April 16, 1977 review: UB Folk Festival

For the UB Folk Festival and the folk scene in general, this was a far cry from the glory days of the early 1970s, but it still had a wonderfully eclectic lineup. 

April 16, 1977

Cooney, Elliott Provide

Mixed Folk Repertoire

           Michael Cooney stirs a spoon of honey into his tea at the afternoon reception in the Tralfamadore Café prior to the UB Folk Festival Friday and says he just wrote an essay called “A Case Against Famous.”

          “The kind of music I play is by nature esoteric,” says the emcee of the Festival’s opening night show in Clark Gym. “Therefore, if lots of people like it, then I must be doing something wrong.”

          Bob Dylan was spoiled by fame, Cooney says, and Leon Redbone’s on the verge of spoiling. A moment later, an unspoiled singer in a cowboy hat comes to the table. It’s Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

          Cooney introduces him as “one of the few living legends on the American folk scene” halfway through the show and darned if he doesn’t sound like early Dylan – meandering phrases, three-finger guitar picking, even the vocal inflections.

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BUT ELLIOTT’S a rambling performer too, and there’s none of Dylan’s harshness in this gentle man. Couples start defecting during Woody Guthrie’s “New York Town.”

          The mostly student crowd of about 900 had grown more and more enthusiastic for the three previous acts, each a picture of contemporary urban folk.

          Sunrise Highway exemplified paying dues locally. A UB duo newly expanded with an electric bassist, their hot guitars and submerged vocals balanced for a final Grateful Dead “Friend of the Devil.”

          Raun MacKinnon typified toughing it out in Greenwich Village. She pushed her bassist and guitarist through her jazz-flavored music with breakneck vigor on piano, finishing with a flourish of scat singing.

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BUFFALO GALS demonstrated the sell-out. The female fivesome from Upstate New York, newly transplanted to Nashville, featured a rookie violinist who really cooked and a guitarist who recovered miraculously fast from two broken strings.

          Tom Paxton follows Elliott. A giant of the early ‘60s, he now looks like the comic Rob Reiner. And he’s just as funny.

          But the things that inspire the old folk festival we-are-all-kindred-spirits feeling are his ballads – “Ramblin’ Boy” and then the big one, “Last Thing on My Mind.”

          Paxton takes three encores. Since he opted to play next to last, the Robert Junior Lockwood Blues Band comes on at nearly 1 a.m. to a diminishing audience which listens in vain for Lockwood’s jazz chords on the big hollow-body electric guitar.

          The festival continues in Squire Norton Hall with music workshops and craft exhibits this afternoon, a second concert evening with Cooney, the Boys of the Lough and Margaret MacArthur at 8 tonight and a country dance workshop from noon to 4 p.m. tomorrow.

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IN THE PHOTOS: Michael Cooney at the 1972 Mariposa Folk Festival; the eternal Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in 1977; promo photos of Raun MacKinnon, the Buffalo Gals, Tom Paxton and Robert Junior Lockwood. 

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FOOTNOTE: Lack of fame hasn’t kept Michael Cooney from having a long career in the folk world. His bio at michaelcooney.com tells us he’s performed at most of the major folk festivals in North America and countless coffeehouses here and in Europe. He even was artistic director of the Mariposa Festival in Toronto in the mid 1980s and was entertainer on the first passenger ship to ever sail around the continent of Antarctica. He lives in a little coastal town in Maine called Friendship, about 30 miles southeast of Augusta.

          Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is 91 years old and still performing. He was one of the attractions at a Woody Guthrie Birthday Celebration in Novato, Calif., in July and the New York Times just wrote him up in September. There’s more about his exploits at ramblinjackelliott.com.

          Also still taking the stage is Tom Paxton, who's 84. The next couple weeks find him at some venerable folk clubs – Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem, Pa.; Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass., and the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va. – and one of the newer venues, City Winery in New York City. 

           Robert Junior Lockwood kept playing regular club gigs with his band in his adopted hometown of Cleveland from the 1970s until two days before his death at the age of 91 in 2006. 

          On her website, raunmackinnonburnham.com, Raun MacKinnon Burnham notes that “after a lot of touring, I stopped performing professionally for some neurotic reasons, some merely practical.” She’s still recording, though, and now has produced six albums. The most recent one, “Odd Little Concert,” appeared in 2019.

          I’m remiss for not paying better attention to the Buffalo Gals. There was much to like about them. First of all, they coalesced in 1974 on the campus of my alma mater, Syracuse University. And then they had a singular distinction, as I discovered when I found a 2015 article by Devon Leger in No Depression magazine headlined “Looking Back at the First All-Female Bluegrass Band.”

Leger tracked them down. Guitarist and vocalist Martha Trachtenberg had her songs have been covered by Tony Trischka. Living in Huntington, L.I., these days, she has sung jingles in New York City and plays in a group called the Folk Goddesses.

Banjo player and vocalist Susie Monick was Trischka’s first student, Leger writes, and she stayed in Nashville. She plays a bunch of other instruments, including musical saw; does clay sculptures and appeared 15 times on the ABC television series “Nashville.”

         And then there’s bassist Nancy Josephson. After the Buffalo Gals broke up in the late 1970s, she went on to play with Arlo Guthrie and her husband, who happens to be David Bromberg. They now live in a house they restored in downtown Wilmington, Del., where Bromberg also has his fabled violin repair and restoration shop.