Spider John Koerner and the SilkenWeb of 1960s Folk Music
Another piece of 1960s Bleecker Street faded into the mist Saturday with the death of “Spider” John Koerner.
Koerner, 85, had been suffering from cancer and was in hospice care in his adopted home city of Minneapolis, where some 60 years ago he teamed up with two fellow students and music lovers named Dave “Snaker” Ray and Tony “Little Sun” Glover to form, logically enough, Koerner, Ray and Glover.
With Ray and Koerner on guitars and Glover on harmonica, they played loud, lively versions of old blues recordings by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell and Leadbelly.
Their first album, titled Blues, Rags and Hollers, became one of the defining intersections between an energized folk movement, comprised largely of young white kids, and the “rediscovery” of black artists going back to the 1920s.
Bleecker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, long a haven for small music clubs, became the Broadway of that relatively brief, but widely influential and musically marvelous moment.
Black artists who had made maybe a few hundred dollars from a handful of records in the 1920s and 1930s, like Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and Son House, were convinced to dust off their guitars and entertain young white folks at clubs and coffeehouses where the waitresses plyed the old trick of offering cheap dishes of salty snacks so patrons would work up a thirst for adult beverages.
Even more abundant on the tiny stages in those clubs were the young white kids who over the past few years had discovered there was way more to music than what they heard on pop radio growing up in the early 1950s. There was blues. Folk, jazz, gospel, country.
Some of these kids, like another Minneapolis-rooted music fan named Bob Dylan, had also started writing their own songs, borrowing styles and sensibility from the artists and songs that came before. What flowered in the folk-and-roots music of the 1960s, as the artists will uniformly attest, were seeds planted over many previous decades.
Spider Koerner went to Minneapolis in 1956 to study aeronautical engineering. He discovered folk music was more fun. Okay, so were the parties and so was the lifestyle, but it was music from which, to his surprise, he found he could make a living. Koerner, Ray and Glover never lived large from their music, but Koerner survived on it for much of his life, and in the music game, that constitutes victory.
After Blues, Rag and Hollers gave them a reputation in 1963, Koerner, Ray and Glover went on the road. To oversimplify a bit, they were white kids singing the blues, and while that had been done since the dawn of recorded music and no doubt before, most of the other white blues artists of the ’60s , like the Paul Butterfield Band, were playing electric, more in the footsteps of Muddy Waters. Koerner, Ray and Glover were acoustic, closer to the country blues of pre-World War II years. When they sang Blind Lemon’s famous “One Kind Favor,” they sounded black.
They mixed raw blues with lively instrumental rags and original songs like the wonderful “The Boys Was Shootin’ It Out Last Night,” punctuated by bemused banter, so it never felt like a blues tribute show. Nonetheless, they were one of the groups whose names would pop up in discussions of what would later be called cultural appropriation.
The argument that performing music with origins in another culture is inherently exploitative requires acknowledging a fair number of grey areas.
There have unquestionably been cases where non-mainstream artists have had elements of their creations incorporated into mainstream work that made a whole lot more money for someone else. On the other hand, in the wider sense, every artist draws from artists who came before, and most artists absorb from a wide range of genres.
Koerner, Ray and Glover were not elbowing Blind Lemon Jefferson off the Billboard charts. They were singing songs they discovered they loved, which in many ways is exactly what was happening with, say, Frank Sinatra.
The cultural appropriation discussion surfaces periodically — amusingly, the most recent incarnation was Beyonce singing in a country style — but that didn’t stop John Koerner from continuing to sing old blues songs well into his 70s, or audiences from continuing to enjoy them.
Because of the music he chose to sing, Koerner never crashed the mainstream or, very likely, thought he would. He became a beloved fish in a modest pond, and doubtless found satisfaction in knowing he had passed some of that music on to colleagues like Dylan, whom he knew when they were both scuffling in Minneapolis.
In his book Chronicles, Dylan wrote that he learned from Koerner and that Koerner introduced him to sounds he had never heard before. Koerner, for his part, remembered Dylan as one of the guys, another kid simply enthralled with music.
Not long after they drank and swapped songs in Minneapolis, Dylan was playing in Greenwich Village. Not long after that, so were Koerner, Ray and Glover. If folk music has been around ever since there were folks, few streets rang with as full a spectrum as Bleecker in the 1960s. John Koerner’s death silences another echo.
