Best wishes to Spider John Koerner, who, according to the Internet, is doing well after triple bypass surgery in early February. Koerner's music has always been a favorite of mine, ever since the old Blues Rags and Hollers LPs of the sixties. I fondly recall driving through the night in 1966 to hear Koerner, Ray, and Glover live for the first time at a Carleton College folk festival, which also featured Richard Dyer-Bennet, Patrick Sky, Jimmy Driftwood, and the New Lost City Ramblers.
I had never been to a festival before and was completely transfixed. Ever the adolescent idolater, I pinched a cigar butt of Koerner's off the floor and squirreled it home in a harmonica case that Tony Glover had thrown out. If I hadn't misplaced it, this disgusting blues amalgam could have been displayed beside the baggie I have also lost, which contained half a marshmallow circus peanut, its missing half having been chomped off by Pete Seeger a few years ago in Lou's living room. I could have been curator of the Tiny Museum of Folk Detritus.
Lou and I got our best pig joke from John Koerner. Back when we were married to each other and living in London, Ontario, we made a pilgrimage to Toronto in 1969 to see him perform at the Riverboat Coffeehouse. He sang a few of the songs that were soon to be released on a great but odd album he wrote and recorded with Willie Murphy, called Running Jumping Standing Still. I remember being very impressed that one of these songs was in 5/4 time, which isn't very common in the world of folk music.
That night he told a pig joke which we stole and use on stage to this day. (To make a long joke short, we saw a farmer holding a pig in his arms, and the pig was eating apples off a tree. We went up and asked the farmer "Isn't that a time consuming way to feed a pig?" The farmer shrugged and said, "What's time to a pig?")
The two of us made up one-half of a small acoustic blues band in those days, which played every Wednesday night in a seedy dive called the York Hotel. I played a $65 set of fake-fur-covered drums and Lou, in her pre-accordion incarnation, was the vocalist. I'm sure we mangled them horribly, but we actually did work out a few John Koerner tunes.
Art, Faith, Utah, Sam, and Dr. D
Eventually, we participated in a workshop with John at a festival in St. Paul. The premise of the workshop escapes me; looking back on it, I can't picture a theme which would tie his music to ours. It was a weird workshop, but as you might imagine, we were thrilled. Moreover, we have found ourselves in stranger workshops, the oddest of which was at the Old Songs festival in Altamont, New York, last summer. There, we were one-third of a workshop of which the other two-thirds were Utah Phillips and Dr. Demento. It was delightfully peculiar. As the Therapy Sisters say, "If you can't get even, get odd."
Though word of ill health can be upsetting, it's also thrilling to see folk artists persevere despite their physical setbacks. Utah Phillips is another musician having his share of health surprises but who is continuing to travel and perform as much as he can. Art Thieme, who attended the Folk Alliance convention in Memphis in February, is excitedly putting together material for a new CD in spite of his recurring problems. The indefatigable Sam Hinton of San Diego, recent knee surgery notwithstanding (bad choice of words), played nearly ninety gigs last year.
Faith Petric, kingpin (queenpin?) of the San Francisco Folk Music Club, just a few weeks ago in California told us she is booked for all the major folk festivals in Australia and was soon leaving for a two month tour down under. This is spectacular in that she does her own booking, but even more so considering she turned eighty a while back (we sent her ten pounds of Wisconsin cheese) and has had health problems of her own. And soon, no doubt, John Koerner will be back up on stage telling pig jokes in the name of folk music for years to come.