I’ll start by saying that I’ve never been a fan of folk music. To be sure, I was cast among the folk artists in the ’70s whenever and wherever I played a gig. I played acoustic, therefore I was a folkie. I didn’t really come to understand folk music until I met Derroll Adams and we became friends. Even then—and even more so now—I saw myself and my songs as distant from that tradition.
Moving ahead, I browsed through the entire catalog and came up with a few titles that sounded good to me. You will soon see that many are not songs at all.
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Good Morning Blues | The Grey Goose | Take This Hammer | Big Fat Woman | Green Corn
By Lead Belly
From Where Did You Sleep Last Night: Lead Belly Legacy, Vol. 1 (1996)
Lead Belly was the most influential musician in my life. I first heard him at age ten on a ten-inch Folkways album—dark blue pebble cover with only a tag slapped on that said “Take this Hammer.” I took his hammer. I was transported out of this world by his voice and the sound of his guitar mesmerized me. I learned later that his guitar was a twelve-string and I promised myself that if I ever grew up to play guitar, it would be a twelve. At the age of twenty-five I kept that promise—and keep it to this day.
San Francisco Bay Blues
By Jesse Fuller
From Frisco Bound (1999)
I met up with Jesse Fuller in 1961. He often played in the bar-b-q houses on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street. I went down whenever I heard he was playing. He sat in a corner on a podium surrounded by his gear—namely his own invention, the fotdella, a harp-like frame with low piano strings that were plucked by strings attached to a row of foot pedals. Those were his bass notes. He played harmonica and kazoo and, yes, a twelve-string guitar. I sat next to him in the corner and absorbed everything he did. He ignored me. We never spoke a word, yet he was a great teacher.
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These are the only songs I wanted on my list. Knowing that six titles are not enough for this project, I searched through the list and found a dozen or so others that all had some relevance in my life. I’ll list them first then tell you why I included them in this collection.
Mercury Blues
By K.C. Douglas
From A Dead-Beat Guitar and the Mississippi Blues (1952)
I’m partial to the highway—car songs, trucks songs. I heard this song from other artists not on the list. This is the closest I could find.
Down South Blues
By Dock Boggs
From Legendary Singer and Banjo Player (1964)
I first heard about Dock Boggs while reading Greil Marcus. I looked him up and liked what I heard.
P. 1-2 May 2
By Kenneth Patchen
From The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1972)
This is the first of several spoken works, all of which have marked my creative work, both as a writer and a composer. Albion Moonlight, which I first read when I was a student in college, opened up a path for me and showed me an entire new way of looking at prose. How to tell a story. It prompted me to write my first book, Good Friday/Easter Sunday, a surrealistic narrative that I submitted as my graduate thesis in Aesthetics, a degree that in turn helped me obtain a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy.
Canto I: The Dark Wood of Error
By John Ciardi
From Dante: The Inferno: The Immortal Drama of a Journey Through Hell: Cantos I-VIII (1954)
The translation that guided me through the original text of my Dante Oratorio, which I composed in Rome while studying at The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia on a renewed Fulbright scholarship. I never heard Ciardi’s voice until now and I don’t think he does his own work justice—an overblown and stentorious delivery—but it's all I have to note the passage of this work in my student life. My paperback copy is tattered from years of reading and re-reading.
The Dream / All the Earth, All the Air / Words for the Wind
By Theodore Roethke
From Words for the Wind: Selections from the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (1962)
Another favorite poet who I am hearing for the first time and whose voice does not do his work any favors. I set both “The Dream” and “Words for the Wind” to music for baritone voice and chamber orchestra as a student composer while attending San Francisco State in 1963.
Dance R4 Divided by 3
By University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio
From Electronic Music (1967)
While a student in San Francisco, I experimented with electronic/tape music. I include this excerpt, never heard before, because it reminds of the kind of sounds and textures I was interested in creating.
Indeterminacy 1
By John Cage and David Tudor
From Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music (1992)
I read this text over and over when I was a student composer. It became part of my thinking. Cage’s voice here is no surprise. I heard him read several times on his visits to San Francisco.
Hooka Tooka
By The Chambers Brothers
From Groovin’ Time (1968)
Delighted to find this item in the catalog. They went on to have great commercial success which I enjoyed totally. A pleasure to hear their first recordings and touch the roots from which they came.
Talking Fishing Blues
By Woody Guthrie
From This Land is Your Land: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1 (1997)
I first heard talking blues from Bob Dylan, who had picked it up from Woody Guthrie. Over the years, I have written several myself. Here’s a recent one called “Talking North Beach”—never recorded, seldom performed:
it was an old Italian restaurant down on Washington Square
I was sitting there eating from my plate of spaghetti
the cook started talking about a poet friend of hers
his name was Lawrence Ferlinghetti
so I went down to his bookshop City Lights
he had a Manifesto of Human Rights
I bought myself a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl
sat down on the floor and read it right now
the very first line was a revelation
“I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical – ”
I flipped out cause the thoughts in my head were much too numerical
I didn’t know if I was coming or going
I just kept reading that god damned poem
I turned a page and there in big words up above
it said the weight of the world is love
I knew if the weight of the world is love,
I’d have to find some way to get my love unplugged
maybe some wild woman who know all about men
or Gary Snyder with his teachings from the Zen
that’s when I saw this guy staggering down the street
drunk as a skunk, no shoes on his feet
he said I used to be a running back
they called me Jack Kerouac
I said Jack Jack, you’re just in time, I need a guide
show me the ropes and how to catch a ride
I read all your books Dharma Bums & On the Road
I think I’ll come along the next time you go
he said man, my hitchhiking days are thru
all the beats are gone now it’s just me and you
and soon I’ll be gone and ain’t it funny
all they talk about now is how to make money
so I sat down at my old typewriter
banged out a poem about The City Lighters
took it down to the corner, hoping to pay my rent
sold it to a tourist for 25 cents
well, this girl came along and said “Tell me what to do
I wanna be a real beatnik too”
She was six foot five weighed ninety pounds
she had long black hair that touched the ground
she had a black cat, she had rings around her eyes
like an old raccoon she caught me by surprise
she said I might look 46, but I’m a chick of 17
I’m a wild wild woman and I wanna make the scene
I said the first thing you gotta do is drop out of school
then we’ll go down to Mike’s Place and shoot a round of pool
drink some wine, smoke some pot, get astronomically high
go back to my pad and make the mattress cry
then you’ll write a poem about our topless sex
you can print on the mattress which is now a nervous wreck
take it down to the corner and with a little luck
sell it to the tourists for a hundred bucks
you see the cost of living was climbing sky high
for the average beat it was sell out or die
she sold her poem to a New York Rockerfeller
a million bucks it was a best seller
she became famous on the Jet Set Scene
got her picture in all the glossy magazines
got her face on the late night TV shows
the Pulitzer Prize for Purple Prose
she said it’s time for me to be moving on
I could hardly wait until she was gone
she took her cat, she took her raccoon eyes
the only thing she left behind was her beatnik disguise
I said just remember to be true to your beatnik roots
so she put on a pair of black high heel boots
moved across town where the kids were hairy
became a hippie in the Haight-Ashbury
me, I stayed down on the old Barbary Coast
nothing on my plate but tuna and toast
flat broke, no joke, no more tourists, no more chicks
Book of Revelations: Chapter Six
yes there I was all alone
so sat down and wrote a thousand page poem
about life and love and a music all the way from jazz to disco
I was the last beat poet in San Francisco
as the years went by I was always down to my last meal
but I’ve often wondered who got the best deal
was it she with her million bucks up in a cage?
or me with my poem of a million pages?
well, you figure it out if it was her or me
she spent her million dollars on LSD
I might be down to my last dime
but I can still write another line
postscript: just between me and you
there’s only two things in the world that seem to be true
one is that the world is not only inside your head
the other is something Allen Ginsberg said:
he said: the weight of the world is love
John Brown
By Blind Boy Grunt
From The Best of Broadside 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground from the Pages of Broadside Magazine (2000)
At last you got Dylan into the catalog, though he had to come disguised.