Ｔｏｋｙｏ Ｊａｐａｎ
(Sam in 1948)(I beg your pardon if that should be Kiyohide-san.)
Thank you for responding to the website about me, which was set up and is
administered by Danny Cooper, the talented husband of our granddaughter Katrina
Cooper, both of whom live in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Thank you for listing a URL for the website of the Tokyo Folklore Center. I
have tried to access that website, but find that the information I had leads
only to a site written entirely in Japanese, which I cannot read or
understand. Your listing, however, has several sections in English!
We have never had the good fortune to visit Japan, although both my wife
Leslie and I (we've been married for 63 years) have often wished we could visit
Tokyo. Now we are toool and inirm to travel very much, but we have had a
wonderful life, and there are no regrets at all! Leslie is a musician, potter, and
weaver, and we were both founding members of the Board of Directors of San
Diego's Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art; you may already know
about the Mingei Museum's website at http://www.mingei.org. This Museum
("Mingei", "arts of the people," was a term created by Dr. Setzuo Yanagi) was founded
by our dear friend Mrs. Martha Longeneckar, (whom we met nearly 70 years ago
when we were all students at the University of California, Los Angeles) and who
has made several pilgrimages to Tokyo to study with Serizawa, Shimaoka, and
Hamada -- all of whom have been designated as Living Treasures, and all of
whom have visited the United States. Leslie has been honored to take coures from
them.
I have read about your Muesum in books by our old friend Pete Seeger; we also
knew Pete's father, Charles Seeger, quite well. Both have been our house
guests many times, and Pete and I have often sung together. Your website
mentions many other folksingers that have stayed at our home and whom we count as
dear friends; these include Faith Petric, Joe Hickerson, Billy Faier, Mike
Seeger, Jimmie Driftwood, Sandy and Caroline Paton, and Michael Cooney.
Again, I thank you!
Sam Hinton
La Jolla, CA
Sam in 1950 Ｓａｍ ｉｎ １９９９
Ｐｈｏｔｏ ｂｙ Ｐｅｔｅｒ Ｆｉｇｅｒ
● サム・ヒントンといえばアメリカにおいて伝説のフォークシンガーといえる人物の−人だ。
カール・サンドバーグ（Ｃａｒｌ Ｓａｎｄｂｅｒｇ），バール・アイビス（Ｂｕｒｌ Ｉｖｅｓ）、アラン・ロマックス（Ａｌａｎ
Ｌｏｍａｘ)等の名前が浮かんで来る。彼のサイトが新しく、たまたま今年になって開設されたと知り，
アクセスすると素晴らしいサイトだったので、ゲストブックに、短いコメントを送った。思いがけず、
数ヶ月後上記のE−MAILを、送っていただき感激している。
サム・ヒントンはオクラホマ州タルサの生まれ今年８６歳になる。カルフォニア州サンジェイゴ市
近くに長い間住み、今では｢サム・ヒントン・フォーク・ヘルテイジ・フェスティバル」(Ｓａｍ Ｈｉｎｔｏｎ
Folk Ｈｅｒｔｉｇｅ Ｆｅｓｔｉｖａｌ）という恒例の音楽祭の名称になっている歴史上の人物だ。ちなみに
、サンジェイゴというと Ｓａｍ Ｈｉｎｔｏｎと Ｌｏｕ Ｃｕｒｔｉｓｓ そして Ｔｏｍ Ｗａｉｔｓをおもいだす。
それと Ｔｈｅ Ｓｉｇｎ ｏｆ Ｔｈｅ Ｓｕｎ という昔あったフォークミュージックセンター だ。
多方面で活躍し、カルフォーニア州立大学で教師として35年、ＵＣＳＤでも同じ教鞭を執り、
Palm Springs Desert Museum、Aquarium−Museumの館長も勤める。
1999年12月に西ドイツのベアファミリーレコードより、アメリカ国会図書館で1947年にレコーディング
された、彼のアルバムが復刻された。私達は、1960年代「ニューポート･フォーク・フェステバル」で
録音された、動物の物真似をする唄でよく知ってた。又、2001年6月、ライノレコードで、「 Washinton
Square Memories:TheGreat Urban Folk Boom（Box Set) がリリースされここにー曲収録さ
れている。Old Man Atom（１９５０）−Talking Atom Blues 。ヒントンはノベルティー演者として
知られる。5歳の時に既に母親からハーモニカを買って貰っていた。来年には、彼のハーモニカ
とユニークなギター奏法の教則本がアメリカで発売されるともいう。。数年前に彼のサイト
にアクセスしたことがあり（今のサイトと異なる）、その時彼のハーモニカと唄による「アーカンソーの
旅人」 Arkansas Travelerを聴いた記憶がある。彼の今回のサイトは素晴らしいもので、昔の写真、
プロフィール、漫画（新聞に寄稿していた）、ディスコグラフィイー等と家族、そして人脈も
専門分野の多さにも驚く、海洋学/言語学／化学／現代美術 と幅が広い。そのすべてにこの
サイトからリンクできる・。フォーク系でAdam Miller(オートハープと唄）と奥さんのLaura Lindに
よる歌声「Going To West」「Wild Birds」ほかも聴ける。彼ら夫婦はサム・ヒントンに影響された
多数のシンガー達のー組であるが、２１世紀に向かってアメリカ西海岸を中心に理想的な活動をして行く
であろうステキなカップルだ。
多数の職業を若い頃から経て、素晴らしい人生を送って来たサム・ヒントン、このメールで、それが
想像できー両国フォークロアセンターそれにこれからの日本のフォーク界に様々な事
を語りかけている。GenerationからGenerationへと。私にとっては感動的なEメールのーつであった。
フォークミュージックを通じて国際文化交流の可能性を示唆しているー文だと思う。。。
サム・ヒントン ありがとう。 (国崎清秀 Kiyohide Kunizaki） ２００３年7月末日
● サム・ヒントンの サイトは http://samhinton.org/ です。
サム・ヒントン氏のお宝映像/ （１９１７〜２００９）ー 米国の伝説のフォーク歌手！
＃1 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2669329089073228615&q=sam+hinton#
＃2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGArzUTCegg
■(NEWS &NOTES).・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・
( 記/２００６年１２月１日 ・・・・・ Dec. 1,2006・・・)
今日、Allen Singer氏から下記のメールが届きました。
I'm following up on your comments about the article about me in the
San Diego Troubadour. I've attached a recent photo of Sam Hinton,
taken on August 13, 2006 at a San Diego Folk Song Society song
circle meeting. I noticed you had a page about Sam on your web page.
Sam's 89 years old and still sings at our meetings and surprised us
by playing guitar at our August get together.
Peace!
Allen Singer
Coordinator,
San Diego Folk Song Society
+ サムヒントン ・２００５年８月のミーティングでの演奏写真。添付されてきました。
ゲストブックの１１月３０日（２００６年）をご覧ください。 サムヒントンのお宝映像が。
・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・
＊ALLEN SINGER氏はSAN DIEGO市？で医者であったと下記の記事に書かれている。
この記事は皆さんも、関心あると思う。
Witness to the Great Folk Scare: The Allen Singer Story
by Larry Rose
In 1959 the folk music revival was already underway in New York's Greenwich Village
long before the rest of America found out about it. For what became known as
the Great Folk Scare, the Village was Ground Zero. Utah Phillips, a folksinger known
as the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest, came up with this phrase early in his
career and it is still in use today, describing an incredible outpouring of traditional
acoustic music that is still alive and well around the country, including San Diego.
As the undisputed keeper of the flame here in San Diego, local musician Allen Singer
was there from the beginning, jamming with guys like Bob Dylan, David Grisman,
and John Sebastian before anybody ever heard of them. Because he was in exactly
the right place at exactly the right time, his acoustic music education is second to
none. Currently coordinator for the San Diego Folk Song Society and on the board
of San Diego Folk Heritage, Singer is up to his eyeballs in the local traditional music
scene, which is simply the natural progression of his entire life.
Singer grew up in the Chelsea area of New York City near Tenth Avenue and 27th
Street. His musical interest was fueled by spending nearly every summer from the
age of five at progressive camps where the songs of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and
Pete Seeger were common campfire sing-along material. These tunes included union
organizing ditties and early protest songs, such as Leadbelly's line "The white folks
in Washington, they know how to chuck a colored man a nickel just to see him bow
." Singer later became a camp counselor himself, helping another generation get hooked
on the noncommercial, yet deep rooted, American sound. His father was into jazz and blues
and he learned to love those tunes too. While in junior high school during the mid-1950s
Singer read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Woody Guthrie's, Bound for Glory, J.D.
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which set off a journey
that pushed him toward the music that was closer to rural farmers, working class people,
real life stories, and union activists. Here you could experience the real world and go
throughmusical doors that took you further along on your life's journey.
Attending Junior High School No. 3 from 1956 to 1959 on Hudson Street in Greenwich
Village, a new world opened up to Singer, where his classmates included kids of artists,
musicians, Mafiosi, and writers. He got to know the Village and the people who lived there
and never looked back. When Singer went to high school with Jose Feliciano, jamming
with him in music class turned him on to really learning the guitar. Prior to that, Singer
had been playing viola in the junior high band and, later, clarinet in a Greenwich Village
dixieland band throughout most of high school. In the fall of 1961 his interest in folk music
carried him by subway to the Village, where great old time music had been going on for
some time. Finally serious about learning to play the guitar, Singer got his first decent
guitar in early 1962 - a 1955 J-45 Gibson that cost him 70 bucks. He still has it and trots
it out from time to time at San Diego folk music gatherings. He has since found a Colling's
Dreadnought guitar that he likes much better and picks that ax 90 percent of the time.
For decades Greenwich Village had been the center of the bohemian culture, home to
great jazz clubs that launched the careers of many mainstream entertainers over the years.
In 1949 Bob Hope discovered a kid named Tony Bennett singing in a Village club and gave
him his stage name at that time. Bennett cut his first record in 1950 with Columbia, the
same label that would eventually produce Bob Dylan's first LP, which took the Folk Scare
to the rest of the world. This writer had never heard anything called "folk music" until some
of the stuff being done in the Village leaked out and made its way to the West as a
commercial phenomenon.
The center of the Village was, and still is, Washington Square, bordered by New York
University on three sides, with clubs occupying the streets on the opposite side. The
Square was the gathering place for musicians and college kids from all over the East.
Open jamming went on everywhere and Singer couldn't get enough of it. MacDougal
Street, which ran south from the Square, was home to many clubs and coffeehouses
where musicians played. Izzy Young's Folk Lore Center was the clearing house for
all folk music activities in New York, which also fed the folk revival. The open mic was
invented here in the late 1950s and was a magnet for Singer and the rest of the kids
from the university as well as from New York's surrounding boroughs. When Bob Dylan
came to New York in January 1961, he went straight to the Caf? Wha? and tried the
open mic there on Hootenanny Night. Club owner Manny Roth,David Lee Roth's father,
noted later that Dylan's first set was almost all Woody Guthrie songs Dylan played
with Mark Spoelstra, Dave Van Ronk, and Fred Neil who wrote "Everybody's Talkin'"
in one of the watering holes on or near MacDougal Street. Dylan opened for John Lee
Hooker in his first professional gig on April 11, 1961, at Gerde's Folk City, a club
west of the Square on West Fourth Street, and Singer was there.
Singer remembers that the late blues and jazz artist Dave Van Ronk was the star of the
MacDougal Street coffeehouse and club scene at that time and that Dylan wanted a piece
of the action, copying Ramblin' Jack Elliott and yearning to be just like Jack and also
using Van Ronk's arrangements in his songs. Having released at least a dozen records
in his career, Van Ronk wrote the definitive book about the epicenter of the Folk Scare
called, fittingly, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. In his book Van Ronk gives Dylan credit
for both launching the Great Folk Scare as a commercial happening with his first LP
in December 1961 and then ending it with his first all-electric LP in 1965. Van Ronk's
wife, Terri Thal, who was Dylan's first manager, was Singer's high school English teacher
in the 11th grade. Small world. Dylan never forgot Washington Square and the nearby
clubs and in a 1985 interview noted that it was a very special place that launched the
music careers of hundreds of people and inspired thousands more who helped spread
the magic to college campuses and coffeehouses everywhere.
Greenwich Village had been the hot spot for bohemians, traditional musicians, artists,
and writers since the 1920s, most of whom lived and played in the alternate culture-rich
area that included bookstores, cheap apartments, and lots of small clubs that featured
jazz, poetry readings, and American roots music. Hearing traditional music on the radio
was rare anywhere outside the South, and the northern-based music business ignored
what was going on in the Village. This drought was broken by Oscar Brand, a folksinger
who hosted a folk music program on WNYC, the New York City owned radio station in the
1950s, where you could hear the first musicians of the folk revival. He still hosts the same
folk music program today. During the late 1940s Washington Square's fountain became the
place to hang out and play guitars, fiddles, and banjos. When Singer discovered the place
in 1961, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. Soon thereafter the commercial
music business took notice when Dylan was featured in a major newspaper article written
by Robert Shelton about music in the Village .
Traditional music could be heard in every club, coffeehouse, and bar in the Village before
the scare really got going; Singer was there nearly every night and every weekend, witness
to an amazing array of acoustic music styles there. Doc Watson played there in his first
venture outside of the South. Ramblin' Jack Elliot, whose music Singer lived and breathed,
was a resident as well as a coffeehouse regular. Singer also heard the Weavers, Pete Seeger,
Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Flatt and
Scruggs, the New Lost City Ramblers, Merle Travis, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins,
Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Odetta, and
Maria Muldaur before they all became the vanguard of the folk movement. This is just a
small list of the hundreds of traditional acoustic musicians who played the clubs where
Singer and his friends hung out.
Singer notes that the first bluegrass band he heard in the Village, from someplace other
than the rural South, was called the Greenbriar Boys. In fact, members of the band -
Ralph Rinzler, Bob Yellin, and John Herald - who used to call Singer the "fat kid," jammed
on the Square with Singer and his friends. This type of traditional hillbilly music, along with
bluegrass and old time country music, which was spread to the north almost entirely by a
bunch of Jewish kids from New York City, many of whom were second generation children of
Eastern European Jews who had settled in the Village. Attracted to this kind of music, Singer
felt it was his way of becoming a part of the real American culture. He couldn't identify
with Dick Clark's brand of rock and roll and its sugary covers of doowop and black rhythm
and blues. He loved honkytonk, cowboy, and old time country music. He notes that Roy Acuff
called New York bluegrass "Jewgrass" after hearing some of these northern kids pick and
win at the Galax Old Time String Band Contest in Asheville, North Carolina.
Marshall Brickman and Eric Weissberg, Washington Square regulars during the 1950s
and early 1960s, released the first all bluegrass banjo LP recording by northern pickers
to add credence to Acuff's Jewgrass moniker. Done in the Earl Scruggs hot three-finger
style, the sound was soon being heard all over the world and the Village became, once
again, the non-southern launching pad for the five-string banjo boomlet. Folk-oriented
LPs at the time would bear a big splash on the jacket, such as "featuring five-string banjo!"
to make sure the new urban fans of "Scruggs style" bluegrass banjo would not miss it.
After his move to the city, Dylan hung out at the Square, feeding on the many varieties of
folk music played there, but his genius soon took him beyond the Square, fueled by his
innovative use of poetic wordplay supported by folk guitar and harmonica. Johnny Cash
once gave Dylan a Gibson J-200 guitar, which can be seen on the cover of his LP John
Wesley Harding. Cash was a Columbia recording artist who had made it big with his
country rock sound in the late 1950s but was well aware of what was going on in the
Village, having played the clubs there. In fact, Cash threatened to quit Columbia when
Mitch Miller, then A&R man at the record company, wanted to fire Dylan after his first LP
had only sold 5,000 copies. Dylan wasn't fired and the rest is history.
When Columbia signed Dylan in 1961 it turned out to be the trigger event that really
launched the Folk Scare on a national level. Radio and television began playing traditional
American music for the first time, and there was even a national TV show called
Hootenanny. Singer played music at the Square until 1965, the year Dylan went electric
and soon became a pop artist. Although many of Dylan's old friends in the Village
disowned him for "selling out" to the commercial music industry, Singer felt that Dylan's
move was positive because he was extending the folk circle and saving not only folk music
but rock and roll as well. It was at that time, however, that the Beatles took the U.S. by
storm and the folk boom faded fast. Even Dave Van Ronk went electric in 1968 in order
to continue to survive as a full time musician. Singer believes the folk music phenomenon
continued on even after it was no longer played on the radio or TV but just went back
"underground" much as it was when Woody Guthrie played in the obscurity of the
Greenwich Village clubs and union halls long before the Folk Scare broke out.
After the folk boom quieted down in 1965, Singer concentrated on his education,
graduating from Pace College in 1967 with a degree in psychology. He went to
graduate school at NYU on Washington Square from 1969 to 1971, earning a
master's degree in clinical social work. Throughout the 1970s he worked for the
Salvation Army and lived in the Village just a short distance from MacDougal Street.
Along the way he acquired his wife, Linda, and moved his family to San Diego in 1980
, where he landed a job in Kaiser Permanente's psychiatry department and retired
from there in 2003. Singer admits that during his working years in San Diego he didn't
play much guitar. He started to play regularly again in 1999 after having a conversation
with his local New York buddy Pete Zelin, who encouraged him to "get out there and
play music again." Sadly, Zelin died a few days later and never got a chance to see Singer
step out and play.When he discovered the San Diego Folk Song Society, Singer was not
only surprised but also very pleased and has never looked back. For him, the Folk Scare
never ended. He continues to maintain a New York connection through the New York
bluegrass and old time blog on Yahoo, a select closed group of more than 150 veterans
of the Washington Square great folk revival in the 1950s and 1960s. Singer remembers,
"Washington Square was one big continuous ongoing jam. It was our meeting place and
it changed our lives. It was an ever-changing music school that provided us with lasting
friendships, a creative forum, the politics of the 1960s, and a music education that still
helps mold who we continue to become through our playing of folk music."
During the 1970s, after the Folk Scare faded, Singer took jazz guitar lessons and now
owns an Eastman F-hole arch-top jazz guitar. Greatly influenced by the music of Django
Reinhart, Charlie Christian, Nick Lucas, Eddy Lang, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Chuck Wayne,
and Barney Kessel, he studied with Ron Parker in New York, a hot picker who taught
Paul Simon and played every Broadway show pit during the 1960s and 1970s. He later
took lessons from Chuck Wayne before moving to San Diego. Singer still loves folk music
best but says that learning jazz guitar was essential to learning the guitar neck and also
inspired him to learn to read sheet music, a very un-folkie thing to do.
Active in the local acoustic music scene since 1999, Singer really got into it big when
he retired from his day job. He has since performed at the Adam's Avenue Roots
Festival and Street Fair and was recently featured at the annual Train Song Festival
in Old Poway Park. Recently Singer did a blues centered concert as part of the San Diego
Folk Heritage Musical Odyssey series with his great harmonica playing buddy Dane Terry.
In addition, he coordinates the gatherings of San Diego's oldest folkie group, San Diego
Folk Song Society, founded by Sam Hinton in 1957. He is deeply involved in the San
Diego Folk Heritage group, which brings wonderful artists to San Diego County.
Singer's CD, Down the Road, which features the tunes he loved best from his Washington
Square days, is available through his website www.allensinger.com and through www.cdbaby.com/cd/allensinger. Singer highly recommends the CD boxed set Anthology
of American Folk Music (ed. Harry Smith) and Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival
1961-1965, a CD boxed set that includes many of the concerts Singer attended in New York
. Both are available at www.amazon.com. A website called http://www.juneberry78s.
com/sounds/index.htm is a great source for the roots music that fed the Folk Scare and
it still provides Singer with musical inspiration today.
For further reading about the Great Folk Scare, read Dave Van Ronk's book The Mayor
of MacDougal Street, published by Da Capo Press (2005), available at www.dacapopress
.com and www.amazon.com.
（上記は「THE SAN DIEGO TROUBADOUR」誌（２００６年１１月号）より）
＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊
■ 今日（１２月２日）に LOU CURTISS氏より素敵なメールが届きました。
ｆｒｏｍ ｆｏｌｋ ａｒｔ ｒａｒｅ ｒｅｃｏｒｄs ｓｉｔｅHi & Greetings from San Diego. We've been doing music festivals here in San Diego
since 1967 and concerts since about 1962. We're planning to put a lot more up on the
site in our listening area. Hope you enjoy it and the information is useful to you.
All my best to you & yours, Lou Curtiss （ｒｅｃｅｉｖｅｄ １２/２/２００６）
Lou Curtiss 氏は伝説的なレコード店のオナーであり、１９６０年代より「ルーツミュージック
フェスティバル」（無料）をSAN DIEGO市で毎年プロデュース、今はKSDS JAZZ８８．３でJaaz
ROOTSの番組を毎週担当している伝説的な人物。一度このラジオ局を聴いたことがあるが
ご機嫌なＪＡＺＺ放送局だった。なにしろ彼は個人的に９００００時間のサウンドライブラリーを
持っていると言われている。
＊ 「ＴＨＥ ＫＨＲＯＭＥ ＫＡＺＯＯ」（当地で１９６０年代の終わり頃発行されていた
アンダーグランドルーツ音楽マガジン やー懐かしい。これを彼は発行していた。
＊ 「ＳＡＮ ＤＩＥＧＯ ＢＬＵＥＳ ＪＡＭ］（ＡＤＶＥＮＴ ＮＯ．２８０４） １９７４
彼はこのレコードのライナーを書いている。
・・・・・上記の雑誌１部とレコード、 Ｔｏｋｙｏ Ｆｏｌｋｌｏｒｅ Ｃｅｎｔｅｒ Archive にあることを
記して置きます。
昔から彼らの活動は知っていたのですが、日本で今まで紹介されていなかったかもしれない。
このような形で語ることは非常に感動的です。
（記 : 国崎 清秀 K. ＫＵＮＩＺＡＫＩ １２/２/’０６）
・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・