Baker's Buskers

"Down on the corner, out in the street Willy and the Poor Boys are playin' Bring a nickel, tap your feet"-Credence Clearwater Revival

Cary Baker’s father took him on a trip to the big city of Chicago when he was a boy to show him the old flea market on Maxwell St that his parents and he had also traversed. Instead of the market, Baker was introduced to the land where electric blues began…but to begin with, the musician known as the busker. The street player. The public entertainer. Baker was already aware of the blues, but to see it live…to walk up to the musician and hear him bend old familiar songs adding new lyrics about the here and now…THAT was a revelation. It was a revelation triggering a life passion about the world of the busker, leading to the now publishing of his debut book, Down On The Corner: Adventures In Busking And Street Music, which came out last week.

Cary Baker

I have known Cary Baker for decades. He is one of those friends who magically appears next to you at a particularly amazing live show, usually at a peak moment in the artist’s set, exchanging that look you give a friend that both says hello and acknowledges the amazing sounds coming from the stage. Cary spent a bulk of his career as a music press agent, working for a half dozen labels before launching Conqueroo, his PR company, that he ran forever. We worked together a number of times over the years. He was one of the early champions of The Idelsohn Society, the record label I co-founded with three friends that looked at the Jewish experience in the mid-20th century through the lens of released records (To the Idelsohns: I miss you guys!).

One day Cary and I were talking on the phone when he told me that he was working a new release of recently found Son House live recordings…and that working this record, with the recordings of one of the greatest bluesmen of all time, was a perfect last chapter to his PR career. He was heading for Palm Springs, and he was planning to start writing. After a few scratched ideas, he decided to focus on the subject which had interested him from childhood: the world of the busker. Since that time at Maxwell Street with his father, Baker had traveled the states…the world…hanging out on the streets when such musicians sat and played. As a young reporter, he was label-whisked to Milwaukee to see a young band of buskers that had just gotten signed to legendary punk label Slash Records by equally legendary A&R person Anna Statman (miss you too!). The band was The Violent Femmes and Baker hit the scene hearing the songs that would make up their iconic first record before they had gone into a studio…while they were writing them as they played, busking on the streets of their hometown.

The Violent Femmes story is just one of so many that Cary celebrates in his wonderful new book. Down on the Corner is not a book just about busking though, it is a book that investigates the journey of a song, especially in the days before sharing via the internet was “a thing.” Songs, stories, ideas that were shared from city to city by the street musician, who would often bring the news from far off places to new communities, just as often pulling ideas and melodies from the musicians they met along the way to take forward. Our history has been partly defined by these road rabbis, preaching their interpretations of our human experience.

Cary was good enough to allow me to post an excerpt from his book (which you can purchase here)….the story of the mysterious singer/songwriter Oliver Smith. It is a perfect example of the treasures that are found in Down On The Corner. Thank you Cary for allowing me to print it…

Oliver Smith: An Ordinary Man

In 1966, record producer Peter K. Siegel – a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene and then a full-time employee of Elektra Records – was walking around Elektra’s offices on W. 51st St. in Manhattan. He may have been headed to the Sam Goody’s record store where he’d frequently buy LPs. Or he may have been walking home. Whatever his destination, he heard a singer on the sidewalk who turned his head.

Peter K. Siegel

He forgets exactly where the singer was perched: “I think it was probably I probably on Seventh Avenue or Broadway in the 40s. That's what I'm guessing.”

In any event, he stopped to listen. There, a white man who appeared to be in his mid-50s was standing with his service dog, playing vintage country, folk and blues songs in Midtown Manhattan.

Siegel doesn’t want to say he “discovered” Smith: “I'm generally not sympathetic for the term ‘discover,’ but I did meet him and record him all in one day.”

But let’s not get too far ahead of the narrative.

Siegel, then 21 or 22 years old, says, “I heard this voice, and it was busy out on the street. But I found my way through and heard him singing. And I knew immediately he was really good. I had listened to a lot of old-time country records and I had listened to lots of good Tanner in the Skillet Lickers. I had a I already had a whole batch of recordings by Tanner in the Skillet Lickers which featured Riley Puckett.”

And that’s who this stranger reminded him of.

Siegel introduced himself to the singer. He said his name was Oliver Smith, and that he was a native of the Atlanta, Ga. metro area. He told the story of their meeting in what would become the liner notes of Smith’s first and only album penned by Little Sandy Review editor and pioneering rock critic Paul Nelson (who, in his later years as an A&R man, would go on to sign the New York Dolls to Mercury Records):

“I was walking down around 43th Street and Broadway when I heard this street singer always listen to street singers and I could bear him block away! He was playing a modern country song, 'Crazy Arms,' I think, but the guitar runs and the voice suggested an older style. I asked him if he knew any old songs. He said ‘Yes,’ and played [the country classic] ‘I Only Want A Buddy, Not A Sweetheart.' It sounds like you've been listening to Riley Puckett,’ I said. ‘Riley Puckett!' he said. 'I used to play with Riley Puckett all the time!’ He seemed impressed by someone who had heard of Riley Puckett and played me about half dozen more old-time songs. I asked if he'd ever been recorded. No, he said. Would he record tonight? I wondered. ‘Well, I'm doing pretty well here tonight,’ he said. 'I might make $10 or $15." I told him that recording fees were far more than that. He said that in that case, he'd be interested.”

Smith is quoted in Nelson’s notes as well, further attesting to his humble, work-a-day nature:

“[Smith’s] speech is relaxed, both considered and considerate, his language gentle and Southern, yet, like James Agee's, almost Elizabethan at times in its unexpected turns and phrasings. He constantly underplays, to really incredible degree, the drama and uniqueness of his own life: ‘I am just an average person with a wife and daughter. I sing and play the best I can. I specialize in this old-type music. There's not much more to be said.’ Here is Smith, with his typical, straightforward modesty, summing up the first 55 years of his life, covering, at one point in the monologue, in single sentence, his entire 37 years of street singing.”

Siegel wasn’t fully authorized to sign artists to Elektra at that point. And he’d also produced for Folkways Records and for County Records, a small Virginia-based label specializing in old-timey and traditional bluegrass music. Nonetheless, he was nearby to the Elektra office and decided to give his employer first refusal on the project.

“I eventually was a staff producer and an A&R person and Elektra. But when I was first hired, Elektra had this thing called producer-engineers, which meant that all their producers were trained as an engineer. At the time I went there, Paul Rothchild was there and Mark Abramson was there. Paul and Mark were so-called producer engineers. I was like, working in the engineering department, assisting Paul and Mark and [label president] Jac Holzman.”

Oliver Smith

In either event, Siegel decided to get the singer from Georgia into the studio that day, and fronted the recording costs himself.

He tells the story of persuading Smith to step off the street and into the studio: “When I asked him if he wouldn't come record, he said, ‘I’m doing pretty well [performing] there. I might make $10 and I mentioned that I I told him that I would pay him for the session. Union scale, that time for a session was $60 for a three-hour session. And that overcame his objection about that he would have preferred to stay and make money on the street. And he was he was a very powerful performer. I mean, I don't know how much it comes across on the record. but my impression at the time, was he was just he had a loud, projecting voice and he had this Gibson I think it was a J-45. And he was just real powerful.”

“I recorded him and paid for the studio time myself that day,” Siegel says. “I did that because I wanted to do it right away because I thought if I didn't do it right then and there. I might never find them again. He was an itinerant musician; he could have left him the next day. So I persuaded him to. I hadn't become familiar with Mastertone recording studios. It was at 130 W. 42nd Street. It was where Elektra made all its records. I called them up and said I want to make this record. And they had a couple of hours of time and they let me come over and be the engineer and producer, if you will. But at that time, I wasn't thinking it was something that Elektra would want I had in my mind. That I could place it with County Records.”

Elektra founder Holzman had made a career of being musically open-minded. At some point, his New York-based label known for folk music (Theodore Bikel, Ed McCurdy, Oscar Brand, and Judy Collins) morphed into a Los Angeles rock label that signed The Doors and Love. His personal motto, also the title of his eventual memoir, was “follow the music.”

“I didn't persuade Jac to do anything,” he clarifies. “I may have told him that I recorded this guy and I'll probably give it the County Records. But when [Jac] heard it, he said he wanted it.”

Smith was accompanied in New York that day by his wife as well as his dog, and lodged at an inexpensive hotel in Midtown. He described himself to Siegel as an itinerant musician. He had apparently recorded two sides in the prewar 78 RPM era that were never released.

“After I recorded him and when Jac said he wanted it, I was able to call them at the hotel. I think I call them or get in touch with him somehow. Maybe I went over there, I don't remember. But anyway, he and his wife came into the Elektra office and signed a recording contract, and then he was off again,” Siegel recalls. “That's what his life was. He was an itinerant musician in his words. So yeah, I never saw him again after I recorded him.”

The album contained 14 songs of 17 recorded that day, among them a few originals including “Manhattan Blues,” and a few country classics such as “I Only Want A Buddy” and “Just A Closer Walk With Thee.” Siegel describes Smith as “sort of a white songster sometimes the blues sometimes you get ragtime and sometimes you get old country songs.”

Elektra released it in 1966. Siegel never heard from the “itinerant musician” again.

And that would be the perfect place to end the story…except:

Nominees were shortly thereafter announced for the 1966 GRAMMY Awards. And there in the folk category were Ravi Shankar, Chad Mitchell Trio, Peter Paul & Mary, Pete Seeger, Richard Farina, Nashville blues busker Cortelia Clark, and…can it be?...Oliver Smith!

Siegel looks back on that night: “And as I recall, I think Felton Jarvis of RCA gave a spoken introduction at the beginning of the album about how Cortelia Clark was a street singer. And then he said, ‘Now let's go out on the street and listen to him!’ And you hear these car horns and street sounds. But they sure sounded like it was a studio recording with street overdubs. Cortelia Clark had some of the same types of progressions that Oliver Smith used. And I thought it was interesting: two street singers, competing for the same Grammy Award!”

Close to six decades after the day Smith caught his ear, Siegel remains proud of his work with Smith:

“[Smith] was a journeyman musician,” he says “He was a professional musician. I don't think he was thinking of it as his big break. I think he was just there to do his best singing. And I do remember they were pretty much all first takes, you know, I mean, he just went right through it. I mean, he must have sung this on so many thousands of times – he just sang them beautifully from beginning to end.

“And I didn't really do anything but you know, I put some mics up and I press the record button.”

Smith went on to make one more recording five years later, titled Street Singer and released by Triagle (sic) Far Records. The LP, according to Discogs, was recorded in Jacksonville, Fla. by Ken Davidson of Kanawha Records, cut in April and May 1971 on a Nagra recorder loaned by the Smithsonian Institute. Two Jacksonville area musicians assisted: Roy Jones on lead guitar and Bob Patterson on 12-string guitar.

~fin~