Frank Beacham's Journal

A Reunion of Musical History in Washington Square Park

The musical interconnections of those gathered in Washington Square Park on Sunday boggle the mind. It’s billed as an annual folk music reunion, but to those who ask questions and dig deeper, the rewards are rich.

Take Roger Sprung, age 81. A pioneer in progressive bluegrass banjo, he has been playing in the park since 1947. After being exposed to country musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford in the South, Sprung almost single handily introduced authentic Southern bluegrass banjo picking styles to the folk music movement in Washington Square Park. He has recorded with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. His “Tom Dooley” was recorded and popularized by the Kingston Trio.

Steve Mandell squared off with Eric Weissberg as the guitar-playing city boy versus the banjo playing country boy in the film, Deliverance. "Dueling Banjos" became a huge hit in 1973 and remains so today. 

Peter Stampfel is the only person ever to play music with Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard, Mississippi John Hurt and Buckminster Fuller. He has a long legacy of folk and rock, and was a founding member of both the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders. The Holy Modal Rounders, by the way, featured the first use of the term "psychedelic" in popular music in their version of "Hesitation Blues," released in 1964.

Gene Yellin has been playing guitar and singing bluegrass in the New York area for 30 years. He has played with Breakfast Special, Hazel Dickens, Yellin Grass (with his bluegrass banjo playing brother, Bob), his own band with Michal Shapero, and numerous other bands through the years. He has recorded with Hazel Dickens ("Hard Hitting Songs from Hard Hit People" on Rounder).

Paul Prestopino (in the foreground) played for many years with the Chad Mitchell Trio, Peter Paul and Mary and Tom Paxton. The man with the washboard is Val Gelo, who has played primitive instruments with a host of bluegrass and country musicians. He now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina and came up for the reunion.

Irv Landau used to play at various folk clubs in Greenwich Village, opening for acts like Richie Havens. He still comes to the reunions to this day.

Erik Frandsen is best known in the world of theater; he is one of the authors and songwriters of the well-known off-Broadway production "The Song of Singapore." Although he still plays music, most of his energies now go into acting. Frandsen has recorded “Catfish” and other songs with Bob Dylan and also recorded with the late Dave Van Ronk.

Arnie Soloman's father knew Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, who gave the young man a lesson on the mandolin at age 11. It made a life long impression and he still plays, even though he holds a job teaching English in Greensboro, North Carolina. Soloman came to New York City to be part of the reunion and to play with several legends.

Woody Mann (left) was at the reunion shooting more footage for his soon-to-be-released documentary, Harlem Street Singer, the story of the Rev. Gary Davis. Davis had a huge impact on the musicians in Washington Square Park. Seen with him is Barry Kornfeld (kneeling), a great guitarist who used to “lead” Rev. Davis when he lived in Harlem. Kornfeld is now retired.

Fred Swedberg, a Baptist minister who also grows heirloom tomatoes. His nickname is “Tomato Fred.”

Feds: Leave Gibson Guitars Alone

My disappointment with the Obama administration runs very deep these days. While Obama’s Justice Department lets virtually every financial villain off the hook for the worse economic meltdown in our history, now the administration raids Gibson's guitar plants. Over what: wood!

On August 24th, government agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar’s facilities in Nashville and Memphis, and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The raids forced Gibson to cease manufacturing operations and send workers home for the day while armed agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service executed the search warrants for ebony and rosewood that was imported from India.

The feds claim that Gibson violated the Lacey Act, which stipulates that a company cannot import wood in a manner that’s against the laws of the country the wood is coming from. However, Gibson has complied with Indian law and no concerns have been raised by the Indian government.

“Agents seized wood that was Forest Stewardship Council controlled,” said Henry Juszkiewicz, Gibson’s CEO. “Gibson has a long history of supporting sustainable and responsible sources of wood and has worked diligently with entities such as the Rainforest Alliance and Greenpeace to secure FSC-certified supplies. The wood seized on August 24 satisfied FSC standards.”

Juszkiewicz believes that the Justice Department is bullying Gibson without filing charges. This is the second time Gibson has been raided by the federal government (the first was in 2009), yet no charges have been filed and the materials confiscated on both occasions remain in federal hands.

Gibson needs help. Sign this petition, which asks that the current investigation of Gibson be stopped and brought to a fair and conclusive settlement; that the Lacey Act be amended to provide clear guidance on how corporations can comply; and to make sure that consumers (meaning guitar players and owners) will not be prosecuted for owning or transporting instruments for their own use.

In our dumbed down, economically deprived nation, very little matters much more anymore than music. Guitars enable that music and give pleasure to countless souls. Come on, Mr. President. Do things that matter and quit harassing the little guy!  Go after the real criminals in our society.

Happy Birthday, Danny Kalb!

Danny Kalb, founder of the Blues Project and one of the great living guitar players, is 69 today. We wish him a very happy birthday.

Yesterday, he had a party in his Brooklyn apartment. There were more guitar players per square inch than I’ve experienced in years. It was a great day, with a terrific jam and a wonderful exchange of stories about a who’s who in the music business.

Barry Kornfeld, (far right) the legendary guitarist who is retired and no longer even touches a guitar, used to “lead” the Rev. Gary Davis, whose great songs still resonate in Kalb’s body of work. 

I mentioned that the people of South Carolina, where Davis was born in Laurens, don’t know him today. Kornfeld wasn’t surprised, saying Davis didn’t become famous until the 1960s, along with other performers like Mississippi John Hurt and John Lee Hooker after they played in Greenwich Village.

He knew them all, as well as Bob Dylan, who he said once told him he’d played piano for Elvis Presley. “I don’t think so,” said Kornfeld, amused by Dylan's antics.

Information Without Knowledge

Information everywhere. We are drowning in it. We are assured that information is wealth. To succeed in the new economy, we are told, we must be connected.

Why then—with so much information—are we in an age of such unenlightenment? Why is virtually any idea of substance "dumbed down" for public consumption? Why is instant gratification so important to so many of us?

Easy access to information, it would seem on the surface, should be leading to a better educated, more knowledgeable population. So why is it that as information technology improves, most people move down, not up, the knowledge chain?

Some answers to these questions emerged from a symposium where a group of major American artists tried to grapple with creative issues facing them in the age of digital media. The session, called "Digital Expression," was held at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Peter Sellars, a director of theater, opera and film, offered some insight on modern information overload.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information easily available, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful to the recipient.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something.

"Now we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it," Sellars continued. "Where there is no pilgrimage the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered today. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips but we don't value anything."

Unlike some others attending the symposium, Sellars embraced the "untamed quality" of the current Internet structure because it allows the user to wander and discover information through his or her own personal experience. 

"To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," Sellars said. "To have the user making wrong turns through the information is exactly the point. That's where the juice is."

Today's mass media, said Sellars, reflects only a single voice, not the broad range of human experience. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized. A very narrow group of people are creating this insane (communications) gridlock," he said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Artists, he said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience," said Sellars. "As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

The issue of experience was also addressed by the actress Jane Alexander.  She embraced information technology as an important artist's tool but was clearly troubled by those who would use it as a substitute for experiencing reality.

"Seeing the Mona Lisa on a compact disc is not the same as seeing the real thing," she said. "Hearing 'If I Had A Hammer' on your computer speakers is not the same as hearing Pete Seeger singing it. There is no way to actually create live theater in a box or a game.

"The whole point about virtual reality is that it is virtually real, not really real," Alexander continued. "Technology cannot replace the seeing, the hearing and the experiencing of art. It doesn't replicate the doing of art. There's a big difference between a paint brush and a canvas and a mouse and a screen."

Perhaps one of the significant lessons we'll one day learn from this computer era is that information should never be confused with knowledge. Having instant access to all the world's databanks has little to do with genuine cultural progress.

Despite all the information age hype, the real information—the information that matters in life—comes only when we as human beings are ready to open ourselves to accept it. For most of us, this comes through living life, acquiring personal experience and searching for knowledge out of genuine curiosity.

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(I wrote this column in October of 1994. I was reminded of it last night in a discussion about younger people who often use the Internet to substitute information (say from Wikipedia) for genuine knowledge. When I re-read it, it seemed as timely as ever. When it was written, Jane Alexander was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts.)

A Short History of the Blues

(This editorial was in the Guardian in the United Kingdom. It offers a short history lession and brings a unique sensibility to the importance of the Delta Blues rarely found in American mass media.)

The death, at 95, of David Honeyboy Edwards severs the last living link with the original blues of the Mississippi Delta.

Arthur Big Boy Crudup, Delta Blind Billy, Papa Charlie McCoy. They sound like the stuff of legend, even before you get to those who indisputably are: the Howlin Wolfs, the Muddy Waters and the John Lee Hookers. The death, at 95, of David Honeyboy Edwards severs the last living link with the original blues of the Mississippi Delta, music which grew out of the sweltering bitterness of southern cotton fields yet conquered the world nonetheless.

Honeyboy was there when the most legendary bluesman of the lot, Robert Johnson –- the guitarist who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads where blues myth meets blues reality –- drank the laced whiskey which killed him at just 27.

It was the re-release of pre-war Johnson recordings in 1961 which reconnected modern song-writing and rock performance with its forgotten roots, by catching the ear of young musicians from Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton. The Mississippi's waters run down to the gulf of Mexico, but its music flowed north with the great migration of African Americans, passing through Memphis before going on to inspire the birth of Chicago blues.

After Elvis hits such as Houndog, the classic Delta formula for lyrics -- a brief, repeated refrain, and a longer rejoinder -- got so familiar that no one bothered to ask where it had come from. The blues scale and 12-bar chord progression likewise became ubiquitous in pop. But nowhere are they put to better use than in those grainy ancient recordings, which marry sliding strings with voices full of grit.