Rufus Crisp Show Blog:

Links:

Rememberance of Rufus Crisp by Stu Jamieson, printed in the Old Time Herald magazine.

To Hear Your Banjo Play - Film featuring the American Square Dance Group led by Margot Mayo. You can see Stu Jamieson calling the square dance. The film is narrated by Alan Lomax, features a young Pete Seeger as well as Woody Guthrie, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Texas Gladden and others.

Rufus Crisp Folkways CD - Available for download at Smithsonian Global Sound. You can download the whole CD for $10, and the original liner notes in PDF format for free!

Interview with John Herald- He talks about his album "Roll On John." Mentions Rufus Crisp.

 

 

Pictures:   

Rufus and Lulu Crisp              

Rufus Crisp

Rufus Crisp

Information on Woody Wachtel:

*Throughout the show I pronounced his name "watch-tell" but it should be Wach, like "Bach"

An email from Hank Schwartz (7/18/07):

Hi Eli,

Woody did go down and learned directly from Rufus. Quoting a message
that I got from Stu Jamieson:

"when Woody heard my Rufus Crisp stuff, he decided to go
to Floyd County to learn from Rufus directly. He would work on Uncle
Seymour Mayo's farm for his board. (The patriarch of the Mayo clan.)"

Unfortunately, I don't have a chronology of Woody's life. All I know are
bits and pieces gleaned from people that I've written to over the years.

Here they are in no particular order:

Woody was a marine!

He had been in a sanitarium, for tuberculosis I believe. He met and
influenced a number of people while there.

He was the chief psychologist of the Westchester School System of NY.

He was a graduate student of Timothy Leary and it was probably there
that he experimented with LSD that led to his ultimate suicide.

He was one of the sweetest people that I've ever known.

I spent the summer of 1958 on a student trip to Europe led by him.

I visited him at his Connecticut home 2 or 3 times and recorded him there.

He was married to a gorgeous woman from Trinidad and had a son by her
and then twins after his demise. She may have been his second wife(?).

After he learned to play from Rufus he came back to NYC as the first old
time player there and inspired me as well as John Cohen and numerous others.

He was deeply loved by me as well as Izzy Young of the Folklore Center.
After Woody's suicide Izzy had his diary which he offered to let me read
but I couldn't handle it. Izzy wrote a eulogy for him but I never saw it.

I expect that you could learn more about Woody from Stu Jamieson or Joe
Hickerson.

I regard him as my mentor and a crucial pivot in my life. My best
expression of this is probably found here:

http://home.comcast.net/~eyieyio/NATW/NATWlinernotes.html

The only pictures that I've been able to find of him are below.

Best regards,

Hank

Some pictures of Woody Wachtel: