2006 OAH Convention Supplement

An Evening with Folksinger Tom Paxton

Marty Blatt

On Saturday night, April 22, 2006, the OAH/NCPH joint annual meeting will conclude with an evening concert by folksinger Tom Paxton. Milton Okun, founder of Cherry Lane Music and Paxton's friend, publisher, and occasional record producer for more than thirty-five years, has written about Paxton: "His powerful lyrics and lovely music have established him as an icon of American culture, the closest thing we have to Jacques Brel. Some songwriters have a strong social conscience, others a penetrating vision of love and personal relationships, and still others satirical skills and a sense of fun. In Tom, all are combined." In 1960 Tom Paxton wrote his first hit, the children's song "The Marvelous Toy," while in the army stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Required to take a typing course even though he already knew how to type, Paxton recalled, "You cannot learn to type a second type. Your brain won't stand for it. But it was two hours a day, four days a week, so I was typing anything I could instead of the exercises. I typed the words to 'The Marvelous Toy.' A peculiar act of rebellion."

Following his discharge from the army, Paxton remained in the New York area and entered the Greenwich Village folk music scene. His early success at coffeehouses such as The Gaslight and The Bitter End launched a dynamic career that has spanned five decades and has included dozens of albums and several books. He was nominated for a Grammy for "Best Contemporary Folk Album of 2003" for his CD, Looking for the Moon, and in 2002 for his children's CD, Your Shoes, My Shoes. ASCAP, the Folk Alliance, and the BBC in London have all recognized him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Some of the artists who have recorded Tom Paxton songs include Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, José Feliciano, Pete Seeger, and The Weavers.

The folk musician Holly Near said about Tom Paxton, "Every folk singer I know has either sung a Tom Paxton song, is singing a Tom Paxton song or will soon sing a Tom Paxton song. Now either all the folk singers are wrong, or Tom Paxton is one hell of a songwriter." Some of his many songs include: "Ramblin' Boy," "Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound," "Peace Will Come," "Goin' to the Zoo," "The Last Thing on My Mind," "Jennifer's Rabbit," "I Give You the Morning," and "Now That I've Taken My Life."

The best known American folksinger, Pete Seeger, said about Paxton's music: "Like the songs of Woody Guthrie, they're becoming part of America." He continued: "In a small village near Calcutta, in 1998, a villager who could not speak English, sang me 'What Did You Learn in School Today?' in Bengali! Tom Paxton's songs are reaching around the world more than he is, or any of us could have realized."

One of the verses goes like this:

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong;
It's always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
And that's what I learned in school today,
That's what I learned in school.

 Spring 2006 will mark a tragic anniversary. It will be thirty years since the folksinger Phil Ochs, a friend of Paxton and a contemporary of his in the Greenwich Village scene, took his own life. Shortly after his death, I vividly recall sitting in a club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a Paxton concert. During a break between songs, someone in the audience yelled out, "Sing one for Phil Ochs!" Paxton, who is generally a calm, gentle performer with a generous spirit, retorted: "Everything I'm doing up here I'm doing for Phil." In 1978, Paxton wrote a beautiful song, "Phil," which begins:

I opened the paper, there was your picture,
Gone, gone, gone by your own hand.
I couldn't believe it, the paper was shakin',
Gone, gone, gone by your own hand.
I know I'm gonna spend the rest of my lifetime wonderin' why
You found yourself so badly hurt you had to die.
I opened the paper, there was your picture,
Gone, gone, gone by your own hand.

Ochs wrote many topical protest songs and Tom Paxton has written several of his own. One of his most sarcastic, and hilarious, "I Am Changing My Name to 'Chrysler'," includes this verse:

Since the first amphibian crawled out of the slime,
We've been struggling in an unrelenting climb.
We were hardly up and walking
Before money started talking,
And it said that failure is an awful crime.
It's been that way a millennium or two.
Now it seems there is a different point of view;
If you're corporate Titanic
And your failure is gigantic,
Down in Congress there's a safety net for you. (To chorus)

Chorus:

I am changing my name to "Chrysler."
I am going down to Washington, D.C.
I will tell some power broker,
"What you did for Iacocca
would be perfectly acceptable to me."
I am changing my name to "Chrysler."
I am leaving for that great receiving line.
And when they hand a million grand out
I'll be standing with my hand out.
Yes sir, I'll get mine.

Recently there has been increased interest in the folk scene. Scholarship has included Ron Cohen's Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard University Press, 1996), and folklorist Millie Rahn's essay on the folk revival in American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century edited by Jeff Melnick and Rachel Rubin. Rahn's forthcoming book, Let Us Gather by the River: Club 47 and the Folk Revival, will be an important contribution. In popular culture, journalist David Hajdu has written Positively 4th Street: The Lives & Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001). Bob Dylan has come forward with his Chronicles: Volume One (Simon and Schuster, 2004) and Martin Scorcese produced his documentary on Dylan.

Dave Van Ronk, an iconic figure in the folk revival, died in 2002. In 2005 The Mayor of MacDougal Street–A Memoir (Da Capo Press, 2005), authored by Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, was published. Bob Dylan in his book blurb called Van Ronk "the king of the street" in Greenwich Village. Tom Paxton in his book jacket comment said: "Dave was the man on MacDougal Street when I arrived in the Village over forty years ago, and he is once more raucously ruling the world in these pages."

Doug Brinkley reviewed Van Ronk's memoir in the Boston Globe (July 24, 2005) and called it essential reading for anyone interested in what Utah Phillips called the "Great Folk Scare" of the 1960s. Brinkley wrote: "Reading this memoir makes you want to listen to not only Van Ronk's CDs" but those of others, including Tom Paxton. Do yourself a favor and come to the concluding plenary and listen to the music of Tom Paxton. For more about Paxton, visit <http://www.tompaxton.com>.