Sunday night saw another double billing at mActivity’s East Rock Concert series, a near-perpetual lineup of acoustic music gems curated by Fernando Pinto. Rounding the corner to stroll up to the venue, I came across musician Randy Burns holding a cigarette and sitting on the steps of the venue, looking like he’d always sat there, with the ease of a performer who has been enjoying the preshow nicotine for decades. This was, after all, a homecoming show.
Scattered in the crowd were several shirts from Burns’ Sky Dog Band, and nearly everyone was reminiscing about the Exit Coffeehouse, New Haven’s spot for the folk scene in the 1960s, where a veritable who’s who of folk luminaries played for over 200 people at a time before it closed in 1972.
As retired journalist, professor, and non-retired musician Bob Stepno recalled, “Randy was a regular at The Exit, a coffeehouse I started going to in fall 1965 when I was a freshman at UConn Waterbury. I don’t know who owned or managed it. It had three homes near the Green in the three years I went there, on Wall Street, Chapel Street, and a church basement on Elm at College. Randy was about my age and easily one of the best soloists there, with a fine natural resonance in his voice, especially effective on songs written by Eric Anderson and David (Cohen) Blue, and especially for someone his age … I remember really liking Rick and Lorraine Lee and maybe hearing Ed Trickett, possibly others who recorded for labels like Front Hall and Folk Legacy. And the Golden Nectar Goodtime Band, including the late Stacy Phillips, Peter ‘Washboard Slim’ Menta and Dave Howard.”
Burns took careful time to recall the Exit as well, citing Jerry Malone, Jim McGrath, and Cliff Haslam (currently in his over-50-year residency every Monday at Essex’s Griswold Inn), and prominently featuring his song “Hobos & Kings” toward the end of his set.
The resonance of Burns’s voice had not diminished at all with time. His slight frame amplified a voice that sounded like it was calling down from the ages. What struck me, a millennial, about his performance, were the very porous lines of genre in the set — Burns spanned from Irish songs to powerful ballads like “Jesus Love the Late Night Girls” with a raw power and edge not often seen in contemporary depictions of the 1960s folk scene.
After a particularly long anecdote about a girl he dated who only liked nasty people, one could not help but meditate on time dulling the edges — or perhaps only leaving one vision of the music of the time.
For the audience it was good to see people reminisce over the Exit, the legacy of which was clear. Burns was a chord and a word into “Thirsty Boots” when applause erupted and voices softly sang along. Doubly fitting was his set-finishing, a cappella rendition of “The Parting Glass,” saying goodbye not just to the night, but also to his mentors as he told the tale of Jerry Malone teaching him the song.
The tone shifted as contemporary folk luminary and singer-songwriter Sloan Wainwright took the stage. Related to several other famous musical Wainwrights, Sloan was at home on stage, barefoot and all. She actively sought to make connections with the audience, asking that everyone tell her something about themselves on the way out. Each song had a directly personal context, or, as she called it, “the energy around the song.” Wainwright had quite a few friends in the crowd, including a bandmate who, on the last song of the set — “If You Want to Be Happy” — lent a harmony that filled the room even more than Wainwright and her guitarist Steven Murphy had.
What made this show work particularly well was the temporal and genre-based dialogue between the two singer-songwriters. Burns was among the first generation of musicians firmly ensconced in the folk genre, with all the ambiguities involved. Wainwright carried the torch into the minor twang and seventh chords that gave us the word “Americana,” where neither country nor folk particularly fit the bill of the music. But then, as a listener of the 21st century, with its algorithms and keywords, I am more apt to try and find a genre anyway. Perhaps the lesson of this show, besides to remember where we came from, is to let the music define itself and the community that it creates.
