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The House Carpenter
This recording is unique in a number of ways. It was made by the Redwood
Canyon Ramblers at the same time as the four songs (my compositions) that
are included
on my 2008 CD, Places I’ve Been, but it has never
before been available to the public. The arrangement was one that popped
into my head
in the early sixties when the RCR consisted of Scott Hambly, Pete Berg, and
myself, and I believe it is the only existing bluegrass treatment of the
song.
Furthermore, the song itself is special. It is the
oldest in our repertoire, going back at least into
the 1600s.
Francis James Child’s famous ballad
collection gave it the number 243 and the title “James Harris (The Daemon
Lover),” and the song was known in England, Ireland, and Scotland
and before it traveled to America. The original story concerned the return
of
a ghostly
sailor, missing for three years, to his ex-lover who had married a carpenter
and borne his children. In American versions, the supernatural elements
tend to be downplayed and many verses are dropped.
The musicians are Mayne Smith, vocal and guitar; Scott
Hambly, mandolin; Neil Rosenberg, banjo; Ed Neff, fiddle;
and Tom Glass, bass
This
poster, designed and produced by our bass player, Tom
Glass,
was used chiefly to advertise the Washington
School concert discussed in Neil's "Brief History." It
was photocopied onto yellow 8.5" x 14" paper,
but the part not included in this scan was left blank.
A technical note for bluegrass musicians: a separate photo
of Tom was physically cobbled onto the illustration, and
the pegheads of Mayne's and Neil's instruments were trimmed
down to make the result look better. Mayne was playing
a D-28 borrowed from Scott. Neil's banjo was a "bow-tie" Gibson
Mastertone with a flathead tone ring. More specifically,
it's a 1954 RB-250 with a 1933 RB-4 flathead pot installed
by Campbell Coe in June of 1960. You can't see it in the
photo, but Scott was playing a Gibson F4 (no serial number!)
on loan from Campbell Coe.(See Scott Hambly's obituary
for Campbell in the PIECES
OF OUR MINDS section.)
Neil
has been my friend and musical colleague since 1953,
when my family moved to Berkeley. Of course, Neil is
now a distinguished teacher and scholar, as well as
an accomplished bluegrass-style banjo player. His books Bluegrass:
A History (1985), and Bluegrass
Odyssey (with Carl Fleischhauer, 2001),
and The Music of Bill Monroe (with
Charles K. Wolfe, 2007) were published as part of the
influential University of Illinois Press series, Music
in American Life: <www.press.uillinois.edu/books/series/MAL.html>
— Mayne
The Redwood Canyon Ramblers formed in Berkeley,
California, in June 1959. They were the Bay Area's first bluegrass
band, a source of musical influence and inspiration to younger
musicians in the region like Jerry Garcia, Herb Pedersen, Eric
Thompson, Sandy Rothman, Rick Shubb, and Butch Waller.
Prehistory
Scott Hambly, Mayne Smith, and Neil Rosenberg came out of
the Berkeley folk music scene that Rita Weill Byxbe describes
in her notes for Mike Seeger’s documentary album, Berkeley
Farms (Smithsonian-Folkways FW 02436, 1972). Mayne and Neil
had started playing guitars together in 1953 while at Garfield
Junior High School (now Martin Luther King). They met Scott
after all three entered the tenth grade at Berkeley High
School in the fall of 1954.
By 1956
they were part of a group of teenage folk music enthusiasts
who held weekend musical parties at a cabin in Redwood Canyon
(in the hills east of Oakland, near Moraga) that belonged to
the grandfather of a friend of Scott's. Mayne had begun playing
the five-string banjo, initially inspired by Pete Seeger. In
1956 Mayne and Neil were the first of this group to perform
on "The Midnight Special," a live radio program broadcast
every Saturday night from the studios of KPFA-FM in Berkeley.
Mayne and Neil heard bluegrass for the first time when they
started at Oberlin College in Ohio in the fall of 1957. That
Christmas in Berkeley, Scott got his first mandolin. In the
summer of 1958 the trio's concerts in the Bay Area included
a couple of bluegrass pieces with Scott on mandolin, Mayne
on banjo, and Neil on guitar. During 1958-1959 Mayne and Neil
played bluegrass and old-time music at Oberlin with a group
called the Lorain County String Band. Scott, studying at the
University of California, began playing with Pete Berg, a musically
like-minded fellow student from the LA area.
1959-1963
When Mayne and Neil returned to Berkeley from Oberlin in
June 1959, they joined with Scott and Pete to form the
Redwood Canyon
Ramblers. At the outset Scott played mandolin; Mayne, banjo;
Neil, guitar; and Pete, washtub bass. Everyone in the band
contributed to the vocals. Scott had arranged a gig at a
little restaurant on Telegraph (across from Cody's Books)
called The
Peppermint Stick, and proposed putting a band together. Scott
suggested the name, which recalled their high school musical
blasts at Redwood Canyon as well as the New Lost City Ramblers,
another inspirational influence.
In July, illness forced Mayne to stop playing with the band.
In order to keep the band going, Pete moved to guitar, Neil
switched to banjo, and Betty Acyrigg (AKA Betty Mann) was hired
to play bass. They performed frequently until the end of the
summer of 1959, becoming weekly regulars at the Northgate club
on Euclid Avenue just north of the UC campus.
The Ramblers were then inactive until June 1960, when Neil
returned from Oberlin along with fiddler Franklin Miller, who'd
been with him in a new Oberlin band, the Plum Creek Boys. With
Mayne on rhythm guitar they immediately assembled the best-known
version of the Redwood Canyon Ramblers: Scott, mandolin; Mayne,
guitar; Neil, banjo; and Franklin, fiddle. They soon added
jazz bass player Tom Glass, whom Mayne had met at work the
previous year.
They played
frequently that summer at places like Barry Olivier's Continental
Restaurant in Berkeley, the Arena club in North
Beach, and the El Cerrito Plaza mall, as well as regular appearances
on KPFA. At the end of the summer they rented the Washington
School auditorium in central Berkeley and promoted their own
concert on August 27, 1960, with posters advertising them as "The
Bay Area's First and Only Genuine Bluegrass Band." (The
poster was designed and produced by Tom Glass.) After September 1960, when Neil and Frank returned to Oberlin,
Scott and Mayne kept the band going with Pete Berg on banjo.
In the band's second Washington School appearance on December
2, 1961 they shared the stage with Starday artists the Carroll
County Country Boys (Vern Williams and Ray Parks). The Ramblers
band continued into early 1962, with a concert at San Jose
State College on April 6.
In June 1962 Mayne moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and the
band was inactive until Scott reconstituted it with Pete Berg
on banjo and Al Ross on guitar for a regular weekly engagement
at the Cabale, a Berkeley coffeehouse, from January through
March of 1963. That ended when Scott left to join the Air Force.
In August 1963 Scott, Mayne, and Neil, all home on vacation
in Berkeley, brought the band together for three nights at
the Cabale folk club with Scott on mandolin, Neil on banjo,
Mayne on Dobro, and Sandy Rothman on guitar (no bass player).
Reunion Appearances
The Redwood Canyon Ramblers didn't play again in public until
the spring of 1991, when Mayne and Neil did a two-week Japanese
concert tour with Ed Neff substituting for Scott on the mandolin.
Days after returning from Japan they played a reunion concert
at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley. On
that show Ed played fiddle; Scott, mandolin; and Steve Pottier
played bass. Another reunion concert was held at the Freight
in 1993, when Mayne, Scott, and Neil were joined by Julie
Smolin on fiddle, Leroy MacNees on Dobro, and Larry Cohea
on bass.
For a detailed
history of the band and its founding members, see Sandy Rothman's
four-part series, "Rambling in the
Redwood Canyon: The Routes of Bay Area Bluegrass" in the
magazine Bluegrass Unlimited (May 1991, 50-60; June 1991, 58-66;
July 1991, 55-64; August 1991, 60-68).
The little
village of Canyon is marked on the famous 1968 poster, "Humbead's Map of the World with a List of the
Population" (http://www.humbead.com/humbead.html).
After September 1960, when Neil and Frank returned to Oberlin,
Scott and Mayne kept the band going with Pete Berg on banjo.
In the band's second Washington School appearance on December
2, 1961 they shared the stage with Starday artists the Carroll
County Country Boys (Vern Williams and Ray Parks). The Ramblers
band continued into early 1962, with a concert at San Jose
State College on April 6.