Stephanie Nilles closes out her week at TVD with one of the finest—and perhaps most important—pieces we’ve ever posted. Finish it to the end, OK?
What Happened To Folk Music in New York, New York?
It moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn.
In August of 2008, I abandoned New York City to live in my brother’s car. At the time, I wanted to tour all of the time, but the truth of the matter was that I was inexplicably restless and could no longer afford to rent a bedroom in my apartment on W. 148th and Broadway.
Just last week, I relayed this classic American sob story to a grad student from Boston who handed me a shot of whiskey during my set break in New Orleans, the extraordinary hub I now call home. He then proceeded to employ a series of tactics dubiously derived from a certain 2005 best-seller by Neil Strauss.
“How could you leave New York?” he mused. “New York is the cultural center of the world.”
“No, it’s not” I replied.
“Where do you think you can find better culture, then? You’re going to say Paris, aren’t you.”
For decades, New Yorkers and, curiously, people who have never set foot in the greater metropolitan area, have laid claim to New York as the mecca for creative innovation and endless inspiration.
“Other cities have one museum. We have two operas, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center,” says Mitchell Moss, an urban-policy professor at New York University via New York Times Magazine. “Unlike Los Angeles, which is intrinsically a culturally deprived area, we’ve had a competitive cultural life.” The magazine’s author continues, “New York isn’t just a center of finance. It’s home to industries like architecture and design, art and publishing, media and advertising, the businesses that attract what urban theorist Richard Florida calls the “creative classes”— hip, imaginative go-getters whom many cities regard as crucial to future growth.”
But it isn’t the 20-something ad agency producers, Ralph Lauren fashion designers, and entry-level architect associates that fuel the culture of a society. Theirs are the voices that funnel creativity from its epicenter and into the mainstream marketplace. The ideas themselves stem from a place much lower and much less glamorous on the food chain.
It’s no secret that the gap between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor is greater than it’s ever been, never more so than in New York City, where the Consumer Price Index has been growing at a 30% greater clip than that of the national rate. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, in 2007, New York was the most unequal state in the nation, the wealthiest 20% earning more than 8 times the bottom 20%. In 2000, only 1% of NYC filers paid enough city taxes ($2.338 billion) to support the wages of 50,000 government employees. This same 1% generated the wages of approximately 153,000 NYC-area service jobs.
But while a vast majority of the city’s wealth is sewn up in financial services, media technology, and high fashion—curiously three industries in which no tangible goods or independent services are provided—58% of New Yorkers have less than $5,000 of net worth; only 31% of people in the rest of the nation are in this category.
This isn’t to say some revolutionary artistic stalwarts, traditionally and often times purposefully poor, haven’t remained in the outer boroughs. They have. But they are becoming fewer and farther between.
By late 2009, a year and a half into describing myself as “automobile-based,” I had befriended a wonderful folk singer and promoter in Buffalo, NY named Michael Meldrum. I met him at a bar in Allentown, where I played his open mic night and asked if he knew of a good spot to park my car and sleep undisturbed. He offered his couch as a warmer alternative, long as I didn’t steal his wife’s silverware. The Meldrum house quickly became a regular stop in my routing and its inhabitants a beloved part of my extended family. When the weather was nice (in Buffalo that’s one month out of the year), I would sit on the front porch, eat strawberries, and sing songs with the Meldrums and a rotating cast of musicians, some local, some travelers from far and wide. In the winter we’d migrate inside, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer and passing around guitars, autoharps, and melodicas.
After a gig one unusually cold and dead December night, Michael and I came back to the house in the wee hours of the morning and sat in his basement so we wouldn’t wake up Diane and the kids, huddled among the cobwebs and his collection of vintage Schwinn bicycles and rotary telephones, drinking red wine out of mason jars and smoking a joint. He told me stories about the great history of folk music in the artistic port of New York City, stories about squatting houses in Alphabet City in the 60′s and reciting Ezra Pound with Bob Dylan. What my generation has grown up to believe to be a folksy sound indigenous specifically to Bob Dylan was not his sound at all. It was the sound of Greenwich Village, which a young and impressionable Dylan had emulated and then ingeniously absorbed, like many talented musicians before and after him.
Since that December night, it has since struck me as odd that an island which once nurtured, beat the shit out of, and churned out hundreds of artists, beatniks, and intellectuals, has since been passed down to a demographic lured there by the idyllic syndicated storyline of shows like Friends.
New York folk music, as in the folk music that spawned Dylan and his contemporaries, no longer exists in the West Village. Nor is it in the East Village, or on the Lower East Side. The words of the songs themselves provide the most valuable hint. The music has migrated toward the water.
Take the F train to Carol Street. Walk toward the river for 25 minutes, past the white church with the bright green bell tower shutters, and over the BQE. Turn left onto Columbia Street. At the end of the block, you will find a red neon sign flickering “Bar.” Below you will see a tiny instrument repair shop and a hand-painted sign reading, “Jalopy Theater and School of Music.” The owners of the place, Geoff and Lynette (pictured – photo by Gersh Kuntzman), will be manning the old espresso machine and the beer on tap, and beyond the hallway will be rows of wooden church pews that dead end at a stage adorned in large-bulb Christmas lights and red curtains.
On that stage is the remaining folk music of New York City. Feral Foster, John Houx, Christopher “Isto” White, Jessy Carolina and the Hot Mess, Frank Hoier, Boom Chick, Willy Gantrim, Ernie Vega, Hubby Jenkins, Blind Boy Paxton, and countless others. Some of the performers are simply recreating the music of the 1890s-1930s, playing the canon exactly as it would have been played when it was written. But some of them are honest-to-God heirs to the legacies of folk, roots, blues, and jazz. They sing songs about sitting by the river singing songs that have no words; New Orleans the newfound city of Venice; falling asleep on freight trains; sticking it to Ann Coulter.
In classic form, they might very well spend most of their lives doing exactly what they’re doing that night, living gig to gig, working odd jobs on the side, turning their observations about the cogs of the American machine into new stories and new songs. If their work is appreciated far and wide, it’s very likely it will only fully be appreciated posthumously. But that isn’t a new phenomenon. That’s that way it is. That’s the way it will always be. And thank all the gods for that.
