Subject: RE: Joan Baez: Folk guitar
From:
Sourdough
Date: 10 Dec 05 - 11:50 AM
When Iwas in college, I was part of a student group made up of people who were passionate about traditional music and so we formed a group with an unusual goal (yes, Joan Baez will come into this story but you'll have to wait a bit). We put on concerts in a 2400 seat auditorium we rented, and we made money at it. We had people like Theodore Bikel (he introduced us to his protégée, Odetta Felios - that was a powerful voice) Cynthia Gooding, Rambling Jack Elliot, and I think we put on the New Lost City Ramblers but the one sure moneymaker was Pete Seeger. We could sell out the auditorium twice a year if we could get Pete Seeger.
For the big free weekend, we would invite the well known and the not so well but terrific musicians to join us, no cost and even the liquor, or at least the beer was free. Literally, we could sit and talk with people like Fiddler Beers and Blind Rev. Gary Davis. I had never seen a psaltery before and Fiddler showed me how it was built, how it was tuned , played and told me the story of how it came West in a covered wagon with his family (before he took it East again).
One night Gary Davis was improvising some blues and a group of us college students had drifted over to listen. At first, I thought it was some sort of sermon he was giving but when I listened closely, he was advising us young men and women to stop wasting out time listening to him and to go upstairs "to be fruitful and multiply", or at least to practice at it.
Judy Collins also came at least one year. She was already starting to make a name for herself Listening to someone that beautiful sing so beautifully was really special.
Getting Pete Seeger meant dealing with Manny Greenhill, his manager. Manny was tough to deal with but he was really good for the talent he handled and even though he was in Boston, he managed a lot of the big names of that period. (We are getting closer to the Joan Baez part now.)
One time we approached Manny wanting Pete Seeger because we were otherwise going to be a little short on the money we would have for our Spring Folk Retreat that year. When we called Manny, it turned into "Let's Make Deal". Yes, we could have Peter, IF!!
The "if" was that we had to take a young singer Manny was handling, too. We had to give her her own concert and there were some stipulations about how much publicity we had to do for it but if we would agree we could have Pete Seeger and he would charge us very little for the young folk singer that hhe was adding on because, as he explained, he wanted her to have the experience of playing in a large hall.
Unless you haven't been paying attention, you've probably figured out already that this was Joan Baez.
I hadn't met her yet. I was up in the balcony checking on the follow spot. I finished there ad was down in the orchestra waiting with the rest of the audience and I don't think there was one person in a hundred in the hall who had any idea of what to expect. Someone who knew Manny pointed out Joan's father and sister in the audience (I think her mother was there, too). Only later did I realize that they must have thought this was very important because I went to school on the East Coast and her father was teaching, I believe, at Stanford. I think they must have been very proud and wanted to be with her when she took her first step out of tiny coffee houses where the audience is numbered in the tens to a small auditorium where the numbers are in the thousands.
Then Joan appeared. She stepped out on the stage and I remember my first reaction - all these thoughts hit me simultaneously.
"That long hair is beautiful." " She looks so tiny all alone on that big stage" and "She's barefoot." Somehow the lack of shoes made her look even more vulnerable.
When she began to sing, I think most of us fell in love on the spot but our dates didn't seem to mind.
Manny charged us $50 for that concert, We brought her back several more times in the next two or three years. The Baez popularity had begun. Her records were selling well and the price went up to over $2,000 or 40 times what she made at the first concert. Not only was she a terrific singer, she had a great manager.
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