COVER STORY  |  IN THE NEWS  |  GARDEN  |  EDITORIAL  |  THE HUM  |  CALENDAR

OPENING NIGHT
Jeff DeMark expects the unexpected

by AMY STEWART

by BOB DORAN

FRED STARNER IS NOT REALLY A HOBO, ALTHOUGH HE sees himself as a hobo minstrel. But when you spend a while talking with him, you learn that he loves to ramble. Ask him a question and he'll drift off into tales of this or that, be it something about the trials and tribulations connected with life in the uptight world of academia, or a story of some famous hobo like Road Hog, a King of the Hobos who held up a bank so he could get a prison doctor to look into what turned out to be imagined medical problems. "I play in a lot of retirement homes and they like that song because they sympathize with somebody who doesn't have Medicare," he told me, when I tracked him down at his home in the Northridge section of Los Angeles.

Starner had just returned from Folk Alliance, a massive gathering held this past weekend in San Diego, where thousands involved in folk music swapped songs and CDs, trying to line up gigs or book festivals. Fred says he was involved in Folk Alliance from its beginning 16 years ago. "It was put together by the Weissmans, a couple who started a Southern California folk music society. They brought together anybody who was anybody in the world of folk music. The idea was to wave the flag for folk music and folklore, folk dancing and storytelling; to help people get grants and set up a clearinghouse for like-minded performers with a list of venues, contacts for radio and later the emerging Internet; anything that might relate to sustaining and legitimizing folklore in the broadest sense."

Folk music had been a side career for Starner long before that, since the end of the '60s. "I made my living in academia; I just retired after 32 years of teaching economics. I taught at Drew University in New Jersey, and a few other places. I was kicked out of Drew because of my association with Pete Seeger and the Clearwater [a schooner Seeger and friends restored to promote environmental consciousness on the Hudson River]. I was on the original singing crew of the Clearwater along with Don McLean and a few others. That finished me at Drew; the [Vietnam] war was heating up and here was Pete at the front of the anti-war movement. There was no environmental movement to speak of, but here I was an economist criticizing corporations. The conservative faculty members were horrified."

Ousted from Drew, he landed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and continued his duel career: He was the campus' resident alternative economist when he wasn't picking banjo tunes or organizing folk festivals. A government grant in support of folk music again put him at odds with the academics, this time with a music prof who thought the money would be best spent studying "real folk music," for example, Scandinavian fiddle styles.

"The academics do not consider Dylan, Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger to be folk musicians. For them a folk song is a sociological concept: oral songs transmitted from mouth to mouth, like mononucleosis or something. They want to preserve `folk' as this antique expression -- button accordions and dance music, all that stuff. I'd say there's a place for both, for the folksingers, and the button accordion players and Swedish dancers."

Starner says the same old controversy about the nature of folk music is found at events like Folk Alliance, even though the songwriters are now dominant. "At this point the songwriters outnumber the traditionalists on the board and at the festival probably three to one," he said. "Two of the biggest showcases were ASCAP and BMI, both featured songwriters, and of course they had no relation to traditional folk philosophies, storytelling, family song and so forth."

Starner's music mixes it all up. He might start with a centuries-old murder ballad, then shift into a song based on current events. "I'm tickled to be in this thousand year tradition of `folk' where people express stories and views in song. This goes all the way back to the minstrel. The medieval minstrel was something like a folksinger: They were entertainers, but they told the news of the day, and some of it was controversial. In the Battle of Hastings King Henry II was antagonized by a French minstrel, Luke de Barre. When they caught him he was executed, that was in 1100 in England.

"I'm not saying folk music is always antagonistic against the establishment, but that is a branch on the tree of folklore. In America in the last hundred years we had the Hutchinson family, who were Abolitionists and sang songs about abolition before the Civil War. It ran through Joe Hill and the labor movement, then later on to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. All of them used humor as part of their spiel.

"My latest songs have been about Iraq; I have one about the bordellos over there, inspired by a newspaper story I read. But in a typical evening I'll only do a couple of serious political songs, the rest are other people's songs, folklore, stories, banjo history. Up there of course I'll do my Julia Butterfly song, if I can remember the words; I don't sing it that much. And I always do some hobo songs.

"Basically I'm a folksinger who sees himself in this stream of history of expression of folklore through music that goes back 1,000 years. Although I write songs, I'm not really part of the modern songwriter tradition, I'm more like the minstrels of old."

Fred Starner brings his banjo and his guitar to Sacred Grounds this weekend, playing shows Friday and Saturday, March 5 and 6, beginning at 8 p.m. For more on Starner, go to home.earthlink.net/~fstarner.

Bob Doran