Re: [ARSCLIST] John Hammond discovered everybody, was Community Radio

[John Ross <johnross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At  7/18/2006 08:15 PM, Cary  Ginell wrote:
> if it wasn't for the Folkways recordings, he [Pete Seeger] would not 
> have had any income.

Probably true, but the Folkways stipend (for want of a better word) 
was only part of his income. During those years, he spent a lot of 
time touring and performing "under the radar" of the mainstream music 
business , at schools, colleges and kid's camps. Arguably, he laid 
much of the groundwork for the folk music boom of the sixties by 
exposing a generation of kids to the idea that there's more to folk 
music than your third grade teacher with a pitchpipe.

Of course, the Folkways LPs and the concerts fed off of each other -- 
his audiences bought his records, and the records got him more 
concerts, so the "no income" part might be true.

And if he hadn't been doing all those records for Folkways, there's 
no doubt in my mind that Kenny Goldstein would have recorded him for 
Riverside and Prestige, or Diane Hamilton and the Clancys would have 
recorded him for Tradition. They probably wouldn't have produced the 
ongoing revenue stream that he got from Moe Asch -- Utah Phillips 
talks about having done his first record for Prestige, "and damn 
little else" -- but there were other labels out there where he could 
have made records, even at the depth of the blacklists.

And of course, the irony of Pete's having made records for John 
Hammond on Columbia was that they were released around the same time 
that CBS was censoring him when he sang "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" 
on the Smothers Brothers TV show.

John Ross