[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. This hour, we have some great music. Nearly 20 years ago, James Blunt's voice was everywhere with You're Beautiful. He has a new album out. He'll join us for a listening party, and we're going to dive into a conversation about Greenwich Village and music in the 1960s, and we'll keep that folk vibe going on tomorrow's show when we'll preview the Brooklyn Folk Festival, which is coming up this weekend. We'll talk about the 75th anniversary of Smithsonian Folkways Records with its director and curator. Plus they're reissuing a classic recording called Sounds of North American Frogs, and I need to know more about that. That is in the future, but let's get this hour started with Bongo's frontman, Richard Barone.

Richard Barone: Hello, there.

[MUSIC - Richard Barone: Sweet Misery]

All that matters in the end

Are the good times that have been

Living's tiresome, killing a sin

Death is easy if you've been

And you don't think of the bad times when you're dying

I don't believe you hear what I say

Don't bar the windows, keep out of my way

Alison Stewart: That's Sweet Misery, a 1968 song written by the great Janis Ian, the one-time child prodigy and recently retired musician whose career was launched in part by the Greenwich Village Folk scene. That version of his is performed by Richard Barone, musician turned author and professor and founder of the Hoboken band, The Bongos. Barone released the song on his 2016 album Sorrows & Promises, along with other covers of songs that came out of 1960s New York City.

It's a subject matter Barone is very familiar with as a new school professor who taught a course called Music Plus Revolution. Greenwich Village in the 1960s, which also happens to be the name of a book he published this year and the name of a concert at Carnegie Hall, curated by Barone, coming up on November 19th. The event will celebrate the neighborhood's musical legacy and feature a long list of artists who have been instrumental in New York's music history like Jose Feliciano and David Johansen, Vernon Reid, and Terre Roche.

The concert will benefit the artist-focused charity Music Cares, as well as the Village Preservation Society. Richard Barone is in studio. Welcome to All Of It.

Richard Barone: Wow. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: So happy to have you. Listeners, do you have memories of the Greenwich Village Folk scene of the 1960s? Who was your favorite musician to come out of that scene? Are there any that you think deserved more attention or maybe you want to tell us what your favorite venue was to see folk music? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. That is our phone number where you can join us on air or you can text us at that number. Also, social media is available @allofitwnyc. We are talking folk music for a bit. How did you come to teach about the Greenwich Village Folk scene?

Richard Barone: Well, in 2016, I made the album Sorrows & Promises that you just played that track from. It was a real special thing for me because I've lived in Greenwich Village for a while, for since 1984, and I know, and I knew that so much had happened there. I wanted to, as I record each song, I researched the authors of the songs and all of the material you just discussed, the venues, the artists, and it was such a story in my head that I wanted to be able to tell in a book.

It was during the pandemic when I finally had a break from performing that I could actually write the book, but it had been on my mind and I had been teaching music and revolution at the New School for the previous couple of years. The story was evolving before the book was written. It's just something I had to do. It's my neighborhood. It's where I live.

Alison Stewart: I'm so curious about the course units. [laughs] What were some of the things people learned in the course?

Richard Barone: Well, we do it chronologically. We start with really Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger as a holy trinity. They brought folk music into the village. They all live on 10th Street. It's really amazing how the folk scene flourished from the West Village and East Village too. Lead Belly was on the East Village, but it was an incredible momentum that picked up from then in the '40s up to the '60s, it comes in two waves, really, the folk revival. There was the first wave, then there was blacklisting, of course.

Some of them had problems and had to stop and the venues would not book folk artists, so it had to have a restart. Harry Belafonte was a big part of that restarting and Odetta. They just kept forging ahead and really, Harry Belafonte's television special in 1959, I believe, brought folk music back into the public eye on a national level and the second wave then included, of course, many people like Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie and Tom Paxton and these others that I wrote about, especially in the book.

Alison Stewart: Some of the students that you're teaching were born were born-

Richard Barone: Were born in the 2000s.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Truly. What was something that was interesting to you about the way that they received the information or some question they asked you that was a little bit of, "Wow, mind blown?"

Richard Barone: No, it's all mind-blowing. My students were amazing. I just watched their expressions when I play them and show the material that was created during this period. Really, one of the most important things about the Greenwich Village in the '60s was that this was the first time that artists took it upon themselves to write basically all their material that they wanted to sing. Before that the songs came from the Braille building song factories, Broadway, all these other sources, professional songwriters of Tin Pan Alley.

Now kids who are writing their own songs, Lynch Chandler was a big instigator of that and also Tom Paxton, and a woman, a Bonnie Dobson, came into town from Canada and had an original song. All of these three are pre-Dylan but when Bob Dylan wrote Blown In the Wind, that one seemed to be the kind of song, the nature of that song was a universal hit. Somehow that was a turning point in the idea of writing your own songs that could actually be covered and that kind of thing, but before that, there were others who had been composing their own material. It was a new thing, a new thought.

Alison Stewart: Got a text. "Thanks for the segment. My son took Mr. Barone's Greenwich Village music history class a couple of years ago. He loved it and we loved hearing about it, and listening to the music discussed in the class, we learned a lot." There you go.

Richard Barone: Well, there's a lot to learn. I'm learning a lot, still and always about it because I meet more people that were there and I had great help with the book as far as the interviews. I did over 80 interviews, and a lot of them were the behind-the-scenes people. It was Donovan, the artist who told me, "Ricardo," he calls me Ricardo, "Talk to the people behind the scenes. That's where the story is. The guitar players, the accompanist, the musicians, bookers of the venues because that's where you'll get your story." That's what I tried to do in this book and show.

Alison Stewart: You also go into the history of Greenwich Village from 1600 to 1939.

Richard Barone: Yes. I know. My publisher got a little freaked out when I started going to 1625, I think when I started. He said, "Please, just jump to the '60s as soon as possible." [laughter]

Alison Stewart: 1660s?

Richard Barone: 1960s. It starts in 1643, but I tried to make that a timeline. We did a graphic timeline with the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. It's an accurate timeline that brings us up to Billie Holiday, basically singing Strange Fruit in Greenwich Village.

Alison Stewart: Why was that important? Why did you want to set the stage that way?

Richard Barone: Well, what a protest on that was and what an artful piece of work that could have a message so strong. I thought that was important. The fact that it was premiered across the street from the Stonewall that later to be Stonewall Bar that what Christopher Street, that little-- It just seemed to be a historic corner and a historic song and a moment in Greenwich Village that started that was part of it really, but a big part of it I think.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to some callers.

Richard Barone: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: We've got David calling in from [unintelligible 00:08:27] Hi, David. Thanks for calling All of It.

David: Hey, thanks for this. This is great. I'm a folky. My wife and I did pass the hat clubs around New York City back in the day, but my memory-

Alison Stewart: That's where they were.

David: -that is fondly is at the Village gate or the Vanguard. Can't remember. Richie Havens headlining, Joni Mitchell playing an opening set pre-Woodstock and breaking three strings during her set because her tuning was so obscure.

Richard Barone: Well, she has different tunings, yes.

Alison Stewart: It's a great story, David. Thank you.

David: She would change the tuning in first song and broke a bunch of strings. It was great.

Alison Stewart: Cool. Thank you for calling in. Let's talk to Mike from Brooklyn who is on line one. Hey, Mike. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Mike: Thank you so much. I guess my favorite music moment in the Village would've been later on on West Fourth Street. There were bands that were playing out of Ohio, especially what they call the S-H-I-T Gaze Movement then. There was a band called Psychedelic Horse S-H-I-T I remember playing. They were really great. My bigger point or question is I wonder if your guest could speak to what's going on today.

I know that the scene in the '60s, Washington Square Park was surrounded by housing that were filled by people of much more, I would say, working-class origin and being, and today, it's much more of the set by gentrification and NYU and the over policing the Washington Square Park, I think is a real problem for ongoing creativity and communities, especially coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Alison Stewart: Mike, we're going to dive in and I'm going to let Richard respond to your comments.

Richard Barone: I live down the block from Washington Square Park. I agree that there's a lot of excessive policing sometimes. The park still has a lot of music in it. There's music in every corner of that park.

Alison Stewart: I walked through the other day-

Richard Barone: Oh my God, it's so chaotic.

Alison Stewart: -people offering to make poems.

Richard Barone: Yes.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot going on.

Richard Barone: There's a lot there. It's always been-- It's nothing new to have policing. In my book, if I talk about how they tried to close down the park, they tried to when-- What's his name? When-- There was a plan to plow a highway right through the middle of that.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Robert Moses.

Richard Barone: Robert Moses plan to wipe out the park, the entire village with a six-lane highway. There's always been resistance to what happens in Greenwich Village and resistance to what happens in that park. It's a very special spot. I might've written it maybe overly poetically in my book about it, but it has a mystical quality to that park. I don't know if you saw the ending of the book, but it's like, I really feel the spirit of that park, it's got some magic and people are drawn to it. It's alive.

As far as the venues, there's not as many rock venues or music venues as there were. There were so many, during the time of the '60s, almost every location was a club. Even every basement was a folk club. It was incredible. It exploded over quite quickly. It began-- I was talking to Terry Thal, who managed Bob Dylan, that was his first manager, and also was the wife of Dave Van Ronk. She said when they first moved there, there were no clubs.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Richard Barone: That was the late '50s-

Alison Stewart: Huh.

Richard Barone: -but then suddenly, it's like, boom, boom, boom. There were so many. It was a phenomenon, I think.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Richard Barone, founder of the Bongos. We are talking about the book and the concert coming up, Music + Revolution, Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Got to give a shout-out to WNYC. You mentioned the station a few times in the book.

Richard Barone: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: The first time is about Oscar Brand, who hosted Oscar Brand's folk song festival on WNYC AM starting in 1945. We found some old audio of an announcer promoting-

Richard Barone: Wow.

Alison Stewart: -the show.

Richard Barone: Cool.

Alison Stewart: D1.

[music]

Speaker 4: That's right. [unintelligible 00:12:24] the sound of the unmusical note means it's your surest [unintelligible 00:12:27] Oscar Brand in this Festival of American Song. 30 minutes of your favorite melodies of the Folks Day Group and Oscar's special guest for this evening, beat [unintelligible 00:12:35] and Hollywood. The program's coming to you tonight from the Washington Heights, YMHA, whose director is Samuel [unintelligible 00:12:40] Our audience is composed of a brave band of listeners who wrote in for tickets, and right now it's your chance to make music with your [unintelligible 00:12:49] Oscar Brand.

Richard Barone: Wow. That's great.

Alison Stewart: How does Oscar Brand and radio in general fit into this history of Greenwich Village and the music revolution?

Richard Barone: Well, to be honest, I think WNYC goes even earlier with this history of folk music with Lead Belly had a radio show called Folk Songs of America or something. It was a longer title, but Folk Songs, that's the primary word, but Lead Belly was on the station.

Alison Stewart: Lead Belly you say, the person in my next clip?

Richard Barone: Really?

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I'll let you finish and then we'll get to it.

Richard Barone: Okay. Great. Yes. The supportive radio really helped immensely. Well, Alan Lomax was on the radio, and Alan Lomax was the-- I guess called the song catcher. He was finding a lot of folk songs from the south and different regions of the United States, and bringing folk music on the radio. All of that really fueled this fire of what they call the folk revival. Yes, radio is a huge part of it, and WNYC is a huge part of it.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen.

[music]

Speaker 4: Folk Songs of America, another program by that inimitable singer of America's own songs, [unintelligible 00:14:07] Lead Belly. Lead Belly can sing so many songs and so many different kinds that it's often a problem which to choose. How many songs do you know, [unintelligible 00:14:24]

Lead Belly: Well, I can sing 500 songs and never go back to the first one.

Speaker 4: My goodness, that's quite a mess of songs.

Alison Stewart: That's quite a mess of songs.

Richard Barone: It's quite a mess, but you know what, an incredible treasure Lead Belly was because he brought so much material, and that really fed the first wave of the folk revival and leading then to the whole second wave that I was just talking about a second ago.

Alison Stewart: Yes. The narrative around Lead Belly was that he was a prison inmate who Alan Lomax "discovered."

Richard Barone: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What does that history teach us about narratives and how legacies are shaped?

Richard Barone: I called the Smithsonian one of the curators there, and asked him about, "What did that really mean at the time that they were promoting him as a prisoner? Especially now in 2023, I found it to be so exploitive, but Alan Lomax especially rightly believed that Lead Belly was very important. I think the important fact is that the music at least got out and that Lead Belly-- They did promote him. He did get to concerts and he was able to perform the music, but yes, I think the imaging of him was not right.

I can never agree with that. From all the accounts of people that I spoke to, who knew Lead Belly, Pete Seeger being one. I got to work with Pete Seeger quite a lot toward later years of his life. Lead Belly appears to be one of the kindest, nicest people you can imagine, and yet he's painted as this dangerous character. I did ask him, "Is this where the gangster image comes from that is so exploitive?" He is like, "Maybe. I don't like it."

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to John, calling in from Queens. Hi, John. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

John: Hi Alison, and the guest. It's a great show. I wanted to recall the singer-songwriter Jack Hardy, a great narrative singer and songwriter. I used to listen to him on Bob Fass's show on WBAI late night. He's really not talked about too much but was a wonderful singer. I hope he's still around.

Richard Barone: Well, his name does come up quite a lot with people. My book it's based around the scene on the Central Village with the scene that was really unwavering place with Tom Paxton and like I always mentioned before, the scene around Terry Thal, who was managing many of the groups. Jack Handy is a name that comes up from others. It's an endless-- Wow, there's so many people that were involved in the village scene.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Hal calling from Brooklyn. Hi, Hal. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Hal: Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm curious about where Dave Van Ronk [unintelligible 00:17:20] I know he was born in Brooklyn. I'm a little bit young for this set. I'm 50-- I'm sorry, 68 years old. I would've been 10 years old in 1965, but I did see him at the Woodstock Playhouse in Woodstock, New York before it burned down. I became a fan of his because he sang a great kid song of the Shaving Cream song, which I remember vividly.

[laughter]

Richard Barone: That's so funny. Dave Van Ronk was such a great performer, and he was the mayor of MacDougal Street. That's sort of his nickname. Besides being a performer, he also booked the Gaslight Club and really helped Bob Dylan get started in many ways. Bob Dylan I know slept on his couch. The thing about Van Ronk is that he was a mentor to many of the folk singers that came through. That was his big-- Maybe to me, his biggest legacy, even though he's a great performer and really fascinating and entertaining. He's also a great mentor to the others.

Alison Stewart: There's going to be a few performers at this concert who are right in the middle of the Greenwich folk revival. One of them is Texas songbird, Carolyn Hester. For people who aren't familiar, share a little bit more about Hester and her role in the scene.

Richard Barone: I'm so glad you brought her up. Carolyn Hester is one of my favorite artists of that period because she connects the '50s and '60s to me. She worked with, Buddy Holly and when her first albums were produced by Buddy Holly's producer, Norman Petty, but then she moved to Greenwich Village around the same time that Buddy Holly moved. Buddy Holly was in the village. It's not really chronicled in the movie, in the famous biopic, et cetera, but he was in Greenwich Village and Carolyn Hester was as well.

She then connected to the 60's especially because Bob Dylan was discovered through Carolyn Hester when he was playing harmonica on her first Columbia album. John Hammond signed him on the spot.

Alison Stewart: Well, we're going to play I'll Fly Away-

Richard Barone: Oh, I love that song.

Alison Stewart: -which features a young Bob Dylan, as well as Spike Lee's father.

Richard Barone: Of course, yes, Billy. Great bass player.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen.

Richard Barone: All right.

[MUSIC - Carolyn Hester: I'll Fly Away]

One bright morning when this world is over

I'll fly away

To that land on God's celestial shore

I'll fly away, fly away

Oh, Lordy, I'll fly away in the mornin'

I'll fly away

When I die, hallelujah, by and by

I'll fly away, fly away

Just one more weary day and then

I'll fly away

To that land where joys will never end

I'll fly away, fly away

Oh, Lordy, I'll fly away in the mornin'

Alison Stewart: I got lost in that for a minute. [laughs]

Richard Barone: I know. It's a transcendental performance.

Alison Stewart: I really did.

Richard Barone Barone: I know.

Alison Stewart: Oh my gosh. It's Carolyn Hester, by the way. My guest is Richard Barone, founder of the Bongos. The name of the book is Music + Revolution: Greenwich Village in the 1960s. It is also the organizing principle for this Carnegie Hall concert on November 19th. Someone wanted you to shout out the names of the band, members of the Bongos, by the way.

Richard Barone: Oh, of course. Why not? On guitars, James Mastro with me. We both play guitar. On bass is Rob Norris and the drummer for the Bongos is Frank Giannini.

Alison Stewart: Tell me about the lineup, and how you came upon it.

Richard Barone: Wow. It's a dream lineup for me. I'm going to tell you alphabetically who's in the show. May I?

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Richard Barone: Okay. Well, David Amram, he was the conductor for the New York Philharmonic. He was also composer for so many scores of Hollywood films. He was a beatnik, and worked with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, and was part of the Greenwich Village scene 100%. Eric Anderson, another great singer-songwriter who really became famous, well through the '60s, but in the '70s as well. Then there's Richard Barone, that's me. Then there's Justin Vivian Bond. A fantastic performer, considered one of the great cabaret performers ever.

Marshall Crenshaw, Anthony DeCurtis, the author of the new book on Lou Reed. Mark Elliott, the author of the first book on Phil Oaks called, Death of a Rebel. José Feliciano, legend. Carolyn Hester, legend. David Johanson, legend. Steve Katz of the Blues Project. A very important band of that era. Lenny Kaye of the Petti Smith Group. Some of these people are the actual people that were there, and others will be interpreting the songs like Lenny Kaye. MaryLee Cortez and Eric Amble. Glenn Mercer of the Feelies.

Jeff Mulder and Jenny Mulder's daughter. Jeff Mulder was a very important character first emerged in the Jug Band movement with the Kweskin Jug Band. Then of course married Maria Damara, who became Maria Mulder. Willie Nile, a great rocker. Tom Paxton, one of the instigators of the new song movement in the 1960s, where people wrote their own material. Vernon Reid, one of my guitar heroes, a dear friend, and a guitar hero. Terry Roche, who we all know is a big friend of your show.

Terri Thal, who managed Bob Dylan and married to Dave Van Ronk and had so many great interviews in the book, and Happy Traum. The band is with Steve Adabo, Dennis Daikin, Joe McGinty, Jared Michael Nickerson, and Kevin Twig.

Alison Stewart: We're going to go out on one of the artists featured. One of you just mentioned, Tom Paxton.

Richard Barone: Wow. Good.

Alison Stewart: What should people know about Tom Paxton as they listen to this song?

Richard Barone: He came into town. He was in the military. He didn't wear his uniform. He didn't want to push it, but this was during the Vietnam War, of course. He came into town and wrote songs a lot. I don't know what you're going to play now, because I don't know what you picked, but I will say that he was one of the first to really address issues of the Vietnam War, and very directly. Wrote some beautiful songs, some classics.

Alison Stewart: The book is Music + Revolution: Greenwich Village in the 1960s. The Carnegie Hall concert of the same name is happening November 19th. My guest has been Richard Barone. Thank you so much for coming to the studio and taking calls and for this conversation.

Richard Barone: Thank you for having me. What a thrill to be with you. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on Tom Paxton's, The Last Thing on My Mind.

[MUSIC - Tom Paxton: The Last Thing on My Mind]

It's a lesson too late for the learning

Made of sand, made of sand

In the wink of an eye my soul is turnin'

In your hand, in your hand

Are you going away with no word of farewell

Will there be not a trace left behind

Well, I could've loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind

You know that was the last thing on my mind

You've got reason a plenty for goin'

This I know, this I know

 

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