From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- When Eric Von Schmidt Snuck The Blues Into Harvard Square

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bukka White performing Aberdeen Mississippi Blues. Everybody else step back, step way back.

CD Review

New City Blues: The Prestige/Folklore Years: Volume Two, various artists including Eric Von Schmidt of the headline, Fantasy Records, 1994

Everything I know about the Cambridge (Ma) /Village (NYC)/North Beach (SF) (locations provided for the younger set, just in case) folk scene in the early 1960s I know from my old time friend, Peter Paul Markin. I met Markin out in the “great awakening” search for the great American West night, yellow brick road “on the bus” summer of love, circa 1967 night when we connected on Russian Hill in San Francisco. And that date is important because that is the year that I graduated from high school up in Olde Saco (Me). So I was far too late, far too disinterested, and far too committed to some version of psychedelic rock to appreciate what went on in those locales in the early 1960s. But I learned, and learned good.

Even Markin confessed to me one time that he was, being just three years older than me, kind of late onto the scene himself having first become aware of such things as folk music and coffeehouses in 1962 high school days when he, by accident, heard some early Dylan stuff on some late night Sunday radio show, Bill Bixby’s Folk Hour.

The accident part was that he had tuned in assuming that he was going to listen to the Irish National Hour that his grandfather had trained him to tune into religiously. The station had changed the hour (put it an hour later) due to the increasing popularity of, if you can believe this, folk music, roots music, hillbilly stuff. Or so Markin thought then. But he was hooked, and listened to that show religiously every week. Previously, other than music from the “old sod” he had, like every other denizen of what would later be called the generation of ’68, suffered through that rock and roll drought when Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin, Connie Francis and cast of thousands of other one- hit wonders mucked up the airways after “they” killed Elvis, threw Chuck Berry in jail, sneered at Jerry Lee’s sex life, and we lost Buddy Holly.

Now what does all of this have to do with reviewing an early folk blues CD, or with Eric Von Schmidt? Plenty. See Eric was back in the late 1950s one of the first to create the Cambridge folk scene making it safe for young impressionable teens to curse the day Neil Sedaka and Freddy (Boom Boom) Cannon were born. He made (along with others although he gets kudos here because three of his songs, including the famous Light Rain, are part
of this compilation) the search for roots music that we half-knew we were looking for possible to surface, and survive. This was the day of the great urban homage to the country blues, mainly black, who were being “discovered” (really re-discovered”) down in the Mississippi Delta, the back woods of Alabama, and along the Texas panhandle.

And the performers on this album were among those others who tried to put a new spin on some old country blues classics, and had enough sense of history to do the covers up right. Special attention here should go to the late folk historian Dave Von Ronk who was a fountain of knowledge about the old- timers. And shared that information and respect. Attention should also go to Geoff Muldaur who continues to perform many of the classics of the folk portion of the American songbook. I should note that today through networks like YouTube we can see some of the country blues old-timers perform their songs and compare. Take Muldaur’s cover of Aberdeen Mississippi Blues. Very good. Then take Bukka White’s version. Step back on that one Geoff. But listen to this CD-this is the new old-timers (ouch) blues.