Andrew Calhoun - Autobiography

Autobiography

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, November 30, 1957. I have two older sisters and a brother. As a child I had some trouble learning to tie my shoes, causing my father considerable frustration. He worked at Bell Labs and most of the rest of the time on a system of philosophy expressed in mathematics. He read us the Bible for two hours every Sunday, although we preferred horsing around with him. My mother liked to cook and made jars of oatmeal cookies. She read us wonderful books and poems, including the Iliad - 5 times – walked fast and yelled a lot. She paid me a nickel to memorize Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Aengus.” My brother memorized all of “The Congo,” by Vachel Lindsay. “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, barrel-house kings with feet unstable, sagged and reeled and pounded on the table”

My mother leapt from topic to topic in conversation, sometimes in mid-sentence. This influence is revealed in manic songs like "Never Enough" and "A Seat in the Mezzanine." We lived in a large Victorian house in Long Branch, New Jersey, which had a carriage house, a grape arbor and raspberry patch, and two apple trees. There was a stained glass window, a coal bin, and a rooms full of aborigine shields and weapons in the basement. The place had been owned previously by an archeologist.

I became and remain a baseball fan and played all day most days with my brother Matthew, who generously handicapped himself to include me. My mother attended Middlebuy College in Vermont for five summers en route to an MA in French. I remember getting up very early with my brother Matthew and sister Ellen and crossing the bridge over Otter Creek to get a glazed donut at the bakery. We'd go to Lake Dunmore many days. A good deal of my time was spent in searching for dimes in phone booth slots, and finding Pepsi bottles to return for two cents. Marvel Comics (Thor was my favorite) cost 12 cents then. Once at the end of a languid day at Lake Dunmore, Matthew was looking to round me up so we could go home. A friend of his pointed to a distant trash can with two legs sticking out of it. I emerged momentarily, with a Pepsi bottle.

In 1968, my father was transferred to Naperville, IL. I played a couple of years of Little League baseball, one of the only experiences of childhood which brought me into harmony with my peers. I threw a slow pitch, which would sink over the plate, not due to spin but due to lack of velocity, with pinpoint control. And I played outfield and first base.

My mother had been teaching high school and a couple of students with family troubles came out from New Jersey to live with us. They were hippies, and played guitars, so I asked for one. My first useful lessons were with Anne Jones, whose family still teaches folk music in Lombard, Illinois.

In 1970, my mother read a blurb in the Chicago Sun-Times about a mailman who sang his own songs. My parents went down to hear him, and then brought the rest of us with them, every weekend for a year. It was John Prine. I was usually up late trying to learn Elizabeth Cotton and Mississippi John Hurt fingerpicking tunes, and would have dropped out of Glenbard West High School except for one great English teacher, Bernice Pond. I listened to Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Etta Baker, Joseph Spence, Martin Carthy, Joni Mitchell, Leo Kottke, Ewan MacColl, Leonard Cohen, etc. Carthy remains my favorite living musician, a steady beacon of musical integrity and imagination.

My earliest performances were as part of The Osbornes, a group comprised of me and my brother and Doug Tursman on banjo. We gave free shows in our basement. At 13 I began writing songs and performing in coffeehouses (after the bitter break-up of the Osbornes) solo. At 15 I lied about my age and worked all summer at Cintas garment factory to earn the money for a Martin D-28. At 16 I began driving into Chicago to play at open stages at The Earl of Old Town, Somebody Else's Troubles, etc. On Monday nights, you could start at Troubles, go over two doors to Papa's III if you could stand the noise and smoke, thence to the Earl which had a 4 o'clock license. Chicago was a good place to be. I saw Odetta, Jim Post, Cyril Tawney, Jean Ritchie, Clancy & Makem, Rosalie Sorrels, Blind Jim Brewer, Art Thieme, Margaret Christl, Homesick James, Paul Geremia, Gamble Rogers, Andres Segovia, Vassar Clements, The Newgrass Revival, Leo Kottke, Kris Kristofferson, Loudon Wainwright III, Martin, Bogan and the Armstrongs, Norman Blake, Jean Redpath, and Leonard Cohen perform there when I was in my teens. And some great people you've never heard of. Steve Goodman used to borrow my Martin at open mike nights at Troubles.

From age 17-20, I read most of the complete works of Joseph Conrad. I performed monthly at a social center for streeet alcoholics founded by James Harper, called "Save the Alcoholic" and later the "Center for Street People," now "Harper House." My first recording, "Water Street," was funded by a couple on the board, Dick and Nan Conser, and recorded by Mike Rasfeld at Acme Studios in Chicago. That 1983 recording, "Water Street," finally got me working in Chicago clubs and led to two more LPs during the 80's with Flying Fish, "The Gates of Love" and "Walk Me To The War." James Harper, ex-alcoholic and ex-con, was ordained a minister two days before his death from cancer. He requested that I sing "You Will Know God" at the ordination. His wife Anne, a good friend who ran the coffeehouse/music part of CSP, died of a heart attack a few years later.

I married young, had a couple kids, the estimable Louis and Casey, and got divorced. I published a book, "Twenty-Four Poems" and a solo guitar tape, "Banks of Sweet Primroses." I played for 4 years as a solo guitarist (classical, folk & blues) at Evanston's Blind Faith Café, and for a year at Chicago's Third Coast Coffeehouse. In 1990 I went to the Kerrville festival where I connected with other songwriters. I teamed for several years with Kat Eggleston. We toured the US and Europe, and made a couple duo tapes of folk songs, ballads and tunes ("Jack Spratt" and "First Comes Love", from material we performed at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin for several summers, both out of print).

In 1992 I founded an artists' cooperative label called Waterbug Records. Waterbug has released 60 odd titles by 35 artists, and carry many more hard-to-find titles by mail order. I love discovering devoted artists and helping them to be heard. Waterbug was the first to distribute music by Chuck Brodsky, Cosy Sheridan, Kate MacLeod, Dar Williams, Erin McKeown, Rose Polenzani, Steve Fisher, Gina Forsyth, Sloan Wainwright, Sons of the Never Wrong, Erin Corday, Michael McNevin, Lui Collins and others.
I made 3 more CDs during the 90's, "Hope", "Phoenix Envy" and "Where Blue Meets Blue." Waterbug was honored with a two hour mainstage showcase at the Kerrville Festival in 1999. In 1997, I began teaching songwriting groups with a human potential angle, and continued to work at music. I moved to Portland, Oregon in late 1999. Went through a horrendous bout of tendinitis, and if you have something similar, check out activerelease.com and find an active tissue release practitioner. The Graston technique is great as well. I worked some temp jobs and used the time to write some reviews, memorize poems and work on songs. Waterbug ceased releasing recordings for 4 years and my songwriting turned in the direction of story songs.

A highlight of my 5 years in Portland was a friendship with Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. Dave created a vocal arrangement for my song "Joy" on Thanksgiving, 2001, and he and Tracy and Claire Bard sang on the recording for "Tiger Tattoo." Dave Carter passed away in July, 2002 at the age of 49. I was visiting my folks in Illinois the week he died, and began learning his "Gentle Arms of Eden." My mother was disabled and bedridden. I sang it through twice, and she said, "Who wrote that?" "Dave." "David in the Bible?" I went on a hundred day tour that Fall, the longest of my life, and took Dave and Tracy's CDs with me to sell and told their story. Tracy learned the guitar parts to songs she used to play fiddle on. A few days after I returned to Portland, she, with Donny Wright on bass and guitar, played a rehearsal show for their upcoming California tour, performing Dave Carter's music. It was so damn sad to see them up on that stage without him. But Tracy was poised, and funny, and genuine, she belted and bent notes and gave us back the music, even when it was breaking her heart, and by the end of the night there was nothing in that room but joy. It's the bravest thing I've ever seen a person do. Dave told me early in the summer he died that he wanted to retire from the road and have Tracy be the voice of his songs. And so it is.

My songs prove useful for certain people at certain times. A man in California wrote to me: "I like your always surprising poem-songs, all of which demand from a listener a certain kind of attention. I always come away from listening to one of your recordings looking at everything with fresh eyes; thank you for that, for it helps me get back to a place when I once met the world everyday as if I were going into it for the first time. It's hard some days to remember what the world looked like before you had a word for anything."

And so one keeps on. And mainly because, well, it's fun. I've performed at coffeehouses, cafes, coffee bars, bars, clubs, pubs, corn roasts, festivals, nursing homes, reformatories, prep schools, high schools, colleges, house concerts, Renaissance fairs, Highland games, poetry slams, and on a float, sitting between the legs of a giant frog. It was to save "frog hollow," an undeveloped part of Palatine, IL, and the float won first prize. I received $50 and a sunburn. A few other performances stand out in my memory.

At the Sheepshead Café in Iowa City in the mid 80's, I was playing in their outside seating area, a few picnic tables, a small stage. Toward the end of the night I played three songs in a row, "The Hanging," "Willie," and "You Will Know God/LaGrima" and no one applauded, they just listened. An older man came up to me afterwards and said, "so there's hope." One night in the early 90's at Chicago's No Exit, I was singing with my eyes closed, and had the feeling I was singing to a spirit in the room. I opened my eyes and everyone in the audience had their eyes closed.

In my early twenties, I had a weakness for Peppermint Schnappes. At Durty Dick's Pub on Chicago's West Side, I was finishing my third set at midnight, when someone sent up a schnappes. I downed it, and did a funny song. Someone sent another, and I did more funny songs, and comedy bits, and improvisations, keeping straight on until two AM. People were crying and holding their sides. I drank seven schnappes, and have never been so funny before or since. Linda Black (now Maio, and living in Florida) and I went to Dunkin' Donuts and drank a lot of coffee afterwards. I don't drink schappes or coffee anymore, but still hear from Linda now and again.

I spent more of 2003 obsessively translating oral tradition ballads from old Scots dialect; the result is the CD "Telfer's Cows: Folk Ballads From Scotland," which came out way better than I'd hoped, and scored me some ink in Dirty Linen, from an interview with Pamela Murray Winters, one of the finest journalists in Folk. Well, there are only six, really, but she's up near the top. "Shadow of a Wing" followed, 18 songs which to me represent Andrew's stupid journey through the world of love; a look at the workings of idealization, betrayal, forgiveness and acceptance.

2004 saw the revival of the Waterbug label with a new team of artists, among them Jonathan Byrd, Anais Mitchell, Louis Ledford, Rachel Ries, Michael Troy and Karen Mal, and two new samplers, "Waterbug Anthology 7" and "Vote in November: Election 2004 Anti-Theft Device", our first political CD. Arie Koelewyn hand-printed a new collection of my poems, "Hay," released in April of 2005 on East Lansing, Michigan's, Paper Airplane Press. In 2005 I recorded "Staring at the Sun", a solo CD of songs I wrote between 1973 and 1981.

These days I do poems in my shows - Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and had plans for a CD alternating songs and poems by different writers, where Dave Carter and Annie Gallup would hang out with Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay. However, I was declined permission to record some of the poems, so it is not to be. I can record any published song for a standard (and reasonable) fee, but there is no standard for recording poems.

My mother passed away on the 30th of April, 2006. The night before she died, we sang her songs she'd taught us, including "All God's Chil'n Got Shoes". Since she hadn't been able to walk for her last year, the song hit home in a new way. And it struck me that the heaven in the song was not some concept of heaven, but, simply, the glorious and infinite sky around us. And that my mother was going there. "When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, I'm gonna walk all over God's heaven." In the wake of her passing, I began tracking down spirituals and studying their history and the story of slavery in America. There's a great source book called "Slave Songs of the United States", published in 1867, full of obscure gems - I've only ever heard three of the 130 songs performed - and it includes the original, more lyrically vivid "Michael Row the Boat Ashore", a Sea Islands rowing song addressed to the archangel Michael, a prayer for safe passage. This book is a pure source of the real thing. The spirituals were popularized in classical choral arrangements, but to me the original, wild way of using songs in participatory ritual to bind and lift an oppressed community is much more interesting. You can hear it on Alan Lomax' field recordings (Rounder's Southern Journey Series) of Bessie Jones, John Davis and the other Georgia Sea Island singers, recorded around 1960 and still performing in the old call and response/ring shout style. My mother was Jewish, a former union steward who shouted "Jim Crow Must Go!" on sound trucks in the early Civil Rights movement, and drove into the Beethoven School in Chicago to tutor poor kids until she was too sick to drive. I'm fascinated by the connection between the Biblical story of Exodus, and what the African Americans did with it, finding the living heart of a religion twisted beyond recognition by centuries of institutionalized idolatry and sham. I expect to record some of this music after a few more months of research. Because, you know, it's public domain, as, in the new Jerusalem, everything will be. I try not to take these songs for granted anymore.

Bessie Jones sings,

My name written on David line
My name written on David line
My name written on David line
I'm goin' to heaven on the wheel of time
Adam and Eve, don't tell it to me
Just meet me at the door...

"I did not come here myself my Lord
It was my Lord who brought me here
I really do believe I'm a child of God
A-walking in the heaven I roam..." -anonymous enslaved theologian

My daughter Casey Calhoun is now performing in shows with me, singing harmonies and lead vocals, and doing interpretive dance to songs and poems. She sings "Bushel and a Peck", from Guys and Dolls, and "Hymn For the Exiled" by Anais Mitchell, and dances to "Egrets" by Mary Oliver. She's a pearl, that Casey. In July 2006, she danced several songs on the mainstage at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival at the invitation of Dan Bern.

It’s always the beginning of the dream
That started with the men behind the scene
With the lotus ever-knowing and the holy women rowing
I know you know exactly what I mean

-Andrew Calhoun