Cult heroes: Dylan's a big fan, so why isn't Tom Paley a folk celebrity?
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Version 0 of 1. Tom Paley is one of the great survivors of the early American folk scene. He sang and played with Woody Guthrie, and was a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. He was an influence on the young Bob Dylan, who praised the Ramblers in his memoir Chronicles. And he gave lessons to Ry Cooder and Jerry Garcia. He turned 87 in March and has been living modestly in the same little flat in north London for more than 40 years. He is still a fine singer and impressive multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, banjo, fiddle and autoharp, but he doesn’t have the status he deserves, despite a revival of interest in his music over the past couple of years. Talking to Paley is like getting a personal history of the early American folk revival, with added jokes. As a maths student (he became a maths teacher as well as a musician), he learned guitar and banjo, and began to get noticed on the New York folk scene. He knew Pete Seeger and Leadbelly, and played at impromptu folk sessions in Washington Square, where he impressed Dave Van Ronk, the inspiration for the film Inside Llewyn Davis. Then there was Woody Guthrie, whom he first met after one of his friends had dared to knock on Guthrie’s door at his house on Mermaid Avenue. Guthrie invited him in, and they got on well. Later the friend took Paley along, and Guthrie was impressed by his playing. He asked Paley to “do some bookings with me”, and they played together at schools and union halls, and at a memorial concert for Leadbelly at New York town hall in 1950. Paley described Guthrie as “easy-going but not terribly responsible is some ways. Politically he was responsible; he would stick with his political views. But sometimes we had a job and there was no sign of Woody, and I’d ring Marjorie [his wife] and she’d say, ‘I don’t know. He went out on Tuesday to get some cigarettes, and might be back next week …’” Paley recorded his first album for Elektra in 1953, and towards the end of the decade he joined Mike Seeger and John Cohen in the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most successful and influential bands of the US folk revival, with an eclectic repertoire of “old-time music”, some of which would later be popularised by Ry Cooder. After leaving the Ramblers, Paley visited Sweden in 1963, and decided not to return to the US, where he would have been drafted to serve in Vietnam. Then he moved to England, where he recorded with his fiddler son Ben, the New Deal String Band and Peggy Seeger, and played on the folk circuit. But his legendary history seemed to have been forgotten, until artist and music fan Ski Williams saw him playing at the Tuesday-night sessions at Cecil Sharp House in London, the home of the English Folk Song and Dance Society. “He consistently blew me away,” Williams said, “and the more research I did, the more important I realised he was. But he was doing maybe two songs a night, and maybe falling asleep, and people were not really appreciating him, and I thought, ‘This is wrong, this guy should be immense.’” Williams started a record label, Hornbeam, along with a few like-minded friends, and Paley was their first signing. Given his age, the recording was deliberately slow, with sessions taking place over a year in the house of producer and percussionist Dave Morgan. On the day I visited, Paley sat around eating and chatting with the young band that Williams had helped assemble, before producing an impressive version of The Midnight Special. The resulting album, Roll On, Roll On, was released in 2012, and helped to boost Paley’s career. He went on tour with his new band (which included his son Ben on fiddle), and by now he was on impressive form. Back in the studio, he recorded eight tracks in one day, and these will form the backbone of his next album, Paley and Son, which features solo fiddle work from Ben, and a duet between Tom and Cerys Matthews. It’s due for release this year. Not bad going for a musician in his late 80s. So can he switch from cult hero to a folk celebrity? I hope so. |