The Other Folk Singers, Part Three

I belong to a listening group that gets together to socialize and listen to music. We meet in each of our homes on a rotating basis. The host provides the playlist, wine, and food. When it is my turn, I usually make a playlist with a specific theme. In preparation for one of these sessions, I decided on folk singers as my theme. I created a much-too-long list of every folk singer or group whom I ever enjoyed, and was faced with the dilemma of selecting which ones to play for the group. I decided on familiarity as the main criterion and chose artists associated with the folk music revival of the 1960s: Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, et al.

When I was done, I found that there were 21 un-ncluded folk singers or groups, mostly artists from an earlier time. This led to my constructing a second playlist for my own enjoyment. This can be viewed as a “B-side” to the first one. I find that I prefer this second playlist and listen to it much more frequently than the first.

This is the last of a series of three articles discussing “the other folk singers.” (Previous installments appeared in Issue 206 and Issue 207.)

 

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem

 

By 1956, the Clancy Brothers (Liam, Paddy, and Tom) and good friend, Tommy Makem, had all emigrated from Ireland to the United States and began performing as The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Initially, they were more interested in acting careers, with music as a secondary pursuit. In 1959, they decided to more seriously pursue their music and met with instant success, with bookings in New York, Chicago, and Boston. They are often credited with popularizing traditional Irish music in the United States.

In 1961, they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show and when another act failed to appear, Sullivan asked them to fill both slots for the show. All told, they performed for almost 15 minutes. They were then approached by John Hammond from Columbia Records, who signed The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem to a lucrative five-year contract. For their first Columbia album, A Spontaneous Performance Recording, they enlisted Pete Seeger to be their banjo player. That album received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album of 1962. This was followed by an acclaimed concert at Carnegie Hall and appearances on major television and radio shows.

While attaining great success in the United States, the group was mostly unknown to the rest of the world until a noted Irish radio personality, Ciarán MacMathuna, came to the US and heard their music. He returned to Ireland with copies of their albums, which received considerable play on his radio broadcasts. This led to a sold-out tour of Ireland. Worldwide fame soon followed. Of note was a command performance for President Kennedy in 1963. Partially due to riding the crest of the folk music revival in the US, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were highly successful through the 1960s.

In 1969, Makem left the group to pursue a solo career, replaced by brother Bobby Clancy. The heyday had passed. Various people were members of the group over the next 30 years until The Clancy Brothers finally called it quits in 1998. However, there were several reunions thereafter.

 

The Highwaymen

 

The Highwaymen (not to be confused with the 1980s country music supergroup with the same name) began at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1958. The group consisted of five freshman students, led by Dave Fisher, who was their lead vocalist and arranger. Their biggest hit was “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” an old African-American work song that had previously been released by other folk artists. The Highwaymen’s rendition of this song sold over a million copies and reached number 1 on the Billboard charts. Their recording of Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields” was another hit. They also helped popularize traditional folk songs such as “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “All My Trials,” which would subsequently be recorded by many artists.

It should be noted that the five Highwaymen continued their studies at Wesleyan University while pursuing their music careers. All graduated in 1962. They had been dropped by their record label, United Artists, when a single they released in 1959 did not do well. However, the B-side, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” took two years to achieve popularity. As a result, their career reached a peak, with United Artists back on board and leading to appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Upon graduation from college, one member left the group to go to law school and was replaced by Gil Robbins, the father of actor Tim Robbins. The Highwaymen all moved to New York’s Greenwich Village where they began an extended engagement at the Gaslight Cafe.

However, a dichotomy existed in the folk music movement in the early 1960s. There were those such as the Kingston Trio and the Highwaymen who mainly wanted to entertain and there were others such as Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs who were more interested in political and social issues. History tells us that the latter mostly prevailed. The Highwaymen recognized that trend and started to politicize their music. But in 1964, all but Fisher decided to explore other paths, and enrolled in advanced degree programs at prestigious universities.

Dave Fisher moved to Hollywood and had a very successful career composing and arranging music for movies and television. He wrote over a thousand songs and also worked as a studio musician and singer. The others attained their advanced degrees and had productive careers outside the music business. The Highwaymen got together from time to time for reunion concerts and a couple of albums over the years. They last performed together in 2009.

  

Cisco Houston 

 

Cisco Houston. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

 

Gilbert Vandine Houston was born in Delaware in 1918 and moved to California when he was very young. While in high school, he started playing the guitar and was greatly influenced by folk songs he learned from his grandmother. During the Great Depression, he left home with guitar in hand to travel and work odd jobs throughout the western United States. He adopted his chosen forename after visiting a California mountain community called Cisco during his travels. His repertoire of songs broadened substantially during a period when he was working as a cowboy. As his reputation grew, he began performing at clubs and on radio shows.

Houston returned to California to pursue acting. Shortly thereafter, he was introduced to Woody Guthrie at a radio station and they bonded and became close friends. He discussed that relationship in a booklet that accompanied one of his albums: “We traveled up and down California singing together in the fruit pickers’ camps and saloons. We shipped out together in the Merchant Marines during the war.” After World War II, Houston moved to New York and found himself mingling with Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and many other people involved in the folk music movement. When Folkways Records was established, Houston performed on two of their first albums. He also appeared in a Broadway show while in New York.

During the 1950s, Houston hosted a radio show and regularly appeared at colleges and in clubs. He recorded for several record labels and often was a guest on radio and television programs. He sometimes played the songs of his good friend Woody Guthrie. Houston also toured India with other folk artists under the sponsorship of the US State Department.

Throughout his career, Houston was criticized by people who said that his baritone voice was too polished and inappropriate for a folk singer. It didn't have that folksy twang. Of course, he disagreed: “Some of our folk song exponents seem to think you have to go way back in the hills and drag out the worst singer in the world before it's authentic. Now, this is nonsense...Just because he's old and got three arthritic fingers and two strings left on the banjo doesn't prove anything.”

Cisco Houston was a very intelligent person, so much so that most people didn't realize that he suffered from a rare abnormality that severely limited his vision. He died from stomach cancer at the age of 42. In his inimitable style, this is what he said shortly before he passed:  “Well, nobody likes to run out of time. But it's not nearly the tragedy of Hiroshima or the millions of people blown to hell in the war, that could have been avoided. These are real tragedies…" 

  

Karen Dalton

 

Karen Dalton, nee Jean Karen Cariker, was born in Texas in 1937 and raised in Oklahoma. She dropped out of high school and by the time she was 21, had a son and a daughter and was twice divorced. Dalton left her children in Oklahoma and moved to New York in the early 1960s. She brought her 12-string Gibson guitar and long necked banjo (27 frets!) with her and became immersed in the Greenwich Village folk scene. Her 5-year-old daughter joined her shortly thereafter. Dalton played with some of the major folk stars at that time, including Bob Dylan, who sometimes backed her on harmonica. In Dylan’s 2004 memoir he said, “My favorite singer was Karen Dalton. She had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.”

Dalton married her third husband and they moved to Colorado for a couple of years. When that marriage ended, she sent her daughter back to Oklahoma and returned to New York to pursue her career. She exhibited a conflicting persona when it came to her music. On the one hand, she was fiercely uncompromising with record companies and band musicians, while on the other hand she was often a shy and reluctant performer. She had little interaction with her audience. She would frequently find excuses to cancel performances, preferring to just play music with friends at home.

In her entire career, she only produced two albums. Bassist Harvey Brooks played on the first, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, and produced and played on the second, In My Own Time. The first was actually recorded while Dalton thought she was rehearsing. Neither album did well commercially. With the second album in 1971, Dalton made her most serious attempt at success in the music business. It is more polished than the first. (However, I personally, prefer the first.) It includes covers of well-known songs such as “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “How Sweet It Is (to be Loved By To Be Loved By You).” She also plays her banjo on several songs.

The album was followed by Dalton signing on as the opening act for a Santana tour. This turned out to be a disaster. The Santana crowd was not interested in the music of Karen Dalton. This was exemplified by an incident where her band was onstage but she never came out because the crowd was chanting for Santana. Her best effort for commercial success in the music business turned into the death knell for her career.

Dalton being compared with Billie Holiday is due to her singing style and, also, the tumultuous life she lived. You can hear it in her world-weary voice. She had lost two lower teeth when she was punched in the face during a fight between her live-in boyfriend and another man with whom she was having an affair. Dalton exhibited mood swings and was often deep in depression. She became increasingly addicted to drugs and alcohol, exacerbated by guilt from her abandonment of her children.

It is thought that the Band’s “Katie’s Been Gone” is an homage to Dalton. Ultimately, she faded into a life of drugs and poverty in New York City. Many years later, folk musician and good friend Peter Walker brought an AIDS-infected Dalton to Woodstock, New York where he cared for her until she passed away in 1993. She was 55 and had been battling AIDS for eight years.

I have regrets about certain deceased artists whom I never saw in person despite having had opportunities. Doc Watson, John Prine, and Karen Dalton come to mind.

  

The Brothers Four

 

The Brothers Four. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

 

The Brothers Four met as members of a fraternity at the University of Washington in 1956. The name of the group is derived from the fact that they were fraternity brothers, not from being blood relatives. After 67 years, they are still led by original member, Bob Flick, and are one of the longest-lived music groups in history.

They turned professional as a result of a practical joke. A rival fraternity fooled them into thinking that a Seattle club was inviting them to audition. When they arrived at the club, the manager of the venue had no idea who they were but allowed them to perform a few songs. He liked what he heard and hired them. That engagement lasted through most of 1958 and gave them the opportunity to hone their act.

The Kingston Trio had a major hit with “Tom Dooley” at that time and the folk revival boom began. The Brothers Four headed to San Francisco and while performing at the Hungry I club, signed up with Dave Brubeck’s manager, who negotiated a contract with Columbia Records. The group’s first single was a failure but their second, “Greenfields,” rose to number 2 on the Billboard charts. It sold over a million copies and remained in the top 40 for 20 weeks. The Brothers Four were then in high demand and had concert engagements across the country. Their first album was released towards the end of 1960 and made it into the top 20.

1961 was a very good year for The Brothers Four. They had another hit, “The Green Leaves of Summer,” from the movie The Alamo which starred John Wayne. The song received an Oscar nomination and they performed it at the 1961 Academy Awards. An album they released that year reached number 4 on the Billboard charts. They also performed at President Kennedy’s inauguration.

In 1963, they recorded “Hootenanny Saturday Night,” the theme song for the ABC television series Hootenanny. However, the British Invasion and the emergence of folk-rock put an end to much of the success they had been enjoying. They still were able to get bookings at venues catering to older audiences who were not interested in electrified music or the protest songs that had gained dominance in folk music. However, the prime of their career had passed. The last album recorded by the original Brothers Four, A New World’s Record, was released in 1967. But they have endured and are still performing.

 

Patrick Sky

 

Patrick Sky, album cover.

 

Patrick Sky (born Patrick Lynch) was of Creek Indian and Irish descent and grew up in the ancestral Creek Indian region of Louisiana. Early on, he learned to play guitar, banjo, and harmonica and performed traditional folk songs largely learned from his grandmother. After attending college and serving a stint in the Army, Sky began to take his music career more seriously and began performing in clubs and coffee houses throughout the United States.

Sky found his way to Greenwich Village and became a stalwart in the folk music community. He developed friendships with Dave Van Ronk, Eric Andersen, and other folk artists. He also produced three albums for blues icon Mississippi John Hurt during this period. Sky wrote a number of songs and also performed traditional music. He was best known for his rendition of “Separation Blues.” A song Sky wrote, “Many a Mile,” was covered by quite a few folk artists.

Over time, Sky’s music became much more political and outspoken, influenced by the likes of Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie. In 1971, he recorded an album, Songs That Made America Famous, that was so controversial it was rejected by many record companies until finding a home with the fledgling indie label, Adelphi Records, two years later. This album featured satire on topics such as Christianity, anti-Semitism, feminism, and corruption. Political correctness be damned!

I saw Patrick Sky perform several times when I was a regular at the Cafe Au Go Go in the 1960s. However, my recollection of him was just a blur among the sea of great artists I experienced at that time. In researching this article, fond memories of his wry sense of humor and the boyish smile on his face began to re-emerge. I thoroughly enjoyed Patrick Sky back in the day.

Sky became disgruntled with the music business and stopped recording and performing for a while. He became interested in Irish traditional music and co-founded a record label dedicated to Celtic music. His focus turned to producing other artists. Sky later became a recognized expert on building and playing Irish Uilleann pipes. He also established a penny whistle manufacturing company while visiting Ireland.

Patrick Sky’s last album, Down to Us, was produced in 2009. It featured him on Uilleann pipes with his wife on fiddle playing traditional Irish music. He passed away in 2021 at the age of 80.

 

Pete Seeger

 

Pete Seeger. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress/World Telegram & Sun collection/Fred Palumbo.

 

Pete Seeger was born into a musical family in New York City in 1919. His father was a professor of musicology and his mother a concert violinist who later taught at The Juilliard School. Seeger learned to play the ukulele at a young age and the guitar and banjo a little later. He attended Harvard University but became increasingly interested in politics and folk music and dropped out after two years. His father’s friend, Alan Lomax, hired Seeger to work at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger was soon a regular performer on Lomax’s weekly radio program and found himself mingling with the likes of Lead Belly,  Woody Guthrie, and Burl Ives.

In 1940, Seeger formed the Almanac Singers, a quartet that also included Woody Guthrie. They were often joined by other folk artists such as Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, and Josh White. Their songs regularly touched on anti-war, anti-racism, and pro-union themes. The Almanac Singers were active until 1943. They had abandoned their anti-war position, and Seeger went on to serve in the Army during World War II. He was trained as an airplane mechanic but was reassigned to entertain the troops with his music.

In 1948, Seeger (along with Lee Hays from the Almanac Singers) formed the Weavers. That group was discussed in a previous article in this series (Part One, in Issue 206). Their recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” sold over a million copies and was the first folk song to reach number 1 on the popular music charts. All was well until Seeger and Hays were accused of being members of the Communist Party and were forced to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Decca Records canceled the Weavers’ contract and deleted all of their recordings from their catalog. There were anti-Weavers protests at many performances. They disbanded in 1952 after being together only four years. The Weavers reunited in 1955, but Seeger left a few years later because he thought the group was becoming too commercial.

After the 1950s, Seeger mostly worked as a solo performer, occasionally with family members. He was very active in the civil rights protests of the 1960s. His arrangement of the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome” became an anthem of sorts for that movement. At the Vietnam Moratorium March on Washington in 1969 he led half a million people in singing John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” In the 1970s, he was instrumental in a program to clean up New York’s Hudson River. As late as 2009, he and Bruce Springsteen led the audience in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as the finale to President Obama’s inaugural concert.

Seeger wrote or co-wrote songs that have become standards: “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” and others. He became a fixture at folk festivals where he encouraged collaborative singing by the audience. Seeger was awarded a National Medal of the Arts. inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and received two Grammy awards.

Pete Seeger’s dedication and accomplishments never stopped. A few months before he passed away, he was singing “This Land is Your Land” with Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and others at a Farm Aid concert in Saratoga Springs, New York. He died at the age of 94 in 2014.

 

Conclusion

Most of the 21 folk artists discussed in this series were performing in the 1950s and early 1960s. As I researched these artists, some generalizations emerged. New York's Greenwich Village was the nerve center for the folk movement. During its 23 years on the air, The Ed Sullivan Show had an enormous impact on folk and other popular music. Many folk artists such as the Highwaymen, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and the Limelighters simply wanted to entertain. Others, such as Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Woody Guthrie were performing largely to promote social and political change. History tells us that the latter for the most part prevailed. The next generation, led by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs were sometimes called “protest singers,” with a focus on societal issues.

With that in mind, certain themes are apparent in the history of folk music. Liberal politics, anti-war sentiments, civil rights, and the plight of ordinary people were often front and center. Some folk artists developed associations with (Democratic) US presidents including Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama.

I began this series of articles with Woody Guthrie and ended with Pete Seeger. This was intentional. Those two names appear over and over again when discussing folk music. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, two giants in the history of our music!

 

Header image: Pete Seeger, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain/Donna Lou Morgan, US Navy.