In 1959 the folk music revival was already underway in New York's Greenwich Village long before the rest of America found out about it. For what became known as the Great Folk Scare, the Village was Ground Zero. Utah Phillips, a folksinger known as the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest, came up with this phrase early in his career and it is still in use today, describing an incredible outpouring of traditional acoustic music that is still alive and well around the country, including San Diego. As the undisputed keeper of the flame here in San Diego, local musician Allen Singer was there from the beginning, jamming with guys like Bob Dylan, David Grisman, and John Sebastian before anybody ever heard of them. Because he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, his acoustic music education is second to none. Currently coordinator for the San Diego Folk Song Society and on the board of San Diego Folk Heritage, Singer is up to his eyeballs in the local traditional music scene, which is simply the natural progression of his entire life.
Singer grew up in the Chelsea area of New York City near Tenth Avenue and 27th Street. His musical interest was fueled by spending nearly every summer from the age of five at progressive camps where the songs of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger were common campfire sing-along material. These tunes included union organizing ditties and early protest songs, such as Leadbelly's line "The white folks in Washington, they know how to chuck a colored man a nickel just to see him bow." Singer later became a camp counselor himself, helping another generation get hooked on the noncommercial, yet deep rooted, American sound. His father was into jazz and blues and he learned to love those tunes too. While in junior high school during the mid-1950s Singer read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Woody Guthrie's, Bound for Glory, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which set off a journey that pushed him toward the music that was closer to rural farmers, working class people, real life stories, and union activists. Here you could experience the real world and go through musical doors that took you further along on your life's journey.
Attending Junior High School No. 3 from 1956 to 1959 on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, a new world opened up to Singer, where his classmates included kids of artists, musicians, Mafiosi, and writers. He got to know the Village and the people who lived there and never looked back. When Singer went to high school with Jose Feliciano, jamming with him in music class turned him on to really learning the guitar. Prior to that, Singer had been playing viola in the junior high band and, later, clarinet in a Greenwich Village dixieland band throughout most of high school. In the fall of 1961 his interest in folk music carried him by subway to the Village, where great old time music had been going on for some time. Finally serious about learning to play the guitar, Singer got his first decent guitar in early 1962 - a 1955 J-45 Gibson that cost him 70 bucks. He still has it and trots it out from time to time at San Diego folk music gatherings. He has since found a Colling's Dreadnought guitar that he likes much better and picks that ax 90 percent of the time.
For decades Greenwich Village had been the center of the bohemian culture, home to great jazz clubs that launched the careers of many mainstream entertainers over the years. In 1949 Bob Hope discovered a kid named Tony Bennett singing in a Village club and gave him his stage name at that time. Bennett cut his first record in 1950 with Columbia, the same label that would eventually produce Bob Dylan's first LP, which took the Folk Scare to the rest of the world. This writer had never heard anything called "folk music" until some of the stuff being done in the Village leaked out and made its way to the West as a commercial phenomenon.
The center of the Village was, and still is, Washington Square, bordered by New York University on three sides, with clubs occupying the streets on the opposite side. The Square was the gathering place for musicians and college kids from all over the East. Open jamming went on everywhere and Singer couldn't get enough of it. MacDougal Street, which ran south from the Square, was home to many clubs and coffeehouses where musicians played. Izzy Young's Folk Lore Center was the clearing house for all folk music activities in New York, which also fed the folk revival. The open mic was invented here in the late 1950s and was a magnet for Singer and the rest of the kids from the university as well as from New York's surrounding boroughs. When Bob Dylan came to New York in January 1961, he went straight to the CafŽ Wha? and tried the open mic there on Hootenanny Night. Club owner Manny Roth, David Lee Roth's father, noted later that Dylan's first set was almost all Woody Guthrie songs. Dylan played with Mark Spoelstra, Dave Van Ronk, and Fred Neil who wrote "Everybody's Talkin'" in one of the watering holes on or near MacDougal Street. Dylan opened for John Lee Hooker in his first professional gig on April 11, 1961, at Gerde's Folk City, a club west of the Square on West Fourth Street, and Singer was there.
Singer remembers that the late blues and jazz artist Dave Van Ronk was the star of the MacDougal Street coffeehouse and club scene at that time and that Dylan wanted a piece of the action, copying Ramblin' Jack Elliott and yearning to be just like Jack and also using Van Ronk's arrangements in his songs. Having released at least a dozen records in his career, Van Ronk wrote the definitive book about the epicenter of the Folk Scare called, fittingly, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. In his book Van Ronk gives Dylan credit for both launching the Great Folk Scare as a commercial happening with his first LP in December 1961 and then ending it with his first all-electric LP in 1965. Van Ronk's wife, Terri Thal, who was Dylan's first manager, was Singer's high school English teacher in the 11th grade. Small world. Dylan never forgot Washington Square and the nearby clubs and in a 1985 interview noted that it was a very special place that launched the music careers of hundreds of people and inspired thousands more who helped spread the magic to college campuses and coffeehouses everywhere.
Greenwich Village had been the hot spot for bohemians, traditional musicians, artists, and writers since the 1920s, most of whom lived and played in the alternate culture-rich area that included bookstores, cheap apartments, and lots of small clubs that featured jazz, poetry readings, and American roots music. Hearing traditional music on the radio was rare anywhere outside the South, and the northern-based music business ignored what was going on in the Village. This drought was broken by Oscar Brand, a folksinger who hosted a folk music program on WNYC, the New York City owned radio station in the 1950s, where you could hear the first musicians of the folk revival. He still hosts the same folk music program today. During the late 1940s Washington Square's fountain became the place to hang out and play guitars, fiddles, and banjos. When Singer discovered the place in 1961, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. Soon thereafter the commercial music business took notice when Dylan was featured in a major newspaper article written by Robert Shelton about music in the Village .
Traditional music could be heard in every club, coffeehouse, and bar in the Village before the scare really got going; Singer was there nearly every night and every weekend, witness to an amazing array of acoustic music styles there. Doc Watson played there in his first venture outside of the South. Ramblin' Jack Elliot, whose music Singer lived and breathed, was a resident as well as a coffeehouse regular. Singer also heard the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, the New Lost City Ramblers, Merle Travis, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Odetta, and Maria Muldaur before they all became the vanguard of the folk movement. This is just a small list of the hundreds of traditional acoustic musicians who played the clubs where Singer and his friends hung out.
Singer notes that the first bluegrass band he heard in the Village, from someplace other than the rural South, was called the Greenbriar Boys. In fact, members of the band - Ralph Rinzler, Bob Yellin, and John Herald - who used to call Singer the "fat kid," jammed on the Square with Singer and his friends. This type of traditional hillbilly music, along with bluegrass and old time country music, which was spread to the north almost entirely by a bunch of Jewish kids from New York City, many of whom were second generation children of Eastern European Jews who had settled in the Village. Attracted to this kind of music, Singer felt it was his way of becoming a part of the real American culture. He couldn't identify with Dick Clark's brand of rock and roll and its sugary covers of doowop and black rhythm and blues. He loved honkytonk, cowboy, and old time country music. He notes that Roy Acuff called New York bluegrass "Jewgrass" after hearing some of these northern kids pick and win at the Galax Old Time String Band Contest in Asheville, North Carolina.
Marshall Brickman and Eric Weissberg, Washington Square regulars during the 1950s and early 1960s, released the first all bluegrass banjo LP recording by northern pickers to add credence to Acuff's Jewgrass moniker. Done in the Earl Scruggs hot three-finger style, the sound was soon being heard all over the world and the Village became, once again, the non-southern launching pad for the five-string banjo boomlet. Folk-oriented LPs at the time would bear a big splash on the jacket, such as "featuring five-string banjo!" to make sure the new urban fans of "Scruggs style" bluegrass banjo would not miss it.
After his move to the city, Dylan hung out at the Square, feeding on the many varieties of folk music played there, but his genius soon took him beyond the Square, fueled by his innovative use of poetic wordplay supported by folk guitar and harmonica. Johnny Cash once gave Dylan a Gibson J-200 guitar, which can be seen on the cover of his LP John Wesley Harding. Cash was a Columbia recording artist who had made it big with his country rock sound in the late 1950s but was well aware of what was going on in the Village, having played the clubs there. In fact, Cash threatened to quit Columbia when Mitch Miller, then A&R man at the record company, wanted to fire Dylan after his first LP had only sold 5,000 copies. Dylan wasn't fired and the rest is history.
When Columbia signed Dylan in 1961 it turned out to be the trigger event that really launched the Folk Scare on a national level. Radio and television began playing traditional American music for the first time, and there was even a national TV show called Hootenanny. Singer played music at the Square until 1965, the year Dylan went electric and soon became a pop artist. Although many of Dylan's old friends in the Village disowned him for "selling out" to the commercial music industry, Singer felt that Dylan's move was positive because he was extending the folk circle and saving not only folk music but rock and roll as well. It was at that time, however, that the Beatles took the U.S. by storm and the folk boom faded fast. Even Dave Van Ronk went electric in 1968 in order to continue to survive as a full time musician. Singer believes the folk music phenomenon continued on even after it was no longer played on the radio or TV but just went back "underground" much as it was when Woody Guthrie played in the obscurity of the Greenwich Village clubs and union halls long before the Folk Scare broke out.
After the folk boom quieted down in 1965, Singer concentrated on his education, graduating from Pace College in 1967 with a degree in psychology. He went to graduate school at NYU on Washington Square from 1969 to 1971, earning a master's degree in clinical social work. Throughout the 1970s he worked for the Salvation Army and lived in the Village just a short distance from MacDougal Street. Along the way he acquired his wife, Linda, and moved his family to San Diego in 1980, where he landed a job in Kaiser Permanente's psychiatry department and retired from there in 2003. Singer admits that during his working years in San Diego he didn't play much guitar. He started to play regularly again in 1999 after having a conversation with his local New York buddy Pete Zelin, who encouraged him to "get out there and play music again." Sadly, Zelin died a few days later and never got a chance to see Singer step out and play.
When he discovered the San Diego Folk Song Society, Singer was not only surprised but also very pleased and has never looked back. For him, the Folk Scare never ended. He continues to maintain a New York connection through the New York bluegrass and old time blog on Yahoo, a select closed group of more than 150 veterans of the Washington Square great folk revival in the 1950s and 1960s. Singer remembers, "Washington Square was one big continuous ongoing jam. It was our meeting place and it changed our lives. It was an ever-changing music school that provided us with lasting friendships, a creative forum, the politics of the 1960s, and a music education that still helps mold who we continue to become through our playing of folk music."
During the 1970s, after the Folk Scare faded, Singer took jazz guitar lessons and now owns an Eastman F-hole arch-top jazz guitar. Greatly influenced by the music of Django Reinhart, Charlie Christian, Nick Lucas, Eddy Lang, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Chuck Wayne, and Barney Kessel, he studied with Ron Parker in New York, a hot picker who taught Paul Simon and played every Broadway show pit during the 1960s and 1970s. He later took lessons from Chuck Wayne before moving to San Diego. Singer still loves folk music best but says that learning jazz guitar was essential to learning the guitar neck and also inspired him to learn to read sheet music, a very un-folkie thing to do.
Active in the local acoustic music scene since 1999, Singer really got into it big when he retired from his day job. He has since performed at the Adam's Avenue Roots Festival and Street Fair and was recently featured at the annual Train Song Festival in Old Poway Park. Recently Singer did a blues centered concert as part of the San Diego Folk Heritage Musical Odyssey series with his great harmonica playing buddy Dane Terry. In addition, he coordinates the gatherings of San Diego's oldest folkie group, San Diego Folk Song Society, founded by Sam Hinton in 1957. He is deeply involved in the San Diego Folk Heritage group, which brings wonderful artists to San Diego County.
Singer's CD, Down the Road, which features the tunes he loved best from his Washington Square days, is available through his website www.allensinger.com and through www.cdbaby.com/cd/allensinger. Singer highly recommends the CD boxed set Anthology of American Folk Music (ed. Harry Smith) and Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival 1961-1965, a CD boxed set that includes many of the concerts Singer attended in New York. Both are available at www.amazon.com. A website called http://www.juneberry78s.com/sounds/index.htm is a great source for the roots music that fed the Folk Scare and it still provides Singer with musical inspiration today.
For further reading about the Great Folk Scare, read Dave Van Ronk's book The Mayor of MacDougal Street, published by Da Capo Press (2005), available at www.dacapopress.com and www.amazon.com.