Here's something new:
Published: Friday, October 22, 2010Everett musician's mission gets attention in D.C.
By Julie Muhlstein, Herald Columnist
HeraldNet, Everett, Washington
Bob Nelson is up to his ears in a task that's close to his heart.
He is converting about 300 reel-to-reel tape recordings and hundreds of cassette tapes into digital CDs. When I met the Everett musician more than a year ago, he had already spent months working to preserve vintage folk music for future generations.
Nelson is an original member of the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society, a group that dates to 1953. Now 73, he recorded much of his material in the folk scene heyday, when artists jammed at coffee houses and other haunts in Seattle's University District.
I wrote about Nelson in May 2009. He was looking for a repository for the musical archives he is creating. Since then, he has had an encouraging conversation with a folklore expert at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
The national library, he said, is interested in preserving his collection of reel-to-reel tapes, which contain the songs of Walt Robinson, Bill Higley, David Spence and other popular performers from those long-ago hootenannies.
While saving the music he loves, Nelson has been surprised by personal connections he has made. The technical undertaking comes with meaningful rewards.
“I am hearing from survivors. I've had several of those experiences through my archiving,” Nelson said.
The music of one folk artist from Seattle's past, Terry Wadsworth, has Nelson corresponding with a Minnesota man. Patrick Gipson is the brother of Wadsworth, a singer and later an actor who was 42 when he died in 1982.
Nelson made the connection through an online folk discussion site called Mudcat Cafe. He never imagined anyone would respond to his recent post, which said: “I'm looking for the brother of the late Terry Wadsworth, of Seattle. I have a tape recording for you.”
Gipson did respond, and has since traded e-mail with the Everett man.
By phone from Red Lake, Minn., the 61-year-old Gipson said Thursday he was thrilled to discover Nelson had a tape of his brother. “It's a song I hadn't heard since the '50s,” said Gipson, a radiology supervisor with the Indian Health Service.
Both men remember the guitar-playing Wadsworth as wonderfully talented and charismatic.
“He came out of Tacoma. I met him in about 1957,” Nelson said. He remembers Wadsworth as “a skinny kid” who showed up in the University District “singing at coffee houses and just hanging out.”
“Terry was extraordinarily talented,” Nelson said. “The music just exploded out of him.”
Gipson said his brother ended up in California, where he acted in commercials, TV shows and a few films. Using the name Terence Locke, he had a role in the 1976 movie, “Goodbye, Norma Jean.”
“He was the most talented man I've ever met. When Terry walked into any room, he was noticed,” Gipson said. He said his brother married more than once and had a daughter.
Thursday, Gipson sent an e-mail to Nelson in Everett. Because of renewed curiosity about his brother, Gipson did a recent Google search.
“By following a few threads and a couple of dead ends, I found a brief posting from Terry's long-lost daughter. I have been looking for her for 20 years or more,” Gipson's message to Nelson said. “For many years, I thought I was the only one that missed Terry,” Gipson wrote in another e-mail to Nelson.
By phone Thursday, Gipson was pleased to share that he may soon become acquainted with a niece he never knew. “Because of this connection with Bob, I found out Terry's daughter has been looking for me,” he said.
Somehow, it's as though old songs on dusty tapes have come to life.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Learn more
For information about our region's folk music legacy, visit the website of the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society: www.pnwfolklore.org.
...and an earlier article:
Published in Everett Herald: Friday, May 22, 2009
RETIRED EVERETT CARPENTER
NOW HAMMERS OUT FOLK SONGS
By Julie Muhlstein Herald Columnist
Bob Nelson gets up early. By 4 a.m., he's often at work in his home office, which has so much equipment it looks like a recording studio. At 72, he's making good on a promise.
"It's a promise I made to myself years ago," said Nelson, a folk singer who lives in Everett with his wife, Judy.
I visited Nelson on Wednesday to see in person what keeps him so busy. He had sent e-mail explaining his efforts: "I started learning, collecting and singing folk songs when I was 13," he wrote. Now retired from his work as a carpenter, Nelson has time to devote to preserving the music he loves.
"I'm converting over 300 reel-to-reel tape recordings from analog to digital CDs. I also have over 400 cassette recordings," he said. "It's a long process. I've been at it seriously about five months, and have burned up four tape recorders."
Past meets future at Nelson's house, where shelves are loaded with boxes of old tapes. He also has a treasure trove of vinyl records, and a turntable to help him save the Northwest's vintage folk music for future generations.
He has yet to find a proper repository -- a university, library or music organization -- for the archives he's creating, which also include short biographies Nelson is writing about performers. "My goal is to preserve this material so that 50 or 100 years from now, some future researcher will have these songs available," he said. "Otherwise, they will die with me."
Traditional folk music is alive in his heart, and it's a big part of his history. In the 1950s and '60s, Nelson was caught up in the spirited folk scene in Seattle's University District. He performed around the region at hootenannies -- he calls them "hoots" -- jam sessions, coffeehouses and college concerts.
Back then, Nelson would haul with him a 60-pound Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder, capturing performances of folk legends and obscure artists. "It was a working tool, that reel-to-reel. I'd take it to a hoot, then listen and practice," he said.
Nelson was an original and active member of the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society, founded in 1953 by the late Walt Robertson, Don Firth and others. In recent years, Nelson, Firth and Stewart Hendrickson have revived the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society (www.pnwfolklore.org). The group has sponsored folk music performances at the Everett Public Library and other venues.
"I'm having a lot of fun," said Nelson, who in 2007 recorded "Songs I Sing After Dark," a CD collection of traditional songs that includes "The Old Settler," the Ivar Haglund ballad that was printed on Ivar's restaurant place mats.
"I had basically hung it up for about 40 years while I was making a living and being a father," Nelson said of singing and performing. He's been happy to reconnect with artists he knew years ago. Today's folk scene "is very active," he said.
Although Nelson was among the founders of the Northwest Folklife Festival, he said he won't be at this weekend's event. Held annually over Memorial Day weekend at the Seattle Center, the festival has grown too big and too far from its roots for Nelson's taste. "I avoid it like the plague," he said.
That's not to say Nelson hasn't rubbed shoulders with folk music giants. The night Joan Baez played at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, Nelson said Baez and a friend didn't want to stay at a downtown hotel. They ended up in the Seattle home of Nelson and his first wife, he said.
And Pete Seeger? "I talked to Peter about two weeks ago," Nelson said of the 90-year-old folk legend.
At home in Everett, Nelson feels blessed to have played a part in the Northwest's folk legacy. He's proud of himself for learning computer skills needed to save the music -- the songs of David Spence, Bill Higley, Walt Robinson and many more. "I was a carpenter and folk singer, and I had to become a techie," Nelson said.
He figures that compiling CDs, cross-indexing songs performed by several singers, and writing biographies will take at least two years.
"We don't want the music to die with us," Nelson said. "I can't die till it's done."
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.