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Recorded over just two days during a rare visit to the UK, this is the first album in 18 years from the Greenwich Village troubadour John Herald. As the leader of the Sixties New York bluegrass pioneers The Greenbriar Boys, founder member of the Seventies folk collective The Wooodstock Mountain Review and an accomplished solo performer, Herald has flown the flag for traditional folk music throughout his four decade career. His songs have been covered by Joan Baez, Maria Muldaur and Peter, Paul & Mary, and as a singer and session guitarist he has recorded with the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Doc Watson and Ian & Sylvia. Interviewed from his home in the hills of Woodstock, NY, John Herald talks candidly about his influences, his career and his passion for music which remains as strong as ever. |
To go back to the beginning, John, what kind of music were you
first drawn to? Who were your musical heroes when you were
growing up?
Well the first was Pete Seeger. He's the person who let
me know that I could sing in the sense of saying, "Come on,
sing along with this tune here if you feel the spirit and maybe
you will hear your voice sailing above the crowd and you'll see
what fun it is." That was at Summer camp back in 1954. And
later on my father had some records in the house of Pete Seeger,
again, and Leadbelly. He's one of the precursors of rock and
great traditional black singing from the USA. He's not a blues
singer so it's hard to say with a couple of words exactly what
kind of music he’s made but he's the kind of singer, like
Ray Charles, that could sing pretty much anything with a
thrilling feeling and earthiness. Also records by a white
Appalachian singer and banjo player Hobart Smith who was not well
known, even by Americans. He was one of the hundreds or thousands
that were unknown when the folk revival got started in the late
Fifties and Sixties. Woody Guthrie was not so much a music
influence but was an influence in the sense of lifestyle and
philosophy.Then I got really interested in bluegrass. In my last
year or two of boarding school - I went to a progressive school
called Manumit (in Latin meaning Freedom From Slavery) - there
was this radio program coming from New Jersey called Larkin
Barkin’ hosted by Don Larkin. He would come on every day at
12 o' clock, which was lunch time for us at the boarding school,
and would play 15 minutes to half an hour of a certain bluegrass
artist. When I first heard that, of course, I went totally ga ga.
I used to go racing back to my room at the boarding school and
breathlessly turn on his show. So that was how I first started
finding out about the more commercial side of bluegrass and I got
to know some names. I distinctly remember Don Reno (photo
above: Don Reno & Earl Scruggs). He was a bluegrass
banjo and guitar player, totally original, who played lead and to
this day is probably the only person I'd say I copied guitar from.
 (3 of the Skillet Lickers - Riley Puckett, centre) |
Now just for back up guitar and backing your own voice, I was greatly influenced by the same fellow that Doc Watson was influenced by, a fellow named Riley Puckett. Riley was a blind white guitar player from the South. He played with fingerpicks turned backwards and a great character in his voice. Although I was copying Riley Puckett's guitar style, I was also trying to learn his vocal style. When he sang a word that began with an ‘h’ he would get a nice crack in his voice. I haven't tried to learn the voice style of any singers now in maybe 25 years. I just sing the way I sing. So it's hard to say if you would hear a cracked ‘h’ in any of my recent stuff, but perhaps you would in the old stuff that I did for Vanguard. So those were the influences I copied from - Riley Puckett and Don Reno. |
When you perform, John, it seems
to me that you can't help but give it all you've got. When you
sing it's very powerful and when you play guitar you don't seem
to give yourself an easy job. Do you agree with that and, if so,
where did you get that from? Do you think it's a direct influence
from anyone?
The power or volume probably came from learning to play on the
streets of New York City where you had to sing above the traffic
noise to be heard. It also has to do with certain pickers I have
loved like Frank Wakefield and Scotty Stoneman. They come across,
to me, like a possessed old world symphony conductor who pushed
the verve and beat like a train locomotive. Other than that there
is no easy way to describe their feeling of spontaneity and
inspiration. If they ran out of strings while taking an
instrumental break their fingers and body language would end up
playing the pegs or pick guard until someone threw a bucket of
water on them. These same people could also play just one note
throughout a whole song and sound exciting and at the same time
creating some brand new fever pitch section. This one note might
also be more thrilling to them than a lot of notes played very
cleanly and slick. Of more concern to them, I think, is how
unique the sound feels, and if it transfers to the audience. If
it does and they get a nice response from the audience like a
preacher with a holy roller congregation the musician can be
moved to yet another level of excitement, almost doubly wowing
the flock. For me it's musicians and performers like The Skillet
Lickers doing talking music records, good clog dancing, a great
yodeler, a stirring preacher, Doyle Lawson, Carl Story, The Lewis
Family and The Nashville Bluegrass Band doing acapella gospel,
James Brown, The Nicols Brothers, Fred Astaire with feet a-fire,
Earl Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs, Bob Yellin' s instrumental solos and
Raymond Fairchild (Raymond especially can get possessed on the
banjo), Uncle Dave Macon's pure joy on stage, Pete Seeger
singalongs like with Wimoweh was always the heart of chills - buy
his LP with Wimoweh and the audience singing different parts he
shows them, Iris Dement and Steve Earle's sensuality and inner
beauty combined in their beautiful songs and songwriting,
Jennifer Warnes' fully original singing, Rory Block and Hazel
Dickens' passion and Diane Stockwell's pure voice coming right
out of Manhattan's shadowiness. These are the type of folks that
have always made me feel that something is right with the world.
You were one of the founding members of The Greenbriar
Boys in late '59 and were based in Greenwich Village in the early
Sixties. It must have been a very exciting place to be hanging
out and making music.
Boy was it! You bet it was. In this particular case I
was in the right place at the right time. I was born and raised
in Greenwich Village. I had already been prepared for the Village
before the actual music thing started. My father was a poet. All
of his friends were bohemians - painters, dancers, writers - and
here I was, somebody that was in on another sort of bohemian
revolution in the sense of the folk part of art; folk craft, folk
culture and so on. There I was in lower Manhattan and it was
happening all around me. People like Frank Wakefield, Bob Dylan,
Jerry Jeff Walker were arriving every other month. There were
others born in the right time and place in Greenwich Village like
Rory Block who I’m actually wild about to this very day. She’s
a white blues singer. Very big in the United States; John
Sebastian, of course, from the Lovin Spoonful who was always
extremely influenced by jug band music and old blues; and Eric
Kaz was another fellow who turned out to be an absolute crack-a-jack
songwriter. He wrote a tune called “Love Has No Pride”.
That’s what he’s most known for. One of the saddest
songs I ever heard. He's a good friend of mine. He was born and
raised mostly in Greenwich Village and his parents had this place
in Woodstock and I was roughly the same. I was born in Greenwich
Village and my father used to take me to Woodstock. My mother
died when I was three so if you don’t hear me mention my
mother much in my life that’s the reason.
Talking about the Greenwich Village scene, you touched on
Dylan who must be the most famous of your contemporaries.
Well, there was a time in New York - around 1959 to 1961
- when there were not that many people around that were nuts
about traditional music. A lot of them were interested in
songwriting. If I wanted to go hear some traditional music like
blues or Clarence Ashley or the McGee Brothers and so on - that
were being brought into New York by a group called The Friends Of
Old Time Music at the time - there weren’t that many people
that I could call up and say, “Hey, you wanna go see this
concert?”. Dylan was one of those few people that happened
to like traditional music as much as me. That also includes rock
n roll. We were both night owls and enjoyed Cafe Society, our
girlfriends were also best friends, so he was one of the maybe
ten scuffing partners that I had.
Can you remember when you first encountered him?
I actually first encountered him by seeing him when he
was playing fiddle. There was a place in New York City on
Macdougal St. called The Folklore Center and it was run by this
great character by the name of Israel Young. One day I passed by
and heard this fiddle coming out of the store. As I peeked in it
was him. All I knew was he was a guy with a little twitch - a
sort of Woody Guthrie twitch - and a cap that, if you knew him,
he was wearing most of the time. He had this raspy voice - even
more raspy than Woody Guthrie. Anyway, he was noodling on the
fiddle and it kind of surprised me 'cause there wasn’t that
many fiddle players around. There’s probably even less that
would remember Dylan playing fiddle. Maybe he could have been a
great fiddle player if he practised.
You
don’t ever hear of Dylan having been a fiddle player.
No, not that I know of, but back then there was a lot of
experimenting going on. Maybe there’s a hidden Dylan fiddle
record somewhere.
He’s well known for soaking up influences from
people around him.
Yes, probably more than most people.
Do you think you were any kind of influence on Dylan or
might he have been an influence on you?
No. Our ages were too close. It seems most of our
influences were older than us. We were both big Rambling Jack
Elliott fans and that reason was something to do with age. I’m
sixty now, Dylan about fifty nine, Jack Elliott’s about
sixty four. Even that four years age difference meant we would
stand in a position of awe about him, whereas Dylan and myself
might have awed each other in a different way. We were both in
New York, we were both interested in learning Riley Puckett and
Leadbelly and another hundred odd blues and mountain tunes and so
on. But I do remember one time when Dylan was at my house - this
was around 1988 - and I brought out this whole list of songs I
used to sing. It wasn’t singer songwriter stuff, it was just
good old mountain music and Deep Ellum ghetto music. Thirties,
Forties and Fifties music made by acoustic singers. And when I
brought this list out and started naming some of these songs,
Dylan went, “Oh, what is that? Oh I used to know that one”,
and we went down the list. We tried singing them but couldn't
remember a lot. If Rambling Jack was at that singing session when
this list came out, Jack Elliot might have said, “I remember
that tune. I remember this tune. In fact, Cheryl Tridlock used to
sing this tune a bunch over in Glasgow, Scotland. Or so and so
would sing this tune from Deep Ellum in Dallas, Texas”, and
he would have had his own take on the whole thing. He'd been
living some of those songs. Also at that time he knew more songs
than we did. He was an experienced travelling troubadour that
sidekicked with Woody Guthrie. In those days we all did so much
listening and song swapping that we probably all influenced each
other to an extent.
You spent some time in LA in the Seventies. How did that
musical environment compare to the East Coast?
It was similar only in a certain way. It had a sort of
coterie of people that were extremely interested in traditional
music and were, in a sense, like east coasters. They sort of
soaked up what they liked by osmosis. I remember going to play in
the Ash Grove that was the great going club in LA at the time. I
stayed with a friend of Bob Neuwirth's in LA for a while, right
down from Charlton Heston’s house I remember. And we used to
have parties round the swimming pool and pickers and singers like
John Hartford, The Dillards, Linda Ronstadt and Maria Muldaur
might come by. There were many folk music scenes happening all
over the country at a time when these singers weren't so
legendary and busy and played and traded songs with others just
for the fun of it.
Did you enjoy the West Coast experience?
Well, let’s say my soul has always been in the East
Coast but I found some wonderful people in California where I
lived for three and a half years with a quite stunning woman by
the name of Willow Van Den Hoek. She was beautiful inside and out,
and an amazing spoon player and singer. I wrote a song about her
called "Queen Of Spoons".
How did the Woodstock Mountain Review project come into
being?
Artie and Happy Traum put that together. Two of my very
good friends who have lived in Woodstock for as long as I have.
The first record we made was called "More Music From Mud
Acres" and they didn't really have a name for the band. Then
I wrote a song called "Woodstock Mountain" so they
decided to use the name Woodstock Mountain Review. The foundation
of the band was: The Traum brothers; Pat Alger who went on as a
soloist and wrote songs for Nanci Griffith, Garth Brooks and many
others; Jim Rooney who has produced records by Iris Dement and
John Prine; Bill Keith who is known for creating a bluegrass
banjo style all his own; and Roly Salley who has been with Chris
Isaac for the last fifteen years. Other artists that played on
different records and tours were Paul Butterfield, John Sebastian,
Maria Muldaur, Eric Anderson, Paul Siebel, Gordon Titcomb, Patty
Elam, Rory Block and Lee Berg.
It’s been quite a while since you last put out an
album and here you are with a bunch of songs recorded in Scotland.
Can you tell us a bit about some of the songs, for example,
“Roll On John”?
That came to the group [the Greenbriar Boys] through Ralph
Rinzler who was a bit of a musicologist connected to a lot of
fine folk life collectors in this country. "Roll On John"
was collected by Margo Mayo in the Nineteen Thirties and sung by
an unheard of fellow by the name of Rufus Crisp.
"Martha And Me"?
“Martha And Me” was actually originally called
“Lawdy Lawd” and was done by a group that did some
recording in the Thirties called The Alabama Sheiks. They only
recorded four sides which would be two 78 speed recordings, one
song on each side. Every song was top notch. I re-wrote "Lawdy
Lawd" to suit my style a little more, and called it "Martha
And Me". When it comes to giving the proper credit I figure
that if the family of the singer plus the singer himself is long
gone, then there is absolutely no way for me to get in touch with
anybody from the original artist's past. But if anybody knows the
whereabouts of the Alabama Sheiks' relatives please let me know.
As Pete Seeger said, “You wanna be a songwriter? You don’t
know how to do it? If you hear a song you like but don't remember
it then you can add to it or change it. You don’t remember
the words? Write your own. You figure that maybe you didn’t
have the melody quite right? Don’t worry about it. Just
finish the melody off in your own style and with your own words
and you might find you have your own song”. That was one of
many things that Pete Seeger passed on to my generation. Of
course he didn't mean steal it but a blurry memory or mistake or
two can lead to a whole new tune.
OK, one more song on the album. “Gone Home” ?
I first heard that by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and
actually have it in an old songbook by a fellow named Bill
Clifton who was a song collector and well known bluegrass singer
who put out this songbook way back in the mid Fifties. [reading
book] It says “Bill Clifton - Old Time Folk And Gospel - 150
songs”. There are all these pictures of The Carter Family
and this and that...But anyway, he did have this song called
“Gone Home” or “They Have Gone Home” and...just
bear with me here...This song is one of the songs, one of the
literally thousands of old great songs that may have been
forgotten. I don’t know if I’m the one that’s
going to resurrect it here; I haven’t been that up on the
music scene...Anyway, [reading] “They Have Gone Home”
was written by Bill Carlisle - now that’s interesting. I don’t
know if I ever told you this, Francis, but the Greenbriar Boys
played on the Grand Ol’ Opry way back in about 1960. The way
that worked was we were touring with Joan Baez at the time and we
were passing through Nashville and Lester Flatt & Earl
Scruggs couldn’t make it that night, ’cause they were
on tour. They needed a bluegrass band to fill their spot and it
so happened that Flatt & Scruggs knew who we were. And Joan
Baez’s manager, a guy by the name of Manny Greenhill, and
Flatt & Scrugg’s agent who was Earl Scruggs’s wife,
had a rapport going because they were trying to share some shows
with Flatt & Scruggs and Joan Baez. So we ended up playing on
the Grand Ol’ Opry. Anyway, to get back to what I was
originally going to say, I had gone to the Grand Ol’ Opry as
a spectator back in 1957 and there was a great singer by the name
of Bill Carlisle. Bill had this little shtick you might call it,
where he would run up to the microphone with his legs sort of
flailing in the air and stuff like that, and he had these very
unusual body moves down where he was sort of running around the
microphone and was having fun as he sang songs in a very unusual
voice. Comedy was quite big then in the Forties and Fifties when
a lot of the country music acts travelled with their own comedian
or else they did comedy routines. So, to see that he had done
this very moving gospel tune “Gone Home” makes me see
how varied some of these wonderful singers and performers were
back then.
As far as the music scene goes today, is there much that
excites you? Are there any artists you’ve come across that
fill you with enthusiasm?
Well I'm not up on the current music that much but yesterday I
heard a new record by Stacey Earle, Steve Earle's sister, that
was terrific.
You’re still performing, John, and giving it all you’ve
got. Do you still enjoy playing? Is music still as fulfilling as
ever?
Music will always be as fulfilling “as ever”.
There are, I guess, a lot of musicians that once the business
angle is done, in other words they’re not making records or
money anymore, etc., they might not make music much. But most of
the traditional folk music people that I know, including myself,
will always be playing only at home if need be, like we did when
we first started.
(Interview by Francis
Macdonald, March 2000 (C) Shoeshine Records)
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