Jack, judging from the web sites you linked to, I would say that the type of coffeehouses that prevailed in my area during the late Fifties and through the Sixties, were quite different.

For one thing, the owners or proprietors of the coffeehouses were generally not especially interested in folk music per se. And some of the earlier ones hadn't planned on having entertainment at all. The Café Encore, which was the first one in Seattle, was little more than a hole in the wall. Seating capacity (tables and chairs) for about twenty-five people at the most. The fellow who opened it was from New York was setting up an antique shop in Seattle, and discovered that there was no place in Seattle where he could get a cup of espresso. So he saw a business opportunity and opened a coffeehouse in a small area next to his antique shop. You could get a variety of coffees, teas, and chocolate drinks there, along with pastries and such. He hadn't planned on entertainment at all, and a few singers began dropping in sporadically and singing a few songs. He didn't pay anything, it was strictly tips, and he tolerated them because the patrons seem to enjoy the singing. Certainly not any kind of folk center or folk club.

The Place Next Door was opened by the Bob Clark, the owner of an art film theater who managed to get a lease on the store-front next to the theater. With tables and chairs, there was ample seating space for a good seventy or eighty people. His idea was to turn it into a combination coffeehouse/art gallery. He was shooting for a sort of artsy-Bohemian atmosphere, dressed informally but neatly in dark slacks, red short-sleeved shirt, and beret, and he normally had a mustache and neatly trimmed goatee. The inside of the Place was decorated with an abstract mural along one wall, and the wall opposite was covered with pale yellow cloth lighted with an array of spotlights where he planned to hang the "paintings of the month" by local artist, all for sale.

An acquaintance of mine who had been all over the country and was a devotee of coffeehouses suggested to him that a great adjunct to drawing people in would be a "folk singer in residence," especially on weekends. I had just finished doing a television series called "Ballads and Books" on a local educational station, and he recommended that Clark see if he could hire me. I agreed, and wound up singing there on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings off and on for a couple of years. But except for occasional guest sets by other singers, and a period of several months when Bob Nelson (Deckman) and I had formed a duo, I was the only "official" singer. Although when I was elsewhere doing concerts and such, he would hire another singer.

If I felt I was growing stale there, I would recommend another singer to Clark, take a breather for a few weeks, then either do a series of concerts at colleges in the area, then move to another coffeehouse for awhile. Singing perpetually at one place can lead to overexposure, so it's a good idea to disappear to somewhere else every now and then.

Each coffeehouse had its own character, but with a few exceptions, each one had a particular "singer in residence" at any given time, although other singers would drop in and do guests sets. But this was not something that happened every night, at least until there were so many singers around that they were jostling each other at the door. One coffeehouse (Pamir House) solved this problem by hiring several singers. Three or four might be up in front of the audience together, and it was next to impossible to control a set or series of songs. We'd sort of "wing" the program, singing separately and together. Very informal. Like singing at a party or songfest.

By the way, Pamir House didn't start out to be a coffeehouse. He had intended it to be an Indian restaurant (a Pamir house was one of the many inns or wayside refuges centuries ago along the Silk Road through the arduous Pamir Mountains in eastern Afghanistan), but a group of Indian exchange students at the University of Washington dropped in en-masse one evening, ate there, and subsequently declare the place a disaster area! So to cut his losses, the owner decided to open it as a coffeehouse, and began hiring folk singers, one of whom was me.

A similar situation was El Matador. The owner papered the walls with bullfight posters and other bullfighting accoutrements and sent out a call for a flamenco guitarist to entertain. No joy! Someone told him that the nearest thing to a flamenco guitarist in town was me. I could play several classic guitar pieces and three flamenco pieces, but that was just a sidecar to my singing of British Isles and American folk songs and ballads.

There were several other coffeehouses around here as well. Some discovered that if they were to make a go of it, they had to have entertainment, and one person with a guitar was about as economical as they were going to find, so folk singers, who were proliferating at the time, were a natural.

As I said, the owners of the various coffeehouse were far less interested in folk music than they were in drawing people into their establishments and selling them expensive coffees, teas, and pastries, but having someone in the place who would come out and sing for about thirty-five or forty minutes every hour throughout the evening worked out quite well, because the places were generally packed on weekends.

And they were great places for people like me to hone their skills before audiences in preparation for doing concerts and other more lucrative and prestigious engagements, while at the same time, earning a bit of money. In Seattle, anyway, the coffeehouse owners paid a set fee regularly. In some areas, there were what they called "basket houses," where the patrons tipped the singers, but that died very quickly in Seattle. On any given night, they couldn't automatically assume that they would have any singer or singers there at all! And those who did show up usually knew four chords, one strum, and a half-dozen songs learned from Harry Belafonte records.

Although nobody got rich at it, coffeehouse singing in Seattle was a regular job. And some of them, such as The Place Next Door, were pretty much like non-alcoholic night clubs. Rather than a jazz group or pop singer as regular entertainment, they had a resident "minstrel."

This is getting kind of long for a Mudcat post (but it does help bloat Josepp's thread a bit). A really comprehensive run-down of the "coffeehouse scene" would take a book. But I hope this answers most of your questions. Feel free to ask more if you wish, and I'll try to supply answer if I can.

Don Firth