My father was a cantor. His young friends in Brooklyn and New York City were Robert Merrill (aka Moishe Miller), Robert Tucker (Rivn Ticker), and Jan Peerce (Jacob Pinkus Perelmuth). Ever since I can remember he sang in the synagogue on Friday night and went on the road to the Catskills during the high holidays (Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashonah) to sing at the Jewish resorts—Grossinger’s and Brown’s. He also sang in The Schola Cantorum under Toscanini and was friendly with Milton Katims.
My mother played the piano. They were communists and believed in world music. So I grew up listening to liturgical music, Yiddish songs, Theodore Bikel, Pete Seeger and The Weavers, Klezmer, and The Internationale. I started playing the guitar when I was seven years old. I have dim memories of playing the violin in a school orchestra one year.
I took clarinet lessons for a few years (10–13) but got hit in the face with a basketball, which killed some of my front teeth, so that career soon ended. I found the mandolin when I was about 17 and played that for a while, but mainly sang and played the guitar. I made my Bar Mitzvah, despite the family atheism, in an orthodox shul, toasted by men in long black coats and fronted by long gray beards. In those days my parents spoke their first language—Yiddish—and made clear that our cultural and tribal affiliation—Askenazi—was more important than the religion of Judaism.
I went to grad school in Berkeley in the 60s and that was all about an electric guitar and rock and roll and revolution. And drugs. I came to New Hampshire in 1969 and found my way to a contra dance.
I became friendly with Alan Block and Randy Miller and realized that the real action wasn’t about the guitar. I started playing the fiddle, taking some lessons from Alan Block and Rod Miller, and a year of classical lessons from a music teacher at St. Paul’s School.
I played fiddle with The Blackwater Stringband and we made a record with Rounder Records and we won The White Mountains Bluegrass Festival. But I was falling in love with Irish traditional music through contra dance and Dudley Laufmann and I found my way to Doolin, Co Clare, in 1981.
