Search results

Result Limit

Sort

Display

(1 - 6 of 6)

Title: Flip Breskin oral history
Date: 2005-11-21
Description: Second of two interviews conducted with Flip Breskin. Ms. Breskin describes her up-bringing on Mercer Island and her early interest in folk music, and bands and musicians of influence. She relates some of her experiences running Mama Sundays and its history, as well as the evolution of the Puget Sound Guitar camp. Ms. Breskins discusses the strong sense of community in the music scene in Bellingham.
Digital Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Local Identifier: Breskin20051121
Text preview (might not show all results): Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview ti
Show moreCollection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview title: Interview with Flip Breskin Interview Date: November 21st, 2005 Interviewer: Coty Hogue Original transcription by: Laurie Brion, March 2010 HOGUE: Today is November 21, 2005, and we’re interviewing Flip Breskin and I’m Coty Hogue. Before we start, I would just want to ask your permission to record this, if it’s okay. BRESKIN: Yes, it’s just fine. HOGUE: When we start out, I would just like to do a little background information, so if we could start a little bit with where you grew up and maybe when you were born? BRESKIN: Ah. Yes, August 27, 1950, Renton General Hospital just south of Seattle. We started out down near the airport in Burien or Des Moines; I don’t know which way the city lines wound up. And as a five-year-old, my parents moved us out the ‘burbs. We were the first Jews on Mercer Island. This was not a good thing. [laughs] The woods were nice, but the rigidity of an urgently upwardly mobile, conformist Goldwater Republican area was pretty hard. Yeah. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit more about that, growing up, at all? With the rigidity and … BRESKIN: Mostly just wouldn’t nobody play with us. My mom didn’t get it, and my dad wasn’t paying attention. They were both hopeful. Mother was not raised as a Jew; Dad was raised in an orthodox home. This is right after World War II and the Holocaust, and they were trying to solve anti-Semitism with their own lives. They put their own lives on the line – not like you’ll get killed for it, but like you have to live with this every day and try to figure it out, and they tried. They’re still trying. HOGUE: What were some of your ways of dealing with, you know, sort of being outcast from kids? BRESKIN: I read. I read lots and lots and lots. I liked to go wander in the woods. I was a freerange child. There aren’t many left in North America, at least not in the cities. Getting out was good. I think music got in so deep right from the beginning because Mom sang to us, and there was the music box, and there was music around the house. HOGUE: Did you play music yourself? When did you start doing that? BRESKIN: Depends on how you measure it. I got a little portable record player for my sixth birthday, and I got a – oh, what’s his name? – Burl Ives record that went on it, and it had a little white duck, blah blah. It had the Golden Vanity on it, and I had the entire child ballad memorized in short order. I just loved it; I still love that story. I also remember I had all these little bitty china animals and other doo-hickies, and I figured out I could put them on the record or on the turntable, and then I could turn the turntable with my finger and make it go faster and faster until the stuff flew off. So – [laughs] HOGUE: Was that very good for the record? BRESKIN: I didn’t notice! Probably considering the quality of sound reproduction, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. I got piano lessons for six months when I was six years old, and I adored it. My dad had showed me how to play chopsticks sometimes before that, the kind where you curl up your hand in a fist and you roll it down the black keys and go bomp – brrumbum-bomp, brrum-bum-bomp, brrum-bum-bum – that routine. But I went from there to playing Bartok Mikrokosmos within six months, and then lost getting to play piano. HOGUE: Why was that? BRESKIN: Well, my recollection is that I was told that I didn’t practice enough. My mother’s more recent recollection was that she was worried that I was going to compete with my older sister, and my older sister needed some area to call her own. It horrifies me that duets didn’t appear to be an option. Somewhere in the middle, I was also told that my eyesight was failing and so they didn’t want me reading, so they took away the piano so I wouldn’t be trying to read music. But part of the struggle was, I didn’t want to read music; I just wanted to play it. The teacher would play it so I knew what it sounded like, and then I’d go figure out how to play it. HOGUE: When did you start picking up an interest in folk music and that kind of … ? BRESKIN: Well, there was that child ballad. Burl Ives was considered folk music, and Theodore Bikel, and I heard him. Somehow, we didn’t have the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger stuff. There was … oh, no, what was his name? Mr. Obnoxious. Tom Lehrer. In the Fifties, Tom Lehrer was about all there was of dissent music, revolutionary music, that was available in Middle America. You know, he was speaking truth to power rather cheerfully, and my folks had that. And that was kind of what there was. It was that and Mad Magazine and all their song parodies, and I still remember some of those. Punch the right button and all of a sudden out comes a whole song parody from the 1950s Mad Magazines. Oh, and all the stuff around the neighborhood, the naughty songs kids teach each other: “Hello, Operator” and “Great big gobs of …” Everybody else seems to sing it “greasy, grimy, gopher guts”; in my neighborhood, it was “gooey, green, gorilla guts.” And everybody has a different version. I’ll call for a table at any kind of workshop I go to – I call for meal-time tables and say, “I want you to come sing to me all the naughty songs you learned when you were fairly young children. I don’t want the grown-up naughty songs; they’re gross. I want the ones we learned as kids.” And they’re hysterical! But everybody will know a different version of that one; no two people seem to have the exact same version, but everybody knows it! And then there are ones that people only know within a specific slice of age because they are like parodies of an advertisement, so only the people that got hit with that advertisement know that parody. But it appears to be sort of North Americawide, a lot of them. Oh, no: [sings] “I hate Bosco, it’s full of TNT.” You didn’t learn this, right? You’re [the] wrong age. “Mommy put it in my milk to try to poison me. I fooled Mommy; I put it in her tea. Now there’s no more Mommy to try to poison me!” The original was something really gross about, [sings] “I love Bosco, it’s rich and chocolaty. Mommy put it in my milk because it’s good for me!” Something about fortified with vitamin C, blah blah. You know. It was fairly early TV based on radio with singing commercials. And there was some good stuff out there, but that wasn’t some of it. Oh, and camp songs, camp songs! Oh! I went to summer camp when I was six, and there was a guy named Steve, and I don’t know what his last name was, but he had red hair and he played the guitar, and he sang “Five Hundred Miles,” and I was in love. That was just the most wonderful thing. HOGUE: When was that? How old were you? BRESKIN: It should have been 1956, maybe ’57, so early. But Hedy West was out there singing that song, but I think that was well before Peter, Paul, and Mary, so he’d picked it up somewhere else. But that was very cool. Oh, and we always sang going anywhere in the car. There might have been a radio in the car, but we got in and we sang “Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and all that stuff. HOGUE: Was that important for you, singing with your family and developing sort of a musical interest? BRESKIN: Yeah, and I learned a ton of songs. It’s really funny because I go play nursing homes and elder hostels and all that stuff, and get paid for singing those songs that I learned as a kid. So I owe my mom for “Five Foot Two” and “Bicycle Built For Two” and all the old songs, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “Grandfather’s Clock,” “Red River Valley.” I knew them because we sang them. HOGUE: When did you actually start playing yourself or really getting into a scene? BRESKIN: Two separate questions. My brother played guitar from the time I was three, and he got good. My sister played classical French horn; you know, she played in the band, she played in the orchestra, sang in the choir, did madrigals. Joe learned jazz and went for rock n roll as soon as he could. And I was outside of that, and by that time I wasn’t singing because … because it looked like singing girls had to sound like Joan Baez. I mean, Bob Dylan sounded like himself, and it didn’t qualify as music in my parents’ household, but at least guys had some slack to not sound pretty. When I was a teenager, there was not slack for girls to not sound pretty. So I sang along on stuff and loved that, loved going to camp because I got to sing. I was fifteen … my sister had … a guitar that was – back then what you got were built mostly in Mexico, and the action would be, you know, a half inch, three quarters of an inch. It was a long ways down, built for the tourist trade, and they didn’t play in tune, and they were junky, but it had six strings, frets, and my sister had one of those. You can get really good ones in Mexico too, but you have to know where to look. My sister had one of those; then she got something better, and my brother wound up with it. And he painted it. [It] didn’t hurt the tone one bit, there wasn’t much tone to hurt, but he used acrylics, which were new then, and he painted it wood-grain hot pink. And then this amazing explosion coming out of the sound hole and going all over the place, and then different colors all over the neck, each string, each fret, so that you could look to see: two frets that had the same color on it would be an octave apart. So it was supposed to teach you to play, right? But mostly it was just unbelievably garish. My guess is that he painted it on an early acid trip, and he had a really good time, but it predated Peter Max by quite a bit, and the detail was wonderful. I would guess that guitar is still out there somewhere because it was good art. But who knows where it wandered on, acid dripping from the strings? [laughs] But I had that for a while and messed with it. I wanted my own guitar, and I worked all winter vacation from school, made twenty-five bucks, and my brother said, “Go to the pawn shops on First Avenue, Seattle.” So I went to the pawn shops, and my father accompanied me. His fifteen-year-old daughter was not going there alone. And I found an old tater bug mandolin, bowl-back mandolin, and was “Tangents R Us” – there I went. It’s “Oh, this is beautiful, how romantic. It looks like a lute – I’m there!” [I] brought it home, didn’t know how it was tuned, didn’t know how to play it, didn’t know what it sounded like. The guy we got it from said, “Well, I think you tune it like a violin.” We eventually found somebody to tune it, and I took a few lessons and once again got busted for not practicing enough. After which, I started hitting up my friends, and me and Jeannie [Rosner?] would get together and she’d play recorder and I’d play mandolin, and we’d play tunes, early Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel stuff, this and that. And then I got a real guitar. It was a little bitty Martin because I was scared to go to a big guitar; it felt like my fingers weren’t big enough. So old Mr. [Tafoya?], Phil [Tafoya?], found me a 518 Martin, which I kind of wish I still had, because everybody is doing these Baby Taylors and stuff. This was that scale, and it was referred to as a cowboy guitar, you know, a saddle guitar. A little fragile for saddle guitaring, I think, but …but there it was. And then I behaved badly. I found everybody that I knew my age that played guitar; I got them to show me everything they knew, and when they didn’t know anything else to show me … I was off to go play with somebody else, so I was very rude. But I took off like a house on fire and learned a ton really, really quickly. It would have been the year I was seventeen. I’d forgotten: there was a boyfriend who had the early Tim Harden stuff, and I don’t know where he got this from, but one day he played me this really cool thing, and I said, “I want to learn that.” And he said, “Oh, it’s too hard, girls can’t do that.” God, I was pissed! This was before bra burners were even on my horizon for feminism, but I was pissed. I went home and I stayed up all night [plays] and I came back the next morning, and I played it for him, in two different keys yet, and my recollection was that that was the end of the relationship, but it was definitely the beginning of a whole bunch more guitar. HOGUE: For you, it seemed like you got in trouble for not practicing enough. What do you think the importance is for really learning – sometimes this kind of music is just going out and being with people and learning from others. How important is that, and how important was that for you? BRESKIN: That’s incredibly important. The other really incredibly important thing is to decide to teach yourself, at which point, if you’re taking lessons, your teacher becomes your assistant, your learning assistant, your guide. It’s kind of Lewis and Clark: you still have to walk there yourself, so it’s not a passive thing at all. HOGUE: When did you first actually get up into Bellingham? What were some reasons for bringing you up here? BRESKIN: I moved up in 1970. Jeannie Rosner, whom I mentioned a little earlier, had come up here to go to Fairhaven when it opened, and Ken Dean and Doug Stern, and I thought, “I’ll come where they are. This looks good.” So I moved up here. And I got up here, and I encountered the [Hunger Brothers?]. I encountered Jack Hanson and Clifford Perry and Gordy Bracket playing Carter Family stuff. I had heard Jack Hanson play at some sort of benefit for the Joffrey Ballet or something that my parents took me to. Jack was down there in a suit playing fingerstyle, Chet Atkins-style guitar. I went up to him afterwards – I would have been maybe fifteen, sixteen – and said, “Please, Mr. Hanson, do you teach guitar lessons?” And he said, “I’m sorry, little girl, I’m moving to Bellingham next week.” So I got to Bellingham and went looking for Jack and showed up and said, “About those lessons…” Jack was a dear heart. You know, it was full-fledged hippie days. Jack used to play with a band in Seattle called Fat Jack that was rock n roll; it was the sweetest-hearted, mellowest rock n roll you ever heard. It was really good. I think I went to hear [Kent Heat?] one time and Fat Jack was opening, and I had a wonderful time at Fat Jack, and then [Kent Heat?] started, and it was like, “Oh, this isn’t very good,” and I left. It was a great band. They didn’t give Jack any veto power over the name; it was sad. But it was a good band. And their roadie manager was Robert Force. Robert Force and Albert d’Ossché wrote a book called In Search of the Wild Dulcimer. They were up here. Robert was one of the people that started Mama Sundays. Robert and Albert, the Bert Brothers, recast how the dulcimer got used as a folk instrument all over the world. It made a huge impact, and they were here in Bellingham at the time, and they were good fun to hang with. Hunger Brothers morphed into South Fork Bluegrass Band. None of those were people that I sat around and jammed with, but they were people whose music I marinated in, and it influenced what came out of my fingers. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about that? BRESKIN: The sounds were really beautiful, so it caught me. Oh, I’d forgotten: before that in Seattle, there was the Morningtown Pizza Collective. Morningtown was on Roosevelt just north of the University Bridge, as you’re going southbound, on your left. The building is still there. And they had several houses; there was the one on Burke Street and the one on Sunnyside. There was another one I’ve forgotten. It was the first place I ever met crunchy granola. Somebody had a big recipe for it taped to the kitchen cupboard, and they were making it. And they had the farm out at Maltby. Oh! And Mary grew up without spare money around; I think she grew up pretty poor in the South, and she was not scared of hard work, and they were trying to clean up the farmhouse, and she was in there with a scrub brush and a big thing of ammonia. She said, “What I really want is to close all the doors and windows and fill the house full of ammonia: pour it down the chimney, pick it up and shake it real good. That’s what this place needs.” So – [laughs] She was definitely not from here. She was pregnant, and one day she announced, “I’m hungry for watermelon. I’m going to eat a whole watermelon myself.” I trailed into the kitchen to watch this happen; I’d never seen anything like that. I just had this vision of her eating a whole watermelon, you know. She split that thing open – a big old sucker – split the thing open, took a big spoon, ate the heart out of it and left all the rest. She came from a place where watermelons were cheap, and in her book she had eaten the whole watermelon. It was a hoot. Boy, Clifford was learning to play dobro, Gordy was playing bass, Jack was playing in the Hunger Brothers; he was also playing with the Morph Brothers playing … Boy, he had a folk band and a rock and roll band and a bluegrass band and a jazz band and something else. He was playing with all of them at once. A lot of people these days talk about playing an eclectic blend of folk and bluegrass and country and new age and world music and blah-blah-blah, and it’s all sort of turned to mush. And Jack could play in each of the different styles and do it exquisitely well and completely within the genre. He really knew what he was doing. So if he was just goofing, you never knew what would come out next. It left me with very high standards, that if it all turns into mush, I’m not horribly interested. But if people really know their genres and can make it come out sounding real in the different styles, that gets really exciting. HOGUE: What was some of the earliest – was blues – ? I mean, what you played there it seemed you were really influenced by that. Was that the first style that you really started playing in? BRESKIN: Oh… well, it was sort of what I was hearing for a while, so … The real early stuff was Simon and Garfunkel and Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But the year I was, I think, eighteen, I heard Elizabeth Cotten play live, and that was it. I went home and turned off the radio – there wasn’t anything there anywhere near as compelling – and started trying to figure out what she was doing, you know, with that alternating bass and the melody sitting on top. HOGUE: Can you talk about how you got to see her live or how that influenced you so much? What did she do that made it so emotional? BRESKIN: Well, the first time I heard her it wasn’t. I had showed up at the community college and was taking music theory courses, and you know, I went and talked to the teacher and said, “I don’t read music. Can I come to your class anyway? I can really hear well.” And she said, “Sure.” So I was trying to figure out how music worked because it was pretty interesting. And she approached me because I was the closest thing to a folkie she knew and said, “We have this guitarist Elizabeth Cotten coming to play; we need a student to get up to introduce her; would you do that?” I didn’t know who she was, but I got up and did my best to introduce her and sat down and listened politely. It was in the Student Union at lunch time with everybody eating, rattling silverware, talking, playing cards – just horribly noisy, nobody paying attention. And she sat up there on stage, and she did her best because she was a lady and she always did her best, but there wasn’t any magic to that, you know, for her or for me. A few nights later, Doug [Stern?] wanted to take me to hear her in concert, and I was like, “I already heard her,” you know. But he was firm about it, and so I came. And she was at the Friend Center in the U District, and every person there was there to hear her play. And it was also a space that – huh! If there’s such a thing as a sacred space, it’s a place where people are inclined to listen, whether to themselves or to each other or to what’s happening around them. The act of listening makes a difference in what happens. So she got up to play and everybody was listening in a really deep way, and she responded to that and played beautifully and played with deep feeling and really offered us what she had to give. And she was able to because of the way we listened. And there wasn’t room inside for all that music: it was so beautiful! And she was playing Washington Square Blues, and my heart filled up. There wasn’t room inside; it overflowed as tears, and I just sat there and shook with tears running down my face. When I went home at the end of the evening, I felt like she made it look so simple – you know, I could do that, and that’s worth doing. So then I dug in. There were lots of late-night sessions trying to figure out what did she do? How did she do that? There was a lot I didn’t figure out, but I tried really hard and burned the midnight oil, just sitting there by myself trying to figure out how it worked. HOGUE: And you had the opportunity to host her at your home in later years? BRESKIN: Yeah, a bunch, and get her to guitar camp and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. When I had moved up here and wound up running Mama Sunday’s up on campus, that’s now the Underground Coffeehouse, I had the opportunity to have Libba come do concerts, so I did, and I did it as often as I could and got to know her some. For me, it was a little baffling about why … why she’d be so generous to give her music to this young middle-class white girl. At this point, it’s a whole lot clearer to me. Part of it was her people didn’t want it and it broke her heart. Part of it was I really listened and she could tell that I would cherish this music and keep it going after she died. She was an old lady, and you know, that looked good. I think probably she just liked me too. But I would be so excited she was coming, I would tell everybody and I’d be in line at the grocery store, and I’d be explaining to the people in front of me and behind me in the checkout that they had to come. I had a budget: it didn’t cost anything to get in, so I could tell people, “Free Concert! World-class music! You’ve got to come!” And they’d come. You know, a regular night we’d have a couple hundred people. Libba would come and we’d have four hundred people, and that was a good thing. And she got paid, and I’d put her up. She’d sit on the couch and play guitar with me. Her version of learning was to sit on the couch and play guitar with me. She played the tunes all the way up to speed with all the complexity, with all the quirks. She didn’t dumb anything down, she didn’t slow anything down, but she respected me as a learner and completely expected that I could figure out, and we’d just play until I figured it out, even if it was a couple of hours. It was very cool. She didn’t, like, you know, make all these encouraging noises and tell me I was getting it or any of that. But when I’d get another little section that that time when it came around I’d manage to catch that little spot, there’d be this teeny bit of smile at the edge of her eyes; there was an acknowledgement that I had that this time. It was really precious. It was good teaching! I learned so much from that. And since she played upside down and backwards, I couldn’t look at her hand and go, “Oh, that’s a C chord.” I had to look at the fingers and go, “Which frets is she pushing? Which string’s down against?” – as it flew by. You know, she didn’t play real slow. So that was really cool, and I learned a whole lot from it. She got this beautiful tone because she was playing the bass with her finger, which gave her really crisp bass tone. She was playing the melody – wrong hand – with her thumb, which gave her this really round, sweet melodic line. It was pretty. She was all over that thing. I learned Freight Train from her, I learned [Fast Paul?], I learned Wilson’s Rag. It was really cool. HOGUE: Do you maybe want to demonstrate something, her style? BRESKIN: Oh, a little bit. Let’s see what I can do. [plays] No, can’t very much, but a little bit. HOGUE: So you talked a little bit about Mama Sunday’s and bringing Elizabeth up there. How did you get started doing that, and can you explain a little bit about the history of Mama Sunday’s? BRESKIN: Well, apparently it started life as Mama Sunday’s Hot Rod and Hamburger Haven. That’s “Hot Rod.” Bob Force was in on the creation of that, and I think [Tee?] Thomas may have been too. It was an open-mike format, and it was held up where they now serve pizza down at the far end of the … that would be the northern-most top floor end of the VU [Viking Union]. I don’t know how much it’s been remodeled; I haven’t been in there in some years. But there was a stage, and it would be an open mike, and people would show up and play, and their friends would come with them, and some would show up early, so there were a bunch of people at the beginning, and by the end there were only a few buddies of the last person playing. It dwindled and people went away. But then they got a budge to pay a featured performer, and they probably had twenty-five bucks or fifty bucks or something, and then there was a featured performer, and everybody left anyway. [laughs] Then Bob took off. I think that was the February he met Albert and went to Iceland and played all the Icelandic things that were like a dulcimer and just learned a ton and had a really good time. [Tee?] Thomas was running it; there may have been somebody in between. We should check with [Tee?]; he’s still down at Skagit Valley. [Tee?] and his first wife Mindy were running it. And then [Tee?] and Mindy broke up, and they asked if Dave Auer and I would take it over. I was married to Dave at the time. So we took it over and I started getting to hire people like Jack Hanson, people like Clifford, people like Larry Hanks. Oh, man, I had fun! Linda Waterfall, Peter Langston, people who remained in my life as musical inspirations, wonderful folks, and occasionally, people like Libba Cotten. I was so excited about it, I’d go everywhere I went, telling people they had to come here, and I was excited enough that they’d try it, and they’d like it and they’d come back and they’d bring their friends, and it grew until there were a couple hundred people most weeks. You know, it was every week during the academic year, so it was nine concerts a quarter, and I really had fun doing that. It was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received, getting to run that thing. When Dave and I broke up, I kept doing it. Eventually they budgeted for me to have an assistant, and I hit up Bridget Jennings and got her to be my assistant, got her trained up, and then she took it over and kept it going. I think she handed it on to Tim [Mixum?], and she went on and became road manager for the Flying Karamazov Brothers. I think she’s now maybe … She was at Microsoft, but she may be back doing concert production doing Music on the Pier for the city of Seattle. I’m not sure, but she was at some point doing that. Anyway, you know, we kept passing it on to other people who were wildly enthusiastic about the music, which is what you really need. If you’re going to put on a concert, you’d better be just thrilled to death and ready to jump on everybody and drag them in the door. HOGUE: How long did it take for numbers to really go up when you started running it? I mean, you mentioned that before when they had the featured performer for this open mike, a lot of people dwindled off; how did you sort of reverse that trend? BRESKIN: By being madly excited about who was performing, by shortening the open mike so that it really was the introduction instead of the featured performer getting on at, like, ten at night, or something, and by hiring just killer musicians. And it worked. Lots of people wanted to play the open mike, and we shortened them to three songs or fifteen minutes, and there were like four people. I remember one time it was the Gypsy [Gippo?] String Band; [they] came and did a cameo before they played down at Fast Eddy’s, which was on State Street – oh, they’re still doing music in that space. It’s just south of Holly on the east side. I can’t remember what it’s called now. You know, there’s the frame shop and there’s the pizza joint and there’s the – you know, next to the pizza joint. HOGUE: The Up and Up? BRESKIN: Yeah, I think it – oh, there’s one further south than the Up and Up. The Factory or something? I don’t know. They do rock and roll. But they used to serve pizza and have music, and the Gippos were going to play that. They were the house band for the Morningtown Pizza Collective. It was Jack Link and Warren Argo and Hank Bradley and Sandy Bradley. They were great musicians. So they came and did a cameo and did a few songs and just knocked everybody out. You could tell people were going to go down there when Mama Sunday’s let out. And the next person up was a lone banjo player I’d never met, standing there with a longnecked banjo, and oh! I was feeling sorry for him having to follow the Gippos who were incredibly tight, doing string band music – you know, the Harry Smith anthology stuff, the stuff from Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Except this was 1974. And this guy with the long-necked banjo gets up and I’m feeling sorry for him, right? He gets up and he looks at the crowd and he takes his time, and he tunes up the banjo, and he starts to play, and he has them in the palm of his hand. It was like: no, they were an appropriate opening act, right? He knew just what to do with all that attention. His name was Mike Marker; he still lives in town. He’s a friend of Pete Seeger’s and he’s a real strong musician. Boy, is he good! So it is my belief that I hired him on the way out the door and booked him to do a gig because he was great. HOGUE: Was this your first experience really, booking concerts like this? BRESKIN: Oh yeah, absolutely. No, I’d never done anything like this, but it seemed so obvious once we started. It was exactly what I wanted. Having grown up in so much isolation, it was also the gift of a lifetime that I could go gather people and they were gatherable. I didn’t know that, so it was really exciting to not get pounded down for bouncing up to people and saying, “You! You! You! You have to do this!” It was a great gift. HOGUE: What were some of your stand-out memories of your time working there? BRESKIN: [laughs] Hiring Clifford Perry and Larry Hanks to share an evening and sit there and trade songs back and forth. It wasn’t like they had rehearsed and figured out – you know, they were just both very, very good musicians with a similar enough repertoire that I knew they’d be able to do that. I got to be the musical yenta and introduce musicians to each other and we all got to watch. And it was really lively because it was so real, so right-this-minute. The two of them came out, sat down, looked at each other and then double took. It was really funny because they were a matched pair with hair way down their back and little bitty glasses on their nose before anybody had those little wire-rimmed things. And big old guitars. And they looked just alike except Clifford was in tasteful grey and Larry was in tasteful red and gold, with the beard like shredded wheat, right? It was really sweet, and it was really fun watching them discover “Oh, that tune! Sure!” Vroom, and off they went. It was beautiful, all these great old songs. That was a great night. South Fork Bluegrass Band: my old friend Tony Trischka came out to visit and sat in with South Fork, and they were like, so blown away to have Tony Trischka playing with them. This was a big deal. I’ve got some photos of them clowning around onstage and having a really good time. They were good enough that Tony was just having a ball. It was good. Um … hmm. Frankie Armstrong. We stuffed the place for Frankie. I could show you that poster; I found it. Somebody built me this stunning – I had a really good photo of her, but somebody built me a world-class poster, and it worked – just this stark black and white, no grays, black and white – bam! Picture of Frankie singing her heart out, head up like a bird, just – And you know, just where and when and who, and this little thing at the bottom, “Voted Britain’s top female folk singer” or vocalist or something. And it was enough. They’d never heard of her, but they came. For me there was a moment, there was one song: she sang Van Diemen’s Land a cappella, which is how she sang. She was sitting up onstage – she was most of the way blind at that point; she still had this little teeny window she could see through. She entered into the song completely as she sang it, a song of grief and permanent loss. Convicts got shipped to Australia – that was Van Diemen’s Land – and never came home. You could be convicted of anything: stealing a loaf of bread when you were starving got you there, transported. And she sang that song. When she finished singing – sitting in a low chair just singing, right? – when she finished singing, she shrank – I mean physically. She shrank, maybe by a fifth of her size. She just contracted; she’d gotten so large in the song. It was like putting a candle out when she stopped singing. It was really something. We were all so deep in the song that we’d built something together, the listeners and the singer. And when it was over, it was vivid that it was over, that it had stopped. It was completely different in the room. But it was also silent for a long time before people clapped. I got to bring Eric Schoenberg out – repeatedly! That was really cool. [He] played guitar; God, he’s good! And Mike Cohen brought over a vinyl over one time, a disk of Richard Ruskin playing. I said, “Ooh, this is good stuff! Where is he from?” He said, “I think he’s from L.A.” I went up to my office at Associated Students and I used the Watts line and I called information for L.A., and they had two Richard Ruskins. I called and I said, “Is this the Richard Ruskin, the guitarist?” By that point, I was able to offer him – he didn’t mind being approached as the Richard Ruskin – I was able to offer him, “I can do you a block booking for five community colleges, I think, up here, including Western, and we can pay your way up and get you all these gigs so you can actually go home with some money. Would you come?” He was like, “Would I come?!” So he came and did a wonderful job and eventually relocated up here and is living in Seattle, taught for guitar camp, all that stuff. Yeah, they were wonderful musicians. HOGUE: You mentioned guitar camp, so can you explain a little bit how that came about? BRESKIN: Oh, God. Summer,1972, I was at Mariposa Folk Festival because I had gotten married and I was living in Syracuse, New York, because David was stationed back there. I was lonelier than I think I had ever been in my life. I didn’t know a soul, and it was early enough [that] we hadn’t made many friends yet. And we went to Mariposa. I saw a face across the crowd and recognized him, and I thought it was this piano player from back at the community college in Bellevue, and I ran across the crowd and threw myself into his arms and then backed up a little and realized I did not know this person. [laughs] Oops. And it got worse rapidly because then we sorted out that oh, he was Eric Schoenberg. Actually, he looked a lot like Kinky, but actually what it was, I recognized him from his album cover. [laughs] Oops. Fortunately, this was not something that happened to Eric constantly from that album. The album was The New Ragtime Guitar with him and his cousin David Laibman. They had learned to play at camp and had taken Scott Joplin rags, broken them down for two guitars as duets and figured out how to play them and did a recording of it. Wonderful stuff, wonderful stuff! So in the end, we wound up going down to New York City and taking lessons from Eric once a month for the rest of the time we lived in Syracuse, which was cool. And he was such a dearheart; he was such a dearheart! He taught me all kinds of cool stuff. When Nathan was born, I named him after Eric: he was Nathaniel Eric. Then we moved home in January or February of ’73. I think early February: God, it was good to come home. But we came home to Bellingham, even though I grew up in Seattle, and I had only been in Bellingham for six months, but by gum, I came home to Bellingham. It was home. And Eric came out to visit us that summer. We took him out to the islands; I don’t think he had ever been anyplace that quiet. I have to back up. I met Dave Auer at a guitar camp, which Dan and Sherry, whose last name I have forgotten, who had Queen Ann Music, or a music store up on Queen Ann Hill for years and years. In ’70, maybe ’71, they had done this music camp: Guitar Camp for Kids. Their vision was for black kids from the ghetto, and who they got were the children of unemployed Boeing executives and engineers who knew how to apply for stuff and thought to send their kids, so it was pretty much all white. Who comes is who you know. So if you don’t have any friends who are people of color, they aren’t going to show up at your events. But I didn’t get it that it was for children, so I showed up and Bill McClarty showed up. He was the guy that I stole the Sweet William strut that I played for that counterpoint thing. David Auer showed up. He was smart about the whole thing and got himself signed on as “teacher of beginners.” So he got to go for free and be staff. But the three of us were the only adults besides the organizers and the formal staff, which was Jerry Corbett of the Youngbloods and Janice Ian, who was pretty famous back then but not like she is now and barely past teenager. And Peter Childs: Pete Childs played … he was a studio musician. He was actually the person who deconstructed what Libba Cotten was doing for me and showed me how it actually worked, what the alternating bass did, and boy did I have my homework. I went home from that camp and I settled down and I had to refigure out every tune I had figured out for the last year or so, and there was a lot. It seemed daunting but absolutely necessary. I sat down and I did it. Then I knew and my thumb was educated for that alternating bass, for how it really worked, which was great. Anyway, there had been that camp, and the “grownups” – I mean, I don’t think anybody was over – well, actually I think Pete Childs must have been in his thirties or forties and everybody else was in their early twenties. But we were the adults and we stayed up all night and played music and had a wonderful time. So there was that, but it was in a terrible space. It was in old Army barracks and there was no place to go for privacy, no place at all. I mean, there was a boys dorm and a girls dorm barracks and no dividers and no acoustic privacy to try to practice what you were trying to learn, so it was maddening. Oh, and Dan and Sherry had just gotten married. This camp was their honeymoon, and they had to spend their entire camp trying to keep the teenagers out of the bushes [laughs] when they would have preferred to be there themselves. [laughs] So years later out on Orcas Island, we were up at the group camp on top of Mount Constitution, cruising through, and there were all these cool little cabins. I have no idea if it was me or if it was David that said, “Now that would be a good place for a guitar camp,” because, you know, you’d have acoustic isolation so you could actually play. But then we were both teaching folk guitar at Everett Community College, going down, and David mentioned it to his advanced class. The following week, one of his students, Larry Squire, came back and said, “Well, I have a friend who runs a Campfire Girl camp, Camp Killoqua” – Smokey Point these days – “at Lake Goodwin. I teach extension classes for Central Washington State College, and I called them, and we can have the camp the third week in August, and Central will give credit for it. Why don’t you do a camp?” So we called Jack Hanson and Cliff Perry [laughs] and, you know, rounded up our buddies to teach and did a camp. That was Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, and if I had known it would last so long, I would have come up with something easier to pronounce. [Laughs] We gradually figured out how to do it because people kept coming back year after year. Most people came back every year. We got to keep building the staff bigger, and it was really fun. The original impetus was a scam so that we could pay for Erick Schoenberg’s plane ticket so he could come back and visit again, and it worked beyond our wildest dreams! A lot of people, a lot of people have gone through that camp and gotten better at playing music for it. When I was a kid, my sister went to music camp, but I couldn’t go to music camp because I was a beginner, right? So when I started music camp, there was room for beginners. So I teach beginners and I love it. I teach advanced students too and I love them, but I learn so much from teaching beginners. They ask really smart questions. [Telephone interruption] HOGUE: So we were talking about the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and its history and how it started. The format that you had when it first started: can you explain how it has morphed into what it is today? BRESKIN: Oh, my. Yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing at all! That first year, as part of registering people [and] intake, I attempted to listen to each person and then suggest which classes would work for them. And then we had one morning class and one afternoon class, and each one was three hours long. People were staggering out of the cabins and falling over whimpering, the teachers along with students. It was like, “Oh, this doesn’t work!” And we were lucky because lots of people came forward with their thinking about what would make it better, and it got better. It wasn’t just people who were thinking well; it was also people who were willing to do work to get it to happen. So many people picked it up and kept it going and contributed to it and felt a sense of ownership of the event that included taking responsibility for it, not just liking it. So that was cool. HOGUE: How did you get the word out about it when you first decided to start this? BRESKIN: Oh dear! We had our Mama Sunday’s crowd, our Bellingham crowd. So we and Jack Hanson, Cliff Perry, the people that we hired to teach, and I think it was probably Jack and Clifford that said, “Oh, you’ve got to have Dudley Hill,” who I guess died recently. It’s like, “Oh, crud, we’re getting old; I don’t like this.” Anyway, there were a bunch of good musicians, and then Dave and I were inviting everybody we knew. On the other hand, Larry Squire was inviting everybody he knew, and who he knew was schoolteachers. And so [we]wound up with all these teachers in their late thirties and early forties who were much better at looking normal than we were and much more committed to looking normal than we were, right? [Telephone interruption] HOGUE: We were talking about the first camp and how there was a mix of people. BRESKIN: Oh, Lord, yes. It is my perception at this point that those schoolteachers were nowhere near as ‘normal’ as they had figured out how to appear. But at the time, boy did they look normal, and we were really committed to not looking normal. [laughs] So these two groups of people get to camp, and I think maybe me and Julie Sakahara may have been the only females in the hippie contingent: it was guys who wanted to learn how to play hot licks. It was somewhat older women who wanted to play John Denver songs. And things were out of phase, out of sync, and it was like, “Uh-oh, what are we going to do here?” And they were sort of standing in two clumps, eyeing each other. And also the ages weren’t right for – you know, there was enough of a gap in age that they weren’t sniffing each other. And we had the good fortune to have Frank Farrell coming in teaching contra dance; it was the first place I’d met contra dance. But he’s a great fiddler. He’s now in Maine. He did a stint at the head of the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes over in Port Townsend. And I also – you know, I bet that might have been [Wheezer?]. Huh. I bet it was. That’s a new thought. [We] stopped in at a fiddle festival when we were driving cross country in ’71 and … Nah, it couldn’t have been [Wheezer?]; it was something else. Anyway, [we] watched Frank win first place at a fiddle festival. Oh, he was good! That was fun. Anyway, Frank came in and called a dance, and there was so much homophobia running around that nobody dared dance with each other, and therefore they had to dance across the lines with the people of the opposite gender. And it really helped – it really helped! The women got to figure out that they didn’t actually smell bad; they weren’t actually filthy. And some of them could sure dance. And the guys figured out, “Well, this wasn’t actually my third grade teacher who treated me so traumatically, and she can dance.” So it was very helpful, after which we could settle in and be human together. But there was still that John Denver stuff. John Denver came later, you know; the first soft sell of folk music was Peter, Paul, and Mary trying to smooth stuff out and make it more palatable and more commercial. But that didn’t keep them from politically oriented stuff. We had them doing Times They Are a-Changing and Blowin’ in the Wind and If I Had a Hammer. You know, it was still a statement about changing the world, a real clear, strong statement about changing the world, and it led a lot of us into the older music, the ‘real’ folk music. For people, even five or ten years younger than me, and people from different areas, John Denver was their path in, but it didn’t really lead them to the fiercely politically active music. Interesting. And so [for] those of us who had gotten our foot in the door into music that led to “We’re going to change this place – my song is my weapon for changing the world,” there was tremendous upset coupled with contempt for what John Denver was doing. So instead of adoring him, we were furious at him for selling out, for not reaching for the deep political content, for the analysis that this is not fair and we’re going to change it. So we had that divide to deal with. One of the biggest things that held back that huge, wide movement in the Sixties where we really did have a sense that everything had to change, and that what made sense was to change it from the ground up and build a world made right that worked for everybody instead of just for rich people … You know, instead of singing about “Oh, those poor people,” it’s like, “Well, fix it!” But the biggest thing that we did that got in our own way was that contempt, because as soon as you put contempt on the table, nothing’s going anywhere. Nobody’s changing, including the person being contemptuous. So that was sad. But somehow we managed to kind of cobble together a community across that divide because everybody was there because they loved music and respected it in each other. HOGUE: And it’s been going for … ? BRESKIN: Well, since ’74. Summer of ’74 was number one, so … the one of ’04 was thirtyone, and the one of 2005 was thirty-two, so this will be the thirty-third year. HOGUE: And during that time, you were also running Mama Sunday’s as well. BRESKIN: I was running Mama Sunday’s till ’78. HOGUE: When you start Mama Sunday’s? BRESKIN: I didn’t start it, but – HOGUE: I mean, when did you start working? BRESKIN: I started working in ’73. [Pause] HOGUE: It is November 21, 2005, and this is the second part of the second interview with Flip Breskin, and I am Coty Hogue. One thing that comes up a lot in the interview and something I want to explore a little bit is the sense of building community and the importance of community in people’s lives, and I wanted to know what community means to you? BRESKIN: Bottom line: it’s people caring about each other and taking some responsibility for the way that we care about each other. Community is a project, not a resource. It’s not just something to latch onto and suck on; it only works if the bulk of the people are taking some responsibility for seeing to it that it happens. We watch for each other and enjoy each other and take the time to get to know each other and hang out. HOGUE: How has community, especially within music, affected you personally, and how has that been an important part of your life? BRESKIN: Having grown up excluded from community, when I met it and recognized it, it was an incredible gift to me. The big social movements, political movements to change things – the unions, the Civil Rights movement, the African end to Apartheid – the big social movements have been singing movements, because when you join your voice with other human beings and sing, all together you are physically actually touching each other. You cause the air to move, and it touches everybody else’s skin. You breathe in the sounds, and it is actually a physical connection with other people. There’s a way that music will go right straight into your heart, where words just wouldn’t. And people can be more courageous when they’re singing together than when they’re not. It’s harder to break a line of people who are singing together than of people who are not. HOGUE: The community here in Bellingham and in the Northwest – you’ve been involved with the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and building up Mama Sunday’s and the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society. Why do you think there has maintained such a strong community with this type of music and this type of scene in Bellingham and in this area? BRESKIN: I think it has something to do with people who have been involved long term who are willing to do the work, not just enjoy it and go away. There are people who show up for music circle even when their lives are busy or the music at Music Circle isn’t going wonderfully, or whatever – hang in for the bumpy times as well as the times where it’s just, “Oh, whoopee!” I think it has to do with the individual people who just keep showing up. HOGUE: And did you consciously ever make a decision, “I’m going to build a community of people in this area,” or if it just sort of happen? BRESKIN: I’m guessing that Richard Scholtz made that decision, and I signed on. It looked like a good idea. There’s also a way that the music is so valuable to me that I’m eager to give that gift to as many people as possible. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit more about that value and how that developed? BRESKIN: Well, it starts with, “Oh, it’s beautiful!” and it’s shared, and it’s [laughs] … There was a point doing guitar camp when we were getting all these demo tapes from people and publicity packets. And there was a point at which we realized we were completely sick of ‘slick;’ [we] didn’t want to see anymore. Give us real people playing real music. These days, for me, it extends to if it’s possible, I avoid having microphones because as soon as there are microphones, it looks like you can’t tell if it’s real or not, because, you know, it might all be effects, pedals, and computer stuff, and all that, like recording so often is these days. When it’s just a person and an instrument, it’s much simpler and it’s much clearer. And if there’s magic to it, you can tell that it’s real magic instead of being manipulated somehow. And there’s a piece of that real magic that – oh, boy. There are people that, when they sing, they are consciously out to try to get you to feel some particular way. It really upsets me when people do that; I actively dislike it. I find myself rebelling, and my spine stiffens, and my heart closes to their music because I don’t want to be manipulated. It feels dishonest and condescending when I encounter it in someone. You know, “Oh, I know I can make you feel this particular way.” Thinking of Dave [Wrong?], thinking of Frankie Armstrong, thinking of Elizabeth Cotten and Tony Rice, there are people who, when they sing – Gordon Bok – when they sing, they are going to the deepest part of themselves, and being there with that song, feeling their own feelings about that song. And as an audience member, I’m invited in, but I’m invited in: it’s my choice whether to join or not. That’s a great gift for them to invite me into that kind of intimacy, and I accept it as a gift. HOGUE: Do you think it’s important as a whole to have a sense of community, whether it be for someone in music or something else? What’s the importance of having that? BRESKIN: There was another kid in my grade school who was even more ostracized than I was. I don’t know what was happening in his house, but he was a very tense child and awkward in his physical movements, uncomfortable in his body. I think he was just scared spitless, but as a boy he got beat up really bad and treated with contempt by everybody. I didn’t go anywhere near him both because he was gawky and awkward, and also because boy, I already had it hard enough. But once I escaped that small community where everybody knew you by the time you were out of kindergarten and was in the wider world where I could find peers to hang out with that were happy to hang out with me, when I went back for my ten-year high school reunion, I went and found the guy and apologized and sat down and asked him what kind of life he had figured out to make for himself after that incredibly difficult beginning. He bowls. I hope he is still bowling. He lives alone; he may have a pet but doesn’t live with other humans. Probably they don’t seem safe enough. But he bowls like five nights a week, so he’s found some kind of community and, you know, the best he could figure. [He] works as an engineer so he makes a living and gets to do work where he doesn’t have to work too closely with other people. And in part that’s a picture of a tragedy, and in part it’s a picture of the triumph of the human spirit that he found some way to find some community anyway. Winnie Mandela, spending all that time in solitary confinement in South Africa, described choosing to love the ants in her prison cell, that they were other beings there for her to be connected with. I think we’re born expecting to be fully connected with other human beings and be welcomed, be cherished, be thought well about, and for everyone of us it’s a shock and tremendously confusing when we’re babies to be born into such chaos where everybody’s too scared and too overloaded to really be able to think well about and get right in there close with other people. And music gives us moments where we can let go of it all, blend our voices with other people, or at least have other people’s voices wrap us in the arms of the voice and get to be welcome. When my youngest was … Clearwater years, I don’t know, eight to twelve years old, maybe something like that, maybe up to fifteen, he got into going to science fiction conventions. I went with him; I was bodyguard, thank you. And I’d get there and there were some people having just a wonderful time, you know, playing with costumes, playing with games, interacting with other people. And then around the edges, there were all these other people who didn’t know how to plug in, didn’t expect to be welcome, and they stood around the edges looking desperately lonely and bitterly resentful about it and just vibing everybody with huge amounts of anger, you know, but simmering under control, just standing around looking like they felt like losers and it was everybody else’s fault for not recognizing their genius, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Oh yeah, I’ve been there! So the first time, I turned around and went back home and got my guitar and settled down in one of the hospitality suites and got a sing-along going. And all those lost-looking, grumpy-looking people came in and sang and stopped looking grumpy really fast because they were welcome. And it was a level at which I could welcome them without exposing myself to really extensive risk of taking charge of their life and, you know, being their only friend and, you know, all of that. But I could open the door wide for that evening and say, “You come on in, you’re welcome here.” And the whole feel of the thing changed, and I felt like my son was now much safer. He knew where I was, and if he got into trouble he could come get me and he did and, you know, it worked okay. HOGUE: Did you ever think that you would play such a prominent role in this kind of community? BRESKIN: Never had a clue. Never had a clue. It was beyond – in some ways, it’s beyond my largest dreams for myself as a child. In other ways, it isn’t. Hopalong Cassidy: when I was a kid, there was Hopalong Cassidy. Nope, nope – got the wrong guy: Cisco Kid. Cisco and Pancho. They rode from town to town; they were sidekicks who really liked each other and would go rescue people, set things right, and ride off into the sunset. It was very 1950s cowboy. And the racism was unbelievable, looking back at it. But what attracted me as a 3- and 4-yearold was buddies who loved each other and weren’t afraid to show it and stuck with each other through thick and thin and stood up for each other in any way necessary and went out and made the world better, fixed things. That was my little girl dream of what I wanted to do when I grew up. HOGUE: And you have sort of done it with the music. BRESKIN: Oh, a little bit. HOGUE: And how do you keep the motivation and energy to keep doing all this after all these years? BRESKIN: Well, the music – I mean, beauty makes its own demands. It just does; you get out and you do. And sometimes I burn out and I don’t do any concerts for a long time, and sometimes I’m a total fool and tell too many people in a row that I will help and get in over my head and then I’m fried and won’t do anything again for a while. And some of it is figuring out how to get help. And more and more people do step forward and say, “Okay, I’ll take a piece of this.” You know, Richard Scholtz figured out that, as far as I know, Homemade Music Society runs different from any other music society anywhere, that instead of there being a committee or an individual who puts on the concerts, there isn’t much that happens from outside. Richard talks to people who go regularly and says, “Who would you like to see there? Who would you like to see there enough that you’re willing to go invite them and get people to come?” And [he] talks people into doing one concert a year and we mentor them. And some people do more than one concert a year, but it generates from inside, you know, who people are excited about rather than it generating from outside about who pushes hardest to get to have a concert or who’s most famous or any of that. It’s just, is there somebody who is so excited that they’ll go do the work to get that to happen. And it gets us this really rich mix of music. Did that answer – ? I forgot what you asked. HOGUE: Yeah, that’s good. I can’t remember what I asked either. BRESKIN: [It’s] just [that] there’s more assistance these days, that people will put on concerts, and when there’s somebody I would really love to have in concert, I’m not going to do it, and I know I’m not going to do it, then I’ll put it out to the Flip’s Picks list, which is about five hundred people, and fairly often, somebody will step forward and say, “I will host that at my house,” and then I will hold their hand while they figure it out. I mean, Colleen and Mark around the corner did [Bad Humphreys?] this last time. They came to my house for the concert the year before; they loved it. They said, “Okay, we’ll do it. We’ve got the big living room. And they did it, and I wasn’t even in town. You know, I sent out a bunch of emails saying, “They’re coming again – if you liked them last time, you’ll like them this time!” But they came, they had a good-sized concert, they had a ball, and Colleen and Mark were glad they’d done it, so they’ll do it again. So there are more people to do it, so it’s not all up to me. And for me, the biggest picture is, if I’m really going to take responsibility, some of the responsibility is replicating myself so it isn’t just me. If the job’s actually worth doing, it shouldn’t be left in one person’s hands. HOGUE: I’m going to switch to sort of more light-hearted little things. One of the questions [is], you talk about learning songs when you were younger when you were in the car, and I’ve noticed that you have a really vast knowledge of songs, and I’m wonder how did you build up such a repertoire. Did it just come naturally? BRESKIN: One song at a time. One of the interesting questions is, “How about all those songs you find in your brain that you never actively invited in and you aren’t really particularly pleased that they are there?” I mean, songs are imprintable and then they’re there. The term ‘song catcher’ is an old term, and I was catching songs from birth. [I] used to use the term to describe myself when I was doing a concert and people wanted something to say about me, and then that movie came out and I can’t use it anymore because they think I’m referring to that. [laughs] I like the stuff that makes me laugh, I like the stuff that makes me cry. And if it doesn’t move me emotionally, mostly it doesn’t much go in. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about your style that you developed? Was that influenced a lot by Elizabeth Cotten’s? BRESKIN: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. HOGUE: It seems, when I heard you play, it was very unique for me before I heard those things, and so I can hear your style, and I think of it as a Flip style. BRESKIN: Well, finger style, and I learned to play lots and lots and lots of instrumentals and didn’t sing because I was too mortified to sing. But I got the melody out of the guitar, and I got some kind of accompaniment going, and then I figured out alternating bass, so I had that. But I also got into bass runs and the Carter Family stuff, Mother Maybelle stuff. [Plays] That style crept in, and then there were bass lines that – there was that counterpoint stuff [plays] where there’s no chords. And then there was a point at which I discovered – and somebody didn’t show me, I discovered – I was trying to figure out how to sing harmony – and I figured out if I moved the melody line over a string but within the same scale, what I got was a harmony. That’s just totally cool, and that’s kind of started to creep in. [plays and sings:] Love comes to the simple heart In the simplest of ways In the face of simple malice She will simply find a way She will find a way to love Though her way be locked and barred Uninvited in her wisdom Love comes to the simple heart which is totally cool and very nearly effortless to just shift over a string and keep playing. Once you’ve played enough melodies, it’ll just kind of happen. So that got in there; there was a point at which I decided I needed to learn to accompany songs, and [I] sat there and I did my boomchuck work until I could do it. And finger patterns: [plays]. And then you start mixing it all together. For me, when I did that CD, the most notable thing that came out of it for me took years before I noticed how many people had gifted me with that CD; I kind of knew it was happening, but I couldn’t quite face it. But in some ways, the most lasting gift was hearing my hands on the guitar because I’d only ever, you know, done it while I was doing it, right? So hearing all the stuff my hands were doing while I was busy singing was really amazing to me. So that was cool. HOGUE: When I interviewed Richard, he talked about one of the memories he had of you when he first got to know you, was that you did cartoon songs. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because he wouldn’t elaborate. BRESKIN: TV theme songs. I got into TV theme songs: why I got into TV theme songs is beyond me, probably because I started with the Mickey Mouse Club theme song and kind of kept going. And then somebody gave me volume 1 and volume 2 of the TV theme songs sing-along song book. And somebody else gave me a Walt Disney song book because I was doing that kind of stuff, and I kind of poked around in those too and just got into it because they were funny, or it was funny to play them. And there were some great musicians, whose names I do not know, who were getting hired to do the TV theme songs, and boy, they were good! I’ve just been thinking lately, I’ve got to go back and learn Leave It to Beaver because it was really good. But I was thinking … [plays]. It’s been a while. And I’m guessing that you don’t recognize it, but it’s a pretty tune, right? It’s the theme song to Maverick, which was this James Garner – yeah, they were great tunes. They were short enough and interesting enough that they just grabbed me. I have no good excuse [laughs] – I was raised on them. HOGUE: Well, just to sort of finish up the interview as a whole, I guess some of the things is community and listening, and how has the importance of listening and the importance of everything come together for you and enriched your life? How has that happened? BRESKIN: Well, it started with the music and I figured out I could do it. And in recent years, it shifted. We moved over to this neighborhood, and I had the Flip’s Picks music list, which has grown over the years. But I got it that I could also do a neighborhood list. I treated guitar camp – after a long time, I got it that it could be a laboratory, that there were things that worked there in my life, and the question became, “How can I bring that stuff home and make my life more like guitar camp?” because I’d leave guitar camp every year broken-hearted, desolate – nothing until next year. It almost felt like I didn’t really have a life. So I started looking to see what is it about music camp that works? One, it’s getting to make music with people. But it’s also having time to stop and talk and have the deep conversations. It’s the fact that there are no cars there, that you walk at human speed, so when you’re passing somebody, there’s time to make eye contact, stop and yak for a minute. At minimum, you don’t pass people without meeting their eyes and smiling at them. It’s a very different way to be. It’s so much less isolated: gathering, hanging out with people. I decided that I would be less terrified if I knew my immediate neighbors around me, so I went after that really hard in this neighborhood in the most organized way I could figure. [interruption] So when we bought this house, it closed on Thanksgiving, we got dressed up in our Halloween costumes and went door to door and knocked on every door that was open to give away candy and said, “We don’t want candy; we want to introduce ourselves,” and got people to tell me who they were, and I had my little book, and by gum – I didn’t feel comfortable writing in front of them, but as soon as we were out the door, I was making notes and where I could, I’d write down the address, who lived there, some description so that I could remember them later, phone number if they were willing to give it to me, emails where I could get them. And then everybody disappeared till spring. But since I worked at home and had my office out on the front porch, I was watching out the window, and as soon as people came out and started gardening in the spring, if I possibly could I’d stop what I was doing and go out and hunker down next to them and start pulling weeds. They thought I was weird, but that was no surprise to me. But people don’t turn you down if you’re sitting there pulling weeds with them; they just don’t. So I started getting to know people. And then Susan Gardner showed up from around the corner trying to gather people to do a neighborhood association because the Greenways trail down in the ravine by the house – there was a bid to take it over and use it as a utilities corridor and run these huge power lines down it. So she wanted to organize against that, and I said sure. So I followed in her tracks, came to the meetings, got involved, got organized. And everybody I met, I asked them if they had email and would be willing to let me email them and build a neighborhood email list. So we had a neighborhood email list, and it is running. It’s over five hundred houses now. And I sit in the middle of that web. I’ve got a buddy that runs the City of Seattle website, or Seattle City Light website, I’m not sure how it works, but he said that part of his job is providing web space for neighborhood organizations there, and he said that they are the most volatile organizations of any he knows of because the people trying to work together have nothing in common except proximity. They’ll have very different religious and political beliefs, pictures of what community is supposed to look like, the whole bit. So it’s very challenging and tends to be explosive, and when they blow up, they blow sky high. So fool that I am, I sit in the middle of it, and if people want to send something to the whole neighborhood, they have to send it to me, and I either send it or I don’t, and I either edit it or I don’t before I send it out. I clean out victim-y stuff, and I clean out attacks, and I clean out contempt, and I clean out the stuff that will cause it to blow up. And for me, as a Jew, it’s a completely insane thing for me to do because I’m putting myself in a high-profile position where people can get upset at me, and sometimes do, and when people get upset at me, I terrified and I get paralyzed, and I’m putting off doing everything, and I can’t get out of bed in the morning, and blah-blahblah. But the tradeoff is I sure know a lot of people now, and I know everybody on the block; they all know me. With Elliot going missing, everybody I see is saying, “Did you find your cat yet?” I’m getting offers of help. People are being very generous with me. So it’s cool that I’ve actually got my community. I love it. HOGUE: Well, I wanted to thank you for doing this very, very much. I don’t know if Cattywompus will allow you to do one more song…? BRESKIN: Oh, sure. Yeah, we can work that. So is it One Heart at a Time or is it something else? HOGUE: Whatever you want to do. That would probably be a nice little ending. BRESKIN: It’s either that or I Believe in Music. I think it’s that because I’m more likely to be able to get to it. [plays and sings] This time we’re going to change the world One heart at a time Man and woman, boy and girl One heart at a time Heart to heart, our lives entwine Heart to heart, our hopes combine It starts with your heart hearing mine One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time Lessons that the lost heart learns One heart at a time It works out if we just take turns One heart at a time Brothers, sisters, can’t you see It’s as simple as can be I hear you and you hear me One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time Look at what contempt has cost One heart at a time Every chance for closeness lost One heart at a time Find the courage that we need To face each other’s rage and greed Listening is the future’s seed One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time People of all different kinds One heart at a time Linking lives and hands and minds One heart at a time Links of caring we create Can pull this world away from hate Listening like it’s not too late One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time HOGUE: Thank you. BRESKIN: You’re welcome. What I didn’t talk about at all was co-counseling, re-evaluation co-counseling, RC. I’ve been doing since 1978, and it’s where I really learned to listen and to think about listening, and to see the music building and the community building I’ve done through that filter of listening and getting it that we don’t have to be professionals with huge amounts of training to listen to one another when we’re having painful emotions, that being listened to and listening is a healing thing to do. I’ve just learned tons about building community there. HOGUE: Can you explain just a little, just a tiny bit about – ? BRESKIN: Sure. It’s that song; [it] was written to my co-counselors. It’s just … we make an exchange, and the exchange we make is listening to one another, loving, respectful attention. And what’s usually thought of as psychotherapy has a built-in imbalance of power, where one person is seen as the expert to fix the other person, and this just dumps that whole thing. Money is not what’s exchanged; you exchange listening to each other. I’ll listen to you for half an hour, you’ll listen to me for half an hour, or two hours, or whatever. Or five minutes on the phone or three minutes on the phone right when I’m in the crunch of ‘can’t deal with something,’ I can pick up the phone, phone down the list until I find somebody who’s home to swap a few minutes with. And it just makes so much difference clearing my mind. Some of it was noticing – the original inspiration was getting it that sometimes you think better after a good cry. You don’t necessarily feel better, but by gum you think better. Our brains get all clogged, and sometimes tears are just – you know, if eyes are windows of the soul, sometimes you need tears to wash them clean so you can see again, both out and in. So we go there. Co-counseling has quietly been involved in a lot of big stuff; the concept ‘support group’ was originally a co-counseling idea. When there are big meetings, they go better if you start by doing mini-sessions where everybody turns to the person next to them [and] takes three minutes or five minutes apiece. Everybody takes a turn, and when it’s over, everybody there has been listened to, has had the experience of being listened to. There’s more and more of that creeping out into the world and happening. One of the other early pieces that the people who discovered it, Harvey Jackins, was a union organizer for the machinists at Boeing during World War II, and he came at as an old Commie, as a socialist, as a world changer, wanting to set things right. He started noticing that people were sinking faster than you could listen them through it, and often it had to do with effects of sexism or racism or classism, that people were just getting slammed so hard that they couldn’t cry hard enough and fast enough to dump all of the confusion that was coming in. And he figured out that you have to also change the world; there’s no way that any one woman can recover from sexism all by herself; we have to actually change things. But the way we get slammed as women tends to divide us from other women, that we tend to be contemptuous or scared or, you know, we’ve all been mistreated by other girls, the bullying that goes on that’s verbal instead of getting beat up leaves us confused and scared to get close and trust other women, so we have to work through the ways we treat each other badly as women and permit ourselves to be disrespected as women, that even if every man and every institution changed overnight, we’d still have the work to do to heal our own lives because those institutionalized hurts come in as individual heartbreaks one at a time into our own hearts. And we have to clean that stuff up too in order to think flexibly and joyfully go out and set things right, because of course we want them right. So that is co-counseling’s place in it, and it’s been a – [pause in the tape]. We’re there? You know how much confidence I have in the power of music to change the world. What you may not know is that I have as much confidence in co-counseling, and I put as much time and energy into co-counseling as I do in music. HOGUE: Thank you so much for sharing everything. BRESKIN: Sure.
Show less

Title: Flip Breskin oral history - October 24, 2005
Date: 2005-10-24
Description: First of two separate interviews. Ms. Breskin briefly describes her experiences as the first Jewish family on Mercer Island, and how this isolation as a child led her to music. She moved to Bellingham in 1970 at the height of the counter-culture movement and recollects her connections with the South Fork Bluegrass Band. She relates her experiences as one of the founding members of the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, and the various camps and workshops that sprang forth from that, the Sound Acoustic Music Workshop and the California Coast Music Camp for example. Ms. Breskin also discusses the influences she had on the WCHMS, and her thoughts and experiences in the Bellingham folk music scene in general. She explores the impact that musicians like Elizabeth Cotten had on her own folk music experience and her personal connections to other folk artists like Janis Ian, Larry Hanks, Mike Marker, Eric Schoenberg, and Richard Ruskin. She explains her connection to Mama Sundays, now the Underground Coffee House on Western's campus, its history, and its connection to the music scene in Bellingham.
Digital Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Local Identifier: Breskin20051024
Text preview (might not show all results): Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview ti
Show moreCollection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview title: Interview with Flip Breskin Interview Date: October 24, 2005 Interviewer: Coty Hogue Original transcription by: Laurie Brion, March 2010 COTY HOGUE: All right, today is Monday, the 24th, and I am Coty Hogue, and I am interviewing Flip Breskin, and – FLIP BRESKIN: Do you want the year? HOGUE: Yeah. It is October 24, 2005. Before we start this, I just want to make sure that I have your permission to record this. BRESKIN: You do have my permission. [interruption] What do you think? Is this any better? HOGUE: That’s really nice. There’s more of an echo, but that’s okay. We’re not going for too much of sound quality on this. Okay, so we were talking about Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, and I was wondering – we talked about how it first started out and how it has morphed into what it is today, and how that gradually took place. BRESKIN: Well, we gradually figured out what worked and what didn’t work about teaching. I mean, that first session, I remember we had like two and a half hour-long classes, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, or three hour[s] – everybody was dying, staggering out of class, falling over. It was too long; it didn’t work. Also, that first year, I tried to listen to each person play when they came in and suggest what classes would make sense for them, and that was also too much to do. So over the years, a lot of different people had ideas, and we incorporated them, and we were smart enough to remember them, which is really good. Stuff that showed up was things like, the first afternoon and evening, having each person who is teaching get up for five minutes and play a little and talk about what they’re teaching and what they’d like people to know in order to show up for that class. At some point, I started sorting levels and styles, areas. So, like, finger picking, flat picking, chord styles, vocal stuff, other instruments. And at some point, there was, sort of, fundamentals; you know, what are those key skills that you’ve got to have? When I was a kid, I never got to go to music camp; my sister went to music camp, but I never got to go, so when I started a music camp, I, by God, made room for beginners! So we have them, and we figured out that it takes a lot more skill to teach beginners well than it does to teach advanced players well, because advanced players have already taught themselves to learn. So it’s a place I’ve focused for a long time. Something that I’ve noticed is that people actually started playing better; it wasn’t just who we attracted as students. Some of them actually got better by the next year, which was really exciting. We got into doing evaluations of the teachers. Teachers who had 2 lots of handouts got praised for it; teachers who had no handouts got praised for that. So it was like – hmmph! (laughs) There was a point at which we sorted out that we needed teachers who had – they were inspirational musicians, they were skilled teachers – you know, people who had some experience at assisting other people to learn – and who were warm, generous people who could interact socially. In any given session, we could get away with a couple of people, maybe even three people, who didn’t have all three skills, but [there] couldn’t be very much of that, and people really noticed. So you know, at a really advanced level, you could have somebody who didn’t have a clue about how to teach, but if they were inspirational enough and generous enough, it’d go anyway. But the students got better year after year. Eventually there were a lot of students hanging around, not going to classes. They weren’t interested in going to classes; they just wanted to be there, you know, just sit around and jam. And camp kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and we went to a second session, and it didn’t help. I don’t think it even got us a year’s break from being too big. And we went to three weeks and it didn’t much help. Those were years where our waiting list was as long as the list of who got in. The next step was – I think Richard Scholtz was probably who was really smart about it – he had a vision of, “All right, let’s let other people start other camps and let’s help them,” instead of turning it into a real job, you know, year-around, blah blah. We talked about well, we could buy a camp and set up and do a year-around something. Nobody really quite wanted to take on all that work. People thought about it; I thought about it, but that’s a lot of work. So there was Jam Camp, which started out called Sound Acoustic Music Workshop. John Miller started that one. We had a non-profit, so we had the umbrella. And then there was California Coast Music Camp, and boy, I spent a lot of time on the phone that year. Lissie and a bunch of her friends decided they wanted to start one in California, so we let them use our non-profit so they could rent a camp, and [i] just spent a lot of time on the phone listening to them saying, “Well, this is what we did when we hit that,” and mostly just saying, “Yeah, you can do it.” So that’s California Coast Music Camp, and that’s going strong. I got invited up to one in Smithers, B.C., Bulkley Valley Music Festival; it’s amazing! It’s so cool! It’s in the lap of God; it’s sitting in the middle of this huge bowl of incredible high mountain peaks. It’s beautiful! And the whole community comes, of all ages. It’s very cool, and it was a real honor to be invited, so I had a good time at that. Somebody who had been to camp wanted something and got people together and they did something. There’s one back East, SAMW, Summer Acoustic Music Workshop, which is Lorraine Lee and Bob Frankie and a bunch of folks in WUMB radio out of Boston. They got two weeks at this point. I mean, they’re all over the place. [I] found out that Augusta Heritage Festival apparently just lifted our schedule whole and used it, which is fine; it works. It took us a long time to get there. There was briefly a classical guitar camp on Puget Sound, but it didn’t survive. You know, over the years we’ve done a fair number of classes about classical technique for folkies. Got into doing vocal music – all sorts of things. HOGUE: Was it one of the first of its kind then? BRESKIN: Yeah. HOGUE: And did you ever expect it to get so big and – ? 3 BRESKIN: Oh, no, we were just hoping that we could get a plane ticket for Erick again the next year! (laughs) It was either the first or second year that Tony Trischka and Peter Langston crashed: they drove all night and showed up. It was really dear; you know, they got away with it – early years. (laughs) It was a good thing they got away with it. Peter is one of the people who runs it these days. That’s good. HOGUE: And you’re able to get quite an impressive list of teachers to come too, and what do you think the draw is for them to come? BRESKIN: For a lot of people, Guitar Camp is seen as the original, the big one, the mother ship. And there are a lot of people who would like to teach there so they can say that they taught there, you know, or to come check it out – like that. People come teach there – it’s sometimes because of the other cool people who are there but also because there’s such a vision. I mean, these days there are listings of all the music camps in Sing Out! Magazine, and you’re reading down all the descriptions of things, and then you hit Guitar Camp, and it says, “A fiercely egalitarian – .” You know, quack quack. It sounds really different in the language from anything else, but there is still some piece of that original vision that we’re going to get together and create a listening space and really listen to each other and that music can change lives and change the world. I mean, that was my picture of music, and I think I was pretty fierce about it, and you know, some of that is still running. HOGUE: You bring that up a lot, about how when you were able to really listen to Elizabeth Cotton and really sharing with each other. Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of that? BRESKIN: Yeah. Listening is an incredibly powerful thing to do, and listening as a group is even more powerful. When a group listens really well, it’s incredibly inspirational to the musicians, and they’ll dig down deep and give things they didn’t even know they had. And it’s true not just of music, but listening to people talk about their lives, when they’re listened to well, they think of things they never would have thought of if nobody was listening. Does that do it? HOGUE: That’s great. BRESKIN: Yeah. Also, you get smarter when you’re listened to well. You hear what’s coming out of your own mouth. At this point, I’m completely committed to listening as political change work, that if somebody is holding an irrational position and you can find a way to keep yourself there, caring about the human being that’s spouting this hurtful nonsense, sometimes after a while they can hear what’s coming out of their own mouth and realize that’s not what they had in mind either. It takes the relationships to do it. And people come to Guitar Camp bringing the music they love and encounter the music other people love, and it gets really moving. And there have been some interesting outcomes over the years. Yeah. Somebody who wrote Richard Scholtz a letter way back when, saying, “I went home from camp, and I put my guitar in the closet and I haven’t 4 touched it since. I think it’s a good thing because I’m rethinking why I’m doing music.” And I think it was a good thing. Or Linda Waterfall came to camp and went home from camp going, “I’m not going to play in bars anymore; I’m going to play where people will listen to me and are capable of doing so.” And that was a huge turning point in her life, and it benefits all of us that she’s playing music that she’s got her heart completely in. HOGUE: It seems like there’s a lot of regular people that come there, and a lot of people who have met each other there that have started playing together. How is that for you, being someone who had a part in starting this and seeing that community come together and people meeting each other? BRESKIN: There’s a sense of wonder to it. It’s a gift to me, and also it feels like I have received the gift of having gotten to do some work in the world that I can see that I had an impact on the world by introducing these musicians to one another. There’s music that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So many people do so much work and never get to see the results of the work they did; it’s as if it just disappeared. There was an old man in the nursing home that I used to go play music with and just loved him: Julius Green. Early in the Northwest’s history, he worked on the railroad building those big trestle bridges, and he could talk about how it was done. But he could also go back later and look and go, “I built that – my hands.” There’s less and less of that in our world, and I’m one of those few people who get to say, “My hands, my work caused this to happen.” And that’s very cool. You know, I can’t take too much credit for it because those people went off and played music with each other. All I did was I was the yenta, I was the midwife, I gave them a chance to meet each other. A lot of my staffing decisions had to do with: I want these two people to be teaching the same week so they meet each other. HOGUE: That’s neat. You also have been an incredible figure in the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society – BRESKIN: Oh! (laughs) HOGUE: – for people who look at it now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your role now here in the Bellingham folk music scene with that organization. BRESKIN: Oh. Well, Richard started it, and then for some years I went sporadically, but it was lovely. And then Laura Smith was running it, and at some point she was struggling with some of the personalities that were showing up, and I decided I needed to show up for her because I love her dearly. That was the thing that got me out the door to get there, but I’d get there and I’d have so much fun [that] I was always the last one out the door at the end. (laughs) Then, you know, two weeks later, here we go all over again: “Oh, I can’t go. Oh, I have to go, Laura needs me.” HOGUE: And this is with the Music Circle? BRESKIN: This is Music Circle. And then at some point, somebody burned out on doing the concerts, so I undertook to do the concerts. And then at some point, I burned 5 out and somebody else did the concerts. Yeah, that was back when we had somebody take responsibility for a year or six months or a quarter, or however long we could corner them into it. I think it was Laura stepped down that I stepped up to the plate and said, “Okay, I’ll host the Music Circles; they should keep happening.” And for that, it’s really been flailing around for me figuring out how to do it so it really works. And it’s gone through periods of not being very interactive. It’s getting better in this period. And people come and go through the years, but some people come and go at glacial speeds. I mean, some of them zip through, but some people … you know, are there for a decade or more. That’s pretty sweet. HOGUE: I asked Richard this question, and I guess you sort of touched on it, but what do you see the future of the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society becoming? What do you see in the future of that sort of organization? BRESKIN: As long as there are people interested in hosting concerts, and as long as there are people who are interested in getting together and sharing songs, tunes, I think it’ll keep going, and if it doesn’t keep going, I don’t think it’s a tragedy; it’s just something else is happening. And I think the biggest impact that it’s had has been a whole lot of people have learned how to host a house concert and aren’t scared to do it. It’s kind of livened things up around here; people have heard music they wouldn’t have heard otherwise and have found out that they too can be a mover and shaker in the music community, that all you have to do is talk your friends into coming to hear someone. And people have met each other and gone off and played music with each other, and that’s a very cool thing. Yeah, you wind up with music buddies, not just at Music Circle, but – you know. If they’d just go away and play with each other, that’s fine too. HOGUE: Bellingham seems to have a really strong community in this music scene. Why do you think that that has been able to stay so strong in this area? BRESKIN: There are key people who have taken responsibility to see to it that musicians support each other and that concerts and dances and classes and stuff happens. And there are enough of us that it goes. Also, it’s been an attractive place for a lot of musicians, so people have moved here. Larry Hanks and Linda Allen and Mike Marker and a bunch of people have moved here through the years – some have moved on, some are still here – because of the lively and mutually supportive music scene. That’s a very cool thing, because then they’re here doing things in the community. HOGUE: Do you think Bellingham is unique in that way? Is there very many places that you have encountered … ? BRESKIN: You know, I have no idea, because it doesn’t seem extraordinary to me, but people come through and they say, “Whoa!” So it may be more unusual than I think. HOGUE: Through all this playing and going to concerts, you talked a little bit that when you first started playing guitar, you didn’t sing, really; you didn’t have a voice. Can you talk about finding your voice? 6 BRESKIN: Yeah … Boy, mostly it was shame in the way, the non-musician stuff, and I knew I didn’t sound like Joan Baez, by gum. So when I let my guitar do the speaking and the singing, I was a lot more comfortable. When I was at Fairhaven in the early years, there was a group voice class, and I went and took it, and it was somewhat helpful. And at guitar camp, when voice classes started to happen, I’d go to them hoping somebody could rescue me. You know. And at some point, the words just felt so compelling that I gave up and decided I was going to have some mercy for myself and a little less for my audiences – that the words mattered. And I think some of why they were so compelling was that sense of you can tell people things in a song, use words in a song, that can change the way they see the world. So if songs are my tool for changing the world, the words are very powerful. I care what I sing very much. Once in a while, in a fairly private group, I’ll go truly snarky, but most of the time, that’s not what I have in mind. I have in mind gathering people together and cleaning up the polarization, resisting the polarization going on in our society. Things are more polarized now than I think even they were at the end of the Vietnam War. It’s amazing watching that happen, and the way that we’re being encouraged to have contempt for one another and to take more and more rigid positions. And I’m fighting it. I’m fighting with everything I’ve got. It means reaching out to the human beings and helping connect them to each other. And music is a very powerful tool for that. HOGUE: Can you talk just a little bit about maybe why you think that such a big polarization has happened? BRESKIN: Well, it’s being fed; let’s start there. North Americans in general, but specifically U.S.ers, are under tremendous stress that the jobs are going away, we’re hitting end points on things like gasoline, oil. We’re being increasingly isolated as we use more than our share of the planet’s resources and are encouraged to use it and throw it away, and waste. I think it hurts us in the heart, and people feel awful about it. We’re increasingly isolated; we have sex stuffed up our nose twenty-four hours a day with advertising, and just in general, sex being used as a distraction. And we get more and more and more isolated, and we feel awful about ourselves, and people are trying to escape those feelings, and we’re encouraged to blame those feelings, pin them on other people, whether it’s on immigrants or right-wing Republicans or … you know, the Communist threat has collapsed; we’ve got to have something. So everybody’s being pointed at somebody – Liberals. And there’s all this modeling of treating one another with contempt. And every human being – if you take their whole life into account, every human being has been doing the very best they could at every single moment of their life. And if you take their whole picture into account, it’s actually a very good ‘best.’ So we don’t deserve blame; we don’t deserve contempt. We do need to step in and set some limits and say this behavior is not going to work. I don’t believe in punishment; I do believe in setting limits, and sometimes that includes jail and locking people up if we don’t have the resources to do anything else, to keep the compulsions that they’re under from harming other people. But they don’t deserve blame; they don’t deserve contempt. None of us do. So that’s the work I’m really doing. 7 HOGUE: And does that come out – I mean, when did you start actually writing songs, and does that work try to come out in the songs that you write? BRESKIN: Yeah, and I’ve been working at making them more accessible, but I’m thinking the very first song I wrote was for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. I kind of had it in my head that she’d been cleared, she was done accumulating objects, so I thought, “Well, I could write her a song,” you know. It was her sixtieth birthday; she’s eighty-two at this point this past summer. And you know, I put it off and put it off and put it off, and uh-oh, here we were, it was getting close. And I asked Linda Allen if I could borrow her song “October Roses” and write new verses. Bless Linda’s heart, she said I could. And so I sat down to write, and up until that moment, I’d been pretty pissed at my mom for all the things she hadn’t done, and I decided what I was going to do was write only about the things she’d done well, that I was going to focus there. And it was a deliberate decision, so I basically did her life story from my point of view about what she’d done right. Things were messy enough between me and my mom at that point that I went in for her sixtieth birthday, left guitar camp and went to go take her her song, and what I did was I printed it off and I took it, and I said, “I wrote you a song,” and I handed her the lyrics, but I didn’t even take a guitar with me because my singing just mortified her; I didn’t have a pretty voice, you know. So I wasn’t going anywhere near that one, right? And I remember, we were upstairs; there were all these people out in the garden and I caught her alone for a minute and handed her the piece of paper, and she starts to read, and then she starts to tear up, and then she starts to look at me after a line; she’d look at me with the tears in her eyes, looking like, “You really thought that? You really noticed that?” It was very cool. And then she said, “Well, are you going to sing it for my guests?” [laughs] So we scared up a junker guitar, and I played it for her guests and they all cried. It was very sweet because they didn’t know. She was orphaned; there was all sorts of stuff in her life that was pretty rough that she found her way through and did her best. I’m thinking that that was a push against polarization right there, the polarization between me and Mom. Yeah, I just keep reaching for, “How do I do this? How do I be direct and clear with people about what I want to have happen and what I’m seeing?” HOGUE: We’re sort of running out of time on the tape, but I have a couple more that I’d like to ask for this session. I’ve heard you referred to as, in different ways, the godmother of folk music in the Northwest. [Breskin laughs] And I’m not pulling that just from Rob because I’ve heard it from other people. I was just wondering how you feel about that title. BRESKIN: [still laughing] Well, it’s very embarrassing, and … It’s a piece about getting to see my work go out in the world. It’s very sweet; I don’t want to get a swelled head. I think maybe the quote I’m proudest of is Peter Langston saying something about a musical force of nature. It’s like when I get down and push, it moves! If I really want it to happen, I’ll make it happen. My father was an attorney and did a huge amount of pro bono work for the good of the community. I see the concerts that I put on, or the musical work that I’m doing in general, if I’m doing it right, it’s a gift to the community, it’s a gift to the musician. I always used to think when I was hiring somebody for camp, will they be a gift to the students, will they be a gift to the rest of the staff, and will the 8 camp be a gift to them? And if all of those are true, then that’s the right person to hire. So it’s a gift economy. It runs different than a for-profit economy. HOGUE: How do you keep that drive, because you’ve been doing it for so long, and you’re still doing it full force pretty much; how do you keep that drive to continue? BRESKIN: Oh, well, I burn out, and I procrastinate, and I’m getting slowly better at asking for help. Richard Scholtz was so smart to get people – I think the Homemade Music Society is different from anyplace else, that he restructured it so long ago that if you come to concerts fairly regularly and you want to host a concert, we will back you and assist you while you host it. And everybody kind of does one a year, or more if they want, but it keeps people from burning out so bad and it keeps new people learning to do it. And so there are more people putting on concerts so I can go and I can know they’re happening, but I don’t have to do them all, which is really good. HOGUE: One more thing for this tape: how did you get started with Flip’s Picks? You said there was sort of a precursor to that, but that seems to be something that a lot of people are on and is a way to keep informed about this kind of music in the community. What was your idea for starting that up? BRESKIN: Yeah, there were those quarterly posters. I did one one time. Richard Scholtz and Michael Burnett were teaching a class at Fairhaven long after I’d graduated. I was gone, but I went back because they were teaching folk music class, and I was curious, so I went. I printed up … boy, it used to be harder to do, but I printed up a list of everything coming up that I was really excited about and handed them out. I had a legalsized sheet of paper divided in thirds lengthwise and in half crosswise, and it wound up a little bigger than a dollar bill, but about those dimensions. [I] printed them on green paper and said, “Okay, here’s what’s happening,” and realized oh my God, this is easier than trying to put up posters because I could take a stack of them in my wallet and just carry them around and hand them to everybody and found oh, that works really, really, really well. At some point, I kind of shifted over to email because it was even easier. And these days, there are around five hundred people on the email list, and it’s local. There are a few in Skagit Valley, a few up in B.C., but mostly it’s Bellingham and the county around. And sometimes I have to push myself; sometimes I go for months without sending something out and feel like I’m disappointing people and feel really bad about myself. But mostly I push myself and I get them out so people will know what’s happening. And it’s kind of a dangerous thing to do because my filter is what do I want to be in the front row for, and I don’t want to put it in if I don’t want to go. I don’t want to tell people about everything, just what I’m excited about, because I figured that’s what I had at Mama Sundays, was what I was excited about. And it worked. So there’s some piece of my integrity there, that I don’t want to push people to go to something that I wouldn’t like or don’t know if I’d like, but it can really piss some people off because they’d like to be on the list because it’s good publicity, you know. And so it’s kind of a dangerous thing to do. For me as a Jew, being a public figure is a scary thing to do and having people pissed at you as a public figure is a scary thing to do. Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it’s always: “Oh my God, what have I done now?” No, I get 9 night terrors; I’m really glad that I’m married to somebody who’s home most nights. But you know, you do the work because it needs doing, and it’s a good thing. HOGUE: Okay, I’m going to stop the tape here for this session, and then we will pick up again next time. [END OF SIDE A, TAPE 1] [SIDE B] HOGUE: Today is November 21, 2005, and we’re interviewing Flip Breskin and I’m Coty Hogue. Before we start, I would just want to ask your permission to record this, if it’s okay. BRESKIN: Yes, it’s just fine. HOGUE: When we start out, I would just like to do a little background information, so if we could start a little bit with where you grew up and maybe when you were born? BRESKIN: Ah. Yes, August 27, 1950, Renton General Hospital just south of Seattle. We started out down near the airport in Burien or Des Moines; I don’t know which way the city lines wound up. And as a five-year-old, my parents moved us out the ‘burbs. We were the first Jews on Mercer Island. This was not a good thing. [laughs] The woods were nice, but the rigidity of an urgently upwardly mobile, conformist Goldwater Republican area was pretty hard. Yeah. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit more about that, growing up, at all? With the rigidity and … BRESKIN: Mostly just wouldn’t nobody play with us. My mom didn’t get it, and my dad wasn’t paying attention. They were both hopeful. Mother was not raised as a Jew; Dad was raised in an orthodox home. This is right after World War II and the Holocaust, and they were trying to solve anti-Semitism with their own lives. They put their own lives on the line – not like you’ll get killed for it, but like you have to live with this every day and try to figure it out, and they tried. They’re still trying. HOGUE: What were some of your ways of dealing with, you know, sort of being outcast from kids? BRESKIN: I read. I read lots and lots and lots. I liked to go wander in the woods. I was a free-range child. There aren’t many left in North America, at least not in the cities. Getting out was good. I think music got in so deep right from the beginning because Mom sang to us, and there was the music box, and there was music around the house. HOGUE: Did you play music yourself? When did you start doing that? 10 BRESKIN: Depends on how you measure it. I got a little portable record player for my sixth birthday, and I got a – oh, what’s his name? – Burl Ives record that went on it, and it had a little white duck, blah blah. It had the Golden Vanity on it, and I had the entire child ballad memorized in short order. I just loved it; I still love that story. I also remember I had all these little bitty china animals and other doo-hickies, and I figured out I could put them on the record or on the turntable, and then I could turn the turntable with my finger and make it go faster and faster until the stuff flew off. So – [laughs] HOGUE: Was that very good for the record? BRESKIN: I didn’t notice! Probably considering the quality of sound reproduction, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. I got piano lessons for six months when I was six years old, and I adored it. My dad had showed me how to play chopsticks sometimes before that, the kind where you curl up your hand in a fist and you roll it down the black keys and go bomp – brrum-bum-bomp, brrum-bum-bomp, brrum-bum-bum – that routine. But I went from there to playing Bartok Mikrokosmos within six months, and then lost getting to play piano. HOGUE: Why was that? BRESKIN: Well, my recollection is that I was told that I didn’t practice enough. My mother’s more recent recollection was that she was worried that I was going to compete with my older sister, and my older sister needed some area to call her own. It horrifies me that duets didn’t appear to be an option. Somewhere in the middle, I was also told that my eyesight was failing and so they didn’t want me reading, so they took away the piano so I wouldn’t be trying to read music. But part of the struggle was, I didn’t want to read music; I just wanted to play it. The teacher would play it so I knew what it sounded like, and then I’d go figure out how to play it. HOGUE: When did you start picking up an interest in folk music and that kind of … ? BRESKIN: Well, there was that child ballad. Burl Ives was considered folk music, and Theodore Bikel, and I heard him. Somehow, we didn’t have the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger stuff. There was … oh, no, what was his name? Mr. Obnoxious. Tom Lehrer. In the Fifties, Tom Lehrer was about all there was of dissent music, revolutionary music, that was available in Middle America. You know, he was speaking truth to power rather cheerfully, and my folks had that. And that was kind of what there was. It was that and Mad Magazine and all their song parodies, and I still remember some of those. Punch the right button and all of a sudden out comes a whole song parody from the 1950s Mad Magazines. Oh, and all the stuff around the neighborhood, the naughty songs kids teach each other: “Hello, Operator” and “Great big gobs of …” Everybody else seems to sing it “greasy, grimy, gopher guts”; in my neighborhood, it was “gooey, green, gorilla guts.” And everybody has a different version. I’ll call for a table at any kind of workshop I go to – I call for meal-time tables and say, “I want you to come sing to me all the naughty songs you learned when you were fairly young children. I don’t want the grown-up naughty songs; they’re gross. I want the ones we learned as kids.” And they’re 11 hysterical! But everybody will know a different version of that one; no two people seem to have the exact same version, but everybody knows it! And then there are ones that people only know within a specific slice of age because they are like parodies of an advertisement, so only the people that got hit with that advertisement know that parody. But it appears to be sort of North America-wide, a lot of them. Oh, no: [sings] “I hate Bosco, it’s full of TNT.” You didn’t learn this, right? You’re [the] wrong age. “Mommy put it in my milk to try to poison me. I fooled Mommy; I put it in her tea. Now there’s no more Mommy to try to poison me!” The original was something really gross about, [sings] “I love Bosco, it’s rich and chocolaty. Mommy put it in my milk because it’s good for me!” Something about fortified with vitamin C, blah blah. You know. It was fairly early TV based on radio with singing commercials. And there was some good stuff out there, but that wasn’t some of it. Oh, and camp songs, camp songs! Oh! I went to summer camp when I was six, and there was a guy named Steve, and I don’t know what his last name was, but he had red hair and he played the guitar, and he sang “Five Hundred Miles,” and I was in love. That was just the most wonderful thing. HOGUE: When was that? How old were you? BRESKIN: It should have been 1956, maybe ’57, so early. But Hedy West was out there singing that song, but I think that was well before Peter, Paul, and Mary, so he’d picked it up somewhere else. But that was very cool. Oh, and we always sang going anywhere in the car. There might have been a radio in the car, but we got in and we sang “Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and all that stuff. HOGUE: Was that important for you, singing with your family and developing sort of a musical interest? BRESKIN: Yeah, and I learned a ton of songs. It’s really funny because I go play nursing homes and elder hostels and all that stuff, and get paid for singing those songs that I learned as a kid. So I owe my mom for “Five Foot Two” and “Bicycle Built For Two” and all the old songs, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “Grandfather’s Clock,” “Red River Valley.” I knew them because we sang them. HOGUE: When did you actually start playing yourself or really getting into a scene? BRESKIN: Two separate questions. My brother played guitar from the time I was three, and he got good. My sister played classical French horn; you know, she played in the band, she played in the orchestra, sang in the choir, did madrigals. Joe learned jazz and went for rock n roll as soon as he could. And I was outside of that, and by that time I wasn’t singing because … because it looked like singing girls had to sound like Joan Baez. I mean, Bob Dylan sounded like himself, and it didn’t qualify as music in my parents’ household, but at least guys had some slack to not sound pretty. When I was a teenager, there was not slack for girls to not sound pretty. So I sang along on stuff and loved that, loved going to camp because I got to sing. I was fifteen … my sister had … a guitar that was – back then what you got were built mostly in Mexico, and the action would be, you know, a half inch, three quarters of an inch. It was a long ways down, 12 built for the tourist trade, and they didn’t play in tune, and they were junky, but it had six strings, frets, and my sister had one of those. You can get really good ones in Mexico too, but you have to know where to look. My sister had one of those; then she got something better, and my brother wound up with it. And he painted it. [It] didn’t hurt the tone one bit, there wasn’t much tone to hurt, but he used acrylics, which were new then, and he painted it wood-grain hot pink. And then this amazing explosion coming out of the sound hole and going all over the place, and then different colors all over the neck, each string, each fret, so that you could look to see: two frets that had the same color on it would be an octave apart. So it was supposed to teach you to play, right? But mostly it was just unbelievably garish. My guess is that he painted it on an early acid trip, and he had a really good time, but it predated Peter Max by quite a bit, and the detail was wonderful. I would guess that guitar is still out there somewhere because it was good art. But who knows where it wandered on, acid dripping from the strings? [laughs] But I had that for a while and messed with it. I wanted my own guitar, and I worked all winter vacation from school, made twenty-five bucks, and my brother said, “Go to the pawn shops on First Avenue, Seattle.” So I went to the pawn shops, and my father accompanied me. His fifteen-year-old daughter was not going there alone. And I found an old tater bug mandolin, bowl-back mandolin, and was “Tangents R Us” – there I went. It’s “Oh, this is beautiful, how romantic. It looks like a lute – I’m there!” [I] brought it home, didn’t know how it was tuned, didn’t know how to play it, didn’t know what it sounded like. The guy we got it from said, “Well, I think you tune it like a violin.” We eventually found somebody to tune it, and I took a few lessons and once again got busted for not practicing enough. After which, I started hitting up my friends, and me and Jeannie [Rosner?] would get together and she’d play recorder and I’d play mandolin, and we’d play tunes, early Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel stuff, this and that. And then I got a real guitar. It was a little bitty Martin because I was scared to go to a big guitar; it felt like my fingers weren’t big enough. So old Mr. [Tafoya?], Phil [Tafoya?], found me a 518 Martin, which I kind of wish I still had, because everybody is doing these Baby Taylors and stuff. This was that scale, and it was referred to as a cowboy guitar, you know, a saddle guitar. A little fragile for saddle guitaring, I think, but …but there it was. And then I behaved badly. I found everybody that I knew my age that played guitar; I got them to show me everything they knew, and when they didn’t know anything else to show me … I was off to go play with somebody else, so I was very rude. But I took off like a house on fire and learned a ton really, really quickly. It would have been the year I was seventeen. I’d forgotten: there was a boyfriend who had the early Tim Harden stuff, and I don’t know where he got this from, but one day he played me this really cool thing, and I said, “I want to learn that.” And he said, “Oh, it’s too hard, girls can’t do that.” God, I was pissed! This was before bra burners were even on my horizon for feminism, but I was pissed. I went home and I stayed up all night [plays] and I came back the next morning, and I played it for him, in two different keys yet, and my recollection was that that was the end of the relationship, but it was definitely the beginning of a whole bunch more guitar. HOGUE: For you, it seemed like you got in trouble for not practicing enough. What do you think the importance is for really learning – sometimes this kind of music is just 13 going out and being with people and learning from others. How important is that, and how important was that for you? BRESKIN: That’s incredibly important. The other really incredibly important thing is to decide to teach yourself, at which point, if you’re taking lessons, your teacher becomes your assistant, your learning assistant, your guide. It’s kind of Lewis and Clark: you still have to walk there yourself, so it’s not a passive thing at all. HOGUE: When did you first actually get up into Bellingham? What were some reasons for bringing you up here? BRESKIN: I moved up in 1970. Jeannie Rosner, whom I mentioned a little earlier, had come up here to go to Fairhaven when it opened, and Ken Dean and Doug Stern, and I thought, “I’ll come where they are. This looks good.” So I moved up here. And I got up here, and I encountered the [Hunger Brothers?]. I encountered Jack Hanson and Clifford Perry and Gordy Bracket playing Carter Family stuff. I had heard Jack Hanson play at some sort of benefit for the Joffrey Ballet or something that my parents took me to. Jack was down there in a suit playing finger-style, Chet Atkins-style guitar. I went up to him afterwards – I would have been maybe fifteen, sixteen – and said, “Please, Mr. Hanson, do you teach guitar lessons?” And he said, “I’m sorry, little girl, I’m moving to Bellingham next week.” So I got to Bellingham and went looking for Jack and showed up and said, “About those lessons…” Jack was a dear heart. You know, it was fullfledged hippie days. Jack used to play with a band in Seattle called Fat Jack that was rock n roll; it was the sweetest-hearted, mellowest rock n roll you ever heard. It was really good. I think I went to hear [Kent Heat?] one time and Fat Jack was opening, and I had a wonderful time at Fat Jack, and then [Kent Heat?] started, and it was like, “Oh, this isn’t very good,” and I left. It was a great band. They didn’t give Jack any veto power over the name; it was sad. But it was a good band. And their roadie manager was Robert Force. Robert Force and Albert d’Ossché wrote a book called In Search of the Wild Dulcimer. They were up here. Robert was one of the people that started Mama Sundays. Robert and Albert, the Bert Brothers, recast how the dulcimer got used as a folk instrument all over the world. It made a huge impact, and they were here in Bellingham at the time, and they were good fun to hang with. Hunger Brothers morphed into South Fork Bluegrass Band. None of those were people that I sat around and jammed with, but they were people whose music I marinated in, and it influenced what came out of my fingers. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about that? BRESKIN: The sounds were really beautiful, so it caught me. Oh, I’d forgotten: before that in Seattle, there was the Morningtown Pizza Collective. Morningtown was on Roosevelt just north of the University Bridge, as you’re going southbound, on your left. The building is still there. And they had several houses; there was the one on Burke Street and the one on Sunnyside. There was another one I’ve forgotten. It was the first place I ever met crunchy granola. Somebody had a big recipe for it taped to the kitchen cupboard, and they were making it. And they had the farm out at Maltby. Oh! And 14 Mary grew up without spare money around; I think she grew up pretty poor in the South, and she was not scared of hard work, and they were trying to clean up the farmhouse, and she was in there with a scrub brush and a big thing of ammonia. She said, “What I really want is to close all the doors and windows and fill the house full of ammonia: pour it down the chimney, pick it up and shake it real good. That’s what this place needs.” So – [laughs] She was definitely not from here. She was pregnant, and one day she announced, “I’m hungry for watermelon. I’m going to eat a whole watermelon myself.” I trailed into the kitchen to watch this happen; I’d never seen anything like that. I just had this vision of her eating a whole watermelon, you know. She split that thing open – a big old sucker – split the thing open, took a big spoon, ate the heart out of it and left all the rest. She came from a place where watermelons were cheap, and in her book she had eaten the whole watermelon. It was a hoot. Boy, Clifford was learning to play dobro, Gordy was playing bass, Jack was playing in the Hunger Brothers; he was also playing with the Morph Brothers playing … Boy, he had a folk band and a rock and roll band and a bluegrass band and a jazz band and something else. He was playing with all of them at once. A lot of people these days talk about playing an eclectic blend of folk and bluegrass and country and new age and world music and blah-blah-blah, and it’s all sort of turned to mush. And Jack could play in each of the different styles and do it exquisitely well and completely within the genre. He really knew what he was doing. So if he was just goofing, you never knew what would come out next. It left me with very high standards, that if it all turns into mush, I’m not horribly interested. But if people really know their genres and can make it come out sounding real in the different styles, that gets really exciting. HOGUE: What was some of the earliest – was blues – ? I mean, what you played there it seemed you were really influenced by that. Was that the first style that you really started playing in? BRESKIN: Oh… well, it was sort of what I was hearing for a while, so … The real early stuff was Simon and Garfunkel and Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But the year I was, I think, eighteen, I heard Elizabeth Cotten play live, and that was it. I went home and turned off the radio – there wasn’t anything there anywhere near as compelling – and started trying to figure out what she was doing, you know, with that alternating bass and the melody sitting on top. HOGUE: Can you talk about how you got to see her live or how that influenced you so much? What did she do that made it so emotional? BRESKIN: Well, the first time I heard her it wasn’t. I had showed up at the community college and was taking music theory courses, and you know, I went and talked to the teacher and said, “I don’t read music. Can I come to your class anyway? I can really hear well.” And she said, “Sure.” So I was trying to figure out how music worked because it was pretty interesting. And she approached me because I was the closest thing to a folkie she knew and said, “We have this guitarist Elizabeth Cotten coming to play; we need a student to get up to introduce her; would you do that?” I didn’t know who she was, but I got up and did my best to introduce her and sat down and listened politely. It 15 was in the Student Union at lunch time with everybody eating, rattling silverware, talking, playing cards – just horribly noisy, nobody paying attention. And she sat up there on stage, and she did her best because she was a lady and she always did her best, but there wasn’t any magic to that, you know, for her or for me. A few nights later, Doug [Stern?] wanted to take me to hear her in concert, and I was like, “I already heard her,” you know. But he was firm about it, and so I came. And she was at the Friend Center in the U District, and every person there was there to hear her play. And it was also a space that – huh! If there’s such a thing as a sacred space, it’s a place where people are inclined to listen, whether to themselves or to each other or to what’s happening around them. The act of listening makes a difference in what happens. So she got up to play and everybody was listening in a really deep way, and she responded to that and played beautifully and played with deep feeling and really offered us what she had to give. And she was able to because of the way we listened. And there wasn’t room inside for all that music: it was so beautiful! And she was playing Washington Square Blues, and my heart filled up. There wasn’t room inside; it overflowed as tears, and I just sat there and shook with tears running down my face. When I went home at the end of the evening, I felt like she made it look so simple – you know, I could do that, and that’s worth doing. So then I dug in. There were lots of late-night sessions trying to figure out what did she do? How did she do that? There was a lot I didn’t figure out, but I tried really hard and burned the midnight oil, just sitting there by myself trying to figure out how it worked. HOGUE: And you had the opportunity to host her at your home in later years? BRESKIN: Yeah, a bunch, and get her to guitar camp and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. When I had moved up here and wound up running Mama Sunday’s up on campus, that’s now the Underground Coffeehouse, I had the opportunity to have Libba come do concerts, so I did, and I did it as often as I could and got to know her some. For me, it was a little baffling about why … why she’d be so generous to give her music to this young middle-class white girl. At this point, it’s a whole lot clearer to me. Part of it was her people didn’t want it and it broke her heart. Part of it was I really listened and she could tell that I would cherish this music and keep it going after she died. She was an old lady, and you know, that looked good. I think probably she just liked me too. But I would be so excited she was coming, I would tell everybody and I’d be in line at the grocery store, and I’d be explaining to the people in front of me and behind me in the checkout that they had to come. I had a budget: it didn’t cost anything to get in, so I could tell people, “Free Concert! World-class music! You’ve got to come!” And they’d come. You know, a regular night we’d have a couple hundred people. Libba would come and we’d have four hundred people, and that was a good thing. And she got paid, and I’d put her up. She’d sit on the couch and play guitar with me. Her version of learning was to sit on the couch and play guitar with me. She played the tunes all the way up to speed with all the complexity, with all the quirks. She didn’t dumb anything down, she didn’t slow anything down, but she respected me as a learner and completely expected that I could figure out, and we’d just play until I figured it out, even if it was a couple of hours. It was very cool. She didn’t, like, you know, make all these encouraging noises and tell me I was getting it or any of that. But when I’d get another little section that that time when it came around I’d manage to catch that little spot, 16 there’d be this teeny bit of smile at the edge of her eyes; there was an acknowledgement that I had that this time. It was really precious. It was good teaching! I learned so much from that. And since she played upside down and backwards, I couldn’t look at her hand and go, “Oh, that’s a C chord.” I had to look at the fingers and go, “Which frets is she pushing? Which string’s down against?” – as it flew by. You know, she didn’t play real slow. So that was really cool, and I learned a whole lot from it. She got this beautiful tone because she was playing the bass with her finger, which gave her really crisp bass tone. She was playing the melody – wrong hand – with her thumb, which gave her this really round, sweet melodic line. It was pretty. She was all over that thing. I learned Freight Train from her, I learned [Fast Paul?], I learned Wilson’s Rag. It was really cool. HOGUE: Do you maybe want to demonstrate something, her style? BRESKIN: Oh, a little bit. Let’s see what I can do. [plays] No, can’t very much, but a little bit. HOGUE: So you talked a little bit about Mama Sunday’s and bringing Elizabeth up there. How did you get started doing that, and can you explain a little bit about the history of Mama Sunday’s? BRESKIN: Well, apparently it started life as Mama Sunday’s Hot Rod and Hamburger Haven. That’s “Hot Rod.” Bob Force was in on the creation of that, and I think [Tee?] Thomas may have been too. It was an open-mike format, and it was held up where they now serve pizza down at the far end of the … that would be the northern-most top floor end of the VU [Viking Union]. I don’t know how much it’s been remodeled; I haven’t been in there in some years. But there was a stage, and it would be an open mike, and people would show up and play, and their friends would come with them, and some would show up early, so there were a bunch of people at the beginning, and by the end there were only a few buddies of the last person playing. It dwindled and people went away. But then they got a budge to pay a featured performer, and they probably had twenty-five bucks or fifty bucks or something, and then there was a featured performer, and everybody left anyway. [laughs] Then Bob took off. I think that was the February he met Albert and went to Iceland and played all the Icelandic things that were like a dulcimer and just learned a ton and had a really good time. [Tee?] Thomas was running it; there may have been somebody in between. We should check with [Tee?]; he’s still down at Skagit Valley. [Tee?] and his first wife Mindy were running it. And then [Tee?] and Mindy broke up, and they asked if Dave Auer and I would take it over. I was married to Dave at the time. So we took it over and I started getting to hire people like Jack Hanson, people like Clifford, people like Larry Hanks. Oh, man, I had fun! Linda Waterfall, Peter Langston, people who remained in my life as musical inspirations, wonderful folks, and occasionally, people like Libba Cotten. I was so excited about it, I’d go everywhere I went, telling people they had to come here, and I was excited enough that they’d try it, and they’d like it and they’d come back and they’d bring their friends, and it grew until there were a couple hundred people most weeks. You know, it was every week during the academic year, so it was nine concerts a quarter, and I really had 17 fun doing that. It was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received, getting to run that thing. When Dave and I broke up, I kept doing it. Eventually they budgeted for me to have an assistant, and I hit up Bridget Jennings and got her to be my assistant, got her trained up, and then she took it over and kept it going. I think she handed it on to Tim [Mixum?], and she went on and became road manager for the Flying Karamozov Brothers. I think she’s now maybe … She was at Microsoft, but she may be back doing concert production doing Music on the Pier for the city of Seattle. I’m not sure, but she was at some point doing that. Anyway, you know, we kept passing it on to other people who were wildly enthusiastic about the music, which is what you really need. If you’re going to put on a concert, you’d better be just thrilled to death and ready to jump on everybody and drag them in the door. HOGUE: How long did it take for numbers to really go up when you started running it? I mean, you mentioned that before when they had the featured performer for this open mike, a lot of people dwindled off; how did you sort of reverse that trend? BRESKIN: By being madly excited about who was performing, by shortening the open mike so that it really was the introduction instead of the featured performer getting on at, like, ten at night, or something, and by hiring just killer musicians. And it worked. Lots of people wanted to play the open mike, and we shortened them to three songs or fifteen minutes, and there were like four people. I remember one time it was the Gypsy [Gippo?] String Band; [they] came and did a cameo before they played down at Fast Eddy’s, which was on State Street – oh, they’re still doing music in that space. It’s just south of Holly on the east side. I can’t remember what it’s called now. You know, there’s the frame shop and there’s the pizza joint and there’s the – you know, next to the pizza joint. HOGUE: The Up and Up? BRESKIN: Yeah, I think it – oh, there’s one further south than the Up and Up. The Factory or something? I don’t know. They do rock and roll. But they used to serve pizza and have music, and the Gippos were going to play that. They were the house band for the Morningtown Pizza Collective. It was Jack Link and Warren Argo and Hank Bradley and Sandy Bradley. They were great musicians. So they came and did a cameo and did a few songs and just knocked everybody out. You could tell people were going to go down there when Mama Sunday’s let out. And the next person up was a lone banjo player I’d never met, standing there with a long-necked banjo, and oh! I was feeling sorry for him having to follow the Gippos who were incredibly tight, doing string band music – you know, the Harry Smith anthology stuff, the stuff from Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Except this was 1974. And this guy with the long-necked banjo gets up and I’m feeling sorry for him, right? He gets up and he looks at the crowd and he takes his time, and he tunes up the banjo, and he starts to play, and he has them in the palm of his hand. It was like: no, they were an appropriate opening act, right? He knew just what to do with all that attention. His name was Mike Marker; he still lives in town. He’s a friend of Pete Seeger’s and he’s a real strong musician. Boy, is he good! So it is my belief that I hired him on the way out the door and booked him to do a gig because he was great. 18 HOGUE: Was this your first experience really, booking concerts like this? BRESKIN: Oh yeah, absolutely. No, I’d never done anything like this, but it seemed so obvious once we started. It was exactly what I wanted. Having grown up in so much isolation, it was also the gift of a lifetime that I could go gather people and they were gatherable. I didn’t know that, so it was really exciting to not get pounded down for bouncing up to people and saying, “You! You! You! You have to do this!” It was a great gift. HOGUE: What were some of your stand-out memories of your time working there? BRESKIN: [laughs] Hiring Clifford Perry and Larry Hanks to share an evening and sit there and trade songs back and forth. It wasn’t like they had rehearsed and figured out – you know, they were just both very, very good musicians with a similar enough repertoire that I knew they’d be able to do that. I got to be the musical yenta and introduce musicians to each other and we all got to watch. And it was really lively because it was so real, so right-this-minute. The two of them came out, sat down, looked at each other and then double took. It was really funny because they were a matched pair with hair way down their back and little bitty glasses on their nose before anybody had those little wire-rimmed things. And big old guitars. And they looked just alike except Clifford was in tasteful grey and Larry was in tasteful red and gold, with the beard like shredded wheat, right? It was really sweet, and it was really fun watching them discover “Oh, that tune! Sure!” Vroom, and off they went. It was beautiful, all these great old songs. That was a great night. South Fork Bluegrass Band: my old friend Tony Trischka came out to visit and sat in with South Fork, and they were like, so blown away to have Tony Trischka playing with them. This was a big deal. I’ve got some photos of them clowning around onstage and having a really good time. They were good enough that Tony was just having a ball. It was good. Um … hmm. Frankie Armstrong. We stuffed the place for Frankie. I could show you that poster; I found it. Somebody built me this stunning – I had a really good photo of her, but somebody built me a world-class poster, and it worked – just this stark black and white, no grays, black and white – bam! Picture of Frankie singing her heart out, head up like a bird, just – And you know, just where and when and who, and this little thing at the bottom, “Voted Britain’s top female folk singer” or vocalist or something. And it was enough. They’d never heard of her, but they came. For me there was a moment, there was one song: she sang Van Diemen’s Land a cappella, which is how she sang. She was sitting up onstage – she was most of the way blind at that point; she still had this little teeny window she could see through. She entered into the song completely as she sang it, a song of grief and permanent loss. Convicts got shipped to Australia – that was Van Diemen’s Land – and never came home. You could be convicted of anything: stealing a loaf of bread when you were starving got you there, transported. And she sang that song. When she finished singing – sitting in a low chair just singing, right? – when she finished singing, she shrank – I mean physically. She shrank, maybe by a fifth of her size. She just contracted; she’d gotten so large in the song. It was like putting a candle out when she stopped singing. It was really something. We were all so deep in the song that we’d built something together, the 19 listeners and the singer. And when it was over, it was vivid that it was over, that it had stopped. It was completely different in the room. But it was also silent for a long time before people clapped. I got to bring Eric Schoenberg out – repeatedly! That was really cool. [He] played guitar; God, he’s good! And Mike Coehn brought over a vinyl over one time, a disk of Richard Ruskin playing. I said, “Ooh, this is good stuff! Where is he from?” He said, “I think he’s from L.A.” I went up to my office at Associated Students and I used the Watts line and I called information for L.A., and they had two Richard Ruskins. I called and I said, “Is this the Richard Ruskin, the guitarist?” By that point, I was able to offer him – he didn’t mind being approached as the Richard Ruskin – I was able to offer him, “I can do you a block booking for five community colleges, I think, up here, including Western, and we can pay your way up and get you all these gigs so you can actually go home with some money. Would you come?” He was like, “Would I come?!” So he came and did a wonderful job and eventually relocated up here and is living in Seattle, taught for guitar camp, all that stuff. Yeah, they were wonderful musicians. HOGUE: You mentioned guitar camp, so can you explain a little bit how that came about? BRESKIN: Oh, God. Summer,1972, I was at Mariposa Folk Festival because I had gotten married and I was living in Syracuse, New York, because David was stationed back there. I was lonelier than I think I had ever been in my life. I didn’t know a soul, and it was early enough [that] we hadn’t made many friends yet. And we went to Mariposa. I saw a face across the crowd and recognized him, and I thought it was this piano player from back at the community college in Bellevue, and I ran across the crowd and threw myself into his arms and then backed up a little and realized I did not know this person. [laughs] Oops. And it got worse rapidly because then we sorted out that oh, he was Eric Schoenberg. Actually, he looked a lot like Kinky, but actually what it was, I recognized him from his album cover. [laughs] Oops. Fortunately, this was not something that happened to Eric constantly from that album. The album was The New Ragtime Guitar with him and his cousin David Laibman. They had learned to play at camp and had taken Scott Joplin rags, broken them down for two guitars as duets and figured out how to play them and did a recording of it. Wonderful stuff, wonderful stuff! So in the end, we wound up going down to New York City and taking lessons from Eric once a month for the rest of the time we lived in Syracuse, which was cool. And he was such a dearheart; he was such a dearheart! He taught me all kinds of cool stuff. When Nathan was born, I named him after Eric: he was Nathaniel Eric. Then we moved home in January or February of ’73. I think early February: God, it was good to come home. But we came home to Bellingham, even though I grew up in Seattle, and I had only been in Bellingham for six months, but by gum, I came home to Bellingham. It was home. And Eric came out to visit us that summer. We took him out to the islands; I don’t think he had ever been anyplace that quiet. I have to back up. I met Dave Auer at a guitar camp, which Dan and Sherry, whose last name I have forgotten, who had Queen Ann Music, or a music store up on Queen Ann Hill for years and years. In ’70, maybe ’71, they had done this music camp: Guitar Camp for Kids. Their vision was for black kids from the ghetto, and who they got were the children of unemployed Boeing executives 20 and engineers who knew how to apply for stuff and thought to send their kids, so it was pretty much all white. Who comes is who you know. So if you don’t have any friends who are people of color, they aren’t going to show up at your events. But I didn’t get it that it was for children, so I showed up and Bill McClarty showed up. He was the guy that I stole the Sweet William strut that I played for that counterpoint thing. David Auer showed up. He was smart about the whole thing and got himself signed on as “teacher of beginners.” So he got to go for free and be staff. But the three of us were the only adults besides the organizers and the formal staff, which was Jerry Corbett of the Youngbloods and Janice Ian, who was pretty famous back then but not like she is now and barely past teenager. And Peter Childs: Pete Childs played … he was a studio musician. He was actually the person who deconstructed what Libba Cotten was doing for me and showed me how it actually worked, what the alternating bass did, and boy did I have my homework. I went home from that camp and I settled down and I had to refigure out every tune I had figured out for the last year or so, and there was a lot. It seemed daunting but absolutely necessary. I sat down and I did it. Then I knew and my thumb was educated for that alternating bass, for how it really worked, which was great. Anyway, there had been that camp, and the “grownups” – I mean, I don’t think anybody was over – well, actually I think Pete Childs must have been in his thirties or forties and everybody else was in their early twenties. But we were the adults and we stayed up all night and played music and had a wonderful time. So there was that, but it was in a terrible space. It was in old Army barracks and there was no place to go for privacy, no place at all. I mean, there was a boys dorm and a girls dorm barracks and no dividers and no acoustic privacy to try to practice what you were trying to learn, so it was maddening. Oh, and Dan and Sherry had just gotten married. This camp was their honeymoon, and they had to spend their entire camp trying to keep the teenagers out of the bushes [laughs] when they would have preferred to be there themselves. [laughs] So years later out on Orcas Island, we were up at the group camp on top of Mount Constitution, cruising through, and there were all these cool little cabins. I have no idea if it was me or if it was David that said, “Now that would be a good place for a guitar camp,” because, you know, you’d have acoustic isolation so you could actually play. But then we were both teaching folk guitar at Everett Community College, going down, and David mentioned it to his advanced class. The following week, one of his students, Larry Squire, came back and said, “Well, I have a friend who runs a Campfire Girl camp, Camp Killoqua” – Smokey Point these days – “at Lake Goodwin. I teach extension classes for Central Washington State College, and I called them, and we can have the camp the third week in August, and Central will give credit for it. Why don’t you do a camp?” So we called Jack Hanson and Cliff Perry [laughs] and, you know, rounded up our buddies to teach and did a camp. That was Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, and if I had known it would last so long, I would have come up with something easier to pronounce. [Laughs] We gradually figured out how to do it because people kept coming back year after year. Most people came back every year. We got to keep building the staff bigger, and it was really fun. The original impetus was a scam so that we could pay for Erick Schoenberg’s plane ticket so he could come back and visit again, and it worked beyond our wildest dreams! A lot of people, a lot of people have gone through that camp and gotten better at playing music for it. When I was a kid, my sister went to music camp, but I couldn’t go to music camp because I was a beginner, right? So when I started music camp, there was room for 21 beginners. So I teach beginners and I love it. I teach advanced students too and I love them, but I learn so much from teaching beginners. They ask really smart questions. [Telephone interruption] HOGUE: So we were talking about the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and its history and how it started. The format that you had when it first started: can you explain how it has morphed into what it is today? BRESKIN: Oh, my. Yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing at all! That first year, as part of registering people [and] intake, I attempted to listen to each person and then suggest which classes would work for them. And then we had one morning class and one afternoon class, and each one was three hours long. People were staggering out of the cabins and falling over whimpering, the teachers along with students. It was like, “Oh, this doesn’t work!” And we were lucky because lots of people came forward with their thinking about what would make it better, and it got better. It wasn’t just people who were thinking well; it was also people who were willing to do work to get it to happen. So many people picked it up and kept it going and contributed to it and felt a sense of ownership of the event that included taking responsibility for it, not just liking it. So that was cool. HOGUE: How did you get the word out about it when you first decided to start this? BRESKIN: Oh dear! We had our Mama Sunday’s crowd, our Bellingham crowd. So we and Jack Hanson, Cliff Perry, the people that we hired to teach, and I think it was probably Jack and Clifford that said, “Oh, you’ve got to have Dudley Hill,” who I guess died recently. It’s like, “Oh, crud, we’re getting old; I don’t like this.” Anyway, there were a bunch of good musicians, and then Dave and I were inviting everybody we knew. On the other hand, Larry Squire was inviting everybody he knew, and who he knew was schoolteachers. And so [we]wound up with all these teachers in their late thirties and early forties who were much better at looking normal than we were and much more committed to looking normal than we were, right? [Telephone interruption] HOGUE: We were talking about the first camp and how there was a mix of people. BRESKIN: Oh, Lord, yes. It is my perception at this point that those schoolteachers were nowhere near as ‘normal’ as they had figured out how to appear. But at the time, boy did they look normal, and we were really committed to not looking normal. [laughs] So these two groups of people get to camp, and I think maybe me and Julie Sakahara may have been the only females in the hippie contingent: it was guys who wanted to learn how to play hot licks. It was somewhat older women who wanted to play John Denver songs. And things were out of phase, out of sync, and it was like, “Uh-oh, what are we going to do here?” And they were sort of standing in two clumps, eyeing each other. And also the ages weren’t right for – you know, there was enough of a gap in age that 22 they weren’t sniffing each other. And we had the good fortune to have Frank Farrell coming in teaching contra dance; it was the first place I’d met contra dance. But he’s a great fiddler. He’s now in Maine. He did a stint at the head of the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes over in Port Townsend. And I also – you know, I bet that might have been [Wheezer?]. Huh. I bet it was. That’s a new thought. [We] stopped in at a fiddle festival when we were driving cross country in ’71 and … Nah, it couldn’t have been [Wheezer?]; it was something else. Anyway, [we] watched Frank win first place at a fiddle festival. Oh, he was good! That was fun. Anyway, Frank came in and called a dance, and there was so much homophobia running around that nobody dared dance with each other, and therefore they had to dance across the lines with the people of the opposite gender. And it really helped – it really helped! The women got to figure out that they didn’t actually smell bad; they weren’t actually filthy. And some of them could sure dance. And the guys figured out, “Well, this wasn’t actually my third grade teacher who treated me so traumatically, and she can dance.” So it was very helpful, after which we could settle in and be human together. But there was still that John Denver stuff. John Denver came later, you know; the first soft sell of folk music was Peter, Paul, and Mary trying to smooth stuff out and make it more palatable and more commercial. But that didn’t keep them from politically oriented stuff. We had them doing Times They Are a-Changing and Blowin’ in the Wind and If I Had a Hammer. You know, it was still a statement about changing the world, a real clear, strong statement about changing the world, and it led a lot of us into the older music, the ‘real’ folk music. For people, even five or ten years younger than me, and people from different areas, John Denver was their path in, but it didn’t really lead them to the fiercely politically active music. Interesting. And so [for] those of us who had gotten our foot in the door into music that led to “We’re going to change this place – my song is my weapon for changing the world,” there was tremendous upset coupled with contempt for what John Denver was doing. So instead of adoring him, we were furious at him for selling out, for not reaching for the deep political content, for the analysis that this is not fair and we’re going to change it. So we had that divide to deal with. One of the biggest things that held back that huge, wide movement in the Sixties where we really did have a sense that everything had to change, and that what made sense was to change it from the ground up and build a world made right that worked for everybody instead of just for rich people … You know, instead of singing about “Oh, those poor people,” it’s like, “Well, fix it!” But the biggest thing that we did that got in our own way was that contempt, because as soon as you put contempt on the table, nothing’s going anywhere. Nobody’s changing, including the person being contemptuous. So that was sad. But somehow we managed to kind of cobble together a community across that divide because everybody was there because they loved music and respected it in each other. HOGUE: And it’s been going for … ? BRESKIN: Well, since ’74. Summer of ’74 was number one, so … the one of ’04 was thirty-one, and the one of 2005 was thirty-two, so this will be the thirty-third year. HOGUE: And during that time, you were also running Mama Sunday’s as well. 23 BRESKIN: I was running Mama Sunday’s till ’78. HOGUE: When you start Mama Sunday’s? BRESKIN: I didn’t start it, but – HOGUE: I mean, when did you start working? BRESKIN: I started working in ’73. [Pause] HOGUE: It is November 21, 2005, and this is the second part of the second interview with Flip Breskin, and I am Coty Hogue. One thing that comes up a lot in the interview and something I want to explore a little bit is the sense of building community and the importance of community in people’s lives, and I wanted to know what community means to you? BRESKIN: Bottom line: it’s people caring about each other and taking some responsibility for the way that we care about each other. Community is a project, not a resource. It’s not just something to latch onto and suck on; it only works if the bulk of the people are taking some responsibility for seeing to it that it happens. We watch for each other and enjoy each other and take the time to get to know each other and hang out. HOGUE: How has community, especially within music, affected you personally, and how has that been an important part of your life? BRESKIN: Having grown up excluded from community, when I met it and recognized it, it was an incredible gift to me. The big social movements, political movements to change things – the unions, the Civil Rights movement, the African end to Apartheid – the big social movements have been singing movements, because when you join your voice with other human beings and sing, all together you are physically actually touching each other. You cause the air to move, and it touches everybody else’s skin. You breathe in the sounds, and it is actually a physical connection with other people. There’s a way that music will go right straight into your heart, where words just wouldn’t. And people can be more courageous when they’re singing together than when they’re not. It’s harder to break a line of people who are singing together than of people who are not. HOGUE: The community here in Bellingham and in the Northwest – you’ve been involved with the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and building up Mama Sunday’s and the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society. Why do you think there has maintained such a strong community with this type of music and this type of scene in Bellingham and in this area? BRESKIN: I think it has something to do with people who have been involved long term who are willing to do the work, not just enjoy it and go away. There are people who 24 show up for music circle even when their lives are busy or the music at Music Circle isn’t going wonderfully, or whatever – hang in for the bumpy times as well as the times where it’s just, “Oh, whoopee!” I think it has to do with the individual people who just keep showing up. HOGUE: And did you consciously ever make a decision, “I’m going to build a community of people in this area,” or if it just sort of happen? BRESKIN: I’m guessing that Richard Scholtz made that decision, and I signed on. It looked like a good idea. There’s also a way that the music is so valuable to me that I’m eager to give that gift to as many people as possible. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit more about that value and how that developed? BRESKIN: Well, it starts with, “Oh, it’s beautiful!” and it’s shared, and it’s [laughs] … There was a point doing guitar camp when we were getting all these demo tapes from people and publicity packets. And there was a point at which we realized we were completely sick of ‘slick;’ [we] didn’t want to see anymore. Give us real people playing real music. These days, for me, it extends to if it’s possible, I avoid having microphones because as soon as there are microphones, it looks like you can’t tell if it’s real or not, because, you know, it might all be effects, pedals, and computer stuff, and all that, like recording so often is these days. When it’s just a person and an instrument, it’s much simpler and it’s much clearer. And if there’s magic to it, you can tell that it’s real magic instead of being manipulated somehow. And there’s a piece of that real magic that – oh, boy. There are people that, when they sing, they are consciously out to try to get you to feel some particular way. It really upsets me when people do that; I actively dislike it. I find myself rebelling, and my spine stiffens, and my heart closes to their music because I don’t want to be manipulated. It feels dishonest and condescending when I encounter it in someone. You know, “Oh, I know I can make you feel this particular way.” Thinking of Dave [Wrong?], thinking of Frankie Armstrong, thinking of Elizabeth Cotten and Tony Rice, there are people who, when they sing – Gordon Bok – when they sing, they are going to the deepest part of themselves, and being there with that song, feeling their own feelings about that song. And as an audience member, I’m invited in, but I’m invited in: it’s my choice whether to join or not. That’s a great gift for them to invite me into that kind of intimacy, and I accept it as a gift. HOGUE: Do you think it’s important as a whole to have a sense of community, whether it be for someone in music or something else? What’s the importance of having that? BRESKIN: There was another kid in my grade school who was even more ostracized than I was. I don’t know what was happening in his house, but he was a very tense child and awkward in his physical movements, uncomfortable in his body. I think he was just scared spitless, but as a boy he got beat up really bad and treated with contempt by everybody. I didn’t go anywhere near him both because he was gawky and awkward, and also because boy, I already had it hard enough. But once I escaped that small community where everybody knew you by the time you were out of kindergarten and was 25 in the wider world where I could find peers to hang out with that were happy to hang out with me, when I went back for my ten-year high school reunion, I went and found the guy and apologized and sat down and asked him what kind of life he had figured out to make for himself after that incredibly difficult beginning. He bowls. I hope he is still bowling. He lives alone; he may have a pet but doesn’t live with other humans. Probably they don’t seem safe enough. But he bowls like five nights a week, so he’s found some kind of community and, you know, the best he could figure. [He] works as an engineer so he makes a living and gets to do work where he doesn’t have to work too closely with other people. And in part that’s a picture of a tragedy, and in part it’s a picture of the triumph of the human spirit that he found some way to find some community anyway. Winnie Mandela, spending all that time in solitary confinement in South Africa, described choosing to love the ants in her prison cell, that they were other beings there for her to be connected with. I think we’re born expecting to be fully connected with other human beings and be welcomed, be cherished, be thought well about, and for everyone of us it’s a shock and tremendously confusing when we’re babies to be born into such chaos where everybody’s too scared and too overloaded to really be able to think well about and get right in there close with other people. And music gives us moments where we can let go of it all, blend our voices with other people, or at least have other people’s voices wrap us in the arms of the voice and get to be welcome. When my youngest was … Clearwater years, I don’t know, eight to twelve years old, maybe something like that, maybe up to fifteen, he got into going to science fiction conventions. I went with him; I was bodyguard, thank you. And I’d get there and there were some people having just a wonderful time, you know, playing with costumes, playing with games, interacting with other people. And then around the edges, there were all these other people who didn’t know how to plug in, didn’t expect to be welcome, and they stood around the edges looking desperately lonely and bitterly resentful about it and just vibing everybody with huge amounts of anger, you know, but simmering under control, just standing around looking like they felt like losers and it was everybody else’s fault for not recognizing their genius, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Oh yeah, I’ve been there! So the first time, I turned around and went back home and got my guitar and settled down in one of the hospitality suites and got a sing-along going. And all those lost-looking, grumpy-looking people came in and sang and stopped looking grumpy really fast because they were welcome. And it was a level at which I could welcome them without exposing myself to really extensive risk of taking charge of their life and, you know, being their only friend and, you know, all of that. But I could open the door wide for that evening and say, “You come on in, you’re welcome here.” And the whole feel of the thing changed, and I felt like my son was now much safer. He knew where I was, and if he got into trouble he could come get me and he did and, you know, it worked okay. HOGUE: Did you ever think that you would play such a prominent role in this kind of community? BRESKIN: Never had a clue. Never had a clue. It was beyond – in some ways, it’s beyond my largest dreams for myself as a child. In other ways, it isn’t. Hopalong Cassidy: when I was a kid, there was Hopalong Cassidy. Nope, nope – got the wrong 26 guy: Cisco Kid. Cisco and Pancho. They rode from town to town; they were sidekicks who really liked each other and would go rescue people, set things right, and ride off into the sunset. It was very 1950s cowboy. And the racism was unbelievable, looking back at it. But what attracted me as a 3- and 4-year-old was buddies who loved each other and weren’t afraid to show it and stuck with each other through thick and thin and stood up for each other in any way necessary and went out and made the world better, fixed things. That was my little girl dream of what I wanted to do when I grew up. HOGUE: And you have sort of done it with the music. BRESKIN: Oh, a little bit. HOGUE: And how do you keep the motivation and energy to keep doing all this after all these years? BRESKIN: Well, the music – I mean, beauty makes its own demands. It just does; you get out and you do. And sometimes I burn out and I don’t do any concerts for a long time, and sometimes I’m a total fool and tell too many people in a row that I will help and get in over my head and then I’m fried and won’t do anything again for a while. And some of it is figuring out how to get help. And more and more people do step forward and say, “Okay, I’ll take a piece of this.” You know, Richard Schulz figured out that, as far as I know, Homemade Music Society runs different from any other music society anywhere, that instead of there being a committee or an individual who puts on the concerts, there isn’t much that happens from outside. Richard talks to people who go regularly and says, “Who would you like to see there? Who would you like to see there enough that you’re willing to go invite them and get people to come?” And [he] talks people into doing one concert a year and we mentor them. And some people do more than one concert a year, but it generates from inside, you know, who people are excited about rather than it generating from outside about who pushes hardest to get to have a concert or who’s most famous or any of that. It’s just, is there somebody who is so excited that they’ll go do the work to get that to happen. And it gets us this really rich mix of music. Did that answer – ? I forgot what you asked. HOGUE: Yeah, that’s good. I can’t remember what I asked either. BRESKIN: [It’s] just [that] there’s more assistance these days, that people will put on concerts, and when there’s somebody I would really love to have in concert, I’m not going to do it, and I know I’m not going to do it, then I’ll put it out to the Flip’s Picks list, which is about five hundred people, and fairly often, somebody will step forward and say, “I will host that at my house,” and then I will hold their hand while they figure it out. I mean, Colleen and Mark around the corner did [Bad Humphreys?] this last time. They came to my house for the concert the year before; they loved it. They said, “Okay, we’ll do it. We’ve got the big living room. And they did it, and I wasn’t even in town. You know, I sent out a bunch of emails saying, “They’re coming again – if you liked them last time, you’ll like them this time!” But they came, they had a good-sized concert, they had a ball, and Colleen and Mark were glad they’d done it, so they’ll do it again. So there are 27 more people to do it, so it’s not all up to me. And for me, the biggest picture is, if I’m really going to take responsibility, some of the responsibility is replicating myself so it isn’t just me. If the job’s actually worth doing, it shouldn’t be left in one person’s hands. HOGUE: I’m going to switch to sort of more light-hearted little things. One of the questions [is], you talk about learning songs when you were younger when you were in the car, and I’ve noticed that you have a really vast knowledge of songs, and I’m wonder how did you build up such a repertoire. Did it just come naturally? BRESKIN: One song at a time. One of the interesting questions is, “How about all those songs you find in your brain that you never actively invited in and you aren’t really particularly pleased that they are there?” I mean, songs are imprintable and then they’re there. The term ‘song catcher’ is an old term, and I was catching songs from birth. [I] used to use the term to describe myself when I was doing a concert and people wanted something to say about me, and then that movie came out and I can’t use it anymore because they think I’m referring to that. [laughs] I like the stuff that makes me laugh, I like the stuff that makes me cry. And if it doesn’t move me emotionally, mostly it doesn’t much go in. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about your style that you developed? Was that influenced a lot by Elizabeth Cotten’s? BRESKIN: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. HOGUE: It seems, when I heard you play, it was very unique for me before I heard those things, and so I can hear your style, and I think of it as a Flip style. BRESKIN: Well, finger style, and I learned to play lots and lots and lots of instrumentals and didn’t sing because I was too mortified to sing. But I got the melody out of the guitar, and I got some kind of accompaniment going, and then I figured out alternating bass, so I had that. But I also got into bass runs and the Carter Family stuff, Mother Maybelle stuff. [Plays] That style crept in, and then there were bass lines that – there was that counterpoint stuff [plays] where there’s no chords. And then there was a point at which I discovered – and somebody didn’t show me, I discovered – I was trying to figure out how to sing harmony – and I figured out if I moved the melody line over a string but within the same scale, what I got was a harmony. That’s just totally cool, and that’s kind of started to creep in. [plays and sings:] Love comes to the simple heart In the simplest of ways In the face of simple malice She will simply find a way She will find a way to love Though her way be locked and barred Uninvited in her wisdom Love comes to the simple heart 28 which is totally cool and very nearly effortless to just shift over a string and keep playing. Once you’ve played enough melodies, it’ll just kind of happen. So that got in there; there was a point at which I decided I needed to learn to accompany songs, and [I] sat there and I did my boom-chuck work until I could do it. And finger patterns: [plays]. And then you start mixing it all together. For me, when I did that CD, the most notable thing that came out of it for me took years before I noticed how many people had gifted me with that CD; I kind of knew it was happening, but I couldn’t quite face it. But in some ways, the most lasting gift was hearing my hands on the guitar because I’d only ever, you know, done it while I was doing it, right? So hearing all the stuff my hands were doing while I was busy singing was really amazing to me. So that was cool. HOGUE: When I interviewed Richard, he talked about one of the memories he had of you when he first got to know you, was that you did cartoon songs. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because he wouldn’t elaborate. BRESKIN: TV theme songs. I got into TV theme songs: why I got into TV theme songs is beyond me, probably because I started with the Mickey Mouse Club theme song and kind of kept going. And then somebody gave me volume 1 and volume 2 of the TV theme songs sing-along song book. And somebody else gave me a Walt Disney song book because I was doing that kind of stuff, and I kind of poked around in those too and just got into it because they were funny, or it was funny to play them. And there were some great musicians, whose names I do not know, who were getting hired to do the TV theme songs, and boy, they were good! I’ve just been thinking lately, I’ve got to go back and learn Leave It to Beaver because it was really good. But I was thinking … [plays]. It’s been a while. And I’m guessing that you don’t recognize it, but it’s a pretty tune, right? It’s the theme song to Maverick, which was this James Garner – yeah, they were great tunes. They were short enough and interesting enough that they just grabbed me. I have no good excuse [laughs] – I was raised on them. HOGUE: Well, just to sort of finish up the interview as a whole, I guess some of the things is of community and listening: how has the importance of listening and the importance of everything come together for you and enriched your life? BRESKIN: Well, it started with the music and I figured out I could do it. And in recent years, it shifted. We moved over to this neighborhood, and I had the Flip’s Picks music list, which has grown over the years. But I got it that I could also do a neighborhood list. I treated guitar camp – after a long time, I got it that it could be a laboratory, that there were things that worked there in my life, and the question became, “How can I bring that stuff home and make my life more like guitar camp?” because I’d leave guitar camp every year broken-hearted, desolate – nothing until next year. It almost felt like I didn’t really have a life. So I started looking to see what is it about music camp that works? One, it’s getting to make music with people. But it’s also having time to stop and talk and have the deep conversations. It’s the fact that there are no cars there, that you walk at human speed, so when you’re passing somebody, there’s time to make eye contact, stop and yak for a minute. At minimum, you don’t pass people without meeting their eyes and 29 smiling at them. It’s a very different way to be. It’s so much less isolated: gathering, hanging out with people. I decided that I would be less terrified if I knew my immediate neighbors around me, so I went after that really hard in this neighborhood in the most organized way I could figure. So when we bought this house, it closed on Thanksgiving, we got dressed up in our Halloween costumes and went door to door and knocked on every door that was open to give away candy and said, “We don’t want candy; we want to introduce ourselves,” and got people to tell me who they were, and I had my little book, and by gum – I didn’t feel comfortable writing in front of them, but as soon as we were out the door, I was making notes and where I could, I’d write down the address, who lived there, some description so that I could remember them later, phone number if they were willing to give it to me, emails where I could get them. And then everybody disappeared till spring. But since I worked at home and had my office out on the front porch, I was watching out the window, and as soon as people came out and started gardening in the spring, if I possibly could I’d stop what I was doing and go out and hunker down next to them and start pulling weeds. They thought I was weird, but that was no surprise to me. But people don’t turn you down if you’re sitting there pulling weeds with them; they just don’t. So I started getting to know people. And then Susan Gardner showed up from around the corner trying to gather people to do a neighborhood association because the Greenways trail down in the ravine by the house – there was a bid to take it over and use it as a utilities corridor and run these huge power lines down it. So she wanted to organize against that, and I said sure. So I followed in her tracks, came to the meetings, got involved, got organized. And everybody I met, I asked them if they had email and would be willing to let me email them and build a neighborhood email list. So we had a neighborhood email list, and it is running. It’s over five hundred houses now. And I sit in the middle of that web. I’ve got a buddy that runs the City of Seattle website, or Seattle City Light website, I’m not sure how it works, but he said that part of his job is providing web space for neighborhood organizations there, and he said that they are the most volatile organizations of any he knows of because the people trying to work together have nothing in common except proximity. They’ll have very different religious and political beliefs, pictures of what community is supposed to look like, the whole bit. So it’s very challenging and tends to be explosive, and when they blow up, they blow sky high. So fool that I am, I sit in the middle of it, and if people want to send something to the whole neighborhood, they have to send it to me, and I either send it or I don’t, and I either edit it or I don’t before I send it out. I clean out victim-y stuff, and I clean out attacks, and I clean out contempt, and I clean out the stuff that will cause it to blow up. And for me, as a Jew, it’s a completely insane thing for me to do because I’m putting myself in a high-profile position where people can get upset at me, and sometimes do, and when people get upset at me, I terrified and I get paralyzed, and I’m putting off doing everything, and I can’t get out of bed in the morning, and blah-blah-blah. But the tradeoff is I sure know a lot of people now, and I know everybody on the block; they all know me. With Elliot going missing, everybody I see is saying, “Did you find your cat yet?” I’m getting offers of help. People are being very generous with me. So it’s cool that I’ve actually got my community. I love it. HOGUE: Well, I wanted to thank you for doing this very, very much. I don’t know if Cattywompus will allow you to do one more song… 30 BRESKIN: Oh, sure. Yeah, we can work that. So is it One Heart at a Time or is it something else? HOGUE: Whatever you want to do. That would probably be a nice little ending. BRESKIN: It’s either that or I Believe in Music. I think it’s that because I’m more likely to be able to get to it. [plays and sings] This time we’re going to change the world One heart at a time Man and woman, boy and girl One heart at a time Heart to heart, our lives entwine Heart to heart, our hopes combine It starts with your heart hearing mine One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time Lessons that the lost heart learns One heart at a time It works out if we just take turns One heart at a time Brothers, sisters, can’t you see It’s as simple as can be I hear you and you hear me One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time Look at what contempt has cost One heart at a time Every chance for closeness lost One heart at a time Find the courage that we need To face each other’s rage and greed Listening is the future’s seed One heart at a time 31 One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time People of all different kinds One heart at a time Linking lives and hands and minds One heart at a time Links of caring we create Can pull this world away from hate Listening like it’s not too late One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time One heart at a time One heart at a time Listening, laughing, crying One heart at a time HOGUE: Thank you. BRESKIN: You’re welcoming. What I didn’t talk about at all was co-counseling, reevaluation co-counseling, RC, I’ve been doing since 1978, and it’s where I really learned to listen and to think about listening, and to see the music building and the community building I’ve done through that filter of listening and getting it that we don’t have to be professionals with huge amounts of training to listen to one another when we’re having painful emotions, that being listened to and listening is a healing thing to do. I’ve just learned tons about building community there. HOGUE: Can you explain just a little, just a tiny bit about – ? BRESKIN: Sure. It’s that song; [it] was written to my co-counselors. It’s just … we make an exchange, and the exchange we make is listening to one another, loving, respectful attention. And what’s usually thought of as psychotherapy has a built-in imbalance of power, where one person is seen as the expert to fix the other person, and this just dumps this whole thing. Money is not what’s exchanged; you exchange listening to each other. I’ll listen to you for half an hour, you’ll listen to me for half an hour, or two hours, or whatever. Or five minutes on the phone or three minutes on the phone right when I’m in the crunch of ‘can’t deal with something,’ I can pick up the phone, phone down the list until I find somebody who’s home to swap a few minutes with. And it just makes so much difference clearing my mind. Some of it was noticing – the original 32 inspiration was getting it that sometimes you think better after a good cry. You don’t necessarily feel better, but by gum you think better. Our brains get all clogged, and sometimes tears are just – you know, if eyes are windows of the soul, sometimes you need tears to wash them clean so you can see again, both out and in. So we go there. Cocounseling has quietly been involved in a lot of big stuff; the concept ‘support group’ was originally a co-counseling idea. When there are big meetings, they go better if you start by doing mini-sessions where everybody turns to the person next to them [and] takes three minutes or five minutes apiece. Everybody takes a turn, and when it’s over, everybody there has been listened to, has had the experience of being listened to. There’s more and more of that creeping out into the world and happening. One of the other early pieces that the people who discovered it – Harvey Jackins was a union organizer for the machinists at Boeing during World War II, and he came at as an old Commie, as a socialist, as a world changer, wanting to set things right. He started noticing that people were sinking faster than you could listen them through it, and often it had to do with effects of sexism or racism or classism, that people were just getting slammed so hard that they couldn’t cry hard enough and fast enough to dump all of the confusion that was coming in. And he figured out that you have to also change the world; there’s no way that any one woman can recover from sexism all by herself; we have to actually change things. But the way we get slammed as women tends to divide us from other women, that we tend to be contemptuous or scared or, you know, we’ve all been mistreated by other girls, the bullying that goes on that’s verbal instead of getting beat up leaves us confused and scared to get close and trust other women, so we have to work through the ways we treat each other badly as women and permit ourselves to be disrespected as women, that even if every man and every institution changed overnight, we’d still have the work to do to heal our own lives because those institutionalized hurts come in as individual heartbreaks one at a time into our own hearts. And we have to clean that stuff up too in order to think flexibly and joyfully go out and set things right, because of course we want them right. So that is co-counseling’s place in it, and it’s been a – [pause in the tape]. We’re there? You know how much confidence I have in the power of music to change the world. What you may not know is that I have as much confidence in cocounseling, and I put as much time and energy into co-counseling as I do in music. HOGUE: Thank you so much for sharing everything. BRESKIN: Sure.
Show less

Title: Laurel Bliss oral history
Date: 2006-02-16
Description: Ms. Bliss briefly outlines her early experiences with playing music and some of her early artistic influences, including Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles. She spent the majority of her college career at University of Washington. Ms. Bliss recalls how she was exposed to bluegrass style music, and how she was first introduced to playing the dobro, a lap-played guitar often featured in country and bluegrass music. She relates her experiences playing with the South Fork Bluegrass Band of Bellingham, including playing at the Darrington Bluegrass Festival and the Grass Valley Festival. Ms. Bliss has taught classes at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop since 1984, and attended Whatcom County Homemade Music Society (WCHMS) music circles at the Roeder house when she was first learning to play folk music. She also describes the recording of a record, Old Pal, in 1994 with long time friend, Cliff Perry, and discusses her experiences playing Cajun music, specifically with the Bellingham-based band the Happy Valley Sluggers.
Digital Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Local Identifier: Bliss20060216
Text preview (might not show all results): Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview ti
Show moreCollection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview title: Interview with Laurel Bliss Interview Date: February 16, 2006 Interviewer: Coty Hogue Original transcription by: Laurie Brion, April 2010 COTY HOGUE: Today is February 16, 2006, and I am interviewing Laurel Bliss at her home. Thank you for letting me do this. I just want to make sure that I have your permission to record this and use it with the radio documentary. LAUREL BLISS: Yes. HOGUE: Great. We’re just going to start out – I was going to ask you a few questions about your childhood and work our way through to the present, sort of focusing on the music. First off, I was hoping you could state your name for the recording and maybe tell me a little bit about where you were born and when. BLISS: I’m Laurel Bliss, and I was born in 1951 in Seattle. After a year of living in Seattle, my family moved to Michigan, where I lived until I was in the ninth grade, and then back to Bellevue, Washington, for the rest of my school. HOGUE: Tell me a little bit about your childhood growing up, maybe what was your earliest memory of music. Did you find that early or did you just grow up listening to it, or what was … ? BLISS: I remember my family taking us to symphonies. My dad played the piano with his left hand and the harmonica holding with his right hand because he had a right hand injury; he couldn’t play. I remember listening to him play piano a lot. I started taking piano lessons when I was probably in the fourth or fifth grade. HOGUE: So you started playing the piano. What kind of music was that that you played? Was it classical music? BLISS: [Yes], classical music. HOGUE: Is that what you continued with for a while? BLISS: Yeah, I took piano lessons for about three years, and I was also taking some music lessons at school, flute and then string bass. I moved from the flute to the string bass; I think in the seventh and eighth grade I played the string bass. And then when we moved out here, I dropped everything, all the lessons. 2 HOGUE: When you were taking the lessons, was it a passion for the music, or was it something you sort of did? BLISS: No, I loved it. I loved especially the ensemble playing, the orchestra and the band in junior high school. HOGUE: And was that your main activity then to do? BLISS: No, my main activity was gymnastics. HOGUE: So you started playing music; you played the piano, and it was classical music, was when was it really that you took an interest in this sort of American roots music, the folk or bluegrass or old time music? Was it later? BLISS: My sister was taking some finger-style guitar folk lessons when I was taking piano lessons, and I got interested. I remember she learned the Spring Hill Mining Disaster – I don’t know if you know that song – with very intricate finger-style arrangement. She showed me when I was in high school how to play a little, and I started learning some Simon and Garfunkel songs and things like that in high school. HOGUE: Was that type of music popular at that period of time? BLISS: Yes. Yes, Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, yeah. HOGUE: And were those, do you think – Simon and Garfunkel, you mentioned – sort of a gateway into this kind of music? Who were some other people that got …? BLISS: Well, when I went to college, I had a roommate who played very good, very, very well finger-style folk. And she showed me how to do some pattern picking, righthand pattern style, and turned me on to Joan Baez, and I really started to delve into the ballad singing and the finger-style arrangements of Joan Baez particularly. I really like Leo Kottke and John Fahey; I kind of went in that direction. HOGUE: Where did you go to college? BLISS: My first year was at the University of Colorado, and then I transferred to the University of Washington. HOGUE: From that, doing the finger style and that style, how did you make this sort of turn into more bluegrass and old time music? What was the turning point there? BLISS: Let’s see, when I was in Seattle going to school, I took some classes in classical guitar through the Experimental College, and I think I realized that I wanted to play more with people, and everything I had learned on guitar up to that point was very solo oriented. I was at the University of Washington, and the Seattle Folklore Society had a clubhouse on the University Way, on the Ave, at 52nd, and they were offering workshops. 3 I just on a whim took a workshop on backing up fiddle tunes on the guitar. I took that class from a man named Rich Levine, who still lives in Seattle, and learned how to do the basic backup rhythm. From that, I just met so many people and heard about so many events, like Weiser, Idaho, the fiddle contest there, and fiddle tunes workshop in Port Townsend, and the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, that it just sort of exploded at that point for me. HOGUE: What years were those college years? BLISS: ’74, I think, was probably when I took that workshop, so ’74, ’75 was when I started listening to that kind of music, Will the Circle Be Unbroken was an album. That three-set album was really an influence on me. I hadn’t heard of any of the people on the album when I got it: the Carter Family, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson. It was all new to me. So that’s kind of the turning point for me, was getting exposed to the old time and the bluegrass in one place on those records. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit more about maybe that record, or some others in there, and maybe why that felt so much within you, doing that kind of thing? You talked about playing with people – [how was] that different from the other stuff that you’d started doing? BLISS: After starting to listen to this music and learning how to play the simple backup style with a flat pick probably, I went to Weiser, Idaho, and hung out for that week, the fiddle week, and started playing music with people and realized that that was a big part of the music for me, was the communication of playing with people that I didn’t know, having these common tunes that we could all play together. That just seemed like a community that I could enjoy getting to know more. I think that was the biggest draw, and also the music was pretty easy to learn off the record. I had classical training in that I could read music, but this kind of music at that point wasn’t written down. I could learn it off a record, and so it was just easy to grow. HOGUE: That’s when you actively started playing with that kind of music and making connections with people, and that was in Seattle when you were going there. When did you actually move up to Bellingham, or were there times in between that that you were elsewhere before being up here? BLISS: I was in Bellingham for a summer while I was in college, but I didn’t have much music connection. I graduated in ’75 and went to Whidbey Island for a couple years; that’s my first job. I got into a little string band there, just kind of by chance, the Whidbey Island String Band, and played a little bit. It was more about getting together and playing, not performing. But I learned more about the backup style and started to sing with people, have some singing partners there. And from there, I came to Bellingham, after going to the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and meeting Cliff Perry, who at the time was teaching a class. I took his class on – I think it was flat picking fiddle tunes class. He was in a bluegrass band called South Fork Bluegrass Band, which had a presence in Bellingham for over ten years in the Seventies and Eighties, more like almost 4 twenty years. He lived in Bellingham, and I just decided to move here to be around these bluegrass musicians that I had met at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. HOGUE: So you moved up here for this music. What was so important about getting together and playing this music? What was the powerfulness of it for you? BLISS: I think I was probably more comfortable socializing playing music than schmoozing and partying, you know. I never was much of a – I’m not really socially gifted, and I was more comfortable playing music, and that’s what people did, you know. They had a good time, ate food, and played music and partied and went to concerts together, went to Weiser together, went to the Darrington jams once a month together, and it was just like a big extended family. HOGUE: You met Cliff Perry at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and you moved up here. When did you actually start playing with South Fork Bluegrass Band? BLISS: It was a few years after that. I only lived in Bellingham for a year, and then I went to California to do some more schooling. Then I moved to Seattle after that schooling and worked in Seattle for three years. So I connected with more people in the music scene in Seattle before I came ultimately back to Bellingham. That was in 1982, and that’s when I started playing with South Fork. I picked up the dobro in ’82, and I think in ’83 I started playing with South Fork. HOGUE: You mentioned the dobro. Can we talk a little bit about that instrument? BLISS: Yeah, the dobro is actually a trade name. The Dopyera brothers invented what is called the resophonic guitar in the late 1920s. It’s a guitar that’s played lap-style, and the action of the strings on the finger board is raised up about a centimeter, and you play it with a steel bar. It has an amplification system built into it. This was invented pre public system of amplification, so it was a built in speaker in the guitar. It’s used in country music and bluegrass music and Hawaiian music. HOGUE: What was your appeal to that? How did you start playing it? BLISS: Oh, that’s a good story. I had been going to the Weiser Fiddle Tunes camp contest for years, so I started, I guess, in ’75. And in 1980, I met a woman from the Bay Area, and she was quite a bit younger than I was, but she had the prettiest voice, still one of my favorite voices that I’ve ever heard. I met her, and she was sitting cross-legged playing the dobro and singing beautifully, and I just thought, “I want to do that.” You know, the dobro wasn’t common in jam sessions, and so it’s a welcomed instrument, an additional instrument to a jam session, where usually there were plenty of guitars. I just liked the way she played, and so I decided to pick one up, and I did a year or so later, and Cliff taught me how to play. HOGUE: And was it challenging to do? 5 BLISS: Not really. The guitar is tuned in an open G chord, G-B-D-G-B-D. So it’s easy to make chords; getting control of the steel bar in the left hand takes some work, but the right hand finger-picking patterns I was familiar with from finger-style guitar. I was playing in South Fork about six months after I got the instrument; whether that was a good thing or not, I don’t know, but I was able to do it. HOGUE: Tell me a little bit about your experience playing with South Fork Bluegrass Band. BLISS: Well, I loved the bluegrass music, and South Fork is very traditional. They played the old songs. As they said, “We’re a traditional band; we play the songs we always play.” I loved their repertoire, and I loved singing with Cliff, and we played a lot. We played at Darrington Bluegrass Festival, we played at Grass Valley Festival in California. They recorded an album prior to me being in the band. We played a lot in Seattle at the Harmony, what was called the New Melody, what’s now called the Tractor Tavern, played there a lot. And it was a good time. HOGUE: Was there any experience that stood out for you during that time? BLISS: No, I think playing at Grass Valley was probably – that was the first time I really played out of the area at all, and that’s a pretty big bluegrass festival. I mean, the other bands there were bands like Jim Eanes and Del McCoury and Vern Williams and national acts, and we were one of the local acts, but it was quite an honor to play there. HOGUE: This was pretty much not even ten years after you started getting into this music. Had you done any performing before that? How was it going into performing at places? Was it nerve-wracking? BLISS: I hadn’t done any performing. Yeah, maybe a little bit; I think I was kind of in over my head. Learning to play the dobro – I mean, I was comfortable singing, especially with Cliff because we had a good match right from the start. But there’s a mechanical challenge playing the dobro because you have to look down at the fingerboard. It’s not like the guitar where you grab the neck and you can kind of feel without looking. You have to look at the fingerboard on the dobro, but you have to look into the microphone when you sing, and that mechanical challenge took me several years to work out. So I felt in over my head that way. But we weren’t playing in very hightension situations very often with South Fork; it was usually pretty laid back. HOGUE: Were there any other bands like that in the area? Was it a big thing then, or was this sort of the band in Bellingham? BLISS: Yeah, it was definitely the band in Bellingham. It was the Barbed Wire Cutters back two decades earlier. South Fork Bluegrass Band had grown out of a smaller band called the Hunger Brothers, and together, between those two bands, it was probably twenty years of the only bluegrass band in Bellingham. So, you know, when we would 6 play at the salmon barbecue or something in Fairhaven, you know, two or three hundred people would come usually. It was fun. HOGUE: How long were you in the band? BLISS: I was in the band till the band dissolved in 1990, so about eight years, seven [or] eight years. HOGUE: Then afterwards, can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve done musically after that band? You’ve done a lot of old time stuff and working recently with Carol Elizabeth Jones, but in between that time – ? BLISS: A couple years after the South Fork Band stopped playing, I was asked to play at a wedding, and I asked Cliff Perry if he would be interested in doing the wedding with me, and we did. We tried to find all the positive and happy songs we could find, and we did this wedding, and we decided to play out a little bit. So we formed a duet, and we made a recording called Old Pal in 1994 and did a little bit of touring in California and a little bit back in the Appalachian area. I did that for a while, I think about three or four years, Cliff and I played. HOGUE: How was that dynamic, with just the duo, different from playing with this bluegrass band? BLISS: A lot more work. With the two of us, we were both keeping rhythm, of course, but somebody was filling in behind the singing or taking a break during the parts of the music where there’s no singing. Playing dobro and singing at the same time is really a challenge, not only mechanically with the microphone, but just the coordination of it. Playing a guitar and singing is a coordination that felt pretty natural to me, but not playing the dobro. So it was a huge challenge because you never could stop. But we got pretty good at it, and I like the sound of it, so it was rewarding in the end. HOGUE: And then recently you’ve played with Carol Elizabeth Jones. How did that come about? BLISS: Well, I met Carol Elizabeth Jones and her then partner, James Leva, at Fiddle Tunes, the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend in … I think it was probably around ’94 or ’95, and they were teaching there. I got to jam, to sing some songs with them a couple different times, and we were very attracted to each other’s choice of material and singing style, and we kept track of each other. When Cliff and I went back to North Carolina and Virginia to play, we stayed at their house, and I recommended them to be hired for the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, so they came out here and taught. We kind of kept track of each other, and then about three or four years ago, I just got a phone call one day from Carol Elizabeth, saying she was at a musical crossroads, and she wanted to start a new project and make a recording, and she thought of me, and was I interested. And I said, “Yep!” And so we just made a recording, having 7 not played together, and then we played pretty steadily for the next two years; [we] made another recording. HOGUE: How was that experience, going into this recording process without having ever really done much together? BLISS: It was different; it was an affair, you know. It wasn’t a love grown out of a relationship; it was definitely kind of a one-night-stand feel. But we exchanged material on tapes, talked a lot about material; I flew back east to practice, she flew out west to record, and we practiced, and we did very well, but it was hard. We had to have a pickup band from the Seattle area, and on most of the songs we had some help. HOGUE: You mentioned twice this material, and I was just sort of curious: what draws you? What kind of material … can you pick something out that would describe the material that you like? BLISS: Well, foremost, something that is easy for me to sing, something that feels well within my vocal range of notes and something that is just easy for me to deliver. I think I think of that before I think of the actual content of the words, which is a bit of a fault of mine and, I think, comes from singing a lot of bluegrass songs that sometimes don’t have a lot of substance but the melody is pretty, or Cajun music, which I also play, where the lyrics may not be pretty at all but the melody is pretty. Carol Elizabeth is a songwriter, so she’s first thinking about the words and then everything else, so it was good for me to have discussions with her about material, but I think I’m drawn to the feel of the melody first. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about the Cajun music? I know that you play with the Happy Valley Sluggers, which is a local Bellingham band; maybe you can talk about them and Cajun music. BLISS: Well, I was exposed to Cajun music at Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend the first year I went there, which was the first year it was, 1976. I went to Fiddle Tunes for five years, and pretty much the first five years studied Cajun music. They had Cajun music greats, like Dewey Balfa and D. L. Menard and … just, you know, everyone they had there was just someone who was, you know, just the best. They’re all gone now, of course, because that was thirty years ago. Also, when I was in California during that five-year period – I went down there to study for six months – I took Cajun fiddle lessons from a woman named Suzy Thompson who was in Berkeley, who is just the finest – my favorite singer, my favorite guitar player and fiddler in the world. So I got exposed to a lot of Cajun music from her. And then I didn’t play much until the Happy Valley Sluggers were formed. I guess we’ve been playing ten, twelve, fourteen years – something like that – a long time now. HOGUE: How did you guys meet and form? 8 BLISS: Well, my husband, John Cork, and I have been playing Cajun music and old time music and bluegrass together for a long time; we’ve been together for twenty years. But I think Mike Schway, who plays fiddle and accordion with the Happy Valley Sluggers, we probably met him through Fiddle Tunes and just the local scene, the dance scene, the contra dance scene, square dance scene here in Bellingham and found out he liked Cajun music too and played accordion, which was important. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about Fiddle Tunes and how you found out about it, your experience with it? BLISS: I don’t remember how I found out about it, but I did manage to go from the beginning. It’s an event at Port Townsend at Fort Worden, run by the Centrum Foundation, one of their many programs. What they strive to do is to bring together all the regional fiddle styles of North America that they can, and they try to bring masters, often elderly people, together to teach workshops and have dances and concerts. And it meets the week of the Fourth of July every year. HOGUE: And how long have you been going to that? BLISS: Well, I went for five years, and then it’s been kind of sporadic since then. I took quite a few years off. I was working – I was going to the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop regularly and I was very involved with that organization, so I couldn’t do it all because I had a job. I couldn’t go to every camp and workshop I wanted to go to. HOGUE: And can I ask you what you were working as when you weren’t playing music? BLISS: Oh, I’m a physical therapist. I’m retired now; I just do some teaching. But I was, yeah, working as a physical therapist. HOGUE: What was the experience, going to all these festivals? I mean, I know there was this feeling of community and that, but what was the drive to just go to all these things? BLISS: Well, I enjoyed the community. You know, you get to know more and more people; they become your family. You know people up and down the West Coast, and now I know a lot of musicians on the East Coast, and there’s just this acceptance of you if you play music, bluegrass music, old time music. When you meet, people take you into their homes and have parties. It’s just a great extended family. I think I enjoyed the teaching too; I started teaching at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop after working my way up through being on the board and doing site coordination and stuff. I started teaching classes in, I think, ’84, and I taught … I don’t know, I’ve probably taught twenty times since then, different classes, mostly on vocal repertoire or harmony singing or lately some dobro classes. And I think that when I teach, it sends me into my own repertoire, it sends me into my record collection, and I start listening more and I learn 9 more, and it’s just all about getting familiar with the music and passing it on, and I love that about it. HOGUE: How have you built the repertoire up? Where does that interest go? Are there any particular people that stand out for you? BLISS: Well, there’s a man here in Bellingham named Gene Wilson, or the Earl of KUGS, he was known as. He had a show for eighteen years on KUGS called Basically Bluegrass. It was on Thursday nights from 7 to 9. He has an enormous record collection, and I would go up with him to his show and not really help with the show – I flubbed a few times – but the one year I was in Bellingham in the Seventies, he lent me his record collection. He would say, “Okay, take all of my Bill Monroe records, and when you’re done with them, come back and I’ll give you all of my Flatt and Scruggs records or all of my Doc Watson records.” I built up a big library of tapes of music. Then when I moved to Seattle and had a real job and started making money, I started buying records like a maniac, so I have a really large record collection now. And that’s where my repertoire comes from, listening to my records, pretty much. HOGUE: I want to talk a little bit about Puget Sound Guitar Workshop; you’ve been really involved with that. How did you first hear about that? BLISS: I don’t remember. Maybe through the Seattle Folklore Society? Probably likely. I think the first year I went was the third year that it happened. I don’t remember how I got there, quite honestly. I remember being very intimidated and scared the first year I was there because I hadn’t played music with people, and it really was a challenge to sort of let down my expectations of myself and just play. That’s the first thing I learned there, that you could really just play at the level you are capable of, and it was okay. So I just grew from there and just kept going back and back. It’s a lot of fun. HOGUE: Maybe you could talk a little bit more about how that experience of feeling like it was okay to be at the level where you were at and be encouraged by that, and how that environment at that camp, or maybe other places as well, has allowed you to continue on with doing what you’re doing. BLISS: I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been able to play music with people who are more talented than I am, more experienced than I am, all along the way. As intimidating as that is, I really encourage people who are playing to seek that out because, you know, most people with experience want to encourage people to play; they want the tradition to continue, and there’s a lot of nurturing that goes on. It’s more about your own expectations of yourself that might limit you in those situations, so I found myself exposed to very, very good music right from the beginning. When I could get my ego out of it, that was much more comfortable. HOGUE: At the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, you started out just as a camp goer. How did you get more involved with it as the years went by? 10 BLISS: I decided to run and be on the Board of Directors, which helped plan camp and staff. And then we decided that a site coordinator was in order so that the organizers didn’t have to work during the camp week, so I did that for a few years, and then I decided that I could teach, so I started teaching. HOGUE: I know you mentioned that’s how you met people from Bellingham, like Flip Breskin who was helping start the camp. Were there a lot of Bellingham people that came down with that? BLISS: Yes, there were a lot of Bellingham people. Some of those years, I was living in Seattle, and there were also a lot of people from Seattle there, so I can’t really separate the two out now, but I know that the South Fork Bluegrass Band being in Bellingham was the draw to get me up here when I had the choice to move. HOGUE: So you have been working with that camp for many, many years. How do you think it has sustained itself and continued to be a viable camp? BLISS: Oh, I think that the people who go there, many, many of them want to return because of the community and because of continuing exposure to new musicians, both teachers and students alike. I mean, the musicianship at that camp, many of the people who go there as campers are as experienced musicians as the people who instruct, and that just makes a very nice environment. And it’s like summer camp, except that it’s guitar all the time and other instruments as well, but it’s in a beautiful place over by Bremerton with a lake to swim in and walk around. It’s a very nice setting. HOGUE: You’ve mentioned a lot, talking about that and other things, is the sense of community. What do you think makes the community so strong in this kind of music, or maybe in any kind of music or field in general? BLISS: Well, I think in the case of music that there’s a certain vulnerability that happens when you play music with people. It’s a communication on a level that’s so much more personal than just having a conversation that there’s a trust that goes along. So if you have an experience with someone – maybe you’ve never met them – you get to a level, if your phrasing works and your blend works and your humming ideas work, you get to this level in a relationship with them that could take a really long time to get to if you were just having a conversation. It’s a special, intimate way of communicating, and I think I just thrive on that feeling when the music really feels right to me, when I have that connection with people. It’s like a drug, especially with singing, for me. I guess I just need that; it’s part of my life need, is to have that connection musically with people. HOGUE: Many people have found this community with this music, and I think that it’s especially strong here in the Northwest. Can you talk about maybe what has kept that thriving? BLISS: Well, I think it’s sometimes the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and Fiddle Tunes and Weiser, Idaho Fiddle Week Campout. I think these things keep people coming 11 together. I mean, there are people that go to Weiser – I went myself for about twenty years. I haven’t been going in the last ten years, but people from California and British Columbia and Washington and Idaho and Montana that go every year, and they’ve seen each other have children, and the kids grow up and leave the home, and it’s just a big family. I think that just promotes the music. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit more about that sense of family. You mentioned how people can just invite each other into their homes and how important that it for people, maybe today, to have that sense. BLISS: Yeah, I think that is more important today than ever, that people have this feeling of safeness, you know, that there’s this unspoken acceptance of them because they like the same kind of music and they play the same kind of music. It happens to me time and again when I go back east to North Carolina and Virginia, even though I’m not from that part of the country. When I play that music, when I interpret that music, people are just welcoming me as if I were from across the street or across the hollow or something. I don’t know, maybe it’s true in all forms of music, but it seems very true in old time and folk and bluegrass music, that people are very accepting of you if you play the same kind of music that they do. HOGUE: Do you have any idea why that may be within that particular genre? BLISS: I don’t know … HOGUE: Any opinion? BLISS: It’s such an accessible form of music. You don’t have to play technically well to enjoy it or to join in in a jam session, so it’s more the people’s music. I guess that’s partly folk music too; it’s just so accessible. Maybe that’s why; I don’t know. I have never really thought about it. HOGUE: I think recently there has been more resurgence in interest in this kind of music. I don’t know if you’ve felt that, or maybe you have felt that it’s always been there, but what do you think about that and maybe why there has been this sort of new interest in it? BLISS: Well, I think a lot of people are drawn to simplifying their life and making their life less stressful and less complicated and less commercial and less glitzy and less produced and … I mean, I think that when I was in my twenties and thirties, and actually pretty much my whole life I’ve always felt that way, but old time music, I think, especially the people that I see in their twenties playing this music, in their thirties, that they’re really embracing the noncommercial aspect of it, the non-glitzy aspect of it. That’s an attraction that it’s not popular, that it’s not glitzy, or you don’t hear it on commercial radio, not that it’s underground, but that it exists for the love of it. It doesn’t exist to make money or to be famous or successful, and that’s always appealed to me too. I don’t know if people are just more drawn to those “values” now because the world is 12 spinning out of control on a lot of levels that we can’t control, but we can control our own lives to that extent and being less consuming and less commercial and having less impact on the planet and stuff. I think that has to do with the resurgence in old time music especially. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit maybe of what exactly stems from old time music, or what is the classification of old time rather than say it’s bluegrass or folk or …? BLISS: Well, I think old time music comes from – it’s all country music to me. It’s just different forms of country music, and old time music is maybe more the original that grew out of the Scottish and English and Irish fiddle tunes, unaccompanied ballad singing that came over to the United States with immigrants. So old time music was a vocal tradition early first, and then the banjo and the fiddle came in. The guitar is a recent addition, you know, in the last hundred years. I think that it’s often dance music; the old time music was to provide fiddle or banjo or just one or the other, both together or one or the other, for dance music in peoples’ homes. I think old time music was very much an entertainment that people – they made their own entertainment. They didn’t have commercial – before radio and television existed, they made their own music for entertainment, and there was a lot of local music in the southeastern United States especially, where this music really grew from. I think bluegrass grew out of old time music and the first bluegrass music was really in the late Thirties, early Forties, and it was just old time music, kind of hyped up old time music with a little more speed, a little more finesse. When Bill Monroe first played Mule Skinner Blues on the Grand Ole Opry at lightning speed, people just couldn’t believe it, and that’s sort of how bluegrass started, just more pep and more emphasis on tighter singing arrangements and instrumental arrangements, whereas in old time music, the quality of the singing isn’t really important; it’s more the spirit. I think the spirit of the singing and instrumentals are often played – everybody plays at the same time. You don’t take turns and take instrumental breaks, so it’s not so much instrumental prowess going on; it’s more shared. That’s the main difference between the style bluegrass and old time in my mind. HOGUE: I wanted to turn back a little bit to that community and focus more on the Bellingham community in general. There’s definitely sort of maybe two different sectors: there’s ‘folk music’ and maybe there’s more old time, bluegrass style music, but do you think that – I mean in a lot of places, there’s sort of a big rift between that. Do you think that’s here in Bellingham, or have they been able to maintain a pretty good connection? BLISS: Well, when you were asking this question, I realized I don’t know the answer because I … My friends that play folk music I mostly know through the guitar workshop, but I can’t say that they’re people that I hang around and jam with very often, save a few people who I won’t mention in case they don’t want to have their names on the air or something. But I know that there’s an active music circle at the Roeder Home; that’s not something that I’ve been involved in, so I don’t feel like I really know the folk scene in Bellingham as maybe you do. 13 HOGUE: But within the scene that you are involved in, where are some places and people in the past and in the present, where did they get together and play and build that community or hear music? BLISS: Well, I think the Roeder Home, the Whatcom Homemade Music Society, has been a gathering spot. I did go to the music circles when I was first learning and playing more folk-oriented material. I think there were some clubs, as there are now, that emphasize string music and acoustic music. They’re of course completely different now. I think that’s the way people connected often was at these clubs. But I think I just sort of glommed onto a group of people that I’d met at the guitar workshop and ended up pretty much hanging out with them. I think nowadays there’s so much old time, stringband, bluegrass music here in Bellingham that people can hear and get exposed to that … You know, the Subdued Stringband Jamboree that’s been happening for the last four years out at the Deming Logging Grounds is a great gathering place. I’ve met a lot of people, mostly of your generation, out there playing in bands and stuff, and it’s great. There’s just so much activity right now, it’s spawning lots of great bands and lots of participation. HOGUE: What’s the importance of participation for this kind of music, do you think? BLISS: Well, I think that when you participate in the music, you just feel it more, you understand it more, you want to go out and hear performers as well as, you know, playing on your own, and you get inside of it in a way that, you know, if you’re not interested or not capable of playing … I mean, listeners are very valuable, but when you play it yourself you just get inside of it in a different way, I think. HOGUE: Maybe do you think that’s why this music can include so [many] people because it is sort of easy, there’s not a lot of difficulty? BLISS: Yeah, I think so, and I also have an experience when I’ve gone to parties with people in their twenties mostly, that the level of acceptance of the music is just “anything goes.” That’s not really my memory of when I was at that age and learning, and that could have been a projection of my own insecurity, I don’t know. But it seems like now, really, anything goes. People can play whatever instrument they want at whatever level, and they’re welcomed and it works. It’s like there’s no judgment; it’s really wonderful. It’s just so nurturing, and I think that just encourages more and more people to play and take up and make bands because the acceptance level is just perfect right now, I think, for the music. HOGUE: Why do you think that is – just an evolution of that? BLISS: I don’t know. I don’t know. HOGUE: So there is so much stuff going on, the Subdued Stringband Jamboree, there’s all these places that have this kind of music going on, there seems to be a lot of activity, and there seems like there always sort of has been this activity with music here. Where do you think that that comes from here? 14 BLISS: Having a college here is, I’m sure, a big piece of it. I think people at college age are just listening to lots and lots of kinds of music and open to experiencing lots of things, and I think as the tradition continues with the threads like the Whatcom Homemade Music Society – you know, every Wednesday something is happening during the school year – and Western having their own musical programs too, and I think it’s a destination now. I think people can move to Bellingham if they like this kind of music and know that there’s going to be a community in place, much like Portland or Berkeley. Back East, there’s many communities like that, but I bet there are people who are relocating here just because they know the music scene is happening. HOGUE: That brings up the future. Where do you see the future of this music going, here or nationwide, and the community? BLISS: I just think old time music will always grow because it’s always been there and it’s just always going to be … it’s always going to appeal to some people because it’s accessible and now it’s very easy to acquire the music through the internet, all of the file sharing and things. It used to be that it was hard to get; I think there was a time where it was hard to get recordings, and if you didn’t have those recordings, those old 78s of these fiddle players and these LPs that were out of print, you didn’t have access, and now the access is there. So it’s unlimited what you can be exposed to and what you can learn. Satellite radio, you can listen to the Grand Ole Opry if you want to. You can listen to old time radio stations back in Appalachia if you want to, so I think that’s going to encourage people to keep listening and playing old time music and bluegrass. HOGUE: That’s sort of a funny dichotomy between the technology and the – [laughs] BLISS: Yeah, that’s true. It’s true; I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, I was at a jam session recently, and one of the fiddlers said, “I can never remember how to tune scales, but on my iPod I put the first four measures of all the tunes I know so it can kick start me.” I was just thinking that … technology. It’s helpful. I don’t use it myself very much. I’m always about twenty years behind in technology; I still play my LPs all the time. HOGUE: I think there’s been a – I don’t know. My friends and I, we’ve all bought record players and we have records. There is a new interest in going back to the records by a lot of people. So … what is your drive to keep playing this kind of music? What keeps it going? BLISS: Learning more songs, meeting more people that I can share the music with and talk about the music with, and teaching more, having those moments of connecting with someone when I’m singing that are just perfect. I had a lot of those moments this last year; I was very lucky because I was able to teach at some different music camps and meet new musicians. It’s just this real magic communication that gets kind of addictive after a while, and it’s what I like to do the most. HOGUE: Is there a sense of passing on what you know to others? 15 BLISS: Yes, and as I get older, I realize that is my role because I’ve had exposure to a lot of this music that people – they may not have heard the original version, they may not have heard until the fifth generation version of a particular song. Maybe they are interested in the original version, maybe they’re fine with the fifth generation, but I tend to have studied more the source of the songs, and I think that that’s important to pass on. HOGUE: I wante to go back just to a few little things that came up, and ask you… You mentioned how important vocal harmony is for you, and I was wondering if you can talk about how you got into singing with the harmony style and what that does for you? BLISS: Just singing along with records probably, you know, like everybody else in junior high and high school, singing along with the Beatles records and learning those parts underneath the melody that were so interesting that the Beatles sang. I think that’s probably how I got started, and trying to actually sing with someone and seeing that that was a lot of fun. HOGUE: Did you ever go to Folklife? BLISS: I go to Folklife every year. HOGUE: There are a lot of festivals that go on around here; one of them is Folklife. Can you talk a little bit about that festival, since it is so important here in the Northwest, and your experience with that? BLISS: I started going to Folklife Festival when I was in college at the UW, so probably around ’73, when it was a small event. Probably the first time I played at Folklife was with the South Fork Bluegrass Band some time in the early Eighties, probably. Folklife was always the kicking off of the festival season: it happened on Memorial Day weekend. There would be a stage, pretty much now a stage devoted to stringband music, so all the old time bands, Irish bands – well, no, the Irish bands usually played at the pub. But old time and bluegrass and maybe ragtime and stuff would play at this one stage, and so you’d pretty much see everybody who was playing because there weren’t that many bands. So there might be, over the course of those three days, because it didn’t start on Friday then, there might be thirty or forty bands, and it would be pretty much all the bluegrass and old time bands from the Northwest. It’s not quite the same anymore because there are so many more bands. So it was kind of like keeping track of who’s who and what people are sounding like. HOGUE: I just want to finish this up by thanking you for doing this. Was there anything that came to mind or that you wanted to add in at the end of this interview before … BLISS: No, I can’t think of anything. HOGUE: Great. Well, I just want to thank you for doing this; it’s been really helpful. 16 BLISS: You’re welcome, Coty. [TAPE STOP AND RESTART] HOGUE: Tell me a little bit about – in this kind of music, there’s a lot of dances that go on. There’s square dances, contra dances; maybe you could explain what the difference is between the two first. BLISS: Well, they’re all social dances that are done by couples, and the contra dance form is lines where you face your partner across the line. There’s figures that are called by the caller while the musicians are playing. In contra dancing, you’re moving up and down the line and changing partners pretty much with every figure. In square dancing, you’re in four couples, so there’s eight people in the square, and you dance with those eight people the entire dance, so there’s not quite as much mixing. Contra dancing tends to be a little less physical than square dancing, and I think that the scene in Bellingham started out as more of a square dance scene, kind of moved into more contra dancing as we all aged, and now there’s a new square dancing venue at the Fairhaven Fire Hall the last Sunday of every month that is all square dancing, and a lot of people are coming out for that. That’s a little more energetic than the contra dancing can be. HOGUE: Do you think that’s a way for people to be involved with the music if they don’t necessarily play an instrument? BLISS: Yeah, dancing to live music is really different, a lot more energetic than dancing to recorded music with recorded calls. Some people had that experience in junior high school, at least when I was in junior high school. We all had square dancing in P.E. to recorded calls, but this is live music, and it’s really energetic and fun. HOGUE: Great. Thank you.
Show less

Title: Richard Scholtz oral history
Date: 2005-10-20
Description: Mr. Scholtz was born in Los Angeles, California in 1947, and spent parts of his childhood in Ventura and Alton before heading to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. As a child, Mr. Scholtz played piano and trumpet, and took music theory courses in college though he majored in Psychology. His first exposure to folk music came in high school when he heard Pete Seeger and the Weavers, and after college he took up the auto-harp. He recalls his experiences meeting Flip Breskin, and his work with the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. He also relates how he came to found the WCHMS, and his continued work with the group. Mr. Scholtz acted as head of the Washington State Folk Life Council for 8-10 years, and has taught music classes at Western and at Whatcom Community College. He describes the Bellingham music scene, and its influence and impact on groups like the Homemade Music Society.
Digital Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Local Identifier: Scholtz20051020
Text preview (might not show all results): Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview ti
Show moreCollection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview title: Interview with Richard Scholtz Interview Date: October 20, 2005 Interviewer: Coty Hogue Original transcription by: Laurie Brion, June 2010 COTY HOGUE: Today is October 20, [2005], and I am Coty Hogue, and I am interviewing Richard Scholtz today. RICHARD SCHOLTZ: Good morning. HOGUE: Why don’t we start off with some basic little things, and maybe you could tell me where you were born and when. SCHOLTZ: I was born in Los Angeles in 1947. HOGUE: And can you tell me a little bit about your childhood growing up, what it was like for you growing up in Los Angeles. SCHOLTZ: Well, we lived in Los Angeles until I was seven, maybe, and then we moved to a town up the coast called Ventura. The part of Los Angeles we lived in was not very city-like, so my memory of Los Angeles was not of a huge city. And then the town I grew up in – let’s see, we moved when I was seven, and that was a town probably smaller than Bellingham at that point. My family continued to live there, but I went away to high school. I went to a very small high school in a tiny town that was Alton, California, and then I went to Ohio for college. My brother was older than me and still lives in Los Angeles; he feels to himself like he’s a Los Angeles native. California in the Fifties and Sixties was much more a rural place. You know, where I lived there were orange groves and walnut groves. You know, there were freeways, but not like … HOGUE: Not like there are now. SCHOLTZ: Not like Seattle, you know. HOGUE: How did you first get exposed to music? Was your family very musical growing up, or … ? SCHOLTZ: Well, we had a piano in the house, a baby grand that belonged to my father’s side of the family, and which both my – my father had played but he didn’t play much anymore. My mother played more. My father was really interested in recorded music, more I remember that when I … well, it must have been from when I was a little kid, but later on, he had a lot of equipment and lots of recordings. You can see there’s a lot of records in this room, and at least some of them are from him. Part of that collection were still interesting to me. I don’t remember 2 them singing very much. I took piano lessons, and there was a boys’ glee club or something – I guess a boys’ choir or chorus that I sang some in elementary school and played a little percussion for. And I played trumpet in middle school band. And then I didn’t do much with music in high school, and then in college I thought of myself mostly as a listener. I ended up taking quite a few music theory classes. One day I was walking by the music building, and they were listening to a Beethoven quartet and [inaudible], so I just walked in and sat down in the class. It was that kind of school you could do that in. It was an interesting view. It analyzed, so I stayed. I asked the teacher if I could stay, so I ended up taking that class. And then I took three or four more classes from that particular person. They were great. And what was interesting, it made me kind of fall into advanced harmony without ever taking the beginning analysis classes. That worked okay. HOGUE: And where did you go to college? SCHOLTZ: Antioch. HOGUE: In California. SCHOLTZ: No, no, Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio. HOGUE: Ohio. Okay. And when did you sort of get first exposed to folk music and take an interest in that – “folk music.” SCHOLTZ: Well … that’s a good question. Probably when I was in high school, I heard Pete Seeger and the Weavers and people like that, recordings. My brother was going to law school in Berkeley, and he knew Malvina Reynolds a little bit. You know, she was a visible person and he was interested in liberal politics. The free speech movement was happening at Berkeley, and there was quite a bit of folk music stuff that was a part of that. So probably high school. I don’t think my parents – I mean, my parents in their collection would have had stuff like Harry Belafonte, which had some. And they had the Weavers and they had Tom Leary, which, you know, some of that stuff has become – certainly some of the stuff that Harry Belafonte sang. He was a jazz singer before he sang the kind of stuff that he sang where he got really popular. But there was definitely some elements of what he did that were folk music for the time. You know, it looked like folk music before people kind of took steps further back. It wasn’t originally stage music; this was something else and sort of found out what it was before it was performance music in big theaters and stuff like that. HOGUE: And were you listening to folk music in college at all? SCHOLTZ: I had friends there who listened to Doc Watson. In fact, Doc came to Antioch while we were there; Doc and Merle came and played. And Michael Cooney, who was really an amazing source of music, came to Antioch and played. There was quite a bit of acoustic folk music that came through Yellow Springs. So yeah, I wasn’t gigantically interested in it. I was interested in it, but I didn’t get interested in it, really, until I started playing it. I mean, I was interested in it and I liked it, but what was really attractive about it was as a participation music rather than just as a listening music. 3 HOGUE: When did you start playing music, actually? SCHOLTZ: Well, like I say, I played when I was a kid, and I played quite a bit. Then after I graduated from Antioch, I was involved in setting up a college that Antioch was setting up in California, Antioch West, and I was part of the initial three staff people for that, to get that going. So I worked one year down in Southern California running a center down there, and then I worked in San Francisco, which is where our main part of the program was. And it was an interesting other story, what that program was, but it’s not unrelated in that it had educational strategies that are not unrelated to how Fairhaven works. There was no content requirement to graduate; there was only a process requirement to graduate. So yeah, it was a very interesting school. Anyway, most of the people who were students in there were older people – not fifty, although some people were that old, but they weren’t typical college age. There was a guy there who played autoharp some as a student who one day asked me if I played music. I said, “Well, I used to play piano, but they’re too big to carry around.” He said, “Well, you should get an autoharp.” I didn’t know anything about an autoharp. He said, “Oh yeah, they’re great. The music store around the corner [has them] on sale. Go buy one.” I thought, okay. They were like eighty bucks or a hundred bucks, so I bought an autoharp. And I had no idea what it was supposed to sound like, because I had never really heard it. After I got it, I kind of got interested in seeing if I could find any recordings, and I think there were two or three recordings that had autoharp on them that were around. But before I got them, I started messing around with playing, and I was interested in having a melody instrument. I didn’t know that that really wasn’t what they were, so I started trying to find individual notes, and it turned out fairly quickly that I figured out that the music theory I had studied by accident I could apply to understanding what do these chord bars do, and where are the notes, and can I find a scale? So coming through that year, the last part of that year I messed around with it. And the guy who told me about it did play something tune-like, though not really detailed tunes. Then we moved up here after that. I almost went to work for the community college, which at that point was a college without a campus intentionally, which is again an interesting history but not for this interview. I decided not to do that, and I thought, “You know, music would be kind of fun. I think I’m going to do a little bit. What the heck, that would be different while I figure out what I really want to do,” so I started volunteering with the autoharp to do music behind story times at the library and started doing school visits and ended up with a bunch of kids as students, so I kept doing it. HOGUE: I guess let’s go back a little bit. So your involvement with all this: what did you major in in college? SCHOLTZ: Psychology. HOGUE: Working with the kids. SCHOLTZ: Psychology as more of the perception philosophy side of it rather than the experimental social science-social modification side of it. But Antioch is a school – at least at that point – it’s changed. Maureen could tell you more because she was just back there. But at that point, Antioch was a school you went five years and you alternated a quarter on campus with a quarter working some place. So you went year round. And they had connections to jobs around the country, so I worked at a school camp for elementary school kids in Michigan. I 4 guess I played – we did music there, now that I think of it. We had a little band that we played for the kids. I made a gutbucket that I would play in that situation. Anyway, I worked there, I worked in a residential treatment center in Ohio, I worked at an adult … I don’t know what you would call it … sort of an encounter group thing that happened in Philadelphia. I worked for the Department of Mental Hygiene in northern California; I worked at California State Hospital, and then a residential treatment center in northern California, a really isolated place in Philo, California. So anyway, that’s a lot [inaudible]. And there were some elements of music in that, but not really. HOGUE: So when you started working at the library and playing autoharp for these kids, were you singing as well? SCHOLTZ: No, I did just instrumental music for a long time. HOGUE: When did you actually start singing a little bit with people, or do you still mostly do instrumental? SCHOLTZ: No, no, I do a lot of singing. No, I ended up doing a ton of singing. I don’t know. I mean, I was singing, but I didn’t think of singing as part of what I would perform, and I don’t know exactly … I guess that would have been ’73. I can’t remember. Maybe by ’76, ’77. I started singing because I thought there were songs that people wouldn’t hear otherwise. But mostly what I did was instrumental stuff. Then in ’78 maybe, ’77, Helen, my wife, and I – she was doing a class in parent education at the community college. There was a parent co-op kind of thing, and we started offering a class at the community college, which was songs for parents. You know, how do you sing at home rather than sound like a performance? It’s different when you’re at home. If you try and say to your kids, “Okay, everybody sit still in rows and I’ll sing for you,” it’s not the way it works. And there really were no models for that, so people need repertoire, and people need kind of strategies. You know, singing in the car is different from singing at bedtime. Anyway, so we did that for quite a while. So I think that was probably the first time I got paid to sing. HOGUE: And during this time, did you start meeting other musicians? SCHOLTZ: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that made it way more interesting than I thought it was going to be and why I kept doing it. And I can remember really well going to parties where nobody talked; they just played music. Wow, that’s really amazing. People can just sit around and just play. How do they do that? That was very intriguing, and as a person who had been – I’m still pretty verbal, but I was really – verbal was my way of communicating. So the idea that you could spend hours with people and not talk and really something can happen, hmm! That was fun. So yeah. And the stuff at the Roeder Home was just starting up. There were a lot of musicians in town and a lot of people who were really welcoming to play with. I can’t remember – I got invited to go to the guitar workshop really pretty early in all that. HOGUE: The guitar workshop? 5 SCHOLTZ: Yeah, that’s where I met Flip. Well, I don’t know whether I met Flip there – no, they must have met me first. She and David were in town and somehow we crossed paths and got together and [discussed?] music. They invited me to come and do dulcimer autoharp, mostly dulcimer, at guitar workshop, and then the next year I got involved in organizing. HOGUE: Is this the Puget Sound? SCHOLTZ: Yeah, the Puget Sound guitar workshop. HOGUE: And you mentioned dulcimer. When did you pick up actually playing dulcimer as opposed to …? SCHOLTZ: One of the things I did in Bellingham was watch Mojo Music one day a week so that the owner could get a break, and he didn’t have any money to pay me, so he traded me a dulcimer. So okay, that’s kind of cool. And then Bob Force and [Al Deshay?], who were kind of nontraditional dulcimer players who were quite influential, lived in town for a while, and I got Albert to make me a dulcimer. Dulcimer was a very fit companion to autoharp because autoharp is so chordal, and dulcimer is so not chordal. I mean, you can make chords on it, but that’s not really what it’s about. So for a person that didn’t play guitar – and it seemed like there were plenty of guitar players in the world, I wasn’t really interested in learning how to play guitar – between those two instruments, there were a variety of textures and places to explore to figure out how to do things. There really wasn’t anybody to teach me either of those instruments here, so in that sense I learned from playing with guitar players and mandolin players and banjo players about how music works and about how tunes work and kind of work spaces, hearing the spaces and being supportive, but not from playing with people who played my instruments. That was kind of fun, actually; that suited me. HOGUE: You were able to develop your own style. SCHOLTZ: Absolutely. But most people who play either or both of those instruments, in the last twenty years you can find teachers and instruction books and stuff like that, but really at the point when I learned, almost anybody who played – the people I bump into who learned when I did or before that, everybody sounds completely different from each other because there wasn’t anybody to model yourself after. HOGUE: When you started to get involved with people around town, was the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society actually sort of formed, or can you tell a little bit about the history of that and your history with it? SCHOLTZ: Molly Bartholik was running the Roeder Home. I think there had been a couple of acoustic music concerts that happened there, and then Molly Mason, I think but I’m not actually positive, who was a younger person – I can’t remember who was involved. But the idea came up that it would be interesting to have a series of concerts at the Roeder Home which featured an instrument. So, like there were two banjo players; Albert and I and Bob did an evening of dulcimer; there was probably mandolin. So like there were six concerts a week or two weeks apart, and each one featured a different instrument and players who were in town. It was really 6 cool. And then that summer, I think, was the first year I went to Folk Life, which was really early in the life of Folk Life. HOGUE: What year was that? SCHOLTZ: I don’t know, ’75 or ’76. Folk Life in those days was primarily a musicians’ gathering. There were no food things, there were no buskers, there were hardly any crowds. You know, everybody was there because they played music. I t was a chance to meet people that you would never meet, and what happened was there were some stages, but really what happened was people sat around on the grass and played music together. The Seattle Center – you’ve been to Folk Life – was dominated by all these little informal groups that were sitting around playing music. That was fantastic; that was really an eye-opener for me. All these people who were in tune, and you could just sit down and play. So it put me further into the idea that really it was a participation thing much more than an audience thing. The next fall, I started the Homemade Music Society. That was me. We set it up that it would be on Wednesdays, and that’s pretty much the model that continues, which is kind of amazing that it’s still the same after all these years. But the idea that it would be music circles the first, third, and fifth Wednesdays – with the idea that participation was really the main thing, so that’s why it got the extra Wednesday if there was one – and that there were a lot of people in town who played music but they were kind of hard to find … It was hard to know how to meet people. Sometimes it was easy but sometimes it wasn’t, so these Wednesday nights could be a place where people just dropped in [and] played. You might come for a month and meet the person you want to go play music with and never come back, and it would have done its part. Or maybe you’d come for years. Then the other part of it was the concerts, and it was mostly people who were in town, but you know, the model was pretty much what it is, and then for the first three or four years, I did all the Wednesdays, and I sort of organized the concerts and hosted the music circles, so I learned a ton about facilitating groups from doing that and hearing chord changes and helping the group hear chord changes because I could hear them, it turned out pretty fast, and I got so I could call out chord changes for people who didn’t know what was going on, and how to help people step forward. It was great. And then I decided this is way too much: every Wednesday night. You know, it’s a volunteer thing; I’ve learned a lot, it’s been really fun, but it’s enough. Somebody else should do it, or it should die. So I let people know I wasn’t going to do it anymore. And people stepped forward, so it kept going. HOGUE: You still organized concerts? SCHOLTZ: Well, I didn’t for a long time. In 1994, 1995, I started organizing concerts again. The concerts had turned into at that point – the person who was doing it was primarily interested in singer/songwriters who had been doing it for a few years. I think maybe it was ’92 that I ended up taking it back. The concerts had gotten really small. You know. There might be ten to twenty people who would show up for a concert, so he was getting worn out, as you do after organizing that many concerts – it’s very wearing – as well as he was getting an audience that made him very happy. So he and I were talking, and he said, “I’ve had enough of this.” I said, “Great. It should die. Wait a minute, wait a minute, actually I’ve got an idea of a really simple way to organize it that you can do and it won’t be a whole lot of work.” I told it to him, and he said, “That’s a great idea, but I don’t want to do it.” Well, it’s so simple, I think I could do it, 7 and it’s not very much work; I mean, it’s work, but it’s not, compared to putting on lots of concerts but it’s not. My idea was that instead of organizing and finding performers, what I would do is I would find hosts, and my invitation to the host was, “What do you want to listen to? What would you like to listen to for an evening?” We’re not going to take any submissions. It’s just, “You know people, you have taste.” The people I would ask were people who have played music for a long time or who have listened to music for a long time. “You know people; who would you actually like to spend an evening listening to, and let’s invite them.” So we have guest hosts; each Wednesday concert is a different host, and we don’t have to review press releases and submitted CDs because that’s not the way it works. The way it works is, you actually know someone you like whose music you want to hear and whose music you want your friends to hear. And it’s been great. It’s been way easier to organize, and it gets to a lot more segments of the community than it did before. HOGUE: How did you start personally making connections with a lot of these musicians who come through? Gradually over the years? SCHOLTZ: Yeah. HOGUE: And I guess working with so many different – SCHOLTZ: Well, I was one of the main organizers of guitar workshop for years, from ’76 [or] ’77 until about 1986. I was one of the central organizers of guitar workshop, and I am still sort of a major organizer of guitar workshop. Well, not of guitar workshop, [but] the event of guitar workshop, the organization, and so I met a lot of people through that, got to play with a lot of people. And once you start to know people, that leads to more people. HOGUE: So I guess, I mean, has there been any memorable experiences with – I mean, does any stand out for you? SCHOLTZ: I don’t think I can – that would be a tough one to answer. That’s a good question, but … HOGUE: Too tough. SCHOLTZ: Yeah. HOGUE: Bellingham really has a – I mean, with the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society, it seems that there is a pretty strong community. Why do you think that’s been able to stay together and continue? SCHOLTZ: Hmm. Well, that’s an interesting question, and this is an oversimplified … I mean, part of it is that there’s … I’m going to think about an answer to that because that’s an important question. Part of it was the times, that it was …there was a lot of … those of us who were playing were almost all young, and many of us were interested in building community, partly because we were young, and there were only a few people that were in that who had grown up here. So for us, it meant building a community, and music was one of the main glue for that, I 8 guess I would say. Another thing is that Bellingham at the time was pretty cheap, and there were a lot of people who had moved here who had done something else someplace else, like me. I was young, but I had done something else, and I had come here because it was kind of not in the same path of busyness and … And there was a lot of creative energy here and not a lot of way to make a living at it. And, you know, in a certain way it was really different from many towns; people were collaborative with each other rather than – partly because there wasn’t a lot of ways to make a living with your art. It wasn’t like people were wrestling over the performance spaces because there really weren’t any. People were here because there was a community of people to play music with, or a community of potters to share your kiln work, or a group of painters who had studio space together, or whatever. And so people tended to be supportive of each other rather than – I’ve heard lots of stories from other places where people would talk about, “Well, I tried to [start?] something, but they wouldn’t show me how they played the tune because …” or “they wouldn’t tell me how they got the job,” or … That really wasn’t the feeling in Bellingham. And so it’s not just folk music because folk music in other towns has been, I would say, more divisive; you know, it’s had its divisive elements. You know, it’s pretty easy for it to separate into the bluegrass folks and the jazz folks. And partly guitar workshop, from early on, we were interested in – one of the things that made it different was it wasn’t just a style; it was a mixture of styles. And you would hear music that you didn’t like maybe. I used the line, at guitar workshop, people would come for one thing, and they would hear music that if it was on the radio, they’d turn it off. But they’d hear it played by people who really cared about it and for whom it was really a personal relationship with the music, and they’d go, “Oh, I see. Actually, I like it better than I thought.” So I think there was also in the Bellingham community people who had that interest of crossing the boundaries between people, so I think partly it was just the people who were here. There were some strong individuals who wanted things to happen in a particular way and had influence, and we’re still here, some of them; not all of them, but some of them. Does that make sense? Does that fit in at all with what – ? I’m interested; you’ve been talking to people; does that – ? HOGUE: That’s really very – I like that. I’ve been trying to sort of ask that question, and that’s a good answer. I think a lot of people sort of look at you as a key figure in the music scene here, especially with folk music and participatory music. Do you see yourself like that? SCHOLTZ: I mean, it kind of makes sense to me that people would say that, but that’s not really how I think about myself. I mean, I feel at home in the place, and I feel like I have ideas about how things should go. It feels pretty easy, but I don’t feel – you know, I think it’s pretty common that … The way I feel, which I think is not unusual, is, my life feels normal to me. So it doesn’t seem unusual. I mean, do you know what I mean? I don’t feel like – there are lots of people who have influence. Certainly I know there are things that I did do that have had an impact on Bellingham, but you know, there are lots of other people who have done that. Does that – ? HOGUE: Yeah, that’s great. What sort of keeps you active doing music and playing music? It takes a lot of work to continuing concerts and playing. What’s the drive? SCHOLTZ: Well, part of what’s been really lucky for me is I’ve gotten to do lots of different things with music, and at the point when I – I mean, I just started playing. Things happened. I 9 did private students. I did some traveling and performing, but I didn’t really – we had a young child. [Inaudible] Ben – you know Ben? You know Ben. Yeah. And our other son, Nick, and … So I ended up doing … What have I done with music? So music has been [inaudible] to Bellingham. And music has been between thirty and eighty percent of what I do, but it’s never been a hundred percent of what I do, and that’s positive, I think, because when music is one hundred percent of what you do, you have to end up doing things you don’t want to do with music. I think it’s hard on really – you end up playing stuff you don’t want to play if it’s the only way you can make a living because you get at the mercy of commerce. And the kinds of things I’ve ended up doing are what I’m interested in, and what I’m interested in changes. So I played, I performed, I’ve ended up teaching a lot of classes for the community college and for Western. I taught for summer session and continuing [education] classes for the music department and the education department. I’ve done a couple of different types of classes for Fairhaven. I ran the Saturday morning youth choir up at Western as part of the [prep?] program. I played in doctors’ offices for years and grocery store openings and community events and did the Homemade Music Society and did guitar workshop, and for the last few years, eight or ten years, I was head of the Washington State Folk Life council, which wasn’t directly a music thing but got me in touch with a lot of – well, the folk scholarship kind of things that were going down in the state. I do improvised music to go with a story teller, and so we’ve played in … She’s got forty books out and is really, really well known. She’s one of the guiding lights of the story telling revival, so she gets invited all over and I go to some of those things. We’ve got a few recordings out. We got to go to Japan as part of a cultural exchange trip with music. So what keeps me doing music is it’s a way to interact with people that’s – I mean, I think there’s the way of interacting with other musicians, and then there’s another part, which is how do you find out how your music has meaning or communicates to other people. There’s just lots of ways to do it, and performing on a stage … it’s really the smallest part. And it’s one of the hardest ways to make a living. Then in the last …for most of that time, I wasn’t interested in recording. I thought recording was terrible, and I was really interested in the participatory and the live experience and what was most important was – I mean, part of what was really important was the transitory nature of it, and part of what was great about the Roeder Home was the intimate space. And the same with guitar workshop – the intimate space that happens, and somebody being able to be themselves doing it and not have to be the performer in the straw hat and the cane, you know, or whatever, putting on a costume and being somebody else. But then I got interested, seeing people record and seeing how destructive recording was, I got interested in the question of is there a way to do recording that actually sounds like a person and that doesn’t spend … that when you start it, it doesn’t make you feel like you have to start learning how to play music all over again, which is what it does to lots of people. So now, in the last ten, twelve, fifteen years – I mean, I’d done a lot of recording for the classes so that we could give song repertoire tapes and stuff but not to sell otherwise. But then I started getting involved, and so the last twelve or fifteen years, I’ve gotten involved in doing recordings for people like the one that I played for you and Wayne. What you’re meant to sound like a person, you actually hear a person, where the recording process is one which you play music. You come today, and the guitar player will come on Thursday, and we’ll send it to the flute player in Spokane on Wednesday. Nobody ever plays in the same place at the same time, which is not like making music; it’s like doing something else. Anyway … Personally at this point, I’m not as interested in performing. I’m happy to do it, but I’m not driven to – like, a lot of people really like to perform, and it’s okay, but it’s not the main reason I play music anymore. Does that kind of answer the question? 10 HOGUE: That’s great. SCHOLTZ: And I guess let me say one other thing, which I think is that, having worked up at the college and worked with lots of students and seeing people come out of music schools, let alone people who have acquired music skills, you spend a lot of time getting your hands to do what you want, getting your ears so you can hear what it should sound like, getting so you can … imagine what it should sound like before you play. A lot of people think that’s the [inaudible] of their music. But then actually that’s sort of like you’ve [inaudible] the language. Then who you speak to with the language, who you collaborate with with the language, how you connect to the world is a whole ‘nother level of actually learning to be a musician. And that’s endless; that’s part of what … that’s really humbling in the sense that pretty soon, you figure out that music is way bigger than anybody could do in a lifetime. However good you are, there’s lots of people who are better, which at first is, depending on who you are, either depressing or inspiring. But, you know, it’s such a huge area that in a way, there’s no shortage of ways to keep interested in it. And then like these ambient recordings, there’s interest in sound, which is separate. How’s that for a made-up answer? HOGUE: That’s great. [laughs] Where do you see the future of this kind of music going in Whatcom County? SCHOLTZ: Which kind of music? What do you mean? HOGUE: I guess the community and where the community is going and any kind of continuation. It’s managed to last – I mean, the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society has lasted since …I mean, do you see it continuing? SCHOLTZ: Um … Yeah, I don’t think it’s just an historical fact. It’s hard, you know; the town is changing and it’s a little hard to know how it’s going to change. There is certainly another generation of really creative people who are here in town and who are collaborative in spirit. Some of them are interested in the generation that I’m part of, but it doesn’t really matter whether they are or not, I don’t think. So I think there’s going to continue to be – it looks like right now – there’s going to continue to be a really lively music scene in town. And right now, the last three or four years, there’s way more acoustic music out there than there [was] before, which is great, and way more people learning how to do it, and way more – with Nancy’s Farm and some of the other places in town where people are being able to play. I think that’s really good, and I think that part of what’s happened with the guest host thing at the Roeder Home is that a lot more people have figured out how easy it is to put on concerts. That’s great. The Roeder Home itself, I think, it’s not exclusively an older crowd, but it tends to be a little bit more that way, and I’ve been kind of curious about even when we’ve had younger people be hosts or younger people play, it’s been mostly an older generation who show up to hear it there. So whether the Roeder Home will stay relevant for … you know, people who are in their twenties and thirties now, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me. I still have the attitude that I had back in whatever: when it dies, it’s fine. Something else will happen. You know, things need to get out of the way for the next thing, and you know, they evolve or they don’t, but the idea of making something that lives forever doesn’t really interest me. You know, some people are interested in 11 [inaudible], “I want to make something that will carry on.” I don’t care. I mean, in my own life, I’m not interested in knowing that I’ll do the same thing five years from now that I’m doing now. I know I won’t. HOGUE: I’m going to sort of flip the subject just a tiny bit, just because I’m going to be doing a project on Flip coming up. You sort of mentioned meeting her; do you remember how you met her at all? SCHOLTZ: I want to ask you one more question. You’ve asked other people that question maybe about whether they think things will carry on? HOGUE: No, actually, I haven’t asked. SCHOLTZ: Okay. I’ll be kind of curious how other people answer that question. You know, it was some music gathering in town. I remember going over to Flip and David’s. They lived on Lyle, maybe? For some reason, that street name reminds me – which is over in kind of the curvy streets near the Roeder Home, though none of us really knew about the Roeder Home at that point. I remember learning a couple of tunes; I learned the Rose Tree from Molly and Cliff – I can’t remember – in their house, but how I actually met them, I don’t know. That would have been, like I say, ’74 or ’75. Then I went to guitar workshop. They asked me to come as a staff person. Flip and David and Larry Squire were organizing it. And then really soon after that, I started working with them all to help run it. Then it gets all mooshed up into doing lots of things together. HOGUE: What would be some of your memories of her that stand out to you? SCHOLTZ: Wow. Well … you know, she is a really creative person who has lots and lots of ideas about it and who, at that stage of her life, was – I mean, like I say, she was a person for whom building community was hugely important, building a community that was around music, and none of us knew really how to do that, so it took lots of trial and error. When you really think about it, I mean, we weren’t – I mean, I had helped organize a bunch of things before I got involved in that. I helped start a college, and I had done teaching since I was in high school, so I had a lot of experience with groups and a lot of experience with community and was starting to have a lot more experience with music. But really, we were all just kind of searching around. It’s interesting in retrospect that we were all young; the oldest person was Larry Squire, and he was in his forties, and mostly there were no elders involved in it. So Flip was a person who had really lots and lots of ideas to [track them?] and you know, to bounce off of. How did it work? How should it work? What should we do next? So I think my initial memories of her have as much to do with that as music. My initial memories of her have more to do with guitar workshop than with Mama Sunday’s, which she was obviously very deeply involved in too. I can remember her playing – I mean, if I thought about her music, then she did quite a few different things, but partly what’s been done is things like cartoon music. Has she played you any of those things? HOGUE: No. Can you elaborate on cartoon music? 12 SCHOLTZ: Well, she had some cartoon theme songs that she worked out finger picking arrangements you could ask her about. But that wasn’t really – I would say that sort of …It’s been an interesting evolution of Flip for her music to be more … I don’t know how to say this … for her to be more comfortable being herself in her music, rather than feeling like she was writing other people’s music. Does that make sense? And for her to reveal herself in her music rather than to … I think in a certain way, she was a really good player, but she was more willing to … expose her values, you know, organizing than she was in her music for a while. That would be interesting to see how she would talk about that. I don’t know how she would talk about it. She was fun to work with. We worked together for a long time and still do in lots of ways. I don’t know, there’s a lot there and it’s hard to summarize. HOGUE: I guess before we finish up, is there anything else that you feel compelled to add? SCHOLTZ: No. I feel like I talked about a lot. HOGUE: That’s great. SCHOLTZ: And I don’t know whether there’s anything else about Flip that you specifically want me to …? You know, that’s – HOGUE: No, I know a lot of information. I just wanted to sort of get your memories of her dealing with – I guess how did she get involved in the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society? Did she sort of take over after you decided to not be so – SCHOLTZ: That’s a good question. I don’t remember, to tell you the truth. I mean, she has evolved into doing the music circle, but I don’t remember … I don’t remember. You’ll have to ask her. She’ll remember. I mean, I gave up the concerts before I gave up the music circle. Was she the person who took over the music circle right then? I don’t know. She’s done it all that time? That’s an awfully long time. Or did somebody else do it in between? I mean, she’d done it a long time, but that long? That’s a long time. Whew! I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me when you find out. HOGUE: Do you still work with her a little bit? Do you get together and …? SCHOLTZ: Well, I recorded her album. We’re working on recording another one. We get together now and again to play music. We know each other well. We still get together, and Tom Hunter and I have organized teachers’ conference. This will be our eleventh year, and we’ve had Flip there every year, and she’s great. It’s been really fun watching her there. And I guess one of the things I would say … Well, I’m going to come back to that. And because I’m still doing the overarching organization for guitar workshop and the bookkeeping for guitar workshop and the budgeting and … I still work with Flip because she does the retreats, so we still have some overlap, and we still talk about “what’s happening with the board?” You know, those kind of things about how to make the … But we’re both kind of growing out of … We’re happy to … I mean, that’s the thing that is likely to survive us. That’s kind of cool. And it’s already kind of surviving us, and that’s good. So in terms of your question, “What will carry on and what won’t?” I think there’s a lot of things that really do depend on, that individuals do make a big 13 difference, and when individuals change, the events and activities go away and new ones show up and they should because they’re very personal. And there are other things that could be turned into less personal and thus they’re pass-on-able for other people to do. It’s been really fun to watch guitar workshop be taken over by other people and then pass it on to other people. For a long time we had to mentor them, and now less. And to watch different people take it over and, you know, fix some things and break other things: that’s the way it ought to be. What I was going to say about Flip was that part of what my goal was at teachers’ camp, when we first invited her – she’s never had a – Teacher’s camp is set up to discourage people from feeling like they need to be teaching all the time, and Flip is an extremely generous person who knows a lot of stuff, but/and I wanted to try to encourage her to come to teachers’ camp and not feel like her value there was based on … that she had a lot to teach. She could just be there. So initially, we said, “Flip, you should come.” I think the first year she came on her own, but after that we’ve invited her with the idea – I mean, the first year we were very small and we had no budget. We’ve invited her without a position, to just be there and to not feel like she has to work all the time. It’s a challenge for her, which has been fantastic, and a whole other side of what she’s good at and what she’s … I mean, Flip is a person who so clearly has invented herself and invented her life that it’s very inspiring to teachers to meet a person who is as courageous as she is at that, and who is such a great teacher. I mean, she is an amazing teacher. [Inaudible] And what she’s learned about teaching over the years in terms of how she … part of the gift of teaching is knowing what it is you want to teach, but the other part – or another important part, particularly of music teaching, is looking, paying attention to the student and figuring out what you know what is useful to that person right at that minute among all the things you know. You can’t tell them everything; they’re not prepared for it, even if you could tell them everything. So you have to kind of look and go, “Hmm, well, right now, I think the most valuable thing I can tell you is this.” Flip’s really good at this, which is that she’s really good at attending to people too. Another part of teaching, then, is paying attention to people and having them be comfortable with you paying attention to them. Does that make sense? That’s something I think she’s gotten a lot better at. And the other thing I think she’s gotten a lot better at, and [at] teacher’s camp it’s been really visible there, is she’s gotten much better at expressing her point of view and her sense of how the world should go in a way that is strong but doesn’t make other people back up. Again, that’s that she has made such a good contact with the teachers’ camp community when it’s, in a certain sense, unlikely that it would have turned out that way. It didn’t seem unlikely to me, but from the outside if you looked at it you’d go, “Really?” These teachers who are … they’re not exactly mainstream, or they wouldn’t come to teachers’ camp, but they’re at least good at pretending to be conventional. You wouldn’t know how unconventional they are, but partly the connection with Flip is. It’s been cool. HOGUE: Can you just, for reference, sort of give a brief explanation of what teachers’ camp is? SCHOLTZ: Teachers’ camp is … I had been doing lots of, for years, stuff with teachers here, eight-week, ten-week [inaudible] classes, visiting schools. Tom Hunter, a good friend – his recordings I’ve done too – spent most of his life traveling around the country doing workshops one day. He was interested in having something that could make more of a difference than a one-day workshop, even though he likes doing that stuff. He’s really great at it. Or a keynote speech: yeah, people like it but it doesn’t really change anything. So I had all that experience organizing camps; we thought, “Let’s organize a camp. Let’s organize a thing for teachers, end 14 of the school year. People are tired; they’re worn out. Let’s do something that makes them feel better, and they’ll learn something maybe.” So it happens in June; this year it’s going to happen in July. It’s about eighty people, twelve to fifteen kids because people want or need to bring their kids, but it’s really an adult event. Last year, we had people from Arizona, Wisconsin, Illinois, California, New York, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, probably Alaska. Ten or twelve states. They’re from home day care, preschool, elementary school, high school; a couple of principals, central office administrators. It’s a really diverse group of people. So the things we offer are not curriculum-specific, which makes it really unusual for a teachers’ thing. One of our headline kind of things is, “Professional development and personal renewal for educators who like to think for themselves.” [Marie’s?] been part of it from the beginning. It’s set up so that each morning one of our staff people present something or has an activity that they do. All the adults including the staff people come to that, which means that there’s not multiple classes happening, which means that the staff person is four out of the five days an audience person and one day they’re the lead person. It’s part of the ‘you’re not teaching all the time.’ There’s a lot of ways to add to this. It’s extremely collaborative among the staff; we start talking to people now. We meet in the spring; we invent the thing as we go when the camp happens. We don’t ask people to tell what they’re teaching until they get up to do it. We work with them to try and figure out what they’re going to teach, but we don’t advertise, “This person is here and this is what they’re going to offer.” We don’t know, and we don’t want to know. We think it’s important that you wait until you meet the participants before you figure out what you really want to tell them. And the afternoon is set up so that things that happen in the afternoon can only be initiated by participants, not by staff people, so it’s whatever participants are interested in, either questions they want to pursue or things they have to offer. They might have a question that they want to pursue and they need a staff person to help them with it. They might have things that they want to offer. They might want to just spend time by themselves. That’s fine. It’s based on the idea that learning works better when people control their own questions and that there’s lots of people who can be a resource and not just the hired experts. And then the fact that it’s helpful to all the hired experts time to be students themselves and learn things. All those things are really unusual for educators’ conferences. And there’s a lot of music that happens there, but we don’t call it a music camp. And the idea that Tom and I have, and Flip’s been a great ally in and that’s part of what she brings to that camp, is the notion that music is just another language, like talking, and that it rises out of speech and goes back into speech. So there’s a lot of music that happens there, but it’ll just – [interrupted by phone call]. Music camps tend to be – guitar workshop we really worked on playing music you care about, finding music you care about, and at the same time, it’s really heavily influenced by, “How did you voice that chord?” “Could we use a minor seventh there instead of a …” “Is this in 5/8, or is it in …” You know, technical things as well as – in music camps, there’s a certain feeling about … One of the ways you tell your musicians because you get to be a better performer, which seems – like I’ve told you, it’s only a small part from my sense. At teachers’ camp, it’s more, “What’s this song about?” You know, people sing songs because they’re about something and because they mean something to them. Like, one night at teachers’ camp, it’s become part of the ritual at teachers’ camp that we do one night, after the evening gathering is over about 9:30, we re-gather at about ten o’clock and everybody brings pillows and blankets and lays on the floor in this big space. The goal is to put people to sleep, sing lullabies like you mean it. Singing happens, and people do. You know, it’s a struggle because you tend to want to turn things into a performance and make them interesting, but no, that’s not what lullabies are about. Lullabies are about boring, 15 relaxing. And there’s a lot of singing that happens that’s just songs you remember from when you were young or songs… and songs that happen as part of the morning presentations where it’s not, “I’m teaching you this song or teaching you how to play this.” It’s just, “I’m singing this song because it means something that relates to the other things that are happening in the morning.” And that’s great when the fullness of music can expand that way. I think one of the things about guitar workshop, teachers’ camp, the way music functions in our society is so constrained that people are astonished at how powerful it is, and that’s partly what makes the events seem powerful. I mean, events are powerful, but part of it is just that people are not ordinarily allowed to come into contact with – you know, they just barely scratch – you know, you hear music. Where do you hear it? You know, when you walk into the mall and there’s music, or a restaurant. It’s not given – or even an iPod headset or something – it’s not really given much … space to be so strong, what really can happen through music. I guess that’s another answer to what keeps me motivated. HOGUE: Well, shall we just – ? That was great, thank you so much for doing this. SCHOLTZ: You’re welcome.
Show less

Title: Mary Pentinnen-King oral history
Date: 2007-02-24
Description: Ms. Penttinen-King was born in Pasadena, California in 1942, and recounts her early experiences with music, as both a performer and a listener. Ms. Penttinen-King sang in her junior high and high school choirs, and recalls her father listening to jazz and Big Band music when she was a child. She recalls her own early influences, including Mike Seeger and Elizabeth Cotten. She attended the University of Maryland and San Diego State, where she saw Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez perform. While in San Diego, Ms. Penttinen-King was active in the American Civil Liberties Union, taking part in picketing during the Civil Rights movement, and she picked this back up after moving to Bellingham in 1982. She briefly discusses the connection between those movements and singing. She explains the structure/organization and activities of the WCHMS. She discusses her experiences hosting the concert series at the Roeder House, and the acts that she has brought to Bellingham as host, including Hank Bradley and Kathy Whitesides.
Digital Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Local Identifier: PentinnenKing20070224
Text preview (might not show all results): Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview ti
Show moreCollection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview title: Interview with Mary P. K. Freske Interview Date: February 24, 2007 Interviewer: Coty Hogue Original transcription by: Laurie Brion, May 2010 COTY HOGUE: Today is February 24, 2007. I am interviewing Mary P. K., or Pennington King. MARY P. K. FRESKE: Penttinen-King. HOGUE: Penttinen-King. We are interviewing for the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society collection for history of that organization. Before we start out, I just wanted to make sure that I have permission to record this and deposit it in the archive. FRESKE: Yes. HOGUE: For purposes, can you state your name and where you were born and the year. FRESKE: Mary Penttinen-King. I was born in Pasadena, California, in 1942. HOGUE: Great. If we go back a little bit to your childhood growing up and you focus and think back about music and your childhood, what are some of the memories that pop up for you there? FRESKE: I can’t remember ever not singing, so I probably was singing at the age of four and five. I think the first song that I sang for anybody else was Billy Boy, and once I discovered that, I sang it to everybody, to their annoyance or whatever. And I think I probably got it from a Burl Ives 78, it would have been in those days. I did singing in elementary school in whatever choirs or groups there were, and I did singing in junior high school. I still have mimeographed sheets of music, of lyrics, from junior high school. I remember doing Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill and Oklahoma, and a wide variety of songs. HOGUE: How did you get turned on to that kind of music? You mentioned Burl Ives. Was your family also musical? FRESKE: Well, I guess we just had this. Mother sang, and she did church choirs, but I don’t remember her singing much when I was a kid. My dad was musical; he was a big jazz fan, so we had a lot of the early jazz, the big bands, Mildred Bailey. I remember listening to her, and classical music. He had a hearing problem. His favorite way to listen was to lie on his back with his head up towards the player, so I can remember him 2 lying down there and listening. But they weren’t performers by any means, but I think singing kind of runs in the family, actually. HOGUE: You said you sang in choirs and you did even as early as middle school and you just really loved singing. Was it just singing? Was there ever any interest in playing music, or was voice your main thing? FRESKE: I took piano lessons, but I didn’t practice, so my mother, in her wisdom, said, “If you’re not going to practice, we’re not going to pay anymore.” But I can still pick out the treble clef. If there’s a melody, I can still pick that out on the piano, and that’s still useful. In high school, I avoided driver’s education classes because I wanted to be in the choir, and so it took me another ten or fifteen years to get a driver’s license. I sang choir in high school, I sang in church choirs, I was a member of the Unitarian youth group. The guy with the guitar was a Weavers fan, so we picked up that repertoire for all of our camp fire singing, and Girl Scouts was camp fire singing too. I went to a – what would you call it? – settlement house or something in Washington, D. C., where we had work camps, and we would go into people’s houses and paint the interior of the house. We always sang there, and in the evening we’d stay overnight and we would sing there. Joan Ornstein was the director. She had an autoharp, which she played on her lap, and so we did a lot of peace songs. This was the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, so we picked up a lot of adaptations of the spirituals that went into the Civil Rights movement. And we did a lot of international songs and that sort of thing. I think we were probably among the first people singing We Shall Overcome back in ’58, ’59, around in there. And then the father of a good friend of mine was giving guitar lessons, and my mother picked up this – I don’t know whether it’s – it’s probably a weird guitar. It’s a big thing with steel strings, and it was very hard to play. F hole guitar, I think it is? So I took a few group lessons with him, and they took me to some concerts. I saw Mike Seeger playing an autoharp holding it upright, standing and playing. “Oh, that’s how it is!” And I got to see Elizabeth Cotten, and I didn’t really realize what a marvel she was until much later, what a legend. So that’s kind of where the folk music came into it. And we went to Bangkok for a year. There was a madrigal group there, so I did madrigals for almost a year. The fellow was such a purist, he wouldn’t let us play the piano to figure out the melody. We had to do it by ear or we had to read it, so I got my little Girl Scout pitch pipe out and played each note [laughs] to figure out what was going on in the song. We sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas in Thai on Thai television and some other madrigals, but it was fun. Then I kind of dropped it for a long time. We had a few friends in San Diego who were folk people, so we’d get together and do sing-along kinds of things. It wasn’t anything organized for years and years. HOGUE: What did you do after high school? FRESKE: I worked for a year, I went to University of Maryland for a year and joined the choir there. I sang alto; all the other times I’ve been singing soprano. Then I went to Bangkok for a year, came back, went to San Diego State, saw Peter, Paul, and Mary there, and Joan Baez. Judy Collins came too, but I don’t think I went to see her. Then I got married and had kids and sang songs to them. 3 HOGUE: So singing continued to be a part of your life even when you weren’t necessarily doing choirs? FRESKE: Right. Oh, yeah. HOGUE: How did you end up working your way up into this area, and what was the year that you finally went to Bellingham? FRESKE: Well, the ex-husband had this weird idea that we should be able to make a living as dairy farmers. Mind you, he had never worked on a farm and really didn’t like getting his hands dirty, but we moved up to Bellingham. His sister moved up here. They’re from Sweden, and it’s very much like Sweden, the terrain is, with the trees and the water and all that. I’m not sure why we picked Bellingham. I think it was more that we found a pretty good piece of land with a house on it that was affordable, more than anything. But it was a good move. HOGUE: And was the dairy farm successful? FRESKE: No! It was never a dairy farm. We had one cow named Hildy; it was actually Hildegard, which was a Wagner character. We milked her for a year and had calves that eventually – a couple of them, I think, went back to dairy farms and a few we ate. Mr. Tbone. Then the marriage split up and he went back down to San Diego, and I stayed up here. I was active in the American Civil Liberties Union in San Diego, so when we came back up here, I picked that up and was president one year, and we wanted to do a fund raiser, and I had noticed a picture of Larry Hanks and Laura Smith in the paper. They were doing a concert, and I happened to be going through the membership list and Larry Hanks’ name showed up. So I [thought] maybe he’d be willing to do a fund raiser for us. So I called him out of the blue and said, “Would you be willing to do this?” and he said yes, and so we did it. That was probably ’89 or ’90 or something like that. HOGUE: What was the year that you actually moved up here to Bellingham? FRESKE: Okay. Ingmar was … it would have been ’82. HOGUE: So it had been a few years before you found these people. FRESKE: Yeah. Well, Stan was in San Diego part of that time, and I felt it was sort of unfair for me to develop this big social life without him along. Then because of that concert, I started listening to [Larry’s] show, and he told me about Roeder Home having concerts and sing-alongs and so on. So at the time of the divorce, which was ’89, I was looking for a place to go to meet people and just to find some community. And the song circles worked out really well because I could sing but I didn’t like making small talk, so I could just come and sing and be around other people without … how can I say? … without feeling any pressure to be anything other than what I was. It was very cool, and I consider the folk music community my community now. I think it’s an important thing 4 to do for people to sing together, really. I deplore that they’re taking music out of the schools and that people are so performance-oriented. When you talk about them liking music, a lot of people talk about it as if it’s something that they go to and they listen to but they don’t participate in, and I think it’s the participation that builds the community. HOGUE: What in your opinion is it about sharing music and participating in music that is so special and can build that community? FRESKE: I think that if you sing a song, you pay attention to it more, and so the words mean more, and folk music by and large has ideas in it. So I think it’s important for that reason. Other societies, they’re surprised if you say you can’t sing because it’s such an integral part of what they are, and of all the ceremonies that they have and the rituals, everybody sings. In western society, we don’t do that as much. We have music as part of our rituals; there’s always music at weddings and funerals and so on, but it’s not participatory for the most part, I don’t think. Once you sing a song, it becomes more your song, and I think that’s important. I think that’s why something like We Shall Overcome means a whole lot more to me because I was singing it under – I did some picketing and we sang it, and this sort of thing. So it becomes a bonding kind of a thing. People need that. That’s one reason why I’m active in doing sing-alongs here, trying to make it so that people will come and sing. HOGUE: When you found that Homemade Music Society in ’89, ’90, and you started participating in that and going to the song circles, how was that singing for you? Was there something different about what you had done in the past? FRESKE: Well, yeah, because it didn’t matter if you had four parts. There was a stretch when there was only about four of us that were meeting regularly. It was Flip and Rob and me and a fellow named Kerry, who I still see once in a while at concerts. But we met, just the four of us, for a long time because we were keeping it going. I don’t know why that was, but now there’s other people that are coming in. It just changes all the time. You can sing what you want to sing; you don’t have a director saying, “Well, this is the music that we are doing tonight.” It’s quite different. It’s been a broadening experience in that I found I could sing harmony. I never thought I could. And through the informal thing and having the confidence that nobody cared whether I hit a wrong note or not, I could sing harmony. I discovered that I had a whole lower register that I wasn’t aware of, and that led to singing tenor in Kulshan chorus for about twelve years. Yeah, I always thought I was a straight soprano, and then I discovered that register below middle C that goes down to low C. It’s been interesting. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit about how when you first started going, how did you experience the structure of the organization and how has it changed or stayed the same in that fifteen years? FRESKE: You know, I was never really aware of a structure because all we did was sing. Nobody called the meeting to order and nobody solicited dues. Of course, you know, I know that there’s a name to what we do, but that’s simply because we have to 5 name things. It’s not because somebody took a vote and said this should be the Whatcom Homemade Music Society; it’s simply that you need a label to talk to other people about what you’re doing. You can’t, say, put out a poster, “This is sponsored by Some People.” You know, you have to have a label on it. But I never thought of it as being an organized group. HOGUE: You mentioned that, for a long period of time, there was just this small group going, and now there’s more people going. Talk a little bit about that flux of people and the fluidity of people and how that’s sort of fine and how that changed. FRESKE: Selfishly, I prefer the smaller groups because when you have a very large group, you only get to pick one song maybe in an evening. And so then you have a decision to make as to whether you do something that you might really want to do or if you want to play into what’s going on and kind of the sorts of songs that have preceded you. But large groups are fine too because the more people you get involved in something that’s important, I think, the better. HOGUE: Why do you keep going back every other Wednesday? FRESKE: Because it makes me feel good, I guess. I dropped out for quite a while; I had moved to town and doing Kulshan chorus every Thursday night and trying to preserve the voice a little bit anyway. I didn’t come to song circle for a long time, but I’m glad I came back. I started feeling that that was my community, and I wanted to go back to it. So it’s become more or less regular now. HOGUE: We’ve been talking about the song circle part of the Homemade Music Society. They also host concerts that other Wednesday, every other Wednesday, and you’ve hosted concerts and you’ve been to concerts. Can you talk a little bit about hosting some of those concerts and maybe some of them that you’ve done. When did you start hosting concerts? FRESKE: I don’t know when Richard started soliciting hosts. When I first joined, Steve Dolmatz set up the program for the year, and that’s the way it was done. It was his decisions all along, and then when Richard took over, he started soliciting hosts to set up concerts. I kind of figured if there was somebody that I really wanted to hear, why not sponsor the concert and not depend on somebody else bringing that person up or out? I’ve tried to get people that otherwise – I mean, I think that a lot of concerts that we get are people that are passing through from outside, that are on a tour, and so they’ll hit Vancouver and Bellingham and Seattle and wherever. And I’ve sponsored local people that would otherwise might not be. I’m hoping Orville Johnson and Mark Graham will come up this next year. I’ve emailed Orville, and he was going to talk to Mark, and I have to email him again and line that up. I’ve sponsored Jeff Morgan a couple of times. I don’t know if you know Jeff Morgan, but he’s a singer/songwriter. He’s got, I think, four or five songs in Rise Up Singing that he probably wrote when he was in Nashville for a while. And he’s been doing mainly Balkan music, and so it’s been kind of a joke that we do a – his birthday is in December, so we do a birthday concert every couple of 6 years. And then Carolyn Crusoe is a dulcimer player on Orcas Island. She knows the daughter of somebody that I work with. So, you know, why not sponsor somebody who might not otherwise be heard up here? And then she brought in a couple from Minnesota, Curtis and Loretta. Who else have I sponsored? Hank Bradley and Kathy Whitesides a couple of times. But as I said, you know, if you want to hear somebody, you just – and it’s really easy. The host’s responsibility is to make sure that Dana at the Roeder Home has pictures and a story to send out, so you write something up and she duplicates and sends it out. I don’t have to make phone calls to the media or have my own little media list to work from and that kind of thing. And my son, Carl, does graphic art, so I get him to do a poster. So it’s really easy to sponsor a concert. HOGUE: And how is that experience hosting? What has the experience been like? You were talking about it, but getting that experience to host a concert and make some live music happen – what is that like? FRESKE: Well, it’s fun, and I think it’s … Poor musicians, they don’t make much money, so it’s kind of nice to help support that. And you don’t know who is going to be in the audience for whom that music might really speak to. That kind of thing too. And a lot of the musicians, they encourage people to sing along, and that’s my favorite part. HOGUE: Do you have any favorite memories, either in the song circle or going to a concert or hosting a concert? FRESKE: Not really favorites, no. HOGUE: Any that stand out? FRESKE: I don’t think so. That may be weird, but it’s all been good. I can’t think of anything. If you gave me a couple of days, I might think of something. But a lot of it is simply meeting people that are like me, and so there’s sort of an instant rapport with a lot of these folks. So there’s been sort of a structure to do that. HOGUE: We’ve touched on that subject of community and this community through music. I’m wondering if you can maybe elaborate a little bit about specifically this community and how it’s able, do you think, to keep going. FRESKE: A lot of it gets pinned on a couple of people. I think Flip Breskin has been a focal point for folk music in Bellingham and encouraging people to go to concerts, and because she’s been doing Puget Sound guitar workshop, she knows people from all over the country who will come to Bellingham to play because there is a community that will come and listen to them. Richard Scholtz is another one. And none of them, they don’t seek the limelight; it’s not an ego trip at all. It’s just that that’s who they are, and they encourage people like me to try new things like song writing and that sort of thing. I don’t know if it would have developed the way it has without people like Flip and Richard. And there’s others too. I mean, there were people in the very beginning that were a core group: Laura and Larry and Flip and Richard. There’s still some things in the 7 notebooks that we use that are in Laura Smith’s handwriting. It goes way back because they thought it was important for people to come together and sing. HOGUE: Do you have – I don’t know if ‘idea’ is the right word – any thoughts about the future of the organization? FRESKE: [laughs] Well, if it’s not an organization … HOGUE: The future of that particular community. FRESKE: I hope that there will be those that will carry it on. And I think it really does come down to people who have the ability to have people coalesce around them. That’s my hope; whether it will work out that way, I don’t know. It’s been the same people for many years now, and maybe there’s some young person [laughs] who would be able to be that sort of personality. I don’t know. I hope it continues; I think it’s important. HOGUE: Did you ever expect to have the kind of experiences that you’ve had in this organization? FRESKE: No. It’s sort of an evolution, but if you had told me when, say, I had left San Diego that I would find this community and be singing harmony and writing songs and maybe learning an instrument and meeting these cool people, I would have said, “No, there’s no such place.” It’s sort of a utopia. I don’t think that’s unique; I think there’s a lot of us that feel that way, that we were looking for a home and we’ve found one. When I retire, maybe I’ll start an old folkies home. [laughs] HOGUE: That would be something. FRESKE: Yeah. We’d have a big front porch and we could just sit outside. [laughs] HOGUE: Not just in regard to this community, but just as an overall, what is it about music in general – we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the interview – but in your opinion, if you could get like an overall kind of statement or something about music and the power of it, what would that be? FRESKE: I’ve always thought – well, not always – in thinking about music, it’s hardwired in our brains. We really cannot avoid it; it’s there. And it’s there – I’m not sure why it’s there; there must be some evolutionary reason why it’s hard-wired in our brains. But they’ve been doing more brain research, and they’re discovering that yes, there are parts of the brain that are for music. And the fact that it’s ubiquitous in other societies as part of their culture and so deeply embedded in how they bring the unison of the community through music and dance, to regard it just as a performance kind of thing … I mean, that’s part of it, but I think it really comes down to being participatory, and we need to do that more in our society. And I think that folk music is probably what would do it. I know that there are people that gather together because I’ve done it – sing Broadway tunes, you know. But in folk music, you find more of the emotion and more of 8 the speaking to ideas and feelings than you do in popular music. And I think you have to have, well, symphonies. Again, you go and you listen, but the musicians that are participating – it’s interesting. HOGUE: Is there anything that you have gained in this community, whether it be participation or learning something about yourself, that you have been able to take to the outside world, the outside community, in any shape or form? FRESKE: Hmm … outside the community … Well, I think sponsoring concerts is a little bit like that. I don’t really go very far. [laughs] But – HOGUE: I guess outside into your everyday life. FRESKE: Oh. Not specifically, but insomuch as that’s one of the things I do. You know, if somebody says let’s go sing something, I’ll do it. [laughs] Yeah, not really. It’s just there. I don’t make a point of taking it anywhere. But if I can persuade people to come to concerts or come to song circles, in that sense, yeah. If I hear somebody singing, “Oh, wow, you know, you really should come to song circle some time; you might like that.” HOGUE: How has music made you grow personally? FRESKE: Oh, just finding that I can do things that I didn’t think I could do. It’s been – I think that’s the main thing. I organized my own concert at Roeder Home and had a bunch of people; I’d lined up, I think, ten or twelve people and did about two or three songs with each of them. I never thought I would go out on a limb like that, and I’m not sure now why I did it, but it was fun. It was fun doing the rehearsals and picking songs, and we raised, I think, over two hundred dollars for women’s care shelters, so that was good. So yeah, that was a real stretch; I don’t usually do things like that, but I got some crazy idea. It was fun. I should say when I first started, my name is Mary Freske, and I picked up Penttinen-King about eight years ago when I decided I didn’t like the exhusband’s name. So I took my mother’s Finnish name and put it with my maiden name. HOGUE: Great. And I guess to finish up the interview, is there anything else that comes out for you or that we didn’t talk about that you would like to talk about a little bit. FRESKE: I don’t think so. Folk music has changed. I got these out of the library – Hootenanny? It’s a show that was on in the early Sixties, and I watched those and it was sort of interesting because folk music at that time was being used for more commercial things, and people were getting hits, like the Weavers and Good Night, Irene, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, and all of those people. But on these particular recordings, I think there are very few recently written songs. I think that came later as social issues came up that people who wanted to write songs would write about, and they ended up being in the folk song vernacular rather than in the popular. And that’s a trend that’s continuing. And that’s a good thing, I think. I think folk music is what the folk sing, is some definition; I don’t know whether it was from Lead Belly or somebody, but that’s where you’re going 9 to find the music that speaks to social conditions and how people are feeling about their lives. I don’t think you’ll find it in popular music, where it’s commercial and you have to have a three-minute song or a two-and-a-half-minute song to fit on the radio. I think folk music is doing pretty well, actually. HOGUE: Do you see yourself continuing participating in this sort of folk music community with the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society as long as it keeps going or you’re around here? FRESKE: As long as I’m alive, yeah. As long as I can sing, and then I’ll probably even come just to listen if I couldn’t sing anymore because it’s community. It’s my neighborhood. HOGUE: Great. Thank you for doing this. FRESKE: Oh, you’re welcome.
Show less

Title: Laura Smith oral history
Date: 2007-02-11
Description: Ms. Smith was born in Hawaii in 1947. She recalls that her early exposure to music came from her father playing classical piano and ragtime when she was growing up. Her main musical outlet was choir, and she sang in her church choir through high school. She went to college in Portland, Oregon, and continued to sing there. Ms. Smith recalls her musical influences and interests during those years, including Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, Mark Spoelstra, and Steve Young. She relates how she began playing banjo, and how this led to her playing with Larry Hanks, her husband. She moved to Bellingham in 1979, where she and Larry reconnected with Robert Scholtz and became involved in the WCHMS. As a host, she has sponsored various acts including The Wanderers, Bill Merlin and Carl Allen, the BirdÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Creek Boys, and Sarah Gray. She discusses briefly where she sees the WCHMS headed.
Digital Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories
Local Identifier: Smith20070211
Text preview (might not show all results): 1 Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview
Show more1 Collection Name: Whatcom County Homemade Music Society Oral Histories Repository: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Libraries Heritage Resources, Western Washington University Interview title: Interview with Laura Smith Interview Date: February 11, 2007 Interviewer: Coty Hogue Original transcription by: Laurie Brion, April 2010 COTY HOGUE: Today is the 11th, February 11th, 2007, and I’m sitting with Laura Smith in her home in Bellingham, Washington, and just for the record, I have permission to record this interview – LAURA SMITH: You certainly do. HOGUE: – and put it in the archives? SMITH: Yes. HOGUE: Great. So first, just for the record, can we state your name and when you were born? SMITH: My name is Laura Smith, and I was born in December in 1947 in Hawaii. HOGUE: With regard to music, can you talk a little bit about your childhood, growing up. Was your family musical? What was it like? SMITH: My father was very musical, played classical piano and ragtime, kind of stride piano. So that was a constant in my growing up. I remember being very proud of him and corralling all the neighborhood kids to come in and hear him play, and they couldn’t have cared less. But I just thought he was fantastic. He did try to give me lessons once for a couple of weeks, but he said, “You know, your father shouldn’t be the one to give you lessons.” [laughs] So I didn’t ever give you any kind of lessons. I did start singing in our church choir when I was in third grade and I loved it, and I continued that through high school. And it really made a big difference from seventh to twelfth grade. I sang there, and we sang a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas as part of the church choir; every spring we had a Gilbert and Sullivan, and I was always in the chorus, always, but I still remember all the songs. But one of my biggest thrills, because I had such a quiet voice, was to sit in the first soprano section and sing the alto part with sopranos on either side of me. The trick was for me to sing it enough for me to hear that wonderful harmony between the two so close, with a kind of stereophonic, but not for either person on either side to know that I was doing that. I could pull it off because I could sing so quietly. My father bought me a guitar for my fifteenth birthday, a real cheap one. I think it was a Stella, actually, like Libba Cotten. So I started just getting books; I didn’t have anything else. And it’s funny because I look back at my high school yearbook and they had a folk club. I was totally unaware of it because I was so shy, and it’s too bad because I could have probably found some outlet in there. But my main musical outlet was the choir, 2 that’s for sure. So I went to college in Portland and continued to play there with friends. Unfortunately, my boyfriend was this really cool blues player who thought folk music was really stupid and thought that I sang really stupid, and I didn’t at that point have the backbone to say, “Oh, thank you, goodbye,” which is what I should have done. But during that time, drugs were so rampant on the campus, and there were so many bad things that were happening as a cause of that, that even though I was really into rock and roll and had been in high school, of course, like everybody, and into the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez, so I was getting that stuff on the radio; I was getting my first glimmers of the folk, what Flip calls the Folk Scare. I still was into rock and roll too, but about my sophomore year in college, I just thought I don’t want to be a part of that whole scene, because it was really frightening, what was happening. And it was, you know, midSixties. So I just kind of dropped out of music, and I had four records that carried me through that time for about five years. Two of them were Mimi and Richard Farina records, and Mimi Farina is Joan Baez’s sister. No, I think she just died actually – she did. And I just adored them. And Mark Spoelstra, an album called Five and Twenty Questions, and another guy named Steve Young from California who wrote the Seven Bridges Road, a song that Joan Baez recorded. So those three sets of people got me through a time when I was just in total limbo. And then I moved back to Hawaii where everything was Hawaiian music, and I love Hawaiian music but, you know, I was a haole, so I couldn’t participate in it. I mean, the lines are pretty clearly defined. I did hula a lot in high school, and I still do that in the summers and teach it at the guitar workshop, and I always said I did that rather than sing Hawaiian music because to me Hawaiian music is so loaded for me that you know I just have a hard time singing it without crying at the same time, and I can dance and cry at the same time, so it’s a perfect setup. After I moved back to Hawaii, I only lived there for about a year, and then I moved back to Oregon for a couple of years and played by myself in my house. I never had anybody to play with. [I] moved back to Hawaii for another year, and then when I was twenty-five, I moved for good to the mainland, and a friend of mine had said, “Hey, come down to Sweet’s Mill music camp, which is down in the Sierras in California, and I went there for two and a half weeks and camped out, and that’s where I had my first banjo lesson, sitting under a tree. I got my banjo lessons from Larry Hanks. I didn’t play anything for a week; I just went around with my jaw just dropped open. There was bluegrass, there was Celtic, there was folk, there was, you know, kind of reggae kind of stuff – there was everything. And everybody was playing their own music, and it was all acoustic, and it was like discovering the richest gold mine on the planet. In that two and a half weeks, my life was changed. So there was never any thought about going back to Hawaii. Before, I had always gone back thinking maybe I can fit in. I could never fit in; I could never fit in. So I had found where I could fit in. I stayed down in California for a couple months and then moved back up to Portland and started taking banjo lessons, and I found a group of beginners to play with. So that was in 1973, the fall of ’73 and then the spring of ’74 and just started playing then. And then [I] had met Larry at the camp in California, and he moved up in the fall of ’74, and from then on we started blending our music and we started singing together as a duo, which we did for about twelve years and still do once in a while when we get together. 3 HOGUE: Just to go back a little bit to your choir, and you talked about that harmony, do you think, looking back at that, that you have that sort of musical need to do that harmony? SMITH: Yes, from the very beginning I did, and I think part of it was because I was intrigued with the sound. I love it – it’s just a lush sound. Part of it was that I have a fairly low voice, which I didn’t realize, because I always sang first soprano, but I mean, nobody could hear me. When Larry and I got together, it was a perfect fit harmonically speaking because I could sing the tenor part but an octave below, and since he has such a low voice, it really matched well. And so I realized that part of the reason I went into harmony was just so I could sing with other people, and part of the reason was that I really loved it, and I seem to have an ear for it. So it worked out fine. I’ve always felt like, considering my limitations with my voice, that I’ve really gotten a lot of mileage out of it because I do have a very limited range. But it’s better; I’ve been taking voice lessons the last five years, and it’s definitely getting better, so… HOGUE: So you discover this music and you start playing with Larry. What was it about the music and about that camp that did something for you? SMITH: I think it’s the same thing that continues to happen, and that is that there’s a lot in the modern world that I just do not like. It’s the coolness and the hipness and the always trying to outdo everybody else with a new kind of music. I guess I felt that way too when I was in high school and college because rock and roll was fairly fresh on the scene. I mean, we had the Beatles! We did have something pretty incredible, and my father was an incredible fan of the Beatles; he thought they were fantastic. But I think for me it’s harkening back to a more basic, simple time, even though I think that that’s probably not even true. The times that the music came from weren’t necessarily simple and basic, but the traditional music – I just find it very soothing and very honest. And then, of course, with Larry we did a ton of political songs. It was a really neat outlet for trying to find some outlet to help… just help the total picture of how to make a better world. So those are the two things that I really love, are the kind of political piece and also the traditional piece, you know, really honoring the place that our music of yesterday comes from, especially with banjo. I mean, banjo is perfect because, you know, here it’s an instrument from Africa that kind of collided with the instrument from Great Britain, which is basically where my heritage comes from, and look what happened. I mean, it just created something different but with roots deeply held in those old traditions. HOGUE: Was that something about the banjo when you first heard it? Why did you say, “That’s the instrument I want to play”? SMITH: Well, [there are] two reasons, I think. I mean, if you look on that wall over there, there’s a picture of a man holding a banjo, and that’s my dad’s college graduation picture. He’s wearing a tuxedo, and he was not from a wealthy family. As a matter of fact, when he paid one hundred and fifty dollars for his banjo in 1928 – and that picture’s from 1928 – his mother said she was going to disown him. [laughs] How could you dare spend that much money? It was all inlaid. It’s over in the corner now, but the thing is a 4 four-string, so it’s a very different sound. It’s harsh, it’s bright: I can hardly handle playing or even listening to it. But he once in a while would take that out of its case when I was growing up. In Hawaii, there was certainly no other banjo player that I ever heard, but my ears were tuned into that sound, and then my first guitar teacher, when I was twenty-two or so in Portland – one of the first assignments was to go out and buy a Doc Watson record, so I bought a double Doc Watson record. On that, he had two-finger picking, mountain-style picking, which is a precursor of the bluegrass style, the threefinger, but it’s not that real, real bright, drive. It has its own kind of drive, but it’s just – it’s haunting. And when I heard him play that music, that’s what really hooked me. But I don’t know if it would have hooked me as much if my dad hadn’t played the banjo when I was growing up. HOGUE: How did you end up getting up here to Bellingham then, after being in Portland? SMITH: Larry Hanks and I got married, and he got a job in Chehalis. Linda Allen had started the Sunnyside Folk Arts Center in Chehalis, Washington, and so we went there and got a house and lived there for three and a half years. It was a wonderful community of people but it was also a scary, bigger community of people that were not very accepting of any of us. Of course, we looked different and drove different kind of cars. [laughs] I mean, we did stand out a bit. So we were there for three and a half years, and we really had a good time. It was halfway between Seattle and Portland, so we were able to go to music things all the time. But after the Sunnyside folded, Larry started going on tours more, and I was at home working at the county mental health clinic and feeling pretty isolated. I finally said, “You know what? I want to move, and I want to move either to Eugene or to Bellingham,” because we had made a lot of friends in Bellingham just because of the people we knew in Seattle. So we decided to move to Bellingham, so we did in March of ’79. I mean, I just remember sometimes on the weekend going to three different music parties in a day. We’d go to a breakfast one and an afternoon one, and then an evening one, and we’d go every night of the week. It was like, nothing was too much, nothing was too much; it was so wonderful to be in a community that was really strong musically. In those days it was smaller and so everybody played together. I mean, there were like folk and old time and traditional and bluegrass people, kind of all in the same group. It hadn’t kind of splintered off a little bit, which kind of happened as more people moved into the area. And then also as more people settled down and had kids, that really kind of splintered things off too. HOGUE: So you moved up in ’79, and at that time, the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society, if you can call it a society, was already started by Richard. Were those the same people you had met before? SMITH: Yes. We met Richard, I think it was in ’76 at the Folk Life Festival. And then we came up a couple times and Larry sang at the Roeder Home for the Music Society, probably in ’77 and then ’78, and then we moved up. So that was definitely the basis of our friends – you know, it was Laurel and Clifford, Cliff Perry, Laurel Bliss, and Gene Wilson and Peter Schwimmer and Linda Allen and Mike Marker and Larry and me and 5 Flip and … I mean, it was just really a lot of the people that are still here, which is really fun. And in those days, there was the Roeder Home and then there was Mama Sunday’s that Flip ran. Between the two of them, there were always people coming into town. But it was only those two, so it was easy to not get too burned out on concerts, which sometimes can happen now, even here, where there are just like three or four a week. It’s a lot, it’s a lot. HOGUE: What was your first involvement with the actual Homemade Music Society? I know that you hosted the music circle for a while, but was it just going to concerts in the beginning, or …? SMITH: Just going to concerts. I’m not sure – Larry and I did one there in 19 … I remember the one in ’81; I think we had done one in ’79 when we moved here, and then in ’81 we did one. I think it was about in 1980 or ’81, one night when David Hall, who was sort of a … Oh, he did all of the concert setups at that point, because Richard had gotten to a place where he said, “I need some help,” and so David took over, but nobody was doing the music circle, and they would have a different person every other week, so it was just no consistency there. So one night, he said, “You know, it would be really nice if we could get one person to do the music circles.” And I thought, “Gee, that would be fun!” So I said, “I’ll do it.” And Larry looked at me and said, “You’d be great for that,” so I did it. I remember the first time I went, I made a packet of ten songs and ran off maybe ten packets, and I think maybe two people showed up because it was so – you couldn’t tell what was going to happen, who was going to be there, what was … There was no base built up. The next week, there were a few more, and then the third time it was, you know, like twenty-five people. We had so much fun. So I think for six or seven years – and for me, when Larry and I split up in early 1985, it was really an important place for me, because it was, you know, having a bunch of friends who I had gotten to know through that who were different than our regular group because I really wanted to give Larry a lot of our friends to feel like he had that as a backup, you know, because I knew he really needed that. I did too, but I also had this outlet, so that was great. So I made a lot of friends through that and actually formed a little group called Dennis and the Lawn Darts through that. We did four-part harmonies, mostly unaccompanied stuff. It was just fantastic. And then when we’d practice, we’d laugh the whole time in between. We had so much fun! And there were a lot of names bandied around, including Laura Smith White Mombaso – [that] was one of the names of the group but we finally settled on Dennis and the Lawn Darts because one of the guys’ names was Dennis. And so that grew out of that, and it was really fun. The reason I quit doing it was because I started teaching school. I have to get up early, I have to work late: it was really hard. I couldn’t do both of them at the same time. HOGUE: What year did you stop doing that? SMITH: I think it was probably the fall of ’87. I think I did it through the spring of ’87. It’s really funny because Flip had been – I think it was through Bellingham Vo-Tech – had been teaching English classes to people, English as a second language, as a volunteer on Wednesday nights. So she could never come, but about that time – I can’t remember 6 what the shift was, maybe she just decided that this was more important or something else – but anyway, it was perfect because when I stopped, she was able to take over, which was absolutely perfect. It was right around that time too that Rob and Terry, Rob Lopresti and [Terry Winer?]. Susie was about four; I remember that. She was really teeny. They immediately became a really strong part, and I didn’t get to know them for a while because when I started teaching, I – well, I taught one year and then I moved down to Portland because my job was over in one year, and I moved away for a year. So really cut ties with that for a couple years there and then got back in touch. HOGUE: Can you talk a little bit of your knowledge of how, even during your time of involvement in the ‘80s or even now, how the organization has morphed into song circles and then the sponsored concerts during the week? SMITH: Well, going from Richard running all the concerts and song circles to David running concerts and then having different people running song circles to David running concerts and having me running song circles, and I think it was pretty close to the time that Flip took over that David just said he couldn’t do it because he had a lot of conflicts. You know, it’s a burnout job; it’s not fun if you’re doing it every two weeks. It comes to be less about music than – you just think of it kind of as business end, and that’s not where any of us want to be with this. I think it was around that time that Richard came up with the idea to share, which is really a great way to do it, and that way you get to really pick people that you want to have in there. That has worked very well. I mean, I’m not sure what Richard would say; he’d probably get stuck with, “Oh, this person has been sponsored, but now the sponsor has given up because of something, and who’s going to do it now?” He’s still the one who is kind of like responsible in the end. But I think it has kept it from being a place of burnout, and it’s kept it fresh and focused on the performer, and all aspects monetary – you know, having the Roeder Home support us with all that they do – it helps us keep from getting burned out too. HOGUE: You have been both a performer and a sponsor? SMITH: Yeah, performer and sponsor. HOGUE: What were some of the ones you wanted to sponsor? SMITH: Oh, man. Um, I performed a lot. There was Larry, and I performed … I don’t think Dennis and the Lawn Darts ever performed there, actually. I did a couple of Christmas things there, but that’s not the same, with Linda Allen and Janet Peterson. I [inaudible] with Linda there when she has done her concerts, and then Steve Palazzo was the last person I did it with. And that’s pretty much it, I think. In terms of people I’ve sponsored, a wonderful singer from Portland who unfortunately died about two years ago, Merritt Herring?, who was, when I went to Sweet’s Mill in 1973, I parked myself under a tree and listened to this older guy, who was about forty-five at the time, sing for hours. I just thought he was the most incredible performer because when he sang, it had nothing to do with him; it had everything to do with the songs he was singing; it was so apparent. He was just so generous with his music. So I sponsored him to come up here a couple of 7 years after he retired and that was really fun. The Wanderers, Bill Merlin and Carl Allen, who do a lot of really neat, old, kind of Woody Guthrie songs, and also the mellow side of the Sixties kind of songs, kind of more like Kingston Trio, were some of the four-part harmony groups that did neat things. And Linda and … I can’t remember who … No, that would have been – Larry played with Elizabeth Cotten there, but that was before the sponsoring things happened. I’m sponsoring one in April, the Bird’s Creek Boys; I met them at the Farmer’s Market last summer. They’re transplants from Tennessee, an uncle and a nephew; they sing all these old duets, brother duet things, and they’re really good. They’re really good. They’ve got that genetic piece, and they’re really, really good. So it’s real traditional stuff and a lot of gospel stuff; it’s really nice. So it’s one of those things like, “Oh, I’m going to do them this year.” I try to keep it down to one, or maybe two. Another one I’ve done twice is Sarah Gray, and unfortunately I learned the last time that I will never sponsor a concert in the first half of September because hardly anybody came out, and she came from Scotland with her son, and they were fantastic! Yeah. HOGUE: We went to that concert. Tanya was there and we just loved it. SMITH: They were so good. Yeah. She’s just an amazing woman and singer and player, and her son is too. It was so neat because I read the promo, and it sure didn’t sound like he was a musician in his own right, but wow, is he ever! And yet when they play together, it’s so touching because they’re so in sync with each other. HOGUE: Can you talk just a little bit about the music in this community and how it’s affected you, and what is it about this community? SMITH: What is it about this community? You know, I’ve often wondered because there does seem to be something incredibly special here. I used the word ‘generosity’ with Merritt Herring, but with the musicians here that I know, there’s a real generous feeling. I don’t get the feeling so much of trying to outdo each other; there’s a real sharing that happens that is really fantastic and an acknowledgement of people’s strengths without pointing out weaknesses. So there’s a real accepting nature to it. For me, the music circle, when I went back the last couple times and it’s been very seldom, has just not been the place I wanted to be. It just was not the place I wanted to be, and I began realizing that all the people that I shared my music with, I never … Like with Tom Hunter, and I love singing with him and I’ve done a lot of recording stuff with him, but you know, we’d get together twice a year and sing. And I thought, “This isn’t enough for me,” and yet here I am with the predicament of working in Skagit Valley really long days and having homework on the weekends because of the nature of my job. But something popped up in my neighborhood about five years ago a block away, a block over and a block away, when we were walking by on Thanksgiving Day and the back of a car was opened. I knew the dog that lived there and the kid, but I didn’t know the people. I saw a mandolin case and a guitar case. And so when the people came out, I remember just demanding, “Who plays mandolin and guitar?” The man said, “I do.” And I said, “Well, what kind of stuff do you play?” And he said, “I kind of like traditional and bluegrass and folk.” And I said, “I have to play with you!” And he was really taken aback, but I was just at this place where I really needed it in my life a lot. I need it every week. I 8 don’t want it, you know, every three months; it’s too integral a part of me. It helps me balance the world, it helps me balance the bad things that are going on in the world; it gives me strength and levity. I mean, it really does help in so many ways. So anyway, we got together with my neighbor who lives just right across the alley from me, who is a bluegrass banjo player – the three of us got together. This was about five years ago. One of them sang something, and I sang harmony on the chorus, and they both looked a little distraught. After it was done, I said, “Is that okay that I sang?” thinking, boy, [I] probably stepped on some toes and I didn’t mean to – I wasn’t singing loud! And they said, “No, it’s just that we’ve never had anybody sing harmony before!” It was just too new to them. They had both been playing for a couple of years, you know, but in seclusion a little bit. So we just kept doing that. Now, Chuck has his own bluegrass band, so we hardly ever get to play with him. But Howard – his wife Laura was always putting the child to bed. Well about two years ago or so, she came down after putting [the child to] bed and started singing harmony behind me, and I just turned around and said, “Oh, my God, where have you been?” She’s just the most wonderful singer; she’s a fantastic singer and we blend beautifully. And so here is this little – you know, and they’re twenty years younger than me, which doesn’t matter with music. That’s another thing I like. When I was young, it didn’t matter that people were older, and now that I’m older, it doesn’t matter that people are younger. It’s a wonderful equalizer. We get together about every other week – try to do it every week. And we just have so much fun! We laugh, we play, we sing, we experiment, and it’s really fun to be around people who are so joyous at the thought because they’re newer into it, and I still share that same joy, so it’s really fun. I still play whenever I can with anybody else I can play with; it’s just that my job is kind of… HOGUE: Something about this kind of music – you were talking about the age doesn’t matter – it can continue. Perhaps that’s why things like these are able to continue in the community because there’s not really the [inaudible]. SMITH: Right. You know, with rock and roll or anything, you kind of get stuck in your slot. Well, you know, I would still be into the Beatles, and I am, but you know, it’s just that everybody has their own rock and roll period, so they relate to people in that narrow age span. With this music, it just rolls over. Like right now, one of my students is a sixteen-year-old girl, one of my banjo students, and she is so excited. She just had her birthday in the last two weeks, got a banjo, got her driver’s license, and did her finals for her semester, and she is pumped! Her mom is a fiddle player, an old-time fiddle player, so she’s got her mom too to play with, and it’s so neat to see her coming out like that. I love working with younger people to give them skills because to me, that’s the best way to help pass it on. HOGUE: I wanted to ask just a little about – you know, you were talking about how you did the song circle and then coming back and it wasn’t really, you know, the place for you. How do you think that the organization, the Whatcom County Homemade Music Society, allows for people to come together, play, maybe get confident – I don’t know – and then you know, go off and do their own thing and still have that as something. 9 SMITH: As a kind of a diving board. You know, what I always wanted to happen with the Homemade Music Society and it never did, was for groups to splinter off and go into different rooms, and that happened last October. I mean, it was set classes, you know, with people passing each other on the staircase carrying their guitar or their mandolin or banjo and going to sing or going to do this or that – ukuleles – and I thought this is what I always wanted. I wanted it to be like Faith Patrick’s house. Faith is ninety-one years old and still the head of the San Francisco Folk Music Club, and every other Friday night – or is it every Friday night? I can’t remember – her house – it’s just this huge three-story Victorian house on Clayton Street in San Francisco – it’s full of people, and there’s bluegrass here, and there’s old time here, and there’s unaccompanied sea chanties over there, and there’s upstairs and downstairs and in the sauna, and every nook and cranny has a different kind of music, and people move between. I always thought that would be so cool. I think more maybe what’s happened is that people have come and met people through the music circles and then gone off. And there have been many time when that happened. I think that it’s still a really good format; I think for me what happens was, I don’t want to be in a place where there are fifteen people, and everybody sings a song and you listen, and the next person sings a song and you listen, and the next person sings a song and you listen, and then you sing a song and they listen. I want to do it all, and I want to play the whole time with everybody and sing the whole time with everybody, and everybody gets a different chance to choose a song or something, but you all participate. That can happen, and especially that pamphlet that I did grew into twenty-five three-ring binders, and then people would bring twenty-five copies and would put them in alphabetically so that we all had something to go on if you didn’t have something. It wasn’t restricted to that. And the times that I went back, it was still all one – you know, people bringing things that were really for everybody to listen to, which can … that ends up being sort of a great venue for singer-songwriters, kind of a showcasing thing, but I like to think of it more as a sharing thing. I think some of the times people would bring something they wrote. Rob Lopresti is a great example because he would bring things that he wrote which were so ‘join-in-able’, and then we would do them again, so they became part of that common knowledge and that worked really well. But I think that it’s hard to keep it on track when you get some people that come in there to use it as a showcase just for original stuff over and over again but not have it be stuff that can really include people. I really think of that stuff as being a place for inclusion. I want to say one other thing in regard to inclusion. When I was public school, which was basically through seventh grade, I was beat up and shunned a lot because I was white and I was in Hawaii, you know. So then I got to go to this prep school. My aunt sent the money to go to this incredibly terrific school, just a fantastic school, and whenever I look at the newsletters I think gee, I wish I’d gone there because I feel like I was so on the outside because it was all rich kids, white and Japanese mostly. So I felt like I was excluded there, plus I kind of had talked myself into being excluded. When I found myself in California, right after I first went to Sweet’s Mill, with Larry Hanks – I had no clue who he was, you know, but we ended up being together and then getting married – and in Faith’s house with all these musicians, I saw a wonderful opportunity, and that was to smash the damn walls. And that’s what I spent my time doing. I would just look around, and I would watch for the person who was sitting on the edge and was not being included, and I had courage now because I was part of the in crowd, which I’d never been 10 part of an in crowd. I could go over and say, “Hi, my name is Laura. What’s your name? What do you play? Why don’t you come over here?” because to me, even folk music, even folk music can get real exclusive depending on the personalities. It’s always been really important to me to keep the walls from forming, and I think that’s why the guitar workshop has been so important to me, and that’s the role that I’ve always taken upon myself, is to smash the walls and to make sure that people are part of things because I just think that there’s plenty of things that have built up their walls and are around, and we don’t need any more of them. That’s one thing that I could do in addition with teaching second grade in a non-white school to help balance what happened to me and to try to keep it from happening to other people. That’s my mission in life. [laughs] HOGUE: Good one! SMITH: Yeah, it needs to be done, it needs to be done. And a lot of people do it. I mean, that’s the thing about, like, the guitar workshop or the people who are involved in the Roeder Home. I mean, I’m still friends with them for thirty-some-odd years for good reasons, because we all have that same sense about what’s happening and what makes it work and what makes it really bordering sometimes on magic, is that acceptance and allowing for people to really be who they are and accepted for who they are. HOGUE: What do you think the future of the organization is, if any? SMITH: Well, it looks a lot better, now that we’ve got people like you involved because, just like the guitar workshop, it’s our fear, you know. We need more people, younger people at the guitar workshop, teaching, so that it can pull younger people. We need more younger people who are going to be playing concerts at the Roeder Home so that it will pull a younger audience in, so that there will be some transfer going on so that it doesn’t just die with the rest of us when we all die. And I think that we’re starting to really realize that we’ve got to start doing that because there are too many older people in the audience. Not too many: there is just not enough younger people in the audience. So having people like you be in there and having you and Tanya play that night, which, you know, sometimes things work out the best, and that was one of those things that worked out the best. That was so fun, and it was such a wonderful balance – that evening was fantastic. And I think that a lot of people realize that. There’s a lot of talent in this town, and we need to bring more of it into there. So I’m a little concerned because we haven’t done that yet, and we need to be doing more of it. HOGUE: Any final thoughts? SMITH: Just to thank you for doing this because, you know, it’s like a lot of things that people are so involved in doing this it’s hard for them to step out and kind of see the big picture. Richard could in a way, but he’s way too immersed in the history. It would be from his point of view, so this way you’ve gotten all these different points of view and they’ll be out there. It’s great. HOGUE: Thank you for doing the interview for me.
Show less

MABEL: Multimedia Archives Based Electronic Library

Search results

Refine

Date

Type of content

Genre/form

Related Collection

Object custodian

Topics

Name (as creator)