Oct. 30, 1971: Folksinger Jerry Raven

 

Here's the man who transformed the corner of Franklin and Edward streets in Buffalo into a little piece of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. I still think of that storefront as the Limelight Gallery. Among the people performing there at the beginning of their careers were Eric Andersen and John Kay of Steppenwolf. 

Oct. 30, 1971

Sing He Must

Jerry Raven Carries on with New Partner 

The cards slap into seven solitaire piles just like they had minds of their own and Jerry Raven tells a couple college-age kids there won’t be any guitar workshop here today because nothing’s prepared and that’s because the guys from WPHD hadn’t told him about it.

“Sorry,” Jerry says and the kids shrug and walk out of the Limelight Gallery into the grey, wet Saturday afternoon.

Once through the deck, Las Vegas style. Five clubs, three hearts, ace of diamonds, ace of spades. He pulls the cards together and shuffles.

He and his wife, Carol, a teacher at West Hertel Middle School, have just been downtown buying cheese and stuff for the coffeehouse. Carol, at the next table, frowns at her miniature cards.

* * *

“THIS IS such a mindless game,” Jerry exclaims. Seven more piles slap down. “Somebody got us started on it three months ago. What I like about it is that it takes no concentration at all. You can play and operate on two or three different levels at once.”

Operating on many levels has been Jerry’s specialty ever since he and other members of UB’s Blue Maskers drama club sat around their office in 1956 singing old union songs and folk tunes from the Depression.

Presently he’s a coffeehouse owner, folksinger (solo and duet), two-day-a-week instructor at the New School of Performing Arts on Englewood Avenue and a TV series performer in his fourth rerun on WNED-TV.

* * *

THE LIMELIGHT (Edward Street just off Franklin) and Jerry have been inextricably intertwined since 1960. “Jerry’s Ego Trip” proclaims a sign in the kitchen hallway.

“Some girl gave him that the night we reopened the place a year ago February,” Carol says.

Until personal problems forced Jerry to close it temporarily in 1967, the Limelight was a cozy Bohemian den of folk music and good conversation. For three years it sat untouched – a storage room for the antique store that shares the building.

“We used to come by on a Friday night and press our noses against the window and look inside,” Carol recalls.

* * *

MEANWHILE, Jerry did a series of things. One-night appearances here and in Canada. Clerking in an electronics store. Running sound for TV commercials. The TV series for Channel 17.

“I even worked for my father in his junkyard – actually industrial salvage – for a while,” Jerry remarks.

* * *

WPHD’s Jim Santella, black hair snaking from under his Western hat, comes in with maybe a dozen guitarists for the workshop and he and Jerry have a quick conference.

Soon the place is full of tuning-up and random strumming.

“The guys at PHD had gone to the Mariposa Festival up in Toronto,” Jerry says, “and they really dug the workshops. So they thought it would be a groovy idea to have a guitar workshop and do it here. It was fine in the summer, but now I just don’t have the time.”

* * *

JERRY appears solo in the Limelight Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Fridays and Saturdays he duets with pretty Mickey Leonard. Except tonight they’re playing for UB’s IRC coffeehouse in Clement Hall and afterward they go to Villa Maria College for an all-night Halloween thing.

Sundays are hootenanny nights at the Limelight – most anyone can come and sing. And Monday, it’s closed.

“At Villa Maria, we’ll probably do all our lurking songs,” Jerry says. “You see, we got into this whole thing about hanging around. Now today, hanging around is negative. You gotta give it something positive, a whole different face.

“That’s where lurking comes in. Lurking is hanging around in a sinister way. Which everybody digs because they like to think of themselves as a little sinister sometimes.

“And what you need is a place to lurk in, a dark night and you gotta know five or six lurking songs. The best ones are old English murder ballads.

“Lurking is kind of a passive thing, but you can get into an active thing, say, if there’s a full moon or it’s Halloween. Then when somebody walks by, you can get up like this and LOOOOOM over them.”

* * *

“I’LL SING YOU a Song” is on Channel 17 at 5:30 p.m. that Saturday and it shows a thinner, shorter-haired, less mellow Jerry Raven singing sea shanties and giving rapid detailed explanation of when, where and why they were sung.

Again, he’s working on several levels. Research, teaching, performing.

“It was a neat thing,” Jerry had said earlier, “but there were problems. All the material had to be in the public domain. We found the collectors of our great folk heritage have stolen it and copyrighted it under the guise of scholarship.

“The Lomaxes would go into Appalachia and record these songs and then arrange them. A lot of times they’d add verses.”

“We had to take a song like ‘John Henry,’” Carol said, “and find verses that were exactly alike in three different sources. We wound up with 20 different verses.”

* * *

JUST LIKE Jerry said, the Limelight is straight down Goodell and Edward from the end of the Kensington Expressway. Jerry and Mickey are twining harmonies nicely for a good-natured full house of college kids, out-of-school couples and a few older folks.

No blue-jeaned folksingers, these two. Mickey in a long shiny acetate dress and Jerry in striped bell bottoms and a purple shirt.

Songs range from “Me and Bobby McGee,” where they sound a lot like Ian & Sylvia, through some mid-60s Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin and Judy Collins to a couple lurking numbers – “Pretty Polly” and “The Silkie.”

Mickey’s clear soprano makes an evocative solo out of “Woodstock.” A lot of Jerry’s general theatricality carries over in his buzzing tenor. Their avowed schmaltz song – “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” – drives Carol to turn on the blender so she can’t hear it.

* * *

IN THE kitchen afterwards, Carol’s doing her nightly clean-up while the solitaire cards flip for Jerry.

“You know,” he says, “to a lot of the kids, these songs from the ‘60s are completely new. I sing something and they say great, did you write it? And I tell them, no, Bob Dylan did. And they say, ‘Who?’” 

The box/sidebar:

They Need a Name 

Jerry Raven’s been solo since the Hemi-Demi-Semi-Quavers broke up some five years ago, but this summer he got the urge to team up again.

This time it’s with Mickey Leonard, 22, a Hamburg doctor’s daughter who’s been folksinging since she left Oberlin College a few years ago.

Married to a UB pre-med student, she’s finishing a nursing course this year at Erie Community College, so it’s only a two-night-a-week duet so far. And no touring.

“She came into the Limelight for a Sunday night hootenanny back in August,” Jerry says, “and she said she’d been looking to get into a group. The next day we tried some songs and we’ve been doing very well. She’s very easy to work with.”

* * *

JERRY, just turned 33, is a Bennett High School grad who got into folk music in the mid ‘50s while attending UB’s School of Pharmacy.

        “I learned a little guitar and didn’t want to do anything else,” he says, “so I left the university and started playing in bars.”

        He lived in Woodstock around 1960, was a friend of Peter Yarrow’s: “One day he said he was going to New York City and he’d call when he got something together. Next time I saw him, it was Peter, Paul & Mary.”

        Back in Buffalo, Jerry joined with Don Hackett. Hackett & Raven traveled to Canada and South America, did a folk music radio show on WBEN evenings in 1963-64 and appeared on most of WGR-TV’s 20 “Shivaree” shows.

* * *

“DON WANTED to do that forever,” Jerry says, “but I broke it up. We got together after a year with a girl named Sherry Vann – Don married her – and formed the Quavers.

        “That fell apart from inertia. We got a manager who was supposed to have recording connections and he said we needed a musical director. We couldn’t afford to play in the Limelight. And it took us six months to get a new song together.

        “A name? Right now, we’re just Jerry Raven and Mickey Leonard. Maybe we should run a contest.”

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Jerry Raven has kept right on singing. As his Buffalo Music Hall of Fame bio notes, in 1977 he founded a folk group called the Hill Brothers. They have performed extensively in schools from Albany to Cleveland to Pittsburgh.

A glimpse of his work with kids can be seen at jerryraven.com. His system, called “Learning Through Songs and Movement,” takes learning the alphabet and turns it into fun.

Young Audiences of Western New York has honored him for his “ongoing commitment to learning in and through the arts.” The full array of Hill Brothers programs for kids can be found on the Young Audiences website.

        Meanwhile, Don Hackett, his former singing partner, also was his partner in the Limelight. They worked together again in an early edition of the Hill Brothers.