The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #56949 Message #893510
Posted By: Art Thieme
19-Feb-03 - 12:21 PM
Thread Name: Obit: Jonathan Eberhart (18 Feb 2003)
Subject: RE: Obit: Jonathan Eberhart
Hard news, this ! A fine singer and an alarmingly complete researcher of songs. Read through those unbelievably thorough notes booklets he and the rest of the guys wrote for their albums on Folk Legacy Records. Those were one of the many reasons that made me so proud to be a part of Sandy Paton's fine record label. (Those notes also led me to make my own notes more abreviated, succinct and to the point ;-)
When Jonathan took me aside at one of the Folk Legacy Festivals in Hartford, CT to say how much he liked what I had done with the ballad "Robin Hood's Death", I was amazed and greatly gratified to have that input from him. It made me feel that, just maybe, I was doing something correctly after all. He also let me know that he generally didn't like what modern folksingers of the day (early 80s) did to the British ballads when they took them over.
Jonathan was, as Bill said, hard to know. There was so much going on in his active life and in his mind, all the time, that the news he was bedridden seemed so unbelievable and unacceptable to his friends. I was glad I made a phone call to him to try to gain insight into my own fight with MS. What I found out from him then is that this disease rarely is the same in two individuals. It only hits you where it thits you---and it takes it's own sweet time. That was good for me to know. Talking to others about it only makes you aware of how it has hit them. But the talking of it does help-----so I found a decent support group where, mostly, I just make jokes.
For rhose of you who think he died of MS, keep in mind that from what all I can see, nobody dies of MS-------something else is always the culprit---with MS being a complicating factor (or two or three ;-)
Losing Jon is, indeed, a huge loss.
Art Thieme