Welcome aboard, Murrbob!

Interesting observation, GUEST,30-button—and "right on the button," I would say. It got me to thinking a lot about those "glorious days of yesteryear" and the following are some of my observations from that time. Pretty long-winded, but since I'm a Geezer, I figure people expect me to ramble on a bit.

The "folk boom," the "folk scare," or whatever you want to call it, did indeed introduce a lot of people to folk music who might not have become interested otherwise, but it was a bit of a mixed blessing to some singers who were already into folk music before, say, late 1958 when the Kingston Trio's recording of "Tom Dooley" was released. This forms a fairly good marker point for the onset of folk music's entry into the realm of "pop music," although the early recordings of The Weavers in the very late 1940s and early 1950s ("On Top of Old Smoky," "Goodnight Irene," etc.), before they were blacklisted, sparked the interest of a number of people.

Although as a teen-ager, I was already familiar with Burl Ives (radio program) and Susan Reed (slightly dopey B movie, good singing by her), I got actively interested (bought my first guitar and started learning songs) in 1952, and soon after, heard a live concert by a local singer named Walt Robertson (television show, two records on Folkways). That's when I got really interested. I met Walt a few days after the concert and hit him up for guitar lessons.

There were about a dozen people in Seattle's University District who were into folk music, including Sandy Paton (later, founder of Folk-Legacy Records), who was living here at the time. There were others, not habitués of the U. District, who appeared a bit later. At the time, folk music was something sort of esoteric, and if you mentioned folk music to most people, they thought you were talking about Country and Western or "Modern Western Swing" (Sons of the Pioneers, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, etc.).

By the mid-Fifties I had a fair handle on the guitar, had learned a good batch of songs, and was starting to get gigs playing for groups like "The Overlake Friends of the Library," the Washington State Museum of History and Industry, at a couple of arts festivals, and got hired to do some house concerts, even though we didn't call them "house concerts" back then. Some classical music buffs, especially ones who were interested in "early music," considered a concert by a folk singer in an informal setting (big living room) to be a form of "chamber music." Or like listening to a troubadour or minstrel sing songs and spin stories.

Coffee houses began to appear in Seattle, and I started singing regularly in one of them in 1958, a few months before the KT's record of "Tom Dooley" was released. I moved to another coffee house shortly thereafter, opened by a theater owner who presented art movies and European films. This particular coffee house was a nice, clean place (your elbows didn't stick to the table), more like a non-alcoholic night club with a bit of a "bohemian" atmosphere, and it often drew the after-show or after-concert crowd. Although the audience was mainly college students, later in the evening it wasn't all that unusual to see a few tuxes and formals in the audience.

I frequently read posts here on Mudcat from some people who say that the "pop-folk" groups created an audience for folk music, but my experience tends to dispute that a bit. It most certainly enlarged the audience, but it also tended to change the nature of that audience. Into the pre-existing audience came a bunch of people whose first acquaintance with folk music was derived from the records of groups like the Kingston Trio and The Limeliters.

When they came to the coffee houses to hear local singers such as myself, they arrived with a lot of preconceptions of what folk music was all about. This was where I first noticed the "mocking" aspect of this sudden increase in popularity of folk music. My purpose was to present the songs in an entertaining manner, but I took the songs seriously. My sets were a good mix of funny and serious, slow and fast, loud and soft. But I didn't spoof the songs themselves. I didn't make fun of the material I was presenting.

But this was often what the new folks in the audiences seem to expect. More than once, I'd get a request of a particular song—say "The Wreck of the John B," which I learned from Carl Sandburg's "American Songbag" well before the Kingston Trio's recording of it came out—I'd sing the song, then hear the requester grump that I "didn't sing it right." Which is to say, I hadn't sung it the way the Kingston Trio did.

Here's a graphic example of what I'm talking about. What the Kingston Trio does to one of the verses in "Tom Dooley:"

I met her on the mountain,
'Twas there I took her life.
I met her on the mountain,
And stabbed her with my Boy Scout knife!

Mocking the song. Making a big joke of the whole thing.

The pop-folk groups tended to do this a lot. And/or do a lot of "prettying up" of songs to present them in a popular music style. Interesting to note that when Bob Nelson (Deckman) and I (both of us deeply interested in folk music) went to the San Francisco Bay area in 1959, we learned that the clubs such as the Hungry i and the Purple Onion that presented the pop folk groups like the Kingston Trio and The Limeliters weren't interested in folk music per se, they wanted comedy acts. In fact, Bob and I saw the first professional engagement of the Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion.

Now some of these groups were darned fine entertainers. But I just couldn't bring myself to screw up a great song—say, a 400-year-old Child ballad—just to get laughs. If that's what fame and fortune was going to cost me, I decided that fame and fortune were too darned expensive. Bob agreed. So we came back to Seattle where we already had an established audience who—like Mister Rogers—liked us just the way we were.

Don Firth