Oct. 19, 1974: Folk music at the UUAB Coffeehouse

 


Folk music in Buffalo hit a low point in the mid 1970s. Keeping it alive were two dedicated women at UB. 

Oct. 19, 1974

UB’s Ole Coffeehouse Blends

A Rich Brew of Folk Spirit 

THIS MAY JUST BE a curtained-off cafeteria room on the first floor of UB’s Norton Union, but the spirit’s alive in here tonight. The minute you’re past the door, it seizes you.

          Your skin embraces the hearty toughness of denim. An easy grin starts spreading beyond your lips and you toss it to your neighbor.

          Your fingers throw a mean G-diminished around the neck of an imaginary guitar. You want the wind blowing through your hair and a beat-up old slouch hat, the one that’s second nature to your head, like Bill Staines’.

          The multitude may not have heard of Staines, who looks like what John Denver must have looked like before he started shaving every day, wearing new clothes and saying: “Farrr out,” but these folks here at the UUAB Coffeehouse have heard of Bill.

          They know how to stomp and clap for each upshift in his breathless yodeling number. And his mind-tickling talking “nothing” blues must be tickling some of them for the third or fourth time.

          Staines is sharing the billing with a tall roadwise California lady named Mary McCaslin and a craggy but gentle giant who answers to Jim Ringer. Singalong voices echo McCaslin’s in “San Bernardino Waltz.” There’s some folks who feel she’s going to be the next Joni Mitchell.

* * *

“I’M FROM QUEENS,” Rebecca Kutlin is saying, “and there’s a lot of folk music around New York City, but I never was into it there. Once I came up here and went to the coffeehouse, I realized what I had missed.

          “It was quiet. It wasn’t hectic. You could listen without your ears getting blasted out and you could get involved in the music and the singers. The atmosphere is what attracted me more than anything.”

          Now she’s a senior and the publicity director for the coffeehouse, diminutive chief assistant to ebullient director Judy Castanza. She’s even taken up the autoharp.

          “I saw Brian Bowers playing one at our folk festival in ’73 and I knew I had to do it,” she says. “I’m not very good at it all. It’s just fiddling around, but it’s nice to be able to play.”

* * *

ONCE THE folk boom started waning in the late ‘60s, it seemed to give up its brightest artists to the star-making machinery of the popular song and then disappeared into the underground.

          What’s left is a certain tight-knit purity, uncorrupted by electrical instruments and commercial considerations. And the old sentiments are still there too.

          Like saving the earth, elevating the downtrodden, kidding with the powerful, celebrating the simple joys of poetic love and poetic highways, passing down the lore of wanderers and saviors, victories and disasters.

          There’s the throb of the railroad, the mystery of the sea, the thrill of discovering the brotherhood of humanity in the initially dissonant heartsprings of unknown cultures, some of them no more than a bus ride away.

          “Utah Phillips is the closest thing to Woody Guthrie we have right now,” Judy Castanza says, “as far as singing about the country and the unions, the problems of ecology and the poetry of his lyrics.

* * *

“EVERYBODY thinks that Pete Seeger is the grandfather of all this, but he’s so withdrawn. Utah’s a people’s person. When he comes to Buffalo, he goes down to Chippewa Street and talks to the people. Then he gets up on stage and tells stories and sings about them.

          “If it wasn’t for this coffeehouse, there would be no place in Buffalo you could go to hear music like this. If you wanted to hear Utah Phillips, you’d have to go to Toronto or Rochester. It wouldn’t be in Buffalo.”

          Judy is 30, ten years older than Rebecca. She was a regular folk performer at the Rue Franklin West until about two years ago, when she got back into school full-time. Her three foster children are along, this being a school holiday. They go with her to the coffeehouse too.

          “Harold loves Utah Phillips,” she says. “You can identify with his songs. It doesn’t matter if you don’t care about trains and unions. You will once you hear him.

          “I just came around to hear Alhaji Ben Konte one night and asked the guy who was running the coffeehouse, David Benders, if I could help. Three days later he calls me and says would you pick up Jean Ritchie at the airport. Jean Ritchie!

* * *

“REBECCA and I were on the committee last year, taking tickets, putting up the performers, cleaning tables, hanging up curtains. The only thing we got out of was sweeping floors.

          “We started doing the whole thing this summer. We’ve got anywhere from 12 to 20 people helping, but it’s a lot of work. Last year we did a lot of partying with the performers and got to jam with them. This year we haven’t had a chance.”

          The coffeehouse has gone to Wednesday and Thursday nights this year to avoid conflicts with the Pub in the Rathskeller on weekends, so it’s hurt attendance a little on what essentially is a shoestring financial operation.

          Even so, the crowd for Staines and McCaslin was bigger than what they got for then-unknown Maria Muldaur two years ago.

* * *

JUDY and Rebecca now are planning a mini-festival for Nov. 16 and 17, evening concerts both days with a Sunday full of workshops. Utah Phillips will be there. So will Rosalie Sorrels, Michael Cooney, Toronto’s Friends of Fiddler’s Green and Fennig’s All-Star String Band, plus some local performers.

          “There really isn’t any other place in Buffalo you can get together to learn bluegrass fiddle or autoharp or dulcimer or to trade songs,” Judy says.

          “We’d like to become sort of a clearing house for folk music people here, get records for them and things like that.

          “All the big cities have folk clubs. Rochester has a big one. We’d really like to see one here in Buffalo. Remember that feeling you got from the first folk festival you went to? Well, that same feeling is here at the coffeehouse.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Mary McCaslin and Jim Ringer performing at UB’s UUAB Coffeehouse.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Judy Castanza got married in 1980, became Judy Castanza Zygmunt, the mother of four children, and kept an abiding love of folk music.  She made her home on Grand Island and worked as a secretary at the West Seneca Developmental Center, which closed in 2011. She died in 2014.

Her assistant, Rebecca Kutlin, is now a writer, editor, storyteller and improv performer, according to her LinkedIn page. Based in Berkeley, Calif., in 1982 she started her own service, The Right Words Inc., doing technical writing and editing for businesses. In 1986, she was co-author of a handbook, “Desktop Publishing from A to Z.”

 

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