Following Bob (Deckman) Nelson's suggestion, probably second only to Walt Robertson, the singer who had the most influence on me was Rolf Cahn. One doesn't hear much about Rolf Cahn these days, but he had a powerful influence on a lot of folksingers back in the Fifties and Sixties.

In the late Fifties there were several Reed College (Portland, Oregon) folksingers who often shuttled back and forth between Berkeley and Seattle. They spoke of folksingers in the Bay Area other than the Kingston Trio and the Gateway Singers – singers such as Billy Faier, Jo Mapes, Barbara Dane, and Rolf Cahn.

There were a few Reedites in particular who played the guitar passably well, then made a trip to Berkeley, took a couple of lessons from Rolf Cahn, and returned to Seattle shortly thereafter with a remarkable improvement in their guitar playing. It seems that in addition to being a versatile singer of all kinds of folk songs, Cahn was an exceptional teacher as well. And he played some pretty mean Flamenco. He sounded like someone I would like to meet. And when Bob and I went to the Bay Area in 1959, we had a chance to get together with him for a half-dozen long gab-sessions and song-fests before he took off to Cambridge, Mass.

In our first meeting, we were curious about the availability of singing jobs in the area. The question of competition for jobs came up. Cahn said he didn't know. When our eyebrows went up, he told us a parable:

Competition? I never think about it. I once had a chance to hang out with the Mercedes team during the thousand mile Mexican Road Race. There were Jaguars, Porsches, Ferraris, Allards, Cunninghams, you name it, they were all there. During the strategy meetings, none of the other cars in the race were ever mentioned. All they talked about was getting the Mercedes from point A to point B in the fastest, safest possible manner. What the other cars did was up to them. Competition? Don't waste your time thinking about it. Just do the best you can.

That really stuck with me. And another thing that really stuck with me was something Rolf wrote on the back of a record jacket:

The most ticklish question still results from that awful word "Folk Music", which gives the erroneous impression that there is one body of music with one standard texture, dynamic, and history. Actually, the term today covers areas that are only connected in the subtlest terms of general feeling and experience. A United States cowboy song has less connection with a bloody Zulu tale than it has to "Western Pop" music; a lowdown blues fits less with Dutch South African melody than with George Gershwin.

Most of us agree in feeling as to our general boundaries, but more and more we search for our own particular contributions as musicians within these variegated provinces. There doesn't seem to be much point in imitating – what, after all, is the point of doing Little Moses exactly like the Carter Family? Yet it seems vital to convey the massive, punching instrumentals and the tense driving, almost hypnotic voice of the Carter Family performances.

One the one hand, there is the danger of becoming a musical stamp collector; on the other, the equal danger of leaving behind the language, texture, and rhythm that made the music worthy of our devotion in the first place. So we have arrived at a point where in each case we try to determine those elements which make a particular piece of music meaningful to us, and to build the performance through these elements. By continuing to learn everything possible of the art form – techniques, textures, rhythms, cultural implications and convention, we hope to mature constantly in our individual understanding and creativity in this music.

At the time (and sometimes, I think, still), there seemed to be two approaches that most people followed: 1) Ethnic purity, in which one tried to sound as much as possible like the original source. I found this limiting because it left no room for creativity and growth. Not being "allowed" to put something of oneself into a song was just too constricting. Why bother? 2) What might be called "commercial," in which one catered to what one thought the general audience might want. It might be successful financially, but creatively one became "silly-putty" in the hands of the broadest public taste (and perhaps the less said about that, the better). And a third approach: as much as I admired Richard Dyer-Bennet and as much as I learned from him, I felt that adhering to a strictly classical style was as limiting as the previous two approaches. What Rolf Cahn wrote above put the whole thing into focus for me. The basic question is: "what is this song really about and how best can I express it?"

Don Firth

P. S. I just did a web search for Rolf Cahn and, sadly, discovered this website.