Subject: RE: Little known '60s Folk Singers
From:
Don Firth
Date: 21 May 07 - 10:26 PM
Frank, I feel a bit as if you're talking about the Gods of Mount Olympus.
I first got "hooked" on folk music in 1951 when a girl I was going with inherited a neat old parlor guitar from her grandmother and set about teaching herself to play it, and started learning songs from "A Treasury of Folk Songs" compiled by John and Sylvia Kolb, a drugstore paperback (and still a very good collection). I bought a cheap guitar and a copy of the book, and she started showing me chords. Then we took in a concert by Walt Robertson (he had a local television show at the time) and that really got me going! I met him a day or two later and hit him up for guitar lessons. I bought my first really good guitar in 1954: a Martin 00-18 ($95.00 back then I felt like a junior executive with his first BMW).
In the early Fifties, there were a fair number of people around Seattle who were interested in folk music, and they were a pretty avid bunch. Sandy Paton was one. He went back east shortly thereafter. At the time, whenever you mentioned folk music, a few people might say, "Oh. Like Burl Ives?" But most people thought you were talking about Country and Western or "hillbilly" a la Grand Ole Opry.
Several people of note managed to make there way out here. Pete Seeger did a concert here in 1954, and it wound up with a party that went until 4:00 in the morning (including Pete). Guy Carawan made a couple of trips to Seattle in the late 50s, once just barn-storming, then a couple of years later to do a couple of concerts. Pete Seeger again in '57. In '57, I went up to Bellingham, Washington to hear Richard Dyer-Bennet (he wasn't booked in Seattle) and had a chance to chat with him for awhile after the concert. Very pleasant and encouraging. Then Bob Gibson and Dick Rosmini in '58. They stayed in Seattle for a couple of weeks, and a lot of song-swapping got done. Roger Abrahams came here a couple of times. I learned several good songs from him, as did a couple of other people.
The Gateway Singers did a concert at the University of Washington in the late 50s, and although the other three had to take off, Jerry Walter hung out for a day or two. One evening at a song-fest, he sang one of the nicest renditions of "Pretty Saro" I've ever heard. I tried to reconstruct it and sing it the way he did.
I'd heard of Rolf Cahn and Jo Mapes early on (learned some good songs from a record they did—Bay Concerts label), and through records, knew about people such as Paul Clayton, Cynthia Gooding, Billy Faier, and Barbara Dane. I met Rolf in Berkeley in 1959 and Barbara Dane a couple of years later when she and Dick Rosmini opened for Bob Newhart (this led to another all-night song-fest).
I met all kinds of well-known singers and academicians (such as Alan Lomax and Charles Seeger) at the Berkeley Folk Festivals, including Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl in 1960 and Marais and Miranda in 1964 (a couple of thoroughly charming couples!).
Around the Seattle area in the 50s there was Walt Robertson, Bob Nelson (Deckman), Bob Clark, Dick Landberg, Rae Creevy, Claire Hess, Patti McLaughlin, Mike Reedy, Danny Duncan, John and Sally Ashford, Ron Ginther, and several others that my memory can't conjure up at the moment (my apologies!). Some of these folks are still around and singing, and some have disappeared into the mists. Coffeehouses started opening in Seattle in the late 50s, and a lot of these singers performed in them regularly.
This incomplete list of local Seattle singers got started well before fall of 1958, which I (albeit rather arbitrarily, perhaps) mark as the beginning of the pop folk craze—the advent of the Kingston Trio's recording of "Tom Dooley" hitting the pop charts, followed by a host of other similar groups, ushering in "The Great Folk Scare." I could reel off another dozen or so, such as Paul Gillinghan and Don McAllister and Alice Stuart and Nancy Quensé who started out in the very late 50s or early 60s, and whose interest was ignited, not by what they heard on radios and juke boxes, but by local singers such as Walt Robertson and Bob Nelson (and, with a blush of modesty, myself), who were out and performing.
I also recall going to a Weaver's concert in Seattle. Pete had left the group by then, and they had another singer with them. He didn't see me because I was up in the dark balcony, but I saw and heard him.
His name was Frank Hamilton.
Lots of folks these days have no idea of the amount of activity that was taking place in the Fifties—and before that!
Don Firth
P. S. Susan Reed. I first saw her in a movie in 1948 and learned that she had some records out. Somehow, when the pop-folk fad got under way, she just seem to disappear.
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