f44 “I
n junior high school, I formed a girls’ doo-wop group and then when I got into high school, I hooked up with three Jewish girls from the Bronx and we formed a group called The Cashmeres. We would lie to our parents, tell them we were going to the library to do a book report and we had our Cashmere out- fits in our lockers – tight white sweaters and tight black skirts and we sewed a velvet ‘C’ on the front for Cashmere, and we would go to Tin Pan Alley, visit the Brill Building and just look on the directory by the elevator, start at the top and just go in and say ‘Hi, we’re the Cashmeres.’ When I think about it now, I can’t believe I had that nerve.”
“Around the time that the really cool R&B and rock ’n’ roll was getting co-opted and whitewashed, I lost interest and noticed that right in my own neighbourhood, the Village, there were all these great jazz clubs. I started sneaking out of the house with a friend of mine and go hear Horace Silver, or Cannonball Adderley or Gerry Mulligan… two dollars and we could sit and hear Thelo- nius Monk all night long in a little club that had ten other people in it, so I got very interested in that.”
“In senior year I got a job as a nanny looking after two little girls for a couple who would go out every night. I think God put me in that house because this couple had walls floor to ceiling full of records. They were great music fans… everything from all Bessie Smith’s original 78s, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and, I mean, everybody. I just couldn’t wait to put the kids to bed and then I’d start… ‘what’s this, what’s that?’ I’ll never forget coming across Bessie. I didn’t know who Bessie Smith was, but I saw Empty Bed Blues – I just went ‘that sounds interesting’. I’ll never forget putting that needle down on that scratchy 78 and hearing this incredibly soulful voice start singing that song. I just was transfixed and it was just a pivotal moment in which I said ‘that’s what I want to be when I grow up’.”
“Right around that time was the beginning of what they call the ‘folk revival’. Every Sunday in Washington Square Park was like a mini folk festival going on, you’d walk around one place and there’d be people playing old-time fiddle music, you’d walk anoth- er ten paces and someone would be playing a blues, go around and there’d be people singing social protest songs and so on, bluegrass, everything and I just loved it all. At the end of the street where I ended up living was a little sandal shop run by Alan Block, Rory Block’s father. I met her when I was 17 and she was 12. She was already playing guitar. Her dad played old-time fiddle. On Saturday afternoons he shut down the sandal making and had a little jam in there and a lot of the people like Mike Seeger, from the New Lost City Ramblers, and all kinds of great fiddlers and banjo players would all just crowd in there and start jamming away.”
“Shortly thereafter the Friends Of Old-time Music found Doc
Watson and brought him and his family up to do a concert and that’s when I first heard Doc’s father-in-law Gaither Carlton. Gaither had a really sweet and simple way of playing fiddle that I fell in love with and also I thought ‘I think I could almost do that’. So I approached him afterwards at a party that Alan Lomax was throwing and said ‘Oh, God I just wish you lived here, I’d love to learn to play fiddle’. Gaither Carlton said ‘Well, why don’t you come on down to North Carolina and I’ll teach you everything I know’. They were so hospitable and nice and so, subsequently, I went down … and that’s when I picked up the fiddle.”
“I was knocking around in the Village and all kinds of people, John Sebastian, David Grisman, John Hammond, Richie Havens… who were all experimenting, and sometimes you’d form a duo. I was singing bluegrass in the Park with David Grisman and a couple of other guys in another very short-lived group that sort of sponta- neously came together. We got hired for a month playing blue- grass at a restaurant way at the end of Long Island owned by some Mafioso-type guys who’d noticed business was down and they’d heard folk music was the big thing.”
“So, I get back and I go to the Park on Sunday and I say
‘What’s going on?’ and they said ‘We’re going to be in a jug band and we’re going to make a record’. Veteran blues singer Victoria Spivey, whom I had seen around, was one of the first artists savvy enough to have her own label and so, apparently, she’d seen the Even Dozen guys just knocking around experi- menting with jug band music and she said ‘I’ll sign you guys to my label’. They were all excited, but she had said ‘Now, you boys, you know you all sound good, but you need some sex appeal up there’ so this is what they told me, they said ‘She said we need sex appeal and suggested that we ask you to join the band’. Apparently, she said, ‘Why don’t you get that little gal with the pigtails I’ve seen playing the fiddle, now, if you get her in your band, you’ll have something.’ It was before Women’s Lib, I didn’t feel insulted to be asked to join for my sex appeal, so I said ‘Sure, it sounds like fun. What’s a jug band?’”
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