Hi Buck,

I'd love to be able to agree with you because Pete is an old friend, a dear man, a great performer, and one ot the most important popularizers of American folk music. A genuine person who I can honestly say is as fine a human being as he is a performing artist and that's saying quite a bit I think.

There are people who have never heard of him. They think the Kingston Trio is folk music.

Of course there are people who have never heard of Duke Ellington, I suppose.

There are many countless representatives of American traditional folk music in the South who haven't heard of him either. But lately, Pete has gotten more press. But there are young rockers who know of Lightning Hopkins, Muddy Waters and early blues players who don't know of Pete. And does Pete represent them? Is that not a form of folk music? What about old time ballad singing Appalachian style? Pete approximates that but doesn't really do it in the way someone like Almeda Riddle or Texas Gladden did.

It gets complicated but you're certainly right about Pete's influence in the "folk music revival" of the "Sixties" and on. But a true representative of the tradition? That's a tough one.

Frank Hamilton