Tom Rush Recalls
Folk Music in Harvard Square
By: Tom Rush and Charles Giuliano - Nov 17, 2010
When David Wilson and I decided to undertake an extended e mail interview about the 1960s in Boston and Cambridge we focused on the folk music scene in Harvard Square.
Some time back Tom Rush performed at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield and we briefly connected when, after the show, he met with the audience to sign CDs. I reminded him that we had met when I interviewed him for his annual series of concerts at Symphony Hall. At the time, I was a music critic for the former Boston Herald Traveler.
David Wilson also covered a concert and spoke with Tom. There was an exchange of e mails and I asked Tom if would participate in our research project. In particular, I wanted to know about his involvement with folk music while an undergraduate at Harvard. Currently, Tom is working on an autobiography so this is a hint of that project.
Charles Giuliano You were an undergraduate and English major at Harvard just when the folk music scene was reaching critical mass with a focus on Club 47 and other coffee shops in the Cambridge/ Boston area.
Can you describe the process when you became involved with playing music? when you entered Harvard had it ever occurred to you that a career in music might result?
Tom Rush I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got to Harvard. I was there because virtually all my graduating class at Groton went to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. (there was one guy who went to the Minnesota School of Mines to become a mining engineer – he was probably the only one of us who actually knew what he wanted. most of the rest of us went on to become pot-smoking, draft-dodging, unfocussed ne’r do-wells. I think that this was where my leadership qualities became evident.)
Club 47 was just a block away from my dorm room at Leverett House, and the call was clear and irresistible. There was music, there were girls, and it was, if not illegal, at least irresponsible to spend so much time there. What’s not to love?
I ended up hanging out in many of the coffee houses around Boston and Cambridge. I inherited a little 30 minute folk show called “balladeers” on Harvard’s student radio station, WHRB. I had to recruit live guests (though I sometimes had the other kind) and the best way to do that was to go to the hootenannies, as open mikes were called in olden times. I found that if you carried a guitar you could get in for free. Then I discovered that if you carried a guitar case you could get in for free, so I’d put a 6-pack in the case and head out for the hoots.
I got caught one night at the Golden Vanity in Boston, told I had to get up and do some songs since I got in free. I borrowed a guitar, did a short set and apparently did ok because the owner called me up a week later to ask if I would substitute for someone who had called in sick. (My first paid gig was actually at a coffee house called the Salamander in the fall of ‘61. A flamenco player friend was going off to Spain to live with the gypsies and asked if I wanted to take over his gig there. I played one night and was fired because, according to the owner, the patrons were spending too much time listening to me instead of drinking coffee and conversing – not the ambience he wanted.)
Anyway, by the time I graduated – having dropped out for a year to explore this music thing, then gone back to finish up 3 semesters – I had no job prospects relating to English literature. The good news was that people did seem interested in paying me to sing and play (which still amazes me), so I decided to keep at that for a while until I figured out what I wanted to do. 49 years later, I’m still trying to work that one out.
CG During concerts you reveal to audiences that it was your study of literature that led to an interest in folk traditions. Can you elaborate on that?
TR It really happened the other way around. I’d intended to major in biology, since I wanted to become a marine biologist. (I’d planned to go to U of North Carolina to do this, but my father prevailed upon me to take the Harvard route.) The introductory biology course, however, was so onerous that it killed off four whole years of pent-up enthusiasm in just two short semesters. At the end of freshman year the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to major in biology. English lit was a fall-back position, suggested by the father of a friend who posited that it would be a good foundation for many different of lines of endeavor. I never did find out what those were.
The English lit department was populated with esteemed professors who had written one famous book or another, but had done so a long time ago, and, further, made no pretense of being the slightest bit interested in undergraduates. It turned out to be a lot like biology, dissecting books rather than frogs.
I was already fascinated by folk music and its traditions, and my instincts for self-preservation led me to sign up for any and all courses even tangentially related to that interest: “Anglo Saxon 101” (a language course, but taught by Bill Alfred, who was a trove of lore and good stories – did you know that the Anglo Saxon verb “to stab” refers to an upward thrust, the best way to get the blade to slide between the ribs? Bill knew how to get a schoolboy’s attention.); “The Oral Epic” (from Homer to the Modern Cerbo-Croatian tradition, taught by Albert Lord who, for some reason, took a liking to me and later invited me back as a guest lecturer); and even “Primate Social Behavior,” which I somehow perceived as being a related field of study.