The boom that Rosenberg noted reverberated with great resonance on the West Coast. The Bay Area, Berkeley in particular, had been a center of interest in traditional music since the end of World War Two. Folksong circles, Pacifica Radio broadcasts, and bluegrass bands had deep roots there. String band music, with its emphasis on small banjo-fiddle-guitar ensembles, was a specialized area within this movement.     

  During the late 1960s, I was part of an influential group of young musicians studying and playing old-time string band music in North Oakland, California.  Our home on Colby Street became acknowledged as an important locus of the “folk music revival” on the West Coast.  The initial trio in residence was the New Tranquility String Band, composed of Sue Draheim and Mac Benford. I replaced the late Jim Bamford on guitar early in 1968. Earl Crabbe, who had to some extent imagined the band in the first place, gave us material support and sometimes served as manager. This was our life and full time work: from the time I joined the band until it broke up in 1970 we lived entirely by performing vernacular music of the American South.   Our efforts brought us face to face with the vortex of 1960s political and artistic life, and led us to meet musicians from communities very different from our own. At any given time as many as ten musicians lived at Colby Street. 

Before we met the older generation firsthand, we learned our repertoire through commercial sources and through legacy of New Deal-era musicians.  We were very serious about our canon as revealed through the work of Moses Asch, particularly the Harry Smith Anthology; the material recorded and produced by Mike Seeger and by John Cohen; and by the reissues and field recordings produced by Arhoolie, County, Topic, Folklyric, Columbia, and (later) Rounder records. Many of us had personal collections of dubbed reel-to-reel music, and each of us had our treasured collections of LP vinyl.  These sources were regarded with genuine and serious reverence. Spending as much time listening as playing, our major source of inspiration was one another. We encouraged and challenged one another, aware that we were only scratching the surface.

One of our goals was to live simply enough not to have to sacrifice time at the expense of music. An observer would have seen us principally studying, listening, and playing. We foraged for gigs around the periphery of the rock scene, busked, gave lessons, and bartered. We rooted through free boxes. We played the coffeehouse/festival circuit and appeared twice at rock festivals where the audiences assembled in tens of thousands. We learned that being well known and being successful were not the same thing.   

  We came to have almost venerational respect for the instruments that we played, building collections of Martins, Gibsons, Vegas, Washburns, and the like.  We swapped them, handed them around at sessions, and cherished their provenance.  Jon and Dierdre Lundberg’s shop on Dwight Way was a hands-on museum. This passion for material culture did much to inspire the current golden age of lutherie.

These times found many of us in a liminal state. We craved to take this music somewhere else:  to the hearth communities of these traditions, to meet and study with masters, and to see what kind of a reception we’d get. Some of these encounters came by chance, some by design. At home in Berkeley, in the backwaters of California’s Central Valley, and in San Francisco’s “Little Ireland,” we found both hope and dread.

In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada a schoolteacher and old school Bohemian named Virgil Byxbe had set up an outdoor camp as a venue for music, folk dance and recreation.  Virgil, who had plowed dry-farmed cotton with a mule to raise money for college,  called his retreat “Sweet’s Mill,” after the Armenian family who had fled the Turkish genocide to run a sawmill there in the 1930s. Virgil rented the camp to all takers from religious groups to faculty retreats.  On request,  he blocked access and left it in charge of César Chavez or members of the American Indian Movement.  By the time we got there as Virgil’s guests the place was already a legendary but little-known crossroads for generations of musicians.  

Foremost among these was the blind mandolinist, singer, and fiddler Kenny Hall, now 89. Kenny,   born blind in San Jose CA in 1923, learned to play music at the CA School for the Blind in Oakland.  (Like Archie Green, he grew up listening to Mac McClintock.)  He had worked in broom factories, sold brooms door to door, and amassed a repertoire of thousands of tunes and songs from the same sources that had inspired us:  Charlie Poole, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, and more. He was able, though blind, to hike –alone– for miles on the John Muir Trail and sleep alone in the mountains. He could tell the ambient temperature of the night air by the pitch of the crickets.   Kenny was and remains one of the musicians in tradition who has forged a truly personal style, and I think he deepened all of our commitments. All of us came to love him deeply.  

After 10 days in the mountains with him, I went to spend time with him at his home in Centerville.  He lived in a shared house with companions who had hit California during the Depression.  Many an Okie and Arkie who came here prospered: these were among those who had just survived.  It was an unforgettable experience to see this hardscrabble poverty, a peripheral colony, perhaps, hidden back in the orange groves of California’s pastures of plenty. In the groves around the house the ripening fruit was caked with the white residue of 2,4-d pesticides, and the people in the battered farmhouses and trailers lived on disability and military pensions, disdaining welfare and food stamps, hanging on from one check to another.  I studied and taped Kenny – Norelco cassette recorders were now available and inexpensive – and squirreled up tunes to take back to the band.  The country stations were still playing Buck Owens and Bob Wills.  “Not broke, but badly bent,” the men were pretty well crippled up by farm work and stock handing. They fished in the irrigation ditches, drank, and talked the old days about running their dogs and roping mountain lions from horseback. In the heat of the day their mongrels slept under the porch until the afternoon cooled, then fanned out through the orchards to bring back jackrabbits as the sun set.   Woody Guthrie had foreseen it:   

“My mother prayed that I would be a man of some renown.

But I am just a refugee, as I go rambling ‘round.” 

In 1969 a very influential musician named Jeremy Kammerer had returned from London where he had studied Irish music. There, he had learned—from Tony MacMahon— of Galway accordion legend Joe Cooley, of the Tulla Ceilidh Band.   Joe’s walk-up in San Francisco was a meeting place for expats who loved traditional music and dance. We were invited to the Tuesday evening gatherings there with Joe and his wife, Nancy. We also met Kevin Keegan, from Ballinasloe, and the young Patricia Kennelly, a step dancer and accordionist. Evenings at Joe’s, or at the homes of Joe’s friends, took the form of a traditional house céilidh where everyone present was expected to demonstrate some accomplishment; poetry, jokes,  dance, storytelling, and  unaccompanied singing.  Joe was a man of very strong opinions and an implacable foe of Irish kitsch. Once, someone present mentioned that they had been to her The Clancy Brothers at Masonic Auditorium.  [Awkward silence.]  

Nancy:  “But that’s not really Irish music, is it, Joe?”

  Joe:  “Nor any other kind of music.”

The large-scale revival of Irish music and dance in mass media was not yet under way, but San Francisco had an influential and deep community of intergenerational Irish immigrants.  We were welcome and recruited. 
     S.F. Ground Zero for St. Patrick’s Day was a pub called Harrington’s, doors away from the Bank of Hibernia.  Joe asked us to play, something of a first for us. The bar downstairs was packed solid with a loud mix of expats, workers taking the day off, and college students bussed in from Stanford. The Irish men and women present were convivial, warmed by drink, in stark contrast to the tourists and frat rats.  Fights broke out; the rowdy were collected into  blue police van was parked outside.  Someone referred to it as the “Paddy Wagon.”  The bartender looked over his shoulder and said,  “Would you mind calling it something else?”  

Between sets, I found looked for Joe and found him alone in a backstage room. We put our feet upon chairs.  “As long as you can do that, you’re all right.”  Onstage behind a thin wall a piano accordion trio with electric guitar and bass was playing “Folsom Prison.” “What kind of music is that to be playing on St. Patrick’s Day, the one day in America that’s supposed to be the Irish day?”  I said,  “There’s no accounting for taste.”  “Taste?  It’s got nothing to do with taste, they haven’t got any fucking brains.”

Politics were not discussed in our presence, but we had met Joe only half a century after the Easter Rising.  Anyone on a dance floor, in a pub, or a private home who was over 65 would have been over 18 when the Free State was founded in 1922. Our meeting with this community took place when “The Troubles” were newly underway:  no one that we met could have been unaware of Ian Paisley, The Battle of the Bogside, or the Ulster Volunteers.  On Easter Sunday, 1979 we gathered at Joe and Nancy’s home after they had come home from Mass.  Joe was beautifully dressed in a tweed coat, and tie.  Someone complimented Joe on his Easter Lily boutonnière.  Joe responded, “Do you have any idea what that’s all about?” I was able to connect it with national resurrection, and the Dublin Post Office in 1916, and James Connelly.  Again, our friendship deepened.  

Kevin Keegan was another great and much- admired player.  The student and heir of Paddy O’Brian, he had emigrated about the same time as Joe. In an Irish-themed bar on Market Street, I heard Kevin reminisce about the public houses in Galway. “The old men would be in there telling all kinds of great stories, you could listen to them forever, but that’s all gone.”  I asked him what had happened.  He pointed at the television.  “That.”

A listener might hear a tune like “The Battle of Aughrim,” or “ Dear Old Skibereen, “The Coulin,” or “The Siege of Limerick” and take the tunes as pleasant and danceable, even perceiving great dignity and melancholy, but still not connect them with historical events of eviction and ethnic cleansing.  

     “Skibereen” dates from the Young Ireland Movement. It describes the Famine, clearances and tumbling of houses. One line, sung by an exile to his son, describes British soldiers firing thatched roofs with torches.    “They set the roof on fire with their cursed English spleen. ”  As we played this, across an ocean, American conscripts were firing Vietnamese hamlets with Zippo lighters. 

Kevin’s own band, “The Aughrim Slopes,” was named after the site of the Battle of Aughrim, and that was one of Kevin’s signature tunes. The blind poet Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta called the place Eachdhroim an áir – “Aughrim of the slaughter.”  

“It is at Aughrim of the slaughter where they are to be found,

Their damp bones lying uncoffined”.

Joe asked us to join him for a dance at the Knights of Pythias Hall on Mission Street supporting the Irish Northern Aid Committee.  After 2 hours of set dances all present stood at attention and sang the anthem of the Irish Republic:   

“Soldiers are we, whose lives are pledged to Ireland, 

Some have come from a land beyond the wave.”  

The sentiments and memories of those present can be better imagined than described.  

That these events took place in 1968-69 requires no elaboration of context.  I remember a music party at Colby Street being brought to a stand down when the word came through that Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles.  Casing our instruments, we felt that we were living in a surreal nightmare. 

When I first heard about the theme of this conference and learned that I would be able to deliver these remarks in Puerto Rico I was struck by my most vivid memory of the Colby Street musical days. We three band members had gone down to Telegraph and Haste in the aftermath of Bloody Thursday during the events surrounding People’s Park. CS gas had been deployed by hand thrown canisters and by helicopters, and Alameda Sheriff’s deputies had fired on the crowds with “OO” buckshot, killing James Rector.  The Berkeley Barb ran a picture of a helicopter over Sproul Plaza spraying tear gas.  The headline:  “Shit Hits Fan.” The National Guard had restored a brittle sense of calm, and demonstrators clogged the intersection at Haste Avenue and Telegraph. CS gas was still scenting the air. We positioned ourselves in front of the new chain link fence between peaceful demonstrators and the National Guard.   Our improvised set included the Red Patterson song, “Battleship of Maine,” somehow appropriate for both that occasion and this one.  

“The blood was a running, and I was running, too,

I give my feet good exercise, had nothing better to do,

Why are you running, are you afraid to die?
The reason I am running is  I ain’t got wings to  fly.

It was all about that Battleship of Maine.

One of our goals today is to explain how the musical countercultures of the 1960s were “regularly the focus of state and corporate-sponsored disciplinary efforts,” and “to explore how these countercultures resisted, but also at times supported, the work of these hegemonic forces,” I can offer a couple of leads.  Many of the musicians from this scene, with countless others, participated in “good will tours” organized and sponsored by agencies such as the Departments of State and of Agriculture. This decision would repay reflection from many standpoints. There is a corporate aspect as well.  After “Riverdance,” Irish dance became big business.  The personal fortune of one-time National Heritage recipient Michael Flatley has been estimated at ten of millions, and the venues include casino and stadium.  Wigs for young dancers are spun of plastic in South Korea and sewn in the People’s Republic of China. (“Owned and operated by an Irish Stepdancer Mom!)”

I must note that revival musicians have had a wary relationship with scholars. Once, a debate ranged between Benjamin Botkin and Richard Dorson over what Dorson called “fakelore.” Dorson argued thatWoody Guthrie’s popularity was “living proof of the anti-intellectualism that has run throughout the urban folksong movement.”   Our renaissance did not get much contemporary recognition from scholars. Some public sector folklorists were openly antipathetic.  Richard Blaustein has written candidly that  “ . . . most American folklorists who entered the profession between the late fifties through the mid-seventies . . . found it expedient to enhance their scholarly credibility by disassociating themselves from the so-called urban folk music revival. “ Many feel that an opportunity to study “the revival” was missed, but practically speaking, documenting the scene (had anyone wanted to) would have been difficult in terms both of rapport and of access.  Moreover, the first obligation of the researcher is to the people being studied. Could researchers who expressed indifference and antipathy towards what we were doing have met this obligation? There was in fact a conscious effort on the part of public sector folklorists to exclude young musicians from outside the hearth traditions in the interests of “pure” tradition. One can credit an instinctive protective impulse towards fragile traditions in the proprietary attitude of some “gatekeepers” toward their “chosen people’s” music, and in their disparagement of young musical interlopers.  However, such attitudes can also be seen as an effort, on the part of academic and public sector folklorists, to establish themselves as the only legitimate conduits of those traditions.  For the record, some of us endured frank and public insult from these “gatekeepers.” It hurt. 

     In retrospect this exclusion may have been more of an interference with traditional process than the organic interaction of the revival itself. The perspective of elder musicians was often quite different. In their homes we found, as fieldworkers very often do, a welcome, cheerful encouragement, respect for our efforts, and lifelong friendship. Dozen of us all across the country maintain friendships and associations now approaching half a century of time depth. Bruce Jackson hit the mark when he wrote that “Transitory as it may have been, the folk revival community was as real and as legitimate as any other based on shared interest and knowledge.” Perhaps time shows that our community didn’t prove so transitory as all that. Mike Seeger and John Cohen each made studio recordings of our work, and our home tapes of Joe Cooley and Kevin Keegan have been released and put on the Web.  There was a “housecooling party” at Colby Street in 1971, a sort of plenary blowout  with  major figures in attendance.  After that, the scene fissioned.  Some “holdouts” left California to pursue opportunities in the East.    Some received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Apprenticeship Program and studied with their admired mentors.  Others took the academic path that brought me here today. Most of the surviving musicians who I knew around Colby Street are still actively involved in playing, teaching, and studying music.  

Many scholars, including Archie Green, have found it remarkable if not puzzling that young musicians of urban, sometimes affluent backgrounds should have been drawn, for example,  to the vernacular music of the rural South. My answer would include the appreciation of a culture that we found fascinating, the great beauty of the music itself, and the accessibility of the music for recreation. String band tradition is one of the great collective arts in our history, as much as quilting, jazz, rock, or storytelling. We found it hypnotic and addictive.  Our love of acoustic music came not so much alienation from rock, pop, singer-songwriters and folk rock, but a sense —admittedly naive— of something calmer, greener, nourishing, crossing boundaries of time, class, and ethos. We were also aware of the social protest in this repertoire. We found that the ethos of this repertoire was intrinsically connected to values of community, of loyalty, of affirmation and identity. I am unaware of having experienced feelings of “nostalgia” in these pursuits: the music was an available and meaningful present, banked against the future. 

In its classical sense a revitalization movement is a “deliberate, conscious, organized attempt by members of society to create a more satisfying culture in a time of crisis.” I argue that this attempt was a success. The music now flourishes mostly in home settings, where it originated.   Efforts that were once dismissed as folklorismus, as fakelore, and as disruptive interference, can now be seen as an organic part of tradition. There was once antipathy between musicians and scholars. I hope that I am correct in thinking  that there is now growing mutual respect and an expanded opportunity for reflection and reconsideration. Bruce Jackson has written, “On the whole, the movement was benign. I think the revival can be fairly characterized as romantic, naive, nostalgic and idealistic; it was also, in small part, venal, opportunistic, and colonialistic.”   Even  if being described as “benign” is to be damned with faint praise, I’ll grant Jackon’s point.  But only with this caveat : the revival can be faulted for being romantic and politically slanted, but Romantics and Nationalists assembled, interpreted, and promulgated the materials laid the groundwork for a scholarly discipline like folklore to emerge in the first place.  But I hope that those Jackson’s sound and fair characterizations will never lend color to the musicians themselves. The musical holdouts I knew around Colby Street in the 1960s were serious, critical, present-oriented, generous, respectful, scholarly, and ambitious.  Time flies, and a great deal of material remains to be recorded from these musicians. . .  and some musicians can double as pretty  good storytellers.