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By Root 872 0

off and unattainable — Cleopatra living in an Italian palace. When she sang, she made your teeth drop. Like John Jacob Niles, she was mighty strange. I’d be scared to meet her. She might bury her fangs in the back of my neck. I didn’t want to meet her, but I knew I would. I was going in the same direction even though I was way in back of her at the moment. She had the fire and I felt I had the same kind of fire. I could do the songs she did, for starters…“Mary Hamilton,” “Silver Dagger,” “John Riley,” “Henry Martin.” I could make them drop into place like she did, but in a different way. Not everyone can sing these songs convincingly. The singer has to make you believe what you are hearing and Joan did that. I believed that Joan’s mother would kill somebody that she loved. I believed that. I believed that she’d come from that kind of family. You have to believe. Folk music, if nothing else, makes a believer out of you. I believed Dave Guard in The Kingston Trio, too. I believed that he would kill or already did kill poor Laura Foster. I believed that he’d kill someone else, too. I didn’t think he was playing around.

As far as other singers around town, there were some but not many. There was Dave Ray, a high school kid who sang Leadbelly and Bo Diddley songs on a twelve-string guitar, probably the only twelve-string guitar in the entire Midwest — and then there was Tony Glover, a harp player who played with me and Koerner sometimes. He sang a few songs, but mostly played the harp — cupped it in his hands and played like Sonny Terry or Little Walter. I played the harp, too, but in a rack…probably the only harmonica rack at the time in the Midwest. Racks were impossible to find. I’d used a lopsided coat hanger for a while, but it only had sort of worked. The real harmonica rack that I found was in the basement of a music store on Hennipen Avenue, still in a box unopened from 1948. As far as harp playing went, I tended to keep it simple.

I couldn’t play like Glover or anything, and didn’t try to. I played mostly like Woody Guthrie and that was about it. Glover’s playing was known and talked about around town, but nobody commented on mine. The only comment that I ever got was a few years later in John Lee Hooker’s hotel room on Lower Broadway in New York City. Sonny Boy Williamson was there and he heard me playing, said, “Boy, you play too fast.”

Eventually, it was time for me to get out of Minneapolis. Just like Hibbing, the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. The world of folk music was too closed off and the town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle. New York City was the place I wanted to be and one snowy morning around daybreak after sleeping in the back room of the Purple Onion pizza parlor in St. Paul, the place where Koerner and I played…with only a few tattered rags in a suitcase and a guitar and harmonica rack, I stood on the edge of town and hitchhiked east to find Woody Guthrie. He was still the man. It was freezing and although I might have been slack in a lot of things, my mind was ordered and disciplined and I didn’t feel the cold. Soon I was rolling through the snowy Wisconsin prairie fields, the looming shadows of Baez and Elliott were not far from my heels. The world I was heading into, although it would undergo a lot of changes, was really the world of Jack Elliott and Joan Baez. However true that might have been, I, too, had the axe in my hands and needed to tear out of there, head off to where life promised something more — felt that my own voice and guitar would be equal to the situation.

New York City, midwinter, 1961. Whatever I was doing was working out okay and I intended to stay with it, felt like I was closing in on something. I was playing on the regular bill at the Village Gaslight, the premier club on the carnivalesque MacDougal Street. When I began working there, the Gaslight was owned by John Mitchell, a renegade and raconteur, a Brooklynite. I only saw him a few times. He was ornery and combatant, had an exotic looking girlfriend who