Pioneers of the Blues Revival

David Evans

David Evans Interview I was born in Boston, January 22nd, 1944. I grew up in a solidly middle-class family mostly in Massachusetts. I spent a good part of my early years, up until fourth grade, in Lexington. Then my father, who worked for Prudential Insurance, was transferred to Dallas, Texas, and we lived there for four years—1954 to 1958. I was young, between ten and fourteen, but it gave me a little bit of exposure to the South—and even to blues, though I wasn’t aware of it by that name, through the radio. These were the years that rock ’n’ roll was coming on the scene, and R & B. You had radio stations with white deejays of the Dewey Phillips sort playing black music. I listened to it as I entered adolescence, so I guess you could say I had a “Southern Exposure.” [laughs] It wasn’t enough to get me hooked on blues. I never saw any of it live, but in some subtle way it gave me an orientation through the radio—and an opportunity to discover a bit of Southern black culture and life. We were classic New England liberals, not flaming liberals [laughs], but for the South my parents’ views would have been considered pretty radical. Of course this was the era with the Supreme Court decision when integration was a possibility. The schools remained all white, but there was an awareness that things were likely to change. It was an interesting experience for me. But then we came back north again to Massachusetts and lived in North Andover, and I got into a prep school as a day student at Phillips Academy. I was totally out of music at that time. In Texas I had taken up trumpet and then played baritone horn briefly in the school band, classical stuff and marches. But then in prep school I was just too busy studying to be involved in music. I listened to radio and rock ’n’ roll of the late 1950s and very early 1960s, but I was studying Greek and Latin and got into Harvard, starting there in 1961. I David Evans, Malibu, California, July 1966. Photo Marina Bokelman. david evans 293 graduated in 1965 as a classics major. Harvard from 1961 to 1965 was one of the hotbeds of the folk revival and the blues revival. I’d go around the coffeehouses just exploring all these new cultural opportunities, like any college freshman. I got exposed to folk music—first the Kingston Trio variety and then quickly on to Pete Seeger. I had a scholarship at Harvard, and one of my duties—we had to do a little work there— was scraping uneaten food off the plates in the freshman dining hall. And the guy next to me, also working with me, was a day student at Harvard. I was living in a dorm then. He was into folk music already, and he started singing these songs while we scraped garbage off the plates—like work songs. [laughs] I liked the songs and we talked about them. He oriented me, mostly to the Weavers, and that was okay. I liked them better than the Kingston Trio. They seemed a bit more authentic in some way. Then in reading liner notes there’d be mention of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie; that’s how I started exploring. Then there was a very good record store in Harvard Square. I’d go over there and buy the occasional album. Then I went to coffeehouses. We went to Club 47, where they had people like Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, also Tom Rush and Jackie Washington. I got to see the Fugs [laughs], the Holy Modal Rounders; others I’ve forgotten—Dave Van Ronk, Eric von Schmidt—the whole list of people who were active in the Boston–New York–Cambridge axis of folk music. I liked it all and I gradually gravitated more toward the real thing; Leadbelly was a favorite at the time. Then in 1962, in my sophomore year, there was a concert by a guy named Sleepy John Estes, who had just been rediscovered. I think I was familiar with one song of his through Sam Charters’s book The Country Blues and the Folkways RBF album that went with it. I got ahold of that book, and of course I had the Robert Johnson album and a few other things. I was branching out. There were probably about twenty blues...