Ned Treanor is a folk historian, with more memories than you’d expect from someone who was part of the Woodstock generation. Maybe the haze only filtered out the boring events.
I continue to share his enlightening and funny emails to me in what has become a monthly series.


You want credentials? Shawn Colvin used to baby-sit his kids. Take it away, Ned

Fran-
In reading your current blog, I experienced a wave of unrelated and random “flashbacks” that again brought back memories of what a force for all kinds of emotion is this thing that Pete Seeger refers to as ‘homemade music.”

My 46-yr.old son’s favorite artist is Boz Scaggs. My 23-yr. old daughter’s is a mixed bag of everyone from David Roth to Tom Paxton to Harry Chapin to infinity. The common thread here is the power of a lyric… a melody… a particular performance… to bring emotions out into the open for a variety of reasons and results.

With 50 years of such moments to draw from, several stand alone in their particular impact value. Possibly the most memorable for me was the night of the near meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, now 30 years ago, where I had spent the day virtually next-door to the near-disaster. But on the way back home to NYC, I stopped in at a favorite “haunt” of mine in Philly, the Main Point, where Josh White Jr. was the Act-du-Jour.

“Donnie” (a.k.a. Josh) and I had been friends for years, and after my day at TMI, I needed a major change of environment before the 100-mile drive home. Josh and his sisters, who had voices that could charm the birds from the trees, but wouldn’t sing for money… only in church… performed one of those shows that you wish you’d been able to record, because it just built to a point where it just couldn’t have gotten any better… UNTIL… Josh walked to the rear corner of the dark cavernous room; and after a bit of obvious coaxing, brought a member of the audience up on stage to join the festivities.

This “mystery man” began harmonizing with the family-White and gradually assumed more of a “lead” role, until 1-by-1, the “stranger” was alone on stage. By then, he’d been recognized by a few scattered members of the audience.

BOB GIBSON, who had not performed in public in years due to substance-abuse problems, was BACK! Song by song, he regained the personnae that had distinguished him as one of “Folk-dom’s Giants”; and when he tried to return the stage to the White clan, the audience went wild!

So Josh and his sisters seamlessly joined Gibson on stage to perform several of Bob’s “classics,” adding and subtracting members from the impromptu ensemble, as determined by the particular material being performed. It was well after midnight when the audience finally allowed the festivities to wind down to a level whereby the performers could finally bid their “farewells.” Suffice it to say that they all got their money’s worth… and then some!

This is the same kind of spontaneous “magic” that I have personally witnessed at a number of “house concerts,” where an audience of “strangers” becomes “one” during a performance; and become “regulars”, with friendships developing beyond the “audience member” level.

Such is the power of this music and its performers.