I was going to have to make a living in folk music. The problem was, how? Most of the other musicians on the scene had jobs or were students getting money from their parents. I had never had any regular work aside from my stint in the merchant marine, my family had no money, and I hadn’t even finished high school. I had nothing to live on except what I could beg, borrow, steal, or—less frequently—earn as a singer. There were no clubs that would hire me or anyone like me, and no one insane enough to sponsor me for a concert.
For a while, I took to busking, playing for tips in bars. That was something that most of the people I knew refused to get into, but I ran into a guy in Washington Square Park who had a voice that was even louder than mine, a tall black man from Maryland named Andrew. He sounded a lot like Vaughn Monroe, and his specialty was things like “Mule Train” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” He and I would hit the bars up on 8th Avenue in the 40s, and on a good night we might pick up as much as seventy-five or a hundred bucks each, which was incredible for that time. Unfortunately, after a month or two the city started one of its periodic cleanups, and since the bars had no license for live entertainment, the cops started to descend on them. The bartenders would see us coming in, and they would take us aside and say, “If you even take that guitar out of the case, we’re
gonna have to throw you out.” We tried to sing in the streets, but that was no better—the cops moved us along immediately. So that was that. Andrew hopped a freight and I never saw him again.
There were, however, some rays of light on the horizon. As I was walking down MacDougal during those first days back from the sea, I noticed a tiny storefront with a new sign saying “Folklore Center.” I thought, “What the hell?” and went right in, and that was when I met Izzy Young, who would be a key figure in the Village scene for the next decade or so. I guess Izzy was in his mid-twenties at that point, and the first thing I remember noticing about him was his ears, which stuck out like mug handles. He had rented this place on the block between Bleecker and 3rd, and it was exactly what the name said: the folklore center. It was a place where you could buy folk music records, books, and accessories. People would leave guitars or banjos to be sold on consignment, and he had strings, picks, capos, odds and ends. But more than anything else, what it almost immediately became was a sort of clubhouse for the folk scene. Izzy was the switchboard: if anything was happening to anyone on the scene, Izzy would find out about it and broadcast it to the world—whether you wanted him to or not. If you came into New York and needed to know how to get in touch with somebody or to leave a message, you would go into the Folklore Center and ask Izzy, and he would probably know all about it, or failing that, he would let you leave a note on his bulletin board. If you had no fixed address, you would have your mail sent care of the Folklore Center. So everybody on the scene was coming by on a regular basis to get mail or check the notes on the bulletin board, and that made it even more of a central meeting place.
There had been places where musicians met before that, like 190 Spring Street, but different crowds went to different places. When Izzy opened that little hole, there was suddenly a place where everyone went, and it became a catalyst for all sorts of things. There were picking sessions, and Izzy even held a few concerts there to help out singers who needed a gig and couldn’t find one elsewhere. I did two or three of those, and a review of one in Caravan says the crowd was so big that “the back room was well-filled with standees who, from there, could only listen”—which, if memory serves, would not have required a very big crowd. I first ran into Moe Asch of Folkways Records at the Center. In fact, by the next year, I was living
For a while, I took to busking, playing for tips in bars. That was something that most of the people I knew refused to get into, but I ran into a guy in Washington Square Park who had a voice that was even louder than mine, a tall black man from Maryland named Andrew. He sounded a lot like Vaughn Monroe, and his specialty was things like “Mule Train” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” He and I would hit the bars up on 8th Avenue in the 40s, and on a good night we might pick up as much as seventy-five or a hundred bucks each, which was incredible for that time. Unfortunately, after a month or two the city started one of its periodic cleanups, and since the bars had no license for live entertainment, the cops started to descend on them. The bartenders would see us coming in, and they would take us aside and say, “If you even take that guitar out of the case, we’re
gonna have to throw you out.” We tried to sing in the streets, but that was no better—the cops moved us along immediately. So that was that. Andrew hopped a freight and I never saw him again.
There were, however, some rays of light on the horizon. As I was walking down MacDougal during those first days back from the sea, I noticed a tiny storefront with a new sign saying “Folklore Center.” I thought, “What the hell?” and went right in, and that was when I met Izzy Young, who would be a key figure in the Village scene for the next decade or so. I guess Izzy was in his mid-twenties at that point, and the first thing I remember noticing about him was his ears, which stuck out like mug handles. He had rented this place on the block between Bleecker and 3rd, and it was exactly what the name said: the folklore center. It was a place where you could buy folk music records, books, and accessories. People would leave guitars or banjos to be sold on consignment, and he had strings, picks, capos, odds and ends. But more than anything else, what it almost immediately became was a sort of clubhouse for the folk scene. Izzy was the switchboard: if anything was happening to anyone on the scene, Izzy would find out about it and broadcast it to the world—whether you wanted him to or not. If you came into New York and needed to know how to get in touch with somebody or to leave a message, you would go into the Folklore Center and ask Izzy, and he would probably know all about it, or failing that, he would let you leave a note on his bulletin board. If you had no fixed address, you would have your mail sent care of the Folklore Center. So everybody on the scene was coming by on a regular basis to get mail or check the notes on the bulletin board, and that made it even more of a central meeting place.
There had been places where musicians met before that, like 190 Spring Street, but different crowds went to different places. When Izzy opened that little hole, there was suddenly a place where everyone went, and it became a catalyst for all sorts of things. There were picking sessions, and Izzy even held a few concerts there to help out singers who needed a gig and couldn’t find one elsewhere. I did two or three of those, and a review of one in Caravan says the crowd was so big that “the back room was well-filled with standees who, from there, could only listen”—which, if memory serves, would not have required a very big crowd. I first ran into Moe Asch of Folkways Records at the Center. In fact, by the next year, I was living
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