Jim Hockenhull, phone interview
5 March 2010
Jim Hockenhull: JH
Annie Paprocki: AP
AP: This is Annie Paprocki. I’m interviewing Jim Hockenhull via telephone. It’s March 5th,
2010. This is part of a project for the Campus Folksong Club history at the University of IllinoisUrbana-Champaign. And my first question to you Jim is: How did you become interested in
traditional music?
JH: Yeah I gave that a lot of thought, Annie. I grew up with music. Not that my family were
musicians but there was always music in the house. My dad did play fiddle. He was born in the
19th century in a small town in central Kansas. He had a--I’ve inherited his old tune book, which
unfortunately the covers are missing, so I don’t know when it was published or even what the
name of it was. But I assumed it was published at the turn of the 20th century. And, as an aside it
has a little bit on the front about how to play the fiddle. And there’s one quote that says, “The
bow should be drawn in an energetic and determined manner.” And I always say that’s become
one of my principals of music through my life. But we had ukuleles around the house. And I
think there was an old guitar. And my sister and I would sing together. Um, there was, actually
there was a lot of traditional music in the grade school music programs. Stephen Foster songs.
And some songs I remember and can even still sing parts of. There was one wonderful one called
“Out Among the Red Men”. And there were a lot of, sort of, politically incorrect negro songs,
like “Walking To Deep Harbor.”
AP: Where was, where was this? Where was grade school for you?
JH: This was--I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Of course it was a very small
town then and there was a lot of empty space between it and Chicago. And I was born in 1939,
so I’m talking sort of about the 40’s here. And you know, the songs that everybody knew, “Red
River Valley”, things like that. And there were also camp songs and rounds. We, my friends and
I, loved to sing rounds like “Are You Sleeping Brother John?”, “High Ho Nobody Home”, those
kinds of things. And singing was really something that kids did when they felt like it.
There were quite a bit of what I’d call pseudo traditional pop songs on the radio after World War
II, and during World War II. There was a guy named Frankie Laine, L-a-i-n-e, who would sing
these kind of minor key songs about “my heart knows what the wild goose knows and I must go
where the wild goose goes,” um, stuff like that. “Cowboy songs”, quote unquote. Gene Audrey
and the Sons of the Pioneers. I think the first record I ever bought was Cool Water by the Sons of
Pioneers. And I still sing that once in a while. “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by Vaughn Monroe was
another. So there was all this kind of stuff that sort of smacked of traditional music.
And of course there were the people like Earl Ives that sang kind of nice versions of some
traditional stuff. The Weavers, the lead singer of this group had a surprising hit record in 1952 of
“Wimoweh”. My sister, who was older than me, bought that record. We listened to it a lot. That
was, uh, I’ve checked things out on the internet. That was number six, you know on the charts in
1952. And it’s, the flip side was a song called “Old Paint” which was a version of “Riding with
Old Paint” which was very pretty and I still sing that a lot.
And then, 1954, when I was in high school. Harry Belafonte started coming out with records.
And he was known for doing sort of calypso songs. And he came, his first record was called
Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites, I think that was the name. Now I mention that because he
did a version, a melodramatic version, of “John Henry” on that record, that I just loved
[emphasis]. And I started taking guitar lessons in high school. But I was studying with a guy who
played, you know, small combo, sort of light jazz. And he taught me musical theory, which I
learned. I was a good student. But I really wanted to play three-cord cowboy music. So when I
stopped taking lessons I forgot all the musical theory. I learned the one four five progression.
And our high school had a, every year, had a big talent show, a very lavish production. I got to
hand it to the poor music teacher who was in charge of it. And so in 1957, my senior year, I
made my debut in front of the microphone doing a cover of Harry Belafonte’s version of “John
Henry”, accompanying myself on guitar. And yeah, it was very successful and I had the first
taste of an audience eating out of my hand. And I loved it. Just loved it. [laughing] So I think that
sort of set the course of my life.
And then when I went to college, which we talk about in a little, soon. There were college
drinking songs and dirty songs. And those were, those were passed through the oral tradition.
There, there weren’t any books. You couldn’t go out and buy a book of dirty songs. And you
didn’t go on the internet to check out the words. So they were just passed down. And so I was
kind of primed for, for what I found in the University of Illinois.
AP: Well that’s a--that’s a good transition into my next question.
JH: Doesn’t that? You’d almost think I’d written it down.
AP: So how did you end up at the University of Illinois from Wheaton?
JH: Well it was a state school, so it was, you know, very affordable education. And I set off from
high school intending to be an engineer. I didn’t have any idea what an engineer was. But I was
kind of a smart kid and that’s what you were supposed to do. And it was close to home, which
was nice. I think I’m safe in saying that the student population at the U of I was much bigger
than my home town, so it was quite an adventure. And at the time, 1957, I think Illinois had
more fraternities than any other college or university in the country. And I went down and went
through rush, and pledged a fraternity. Um, again that’s sort of what you were supposed to do. I
joined a house that had some interesting guys and I could tell just through the process of looking
at fraternities that these guys were unusual. Unfortunately it turned out they were all seniors and
they graduated next year, and there I was, with a lot of downstate farm boys.
AP: So 1957 was your freshman year?
JH: Yeah.
AP: Okay.
JH: I think, speaking for the fraternity, it sort of forced a social life on me. I think it would have
been real easy to just disappear into one of those huge men’s dormitories, and to never come out
except to go to class. So it wasn’t all bad. And in fact, one of these guys who was a senior when I
was a freshman, introduced me to the singing of Ewan MacColl, the Scottish, a singer of Scottish
songs. He and a man named A. L. Loyd had put out a, like a six record series of child ballads.
Traditional ballads. And I had never ever heard anything like that. And I was just, the first, the
first song I heard was “Lord Ramble”, Ewan MacColl singing it, and it just, it was uncanny. Still
kinda gives me goose bumps to think about it. So, I liked that very much and wanted to learn
more about traditional ballads.
AP: So then how did you become part of the Campus Folksong Club?
JH: Well, as I try to work out this chronology of things. The Campus Folksong Club I believe
started in 1961.
AP: Around there. Yeah, I think that sounds right.
JH: Yeah. So, somewhere early on in my college career. And this is the funny thing about
memory. I recall events, but sometimes I don’t quite see how they fit with one another in a time
frame. But pretty early on, I started singing on Saturday afternoons at the Turk’s Head Coffee
House, which was run by a man named Steve Simon.
AP: Huh. What street was that on? Was that Campus Town?
JH: It was on Green Street, in Campus Town. Let’s see, there’s Wright, Wright Street and then to
the west is, what’s the next street? Sixth, Sixth Street.
AP: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Well it was in the block between Sixth Street and Fifth Street on the south side of
Green. And I have, it’s surprising, but I haven’t, I’ve skimmed a lot of the interviews on the web
site and I haven’t seen anyone mention Steve Simon or the Turk’s Head Coffee House. He later
expanded and moved it across the street, but still right there in Campus Town. And I can’t
imagine having the temerity to go ask this guy if I could if, if I could play, but I must have.
Cause I think I went down there every week. Played for an hour. I think I got five dollars for
doing that. But, you know, a coffee house in those days was not like going to Starbucks. They
were where the beatniks hung out. So, so the Turk’s Head was a sort of focus of bohemian life
on campus. I remember he had a little bitty portable phonograph. And he seemed to play the
same Weavers record over the years. But somehow that, my presence there, you know singing
pretty much anything I had in my repertoire, which was mostly pretty corny stuff I think. I began
to meet a lot of people who were interested in music. And some of those names that popped up in
other interviews, Noretta Koerpge, which was spelled K-o-e-r-p-g-e. Uh, Harry Babad, who gets
mentioned in a lot of interviews and his name gets misspelled.
AP: Oh no.
JH: It’s spelled every way but correctly. It was B-A-B-A-D. They were, Babad was a real focal
point of the folk scene. Um, a girl named Gail Wood. There were two young, young ladies, Fran
Sears and Jennifer Moberly, who sang in close harmony, and they were just like listening to the
angels. And I picked up a few songs from them that I still sing. In fact, I sang one the day before
yesterday at my monthly old folk’s home gig. A song called “Little Birdy.”
AP: Did they sing at the Turk’s Head too?
JH: No but, but as I recall, we all kind of met in that environment. Once in a while Steve would
sort of turn it open to a hootenanny. A bunch of people would come in and play. Where we
actually met I can’t really remember. Some people have talked about church basements and
things like that. So I suppose that was, was how we, how we got together.
Um, I’m trying to think of other names. Oh Bill Becker. And he pops up in my story a little bit
later. But a lot of others. Um, well, eventually through the Turk’s Head I met a man named Bil
Godsey. And Bil is spelled with one L. Don’t ask me why. And he was, he was a weird
character. He was older than the students. I don’t know what he did. He was, I think he was
connected with the university in some way. And he kind of opened his house and his life up to
me, another focal point of the sort of bohemian beatnik scene. He had parties every weekend.
And, you know, everybody came and got real drunk and sang. Um, strange times.
And then one time at the singing at the Turk’s Head I met Archie Green, who was passing out
wobbly song books. Which struck me as odd because I was a pretty innocent lad from the
suburbs. Um there were, there were concerts I remember, long before the Campus Folksong
Club. And I have no idea who sponsored them. I seem to recall them being held at the YMCA
there on Wright Street. Richard Dire Bennett, who was an English singer, of kind of old English
ballads. I think he played the lute, which really excited me. I was pretty romantic.
Odetta. The late Odetta. Wonderful, wonderful singer! She was a big influence on me after I,
after I went to her concert. I covered a lot of her songs. And I still sing one or two of them. Um,
must have been after the folk song club got rolling that Ewan MacColl himself and Peggy
Seeger, his wife, came. Uh Jimmy Driftwood came. And uh the New Lost City Ramblers, who
figured very large in my life. They gave, they gave a concert. But I’m sure of those last three—
MacColl, Driftwood, and the New Lost City Ramblers—were probably brought in by the
Folksong Club. I’m guessing. So that’s kind of, that was sort of the pre-Folksong Club folk scene
that I remember. It was very tied up with bohemianism, and leftist politics, kind of
internationalism. The kind of music that we played was more of what groups like The Weavers
would play.
AP: So what kind of role do you think then that the Campus Folksong Club played at the U of I
more broadly? Was it part of those politics or bringing like-minded people together?
JH: Well uh it, and again it’s kind of funny. I certainly remember the wonderful concerts, you
know, the concerts of local people that the folk song club had. I don’t remember too much about
the actual organization of it or anything like that. I, I took part as a performer. I’m sure because a
lot of the personnel were the same, that the tendency to progressive politics or even leftist
politics, and bohemianism, went along with the club. But, and you have a question later on about
the influence of the club. But I think what they did was give a more presentable, accessible
venue for traditional music. So a lot of people who wouldn’t come to the basement of the
Unitarian church to hear a couple of beatniks sing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”, would come
to one of the auditoriums on campus and hear, you know, string band music and calypso and
stuff like that. It was more respectable. I think.
AP: Well, can you tell me about the Philo Glee and the Mandolin Society?
JH: Right. Well that was, consisted of me and Paul Atkins and Doyle Moore. Uh, Paul was a, I
changed my major from engineering to art after one semester. I probably didn’t have any more
idea what art was then I did what engineering was. But--hey-- it sounded like more fun. And
Paul was a fellow art student. We took a lot of classes together. We, in fact there were some
semesters where we had identical class schedules. So we became friends and it turned out he was
interested in music. He had a guitar like everybody. But he also owned a five string banjo, the
first one I’d ever seen. And he had a mandolin too. And we used to sit around listening to folk
music samplers. There are a number of record companies that would put out these samplers of
folk music that would usually have some European stuff and some uh old English stuff. But
occasionally some sort of white boy traditional thing, like banjo. So we’d listen to these records
and read Pete Seeger’s book “How to Play the Five String Banjo,” and try to figure out how the
heck you played one of these things.
AP: So you were self taught on the banjo?
JH: Yeah, um we both were. I remember distinctly the kind of a-ha moment when after months
and months of messing around we both sort of got some inkling of how you made these sounds
on the thing. And I went down to a hock shop in Champaign and found a five string for fifteen
dollars. You could do that in those days. So we both slugged away at that. And so we started
playing “folk music”, quote unquote, with other friends. And we’d go down to, I don’t know if
Prenn’s Beer Hall is still there on the east side of campus. But it was a kind of a neat place. It had
a balcony inside. We’d go up on that balcony on Friday nights and play and sing, and people
would buy us beer and we had a wonderful time.
Doyle was on the faculty, of course, and he came--according to him--he came in 1959, and that
sounds right. And Paul and I, being art students, both took a design course from Doyle. And he
was very, very upbeat, a very exciting person. Really a neat teacher. And he kind of befriended
us. He had an apartment out in Philo, which was just a tiny, tiny town. And in that apartment he
had a big Washington, flat bed press, printing press. And a collection, cases and cases of
Victorian type. He had been going around to little type shops as they went out of business and
buying up their supplies. So he had Paul and me out there and let us play with the press and play
with printing. It was just wonderful fun, great experience. And while we were messing around he
would play records. And the one, the records I remember the most were songs by John Jacob
Niles, N-i-l-e-s, who was a musical character who did traditional music and his own takes on
traditional music. I think he was a trained musician. But he had built a multi-string dulcimer out
of an old cello body, and he played, he’d strum on that, and he had this very high almost countertenor voice. And he’d sing these wonderful ballads. It was really eerie, eerie stuff. And we all
just fell in love with it. And so the three of us tried to build our own dulcimers. Which was a
total failure. I mean I was making mine out of plywood. So it didn’t work. But anyway, we
whacked away at those things and really began discovering real traditional music together, the
three of us.
I’d bought a ten-inch LP record of Pete Seeger playing the banjo and singing, in my effort to
learn more about banjo playing. And I mentioned this one time to Bill Becker, who was one of
the people in the folk scene. I said something like, boy that Pete Seeger can sure play the banjo.
And he said, “Have you ever heard the New Lost City Ramblers?” I said, “No.” So he took me to
his apartment and played me one of their records, and I believe they were a very new group at
the time. I don’t think they’d been together too long. That was Mike Seeger, and Tom Paley and
John Cohen. And I, I listened to it, I said, I literally said, “Is that folk music too?” “Yeah.” I
thought that was hillbilly music, because the Ramblers were representing old string band music,
mostly from the southeast. And it was just, it was uncanny. It was so exciting. And of course
Mike. All, those three guys were multi instrumental and multi talented, but mostly Mike Seeger
played the fiddle. And I heard that and I just, I had to do that. I had to figure out how to do that.
AP: So at this point you didn’t know how to play the fiddle?
JH: Oh god no. No, I don’t think I had ever even held my father’s fiddle. But I had a girlfriend at
the time who found a fiddle in the attic of her apartment, and I looked inside the sound hole. And
it said it was a genuine Stradivarius made in Pomona, Italy. Of course, there’s, you know,
hundreds of thousands of violins that have Stradivarius labels inside. And I used, I had no idea
what to do, so I used Paul’s mandolin to learn the fingering, because they tuned the same. And
all I’d ever played before was guitar. Um, and that was a long, long uphill battle. Boy, I
remember, this was before the Campus Folksong Club. Because I was still playing at the Turk’s
Head, and I periodically would say, “You know, I think I’ll take my fiddle down to the Turk’s
Head today.” And my roommate, or my other friends, musical friends, would say, “Um, maybe
not today. Maybe next week you should take it.” I feel sorry for everyone who was around me at
the time. Terrible. It’s the easiest instrument to make bad sounds on. But I was really determined.
Um anyway, as Paul and Doyle and I began experiencing all of this type of music together, we
started playing it together. And eventually called ourselves the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society.
Philo because that’s where Doyle lived, and I had been going through old Illini yearbooks, which
my fraternity had this library full of them, way back when. And back in the, I suppose the 1910’s
or 20’s there was an organization on campus called the Glee and Mandolin Society. So we just, I
got such a kick out of that name. And we adopted that.
And at the beginning, we mostly did covers of songs that the New Lost City Ramblers were
doing. I’m kind of embarrassed about that. But on the other hand the New Lost City Ramblers
were covering traditional material and you know, later on I began hearing the actual tunes, the
actual recordings that the Ramblers based their music on. And often they copied them note for
note. And I think they got some, some static from folklorists, you know, oh they’re just
preserving the music. Preserved in amber, I remember that phrase. But they were exposing
people to the music, because the source material wasn’t available in those days. It was in the
form of reel to reel tape in the hands of collectors. So I don’t fault the Ramblers at all for
copying it pretty literally.
And when the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society got going, we were sort of carrying the ball and
exposing more local people to that kind of music. People would really, wouldn’t have heard it
otherwise I think. And besides, the main point was it was just a lot of fun to play, a lot of fun to
play. Can I just keep rambling?
AP: If you’d like. Whatever you want to say.
JH: Okay. In, I think it was the fall of 1961, Doyle and Paul and I, along with some other friends,
rented a store front on Wright Street, just north of University. It was across Wright Street from
the Marty K Drive-In. I’m sure that all that stuff’s long gone. And we called it Das Chicken
Haus, spelled H-a-u-s, because we were so antithetical to the Bauhaus movement, you know the
less is more. We were into more is more.
But anyway. We each had a little studio space. And Doyle set up his printing press. And he
devoted one of the upstairs room to this enormous wooden loom that he bought somewhere. It
filled the entire room. And I think the only thing he ever wove on it was a little strip about the
size of a guitar strap. But I do remember that when the New Lost City Ramblers did come to
campus for a concert, he took them up, took them to our place and showed them the loom.
Because they had been doing a song called “The Weave Room Blues”, which was all about the
hard times working in the weave room. So he showed them the parts of the loom and the parts of
the weaving process they were singing about. They didn’t really know. I also remember he took
Jimmy Driftwood up to show him that loom.
And by that time of course we were the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society. But, as I try to figure
out the chronology, I keep thinking can it be that the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society only
existed for about a year, maybe a year and a half. It’s uncanny. It was such an important part of
my life. But I think time proceeds a little differently when you’re young. A month is forever. I
seem to recall that when our record finally came out, that we were all slightly disappointed in it
because we had progressed so much from the time we made the recording to the time the record
came out.
The remarkable thing to me, and I think Doyle talks about it in his interview, is that we played so
easily together. We worked so easily together. I think it’s because we really came into it
together, we learned the same stuff together at about the same pace. And so it, playing in the
band was just easy and fun. We didn’t labor over stuff.
AP: How did, how did the record come together then?
JH: Well, there’s, there’s the important part of the Campus Folksong Club to me. Um, someone,
and I suppose it was Archie Green, decided it was worth financing the pressing of an actual vinyl
LP. And I’m sorry I don’t remember more details about it. But of course my focus was on the
music. But we spent one or two days in a guy’s house in Champaign-Urbana somewhere; he had
a decent tape recorder and we just laid down the tracks.
AP: One take?
JH: Well, I’d like to say so. I don’t remember. I doubt it. But it certainly wasn’t this, “Okay we’ll
go into the studio now and sit with headphones and replace that sour note that you hit.” You
know, like they do now. It was pretty straight forward, single microphone stuff. And we were of
course very excited. Thrilled. Delighted to do it.
I have a tale to tell, that, I got a call, oh gosh, five, maybe five years ago, from a woman who I
had known as the small, small daughter, almost baby daughter, of a guy in Iowa City who had
been a friend of Doyle’s. Doyle went to school there, and I went to school there. I went to
graduate school there. So I knew this guy too. And his daughter, who is now a middle-aged
woman, said, “My sister and I grew up hearing the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society record. It
was always on the turn table, we literally played the grooves off of it.” She said, “I just recently
found a new one on eBay. And she said, I knew from then on I was going to be a fiddle player.”
AP: Wow.
JH: And she is. She sent me a CD she’d done, and she’s just uncanny. She’s got the voice of an
Appalachian woman. Her name was Meghan Murker. And the first time I went to the National
Fiddle Convention in Weiser, Idaho, was after her phone call. And I was hanging around with a
bunch of people and there was this really good fiddler jamming with people. I just kept, I’d walk
around and I kept coming back to his music, he was so hot. So finally I asked somebody, “Who’s
that.” They said “That’s Ron Kane.” Like you idiot, don’t you know that. Here I’ll introduce you
when he takes a break. So he came up, and this person said “Ron, this is Jim Hockenhull.” And
he said, “Oh. Then you know Meghan Murker.” And I said “Yeah.” “Then I’m her husband.” I
thought, god what, it’s all one piece somehow. Just because she listened to that Campus
Folksong Club record all her young life. Quite an experience.
AP: That’s amazing.
JH: Yeah. And another story to tell I guess while we’re in that mode. Again at the National
Fiddle Contest. I think it was the second time I was there. Besides the regular contest they had
this little evening talent show, open-ended show that was for all the people from various states
who had won their state contest. They were eligible to take part in this kind of light-hearted
evening. And there were probably prizes for the best costume, or the best male entertainer and
things like that. But I’d heard that one of the judges was a woman from the University of Illinois.
I wish I could remember her name. But is there a department of folklore or ethnomusicology
there now?
AP: There is a strong ethnomusicology program in the school of music.
JH: Maybe that’s who she was connected with. Um, but when I heard that I said, I got to meet
this woman. So I went up and introduced myself, and asked her if she knew Archie Green, and
she said, “Oh no, but, but you know he was the grandfather of our profession.” And then I
explained who I was and what I’d done and the record and the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society.
She said, “Oh you mean you were there for the Campus Folksong Club?” “Yeah.” She said, “We
studied about that in school.”
AP: Wow.
JH: And I mean she was not a girl, she’s a middle-aged woman. And I, suddenly I felt like a
sealacamp or a dinosaur or something. Oh my god. How did this happen? But eh, anyway. I
don’t know if that clears up some of the questions about what the Folksong Club means to me.
AP: Does that kind of feed into what kind of role the Club played at the U of I?
JH: Yeah, like I say I think it leant some kind of academic respect to what had been this sort of
beatnik, basement of the church activity. But as these wonderful, I don’t remember if the
concerts were every week or once a month, but they were fairly frequent and well attended. And
as we got going, musicians started sort of coming out of the woodwork. I remember there were a
bunch of guys from Jamaica. I think they were on the track team. And they, you know, they
started coming and they decided they’d start a calypso band. And so they were, you know,
always a welcome treat. Then some non-University people started coming. There was a group
called Red Cravens and the Bray Brothers, who were this out and out sort of early bluegrass
band.
AP: Were they from Illinois?
JH: Well, they were in Illinois at least. And, you know, I began to realize that boy by the time
you get to the southern tip of Illinois you’re pretty far south, and you’re pretty much into that
tradition. There was a couple named Lloyd and Cathy Reynolds who sang gospel music. And
they were from down there in the southern part of the state somewhere. And actually the Philo
Glee and Mandolin Society took up with them and played some gigs with them. Lloyd had been
a fiddler before he was saved and once I remember he took my fiddle and played some tunes on
it. He was very good but boy his wife did not approve. That was, you know, that was the devil’s
music. They were beyond that.
And then Lyle Mayfield, who pops up on the website. I don’t recall him very well but I think he
was a local guy, an Illinois guy. And then of course the club put out The Green Fields of Illinois,
their second record, with some of the people who I don’t think they would have discovered if it
hadn’t been for the Folksong Club. And the club gave, certainly gave our group a lot of
exposure. And so we did some local TV and radio shows, and that gave us even more exposure
to non-University people. And then of course we cut the record.
AP: Well my next question is, did the political climate of the 1960’s affect the club and the way
its members perceived itself, or themselves?
JH: That’s one I have kind of trouble answering. Like I said earlier, I think a lot of the, the sort of
uh bohemianism and internationalism and leftist politics that had existed in the folk scene before
came over to the club. And you know, Archie Green was not exactly a right winger. He was
pretty far over there. So yeah, except that I think there was more room for other viewpoints. And
I repeat, I was a naïve kid from the suburbs, and while I aspired to be a beatnik, I don’t think I
knew what that really meant. I liked the music, and that sort of transcended whatever else I felt
about the scene. Paul Atkins was from Metropolis, Illinois, which is down, we used to say, “It’s
right across the river from Paduka.” You know, pretty far south. And Doyle was a flamboyant
kind of character, a very upbeat, certainly a very liberal character. But none of us were what
you’d really call political activists. We liked music. I think—and I don’t think it’s my ego
talking—I think the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society were very popular, and well liked, and I
think we were kind of in the center of a lot of weird stuff that was going on on campus. I think
we were probably in the center of a pretty active drug scene. But we didn’t know it. But I think
the campus police had us under pretty tight scrutiny. I remember a classmate saying that she was
sitting in the Marty K Drive-In one night, and saw the campus police enter our storefront when
nobody was home. Look around in there.
AP: Oh my.
JH: Yeah, and I remember the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society was invited up to Chicago to
play in some international, join hands for world brotherhood kind of event. And I’m sure that put
us on an FBI list somewhere. I mean it was that time of the, downstate Illinois in the 1950’s was
a little different than most places are now. But, we just wanted to make music.
I remember, Ewan MacColl, who had, you know, been such an important influence on me with
his singing of traditional Scottish ballads. He and his wife Peggy Seeger came and gave a
concert. And Archie, I think because he knew how important MacColl had been to me. He and
LouAnn had me and my girlfriend over for dinner with MacColl and Seeger. Which, boy I was
thrilled. But the table talk kind of centered around politics. Because MacColl and Seeger were
way out there. They were proscribed on every blacklist there was. And you know I wanted to
talk about music. But I think Archie picked up by that time that I wasn’t a terribly political
person.
Paul Atkins, later went on to get into some pretty active progressive stuff, I know that. Um, I, I
don’t know. I, I remember that one, I don’t know, I won’t go into that. But, for a while after I got
back into music, there was a gospel song that I sang called “Angel Band.” I don’t know why, I
just loved it. I’m not a religious person at all. And I was singing it at a jam session one night.
And afterwards a fellow came up and said, you know, “I want to thank you for playing that.” He
said, “You know, only a believing Christian could sing it the way you do.” And I said something
like “Nice evening, isn’t it?” But I never sang that song again. And I’ve dropped out of gospel
music in any form. Anyway.
AP: You mentioned this a little bit earlier. You mentioned that you, you still play and listen to
traditional music.
JH: Oh yeah. Yeah it never really died out, although it kind of went into the background a few
times. I’ve been in a few rock and roll bands and I messed around with electronic music for a
while. In fact, just last weekend my wife and I went over to Astoria, Oregon and played sort of
semi-rock and roll with the Rat Fish Wranglers, a band from Ketchikan, Alaska. But that was
mostly just because they’re friends of ours.
I, we moved to Oregon in 1997, from Pullman, Washington, where we spent the middle part of
our lives. And I clearly remember digging out my violin, which I had not played in a long time,
putting it under my chin, and sawing away at it and thinking, that’s it, it’s over. I don’t like it, I
don’t like the way it vibrates through my head. I just, you know, I’ll get rid of the thing. But I
decided to, that before I died I wanted to know how the drop thumb banjo was played. This is the
real old sort of claw hammer banjo that proceeded bluegrass banjo. I never could understand how
they could make those sounds. So I started to work on that for a couple of years. And as we got
familiar with this area we live in, we kept hearing people say, well you know there’s a jam
session every Friday night down near Dallas, which is the county seat here. Or sometimes it
would be called a bluegrass jam. And you would just hear about it once in a while.
So one day, one cold, rainy February night in 2001, Jo was away on some trip. Jo, J-o, is my
wife. I decided I would try to find this place; and I did. I had no idea what to expect. I’d never
been to a jam session. Images of deliverance came to my mind. I went to this thing and there
were all these people, and all these musicians, sitting around in a circle in this old one-room
school house. And a big audience. People of all ages from little kids to quite old. And, gosh,
some of them were playing fiddles. Some of them were women playing fiddles. They all seemed
to be having a good time. So I kept going with my banjo and my guitar. And finally, a month or
so after that I decided, I’ll bring the fiddle down and see what I can do. People were very
encouraging and I had the stimulus to keep going with it. So I hit it hot and heavy. And it’s pretty
much what I do now; I’m a fiddle player.
This jam session is a story in itself. A woman who was then in her twenties, bought this
schoolhouse at a public auction, twenty-two years ago so that she and her friends could have a
place to make music. And she has had a jam session there every Friday night for twenty two
years. She’s now fifty five. And it’s this rich [emphasis], nineteenth century kind of experience.
There’s a fairly regular group of musicians. But there’s always new people coming in. And
there’s this big regular group of audience. Who just come there to listen and visit and knit and
gossip. You know, and there’s coffee and people bring cookies and popcorn and stuff. Uh, and
the only restriction is it’s acoustic music only. But, you know. You hear everything from pop
songs of the 1920’s to, you know, Bob Dylan to traditional white boy music to blues to jug band.
We’ve had, there was a trumpet player who showed up for a while. One time there was a
clarinet. This guy brings a cello by every once in a while. Three different saw players.
Accordians. You know, it’s just, it’s madness. But when it’s good it’s just so good and people
like it so much!
AP: That sounds amazing.
JH: In fact that’s one of the things that. So okay, I was reborn as a fiddle player nine years ago.
And ever since then I’ve been playing old time, by that I mean sort of white Southeastern string
band music. Got into Cajun music which I like a lot. And lately I’ve been creeping toward
French Canadian stuff. And Cajun and French Canadian have put me on to trying to learn how to
play the accordion. Which is just a horrible instrument. I love it, but they say it takes about forty
years to learn how to play, and I’m seventy. So probably not going to happen, but I whack away
at it. I like music that’s full of energy and a little bit rough around the edges. And I think that’s
what the Philo Glee and Mandolin Society was too. We certainly weren’t in to become virtuosos
or anything.
I play a lot of solo gigs, and I’ve got a band now called Cooper Hollow.
CooperHollowBand.com. In fact the woman who owns the school house that I was talking about
is one of the band members. And then I also often play with some other real hot old time
musicians who I’ve met through jam sessions. And between those three activities, solo, Cooper
Hollow and others, I get a lot of work—which I love. And so I say that music is, my mode of
expression, my social life, my ego hits, and it also puts a little spare change in my pocket. So it
worked out great.
AP: Well Jim, is there anything else you’d like to say?
JH: My gosh, an hour has passed. Uh yeah, there is. Um, I’ve very impressed with the number of
young people who are interested in traditional music now. I run into them almost anywhere I go.
And you, I can see why. It’s such good stuff, so energetic and upbeat, and you can do it yourself
without a huge investment. You don’t need amplifiers and all that. And I think, relevant to
folklore and musicology, there’s so much source material available now that we, as the Philo
Glee and Mandolin Society, had to get from people like Archie Green and his fellow, collectors,
and musicologists. It’s out there on YouTube, other places on the internet. You can go down to
Borders Books and leaf through the CDs and there’ll be something like Smithsonian Album of
Classic Fiddle Music or Traditional Olde Time Music or whatever. And this is stuff that the most
esoteric business in the 50’s. So the kids have been hearing this and getting into it.
We went to a weeklong campout in Centralia, Washington. Last year there was a band of kids
around twelve years old who, every evening, would put on a square dance. They would play the
music and they would do the calling, and you’d hear this kind of high pitched girl’s voice “Down
on the left, over the left hand, right to your partner, you swing it out.” And these kids were
almost smaller than their instruments and playing wonderful. So I think there’s a whole lot of
hope for keeping it going.