Tom Paley, who has died aged 89, was an American folk singer and musician with a lifelong love of country music and “old-time” styles from before the second world war, and a man with a quite extraordinary history. He could often be seen playing at sessions at the Shakespeare’s Head pub in Islington, and at other venues close to the flat where he lived in north London, but I suspect that few of those who listened to his banjo, guitar or fiddle work were aware of his remarkable career.
Here, after all, was a man who had worked with those American folk legends Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, had influenced Bob Dylan, and taught both Ry Cooder and Jerry Garcia. A passionate enthusiast for folk music and a performer with a wicked and often outrageous sense of humour, he continued to perform – and to record – for as long as he could. His final album, recorded with his son Ben, was released two years ago.
Paley was born in New York, the son of David, a journalist who became associate arts editor at the New York Herald Tribune, and his wife, Sylvia (nee Leichtling), a clerk and secretary. Educated at City College, and then at Yale, where he was a graduate student studying mathematics, Paley had become interested in music when his parents took him to leftwing gatherings in upstate New York. Here, as he told me in 2012, “there were songs from workers’ songs, songs against discrimination or Paul Robeson songs. I didn’t care much for the pop music of the 1930s, but these were songs about real things.”
His parents “split up a number of times” and in the early 40s his mother moved to California, “hoping to get into movies”, and took Paley and his sister, Maggie, with her. There Tom heard folk and country music and “got interested in that”. Back in New York he learned the guitar and then the banjo, and joined a leftwing organisation, American Youth for Democracy. They held square dances and Paley said he “liked the music, so I took my instruments along, got up on stage and started playing with other people”.
He now became part of the emerging New York folk scene. He started performing on the radio station WNYC, backing the singer and songwriter Oscar Brand and played at the regular Sunday afternoon sessions in Washington Square, before which “some of us would gather at Pete Seeger’s house, [which was] nearby in Greenwich Village. There were Hootenanny events, at which people like Pete Seeger would be featured, and less formal gatherings called Wingdings. I’d just get up and play.”
Paley met Guthrie, after a friend had the audacity to knock on Guthrie’s door in Mermaid Avenue. He later took Paley along with him. “I started going back there,” Paley explained, “and at one point he said to me ‘would you like to do some bookings with me?’” They played together in schools or at union meetings, and at a memorial concert for Lead Belly at New York Town Hall in 1950. Paley had also played at sessions at Lead Belly’s flat, sometimes with Guthrie. He remembered Guthrie as “easy-going but not terribly responsible. Sometimes we’d have a gig and there would be no sign of him.”
In the 50s, Paley juggled two careers – as a maths teacher and a folk singer. He recorded his first album Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachian Mountains in 1953, and five years later he became a founder member of the New Lost City Ramblers, in which he was joined by John Cohen and Mike Seeger. They were signed to the Folkways label, and went on to play a key role in the American folk revival. They were “crate diggers”, searching out early recordings made by blues and country music stars such as JE Mainer’s Mountaineers, Roy Acuff or the Carter Family, and the aim, Paley said, was to “play the music in the old style but with individual freedom”. Their repertoire included ballads, fiddle tunes and blues from the 20s and 30s, and among their admirers was the young Dylan, who praised them in his book Chronicles, saying “all their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth”. Cooder asked Paley for blues lessons, and Garcia (of Grateful Dead fame) wanted banjo lessons.
Paley left the New Lost City Ramblers in 1962, partly because Cohen and Seeger wanted the band to be a full-time affair, while Paley wanted to continue teaching, and partly for political reasons. He angered the other Ramblers when they lost a television booking because Tom refused to sign a statement about his political allegiances, after being accused of being a communist. “I was never a member of the Communist party”, he said “but it was none of the network’s business.”
Paley worked for a while with the Old Reliable String Band, and then started travelling. With his wife, Claudia Lingafelt, whom he had married in 1959, he moved to Sweden (“to escape from the Vietnam war and because we liked Ingmar Bergman’s films”), arriving by boat in early 1963. He stayed for nearly three years, making occasional trips to Britain, where he was helped by Ewan MacColl and by Peggy Seeger. In 1965 he and Claudia moved to London. Ben was born in 1967 and the marriage broke up the following year.
Paley kept performing and recording, always specialising in the old songs he so loved. He released two albums with Peggy Seeger in the mid-60s, and she remembers his “brilliant guitar and banjo playing and his rock-solid rhythm. He played like a mathematician.” He was, she said, a man who “never craved the limelight”.
In 1966 he formed the New Deal String Band, which included another expatriate New Yorker, Joe Locker, and British fiddlers. When the band re-formed in the 90s, the lineup included Ben, by now an accomplished fiddle-player, who joined him on further recordings including Svenska Latår: Swedish Fiddle Tunes, and the two albums that were to revive Paley’s career.
Ski Williams, an artist based in north London, was a great admirer and determined that Paley should record a new album, surrounded by younger players. He assembled a co-operative of friends, fans and musicians to make that happen, and the result was Roll On, Roll On Tom Paley’s Old-Time Moonshine Revue, released on the new Hornbeam label in 2012. It included an exquisite version of Green Grow the Lilacs, and one of Paley’s own compositions, Roll On, Roll On, which he said was “a lament about a woman with whom I was once in love”. A second Hornbeam release, Paley & Son (2015) included contributions from BJ Cole and a duet with Cerys Matthews, who had interviewed Paley on BBC Radio 6. In the same year he appeared alongside Van Morrison at the Lead Belly festival at the Royal Albert Hall.
He is survived by Ben, Maggie and three grandchildren, Max, Isaac and Joy.
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