By the next year McGuinn had graduated to the advanced class and taken up the banjo. Hamilton put him into the intermediate class, where McGuinn learned a picking style every week, reading tablature off a poster on the wall as Hamilton coached the group. North, an aging brick building whose third floor then housed the Old Town School. Then, after a sociable coffee break, all the groups were brought together for a hootenanny, which reinforced what had been learned, gave each player the kick of hearing it all come together, and fostered a sense of togetherness in the atomizing big-city environment.įrom his home at 57 E. From her Hamilton learned to divide his students by level of skill and teach each group the same song at increasing levels of difficulty. Hamilton, who would later join the Weavers, had taught in Santa Monica with John Lomax’s daughter, Bess Lomax Hawes.
His teacher told him about the Old Town School, run at that time by the gifted guitarist and banjo player Frank Hamilton. “Bob just played the five-string banjo, sang some folk songs, and blew me away,” McGuinn remembered in Biography of a Hunch, a history of the Old Town School of Folk Music. McGuinn was spellbound by Gibson’s songs and stories. Born in Chicago in 1942, McGuinn was already a guitar-strumming rocker by the time his music teacher at the Latin School invited folk singer Bob Gibson to perform for the class. While McGuinn undoubtedly drew from these old records–Leadbelly’s 12-string guitar work was an early influence–his introduction to folk music reflected the time-honored values of community and oral instruction. By documenting the singer as well as the song, they added an entirely new dimension to the historical record and extended the oral tradition not only around the world but into the future.
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After John was named curator of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song the next year, the Lomaxes found the resources to record such legends-to-be as Bukka White, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Son House.
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By 1933, when Lomax and his son Alan discovered and recorded Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison, he had traded up to a 315-pound portable recorder that cut discs from the trunk of his Ford sedan. When folklorist John Lomax was compiling the celebrated print anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), he dragged a 1906 Ediphone around with him, recording his discoveries on crude wax cylinders. The phonograph thrust folk music into the 20th century by adding performance to what had previously been a purely literary record. McGuinn’s career began as that earlier conflict was still playing itself out, and his music has both shaped and been shaped by it. But judging from the last great collision between folk music and technology–the advent of sound recording–it will probably prove a blessing and a curse, popularizing folk but inevitably corrupting it. No one can predict exactly how the Web will affect folk’s oral tradition it’s still an infant medium, and the promised integration of telephone and television will radically expand its scope. Since November 1995 McGuinn has posted 15 traditional folk songs, with tablature and lyrics, and he promises they will “just keep on coming, one a month, for as long as possible.” On the Web, they’re available as eight-bit, 11-kilohertz digital. With the Folk Den, McGuinn wants to “continue the tradition of the folk process, that is, the telling of stories and singing of songs, passed on from one generation to another by word of mouth.” Actually, McGuinn records the songs on a Windows-based digital home studio and saves them to CD-ROM. And now, with his World Wide Web site, McGuinn is bearing the folk torch into cyberspace, embarking in late middle age on the ultimate busman’s holiday. Even his new record of solo acoustic performances, Live From Mars, includes liner notes by Tom Servo, one of the robot characters on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Spaceman,” “CTA 102”), and dolphin language (“Dolphin’s Smile”). His love of futurism and high-tech gadgetry resonated weirdly against the Byrds’ folk roots in songs that dealt with relativity (“5D”), extraterrestrials (“Mr. Ever since his band the Byrds electrified folk in 1965, Roger McGuinn has embraced the conflict between musical tradition and modern technology.
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