In 1959 a folk song was the number one song on the radio. The song was "Tom Dooley", a tragic tale of infidelity and murder which, like most folk songs, somehow sounded like fun when sung with banjo and guitar. It was performed by the Kingston Trio, three well-scrubbed college boys in matched striped shirts who offered white, middle-class America a relief from the rebellious sexuality of Elvis Presley and the black musicians he imitated.
The folk revival was on. I was six years old.
My father brought the Kingston Trio's first album into our home in the New Jersey suburbs, and I fell in love with the music. By 1960 I had saved $17.95 from my allowance to buy the worst guitar I have ever played. Within three years I was singing the songs of the Weavers, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary. My parents dutifully transported me to their concerts. (They loved the Weavers, but my father never did think much of Dylan's voice).
In the early sixties, even Plainfield, New Jersey, had a coffeehouse. Having graduated to a playable instrument, I performed regularly at the open mikes, singing in my boy soprano Dylan's "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", Tom Paxton's "Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound" and "Daily News", Malvina Reynold's "Little Boxes" and "What Have They Done to the Rain?" and Phil Ochs's "There but for Fortune" and "Ballad of William Worthy". (I had no idea who William Worthy was, but I loved the song.) I learned much of my repertoire from Broadside, the topical song magazine, of which I must have been one of the youngest subscribers at age ten.
My parents were not particularly political. Although they have grown more liberal since, both voted for Eisenhower twice, and my mother voted for Richard Nixon in 1960. (By 1972, she was canvassing for McGovern.) She repeated to me what her parents had told her, that Frankly Roosevelt was "a traitor to his class". But my parents were avid supporters of their children's interests and avocations, including their son's guitar playing and singing. In 1964 we piled into the family car to drive to the Philadelphia Folk Festival. At our motel, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Gil Turner were enjoying the swimming pool. I brazenly followed Paxton to the Coke machine and struck up a conversation. When I asked his advice for a young guitarist, he suggested I work on my fingerpicking. (I did.) The next year at Philadelphia, I heard Ochs sing his stunning antiwar anthem, "I Ain't A'Marchin' Anymore". It shook me, disturbed me, made me think, and left me with an indelible impression of the power of a political song.
By the end of the 1960s the folk revival was fading as a mass phenomenon. I continued to play and sing for friends and at occasional school and college events, but my career plans were focusing on environmental law. After graduating from Yale in 1974, I entered the University of Michigan Law School. But a funny thing happened on my way to the practice of law. On the morning of my Civil Procedure examination in my first term, when I was planning to review my course outline one last time, I wrote a song about land use. It was not a good song, but it was good enough to encourage me to write another the next day, this one about energy conservation. ("Meeting America's Energy Needs", a spoof of oil company advertising that I continued to perform for several years thereafter.) Two weeks later I wrote a third song, "Death in Disguise", which was eventually recorded on my Heart of the Appaloosa album and is included in this book.
Although my performance on the Civil Procedure exam was nothing to write home about, I persisted in my legal studies. I left Michigan in 1978 with a J.D. and M.S. in Natural Resources Policy and Management, and after a brief stint in Denver, landed my dream job in Boston: staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation of New England, a regional public-interest law firm. At CLF I worked on litigation to prevent off-shore oil exploration on Georges Bank (we lost the suit but were successful in making the drilling safer), utility rate proceedings, and public recreation lands policy.
Meanwhile the music was becoming more and more exciting. In 1979 the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island nearly melted down, and the national anti-nuclear movement took off. I had been performing at antinuke events for years, but after TMI the rallies that had been drawing a couple of hundred people began to draw thousands and even hundreds of thousands. Although rally planners now could count on perfomrers like Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, they didn't forget me. I found myself leading vast crowds singing choruses of "Stand Up" and "Three Mile Island". Thousands of people who had never heard of me would be on their feet, singing, clapping, dancing. Most important, they would be participating in the rally--not passively consuming it as entertainment, but tapping the power of music within them. I would leave the stage feeling exhilarated, overwhemed, privileged to have ignited that incredible human energy.
Law began to seem a little tame. Nobody applauds at oral argument. Lawyers talk mostly to other lawyers. Music was putting me in touch with all kinds of people, united in their idealism and generosity. I grew frustrated confining my music to my spare time. I decided that I could be a middle-aged lawyer any time, but if I wanted to be a musician I had better get started while I still had the enthusiasm, resilience, and minimal financial obligations. Fifteen months after starting the perfect job in environmental law, I quit.
I've never regretted it. Oh, it would have been fun to litigate against James Watt, but I sang about him instead. Instead of public-interest law, I practice public-interest music. Instead of suing to force compliance with good laws, I sing to energize people to organize to (among other things) enact the laws in the first place and to keep them on the books. Instead of persuading a judge, I persuade people from all walks of life. Instead of arguing logically from judicial precedent, I sing stories to touch people's hearts as well as minds. Instead of relying on a system of professional experts, I encourage people to take power in their lives, workplaces, and communities.