two until five as long as they had no drums, and that kept out the bongo players. The Village had bongo players up the wazoo, and they would have loved to sit in, and we hated them. So that was some consolation.

When I first made my appearance on that scene, the permit holder was Lionel Kilberg, who played a homemade “brownie bass” with the string band crowd. Lionel was already considered an old-timer, along with Roger Sprung, whom he played with in a trio called the Shanty Boys. (The third member was Mike Cohen, brother of John Cohen of New Lost City Ramblers fame.) As for the other veteran regulars, an article Barry Kornfeld
wrote for
Caravan
magazine gives a pretty good idea, though as I recall, a few of the names were gone by my time: Bob Claiborne, Tom Paley, Ray Boguslav, “Prof” Joe Jaffe, Stan Atlas, Rod Hill, Dick Rosmini, Erik Darling, Jean and Joe Silverstein, Ed Jancke, and on occasion, Pete Seeger. I do not remember Pete coming around, but I saw Woody Guthrie there a couple of times—I understand that it was John Cohen who brought him down. By that time, though, he was in very poor shape. He could still play a little, and we were introduced, but speech was coming very hard to him and it was impossible to communicate or strike up any kind of rapport.

As a general thing, there would be six or seven different groups of musicians, most of them over near the arch and the fountain. The Zionists were the most visible, because they had to stake out a large enough area for the dancers, and they would be over by the Sullivan Street side of the square, singing “Hava Nagilah.”
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Then there would be the LYL-ers, the Stalinists: someone like Jerry Silverman would be playing guitar, surrounded by all these summer camp kids of the People’s Songs persuasion, and they would be singing old union songs and things they had picked up from
Sing Out!
Sometimes they would have a hundred people, all singing “Hold the Fort,” and quite a lot of them knew how to sing harmony, so it actually could sound pretty good. Very few of those people stayed around for more than a year or two, though. Most of them came down because they belonged to these various youth groups, and when they dropped out of the youth groups, they dropped out of the music.

The bluegrassers would be off in another area, led by Roger Sprung, the original citybilly. As far as I know, Roger single-handedly brought Scruggs picking to the city—not just to New York but to any city. Lionel Kilberg would be playing bass, and there would be a little group around them that gradually grew to include a lot of people who would go on to spearhead the bluegrass and old-time string band revivals.

Then there were various people singing ballads and blues, and we would split into a number of smaller circles around whoever felt like singing. The individual singers varied over the years, but they might include me, Dick Rosmini, Barry Kornfeld, Luke Faust, Jerry Levine, Happy Traum, Paul Clayton, Gina Glaser, Roy Berkeley, Roger Abrahams
. . . The ballad singers and the blues people tended to hang around together, because there were not many of either, comparatively speaking, so we banded together for mutual support. We did not make as much noise as the other groups, and we hated them all—the Zionists, the LYL-ERS, and the bluegrassers—every last, dead one of them. Of course, we hated a lot of people in those days.

Those were roughly the divisions, though different people might have developed slightly different taxonomies: Paul Clayton at one point decided that the whole movement could be divided into two essential tendencies, which he called bluegrass and greensleeves. He included the blues singers among the greensleevers, and if one leaves out the political singers, that was about how I saw it, as well. Which is not to say that the greensleevers did not have politics—some did, some did not—but there was a consensus among us that using folk music for political ends was distasteful and insulting to the music.

That Washington Square Sunday afternoon scene was a great catalyst for my whole generation. It kept getting bigger and bigger every year, and by the late 1950s it had become a tourist attraction as well. That was kind of a drag, on one hand, but on the other it meant that we had an audience, which was good for those of us who were, in effect, learning our craft. If you were a soloist, you would just sit down—at least I always sat—and start to play, and people would gather around. You would stake out your own little bit of private turf, where you would not have to sing “Hey Lolly Lolly” with a bunch of people, and then you would keep singing for as long as you could hold an audience. Just as in the jazz world, I had an advantage because of my volume—whether or not I was any good, I could always make myself heard—so I usually had a pretty good crowd around me. Incidentally, there was no money involved in any of this. I never saw anybody pass the hat or collect a cent in Washington Square Park. Some of us could have used the extra money, but most of the singers were still living at home and did not really need it, and in any case it simply was not done.

As with my migration to the Village, or my involvement in trad jazz, my assimilation into the Washington Square scene happened over a period of time and there was never any clear break between that and what I had been doing before. In fact, a great part of what attracted me to the folk scene was that I could hear the tie between what some of those people were doing and
the music that I was already playing. There had been a good deal of interaction between jazz and some of the older folk styles, at least during its first twenty or thirty years, which was the period that most attracted me at that time. When Bessie Smith sang something like “Backwater Blues,” was it jazz or folk music? I would hate to have to answer that question, because there simply is no clear distinction, no firm line dividing the two.

When I heard Leadbelly, I immediately fit him into the music that was already familiar to me. Except for the fact that he sang over his own guitar rather than a band, there was not that much difference between his singing and what I was hearing on a lot of trad records. So for a while I developed a huge crush on Leadbelly, singing a bunch of his numbers and doing them as closely as I could to the way he did them. Josh White was another one. I probably started to listen to Josh when I was still living in Queens, because he was the big star at that point, and to this day when I listen to a tape of myself, I can occasionally hear some of Josh.

Because of those links, blues was my original door into the folk world, but I was never really a blues singer, in the sense of devoting myself exclusively to that. I never stopped doing jazz material, and I also picked up all sorts of other stuff in one place and another. I still have some tapes I recorded in the mid-1950s, and they include songs like “If You Miss Me Here, You Can Find Me at the Greasy Spoon,” an old vaudeville thing that I learned off a record by Coot Grant and Kid Wilson. Now, that is material you did not hear every day, but I had a lot of stuff like that, as well as dozens of Bessie Smith tunes, and I found that with a little work I could fit all of it into the fingerpicking and country blues format. So I had a unique repertoire, and I think that gave me something of a jump start compared with the people who had gotten involved entirely through the folk scene.

Of course, I also got a lot from the folk crowd. While I never thought of myself as a folksinger, I would harmonize along with whoever was singing, and I learned a lot of those songs just through osmosis. Later on, when I started to perform regularly, I used some of that material, too, because I would have been crazy not to. One thing I need to emphasize is that the folk scene at that point was a lot more varied than it became later on. We were a small enough group that the bluegrass players knew the flamenco guitarists, the flamenco people knew the blues singers, the blues singers knew the ballad scholars, and all of us knew the Irish musicians. And there
was a great deal of cross-pollination. For example, during that period I acquired a little knowledge of flamenco singing and guitar playing, I developed a decent repertoire of Child ballads, and I even learned parts from Dowland’s
Airs for Four Voices
. We were all hanging out together, and if you were any kind of musician, you couldn’t find enough hands to pick all the pockets that were available. So I ended up with a very broad musical base, without even thinking about it, simply because of the range of people I was associating with. And while I did not continue to play much of that material, a lot of it was adapted and incorporated into other things I did, and I am musically much the better for it.
¹⁰

Later on, when the scene got bigger, the niches became more specialized and the different groups didn’t mix as much, which was a real pity. The musical world became segregated, and today people no longer get that broad range of influences. There is also this constant pursuit of the new, the search for the next big thing, which is very limiting. It’s like, if you want to be a painter—I don’t care if you want to be a representational realist or an op artist—you still go back and study the old masters. You look at Correggio, you check out Titian and Rembrandt. A while ago, I went to a retrospective show of Arshile Gorky, the early abstract expressionist, and it starts out with Gorky when he’s fourteen doing Cezanne, and then there’s Gorky at age sixteen doing Picasso, and so on. Eventually, you get to the later works, and there is Gorky doing, by God, Arshile Gorky. But if you begin there, you miss the opportunity to profit from the experience Gorky acquired. And it’s the same with music, whether it’s me or Dylan or a jazz trumpeter. You have to start somewhere, and the broader your base, the more options you have.

For a while there, we were all learning from each other, and there was relatively little recorded music coming into the mix. What with the blacklist, the folk record business had slowed way down in the early 1950s, and anyway, my crowd did not have much interest in the sort of folk music that
would have been recorded at that point. That whole thing with the Weavers and the cabaret folksingers—Cynthia Gooding, Susan Reed, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Theo Bikel, Oscar Brand—we might see some of those people occasionally, and often got along with them quite well personally, but their approach to the music did not interest us at all. It was obviously related to the “art song” tradition, very genteel and refined, which to us was the antithesis of everything that true folk music should be. It always used to tickle me to see Richard Dyer-Bennett sing “John Henry” in a tuxedo, or someone get up in an evening gown and perform an Appalachian ballad. We considered all of that slick and fake. Of course, to a great extent, it was a generational thing: we thought of them as the old wave and conceived of ourselves as an opposition, as is the way of young Turks in every time and place.
¹¹

We were severely limited, however, because much as we might consider ourselves devotees of the true, pure folk styles, there was very little of that music available. Then a marvelous thing happened. Around 1953 Folkways Records put out a six-LP set called the
Anthology of American Folk Music,
culled from commercial recordings of traditional rural musicians that had been made in the South during the 1920s and ’30s. The
Anthology
was created by a man named Harry Smith, who was a beatnik eccentric artist, an experimental filmmaker, and a disciple of Aleister Crowley. (When he died in the 1990s, his fellow Satanists held a memorial black mass for him, complete with a virgin on the altar.) Harry had a fantastic collection of 78s, and his idea was to provide an overview of the range of styles being played in rural America at the dawn of recording. That set became our bible. It is how most of us first heard Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and even Blind Lemon Jefferson. And it was not just blues people, by any means. It had ballad singers, square-dance fiddling, gospel congregations. It was an incredible compendium of American traditional musics, all performed in the traditional styles. That was very important for my generation, especially those of us I consider the “neo-ethnics,” because we were trying not only to
sing traditional songs but also to assimilate the styles of the rural players. Without the Harry Smith
Anthology
we could not have existed, because there was no other way for us to get hold of that material.