Chronicles - Bob Dylan [95]
With my newly learned repertoire, I then went further up the street and dropped into the Ten O’Clock Scholar, a Beat coffeehouse. I was looking for players with kindred pursuits. The first guy I met in Minneapolis like me was sitting around in there. It was John Koerner and he also had an acoustic guitar with him. Koerner was tall and thin with a look of perpetual amusement on his face. We hit it off right away. We already knew a few of the same songs like “Wabash Cannonball” and “Waiting for a Train.” Koerner had just gotten out of the Marine Corps, was an aeronautical engineering student. He was from Rochester, New York, already married and had gotten into folk music a couple of years earlier than me, learned a lot of songs off of a guy named Harry Webber — mostly street ballads. But he played a lot of blues type stuff, too, traditional barroom kind of things. We sat around and I played my Odetta songs and a few by Leadbelly, whose record I had heard earlier than Odetta. John played “Casey Jones,” “Golden Vanity” — he played a lot of ragtime style stuff, things like “Dallas Rag.” When he spoke he was soft spoken, but when he sang he became a field holler shouter. Koerner was an exciting singer, and we began playing a lot together.
I learned a lot of songs off Koerner by singing harmony with him and he had folk records of performers I’d never heard at his apartment. I listened to them a lot, especially to The New Lost City Ramblers. I took to them immediately. Everything about them appealed to me — their style, their singing, their sound. I liked the way they looked, the way they dressed and I especially liked their name. Their songs ran the gamut in styles, everything from mountain ballads to fiddle tunes and railroad blues. All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth. I’d stay with The Ramblers for days. At the time, I didn’t know that they were replicating everything they did off of old 78 records, but what would it have mattered anyway? It wouldn’t have mattered at all. For me, they had originality in spades, were men of mystery on all counts. I couldn’t listen to them enough. Koerner had some other key records, too, mostly on the Folkways label — Foc’sle Songs and Sea Shanties was one that I could listen to over and over again. This one featured Dave Van Ronk, Roger Abrams, and some others. The record knocked me out. It was full ensemble singing, hard driving harmonic songs like “Haul Away Joe,” “Hangin’ Johnny,” “Radcliffe Highway.” Sometimes Koerner and I sang some of those songs as a duo. Another record he had was the Elektra folk songs Sampler with a variety of artists. That’s where I first heard Dave Van Ronk and Peggy Seeger, even Alan Lomax himself singing the cowboy song “Doney Gal,” which I added to my repertoire. Koerner had a few other records — some blues compilations on the Arhoolie label where I first heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson.
I listened a lot to a John Jacob Niles record, too. Niles was nontraditional, but he sang traditional songs. A Mephistophelean character out of Carolina, he hammered away at some harplike instrument and sang in a bone chilling soprano voice. Niles was eerie and illogical, terrifically intense and gave you goosebumps. Definitely