"I've been planning this trip for about eight years," the folk singer told me, when I visited him in his home on Mead Mountain.
    The tall, stocky man with short gray hair and glasses was sitting on one of the low-slung woven, straw chairs that he had just brought back from Mexico.  Taking his pipe from his mouth for a moment, he contined, "I'm going down there with a friend of mine, Angelo di Benedetto.  He's an artist.  We'll travel into the interior by jeep.  He'll paint and I'll make recordings of the dances, songs and tales of the people."
    "Do you think these people will let you do that?" I asked.
    Eskin replied, "I intend to bring very simple equipment along.  They'll hardly notice it.  They should trust us," he continued.  "Benedetto is an old friend of these primitive Haitians.  Once, he lived among them for a long time.  He won their confidence to the point where they inducted him into the voodoo religion."
    Eskin has been wandering singing and collecting songs for over thirty years.  He says he first became restless during his childhood in Baltimore, Maryland.  His father, Morris, was a locomotive engineer, and the Eskins lived right next to the railroad tracks.
    "I wanted to know where all those trains were going," Eskin said.  "When I was seventeen years old, I told my parents I was going to leave home and see the world."
    The young vagabond traveled all over the United States, riding the rails and living in the hobo "jungles."  He carried his mandolin with him, and he really began to sing, as he and the other nomads gathered around the campfires in the evenings.
    Like a true hobo, Eskin worked and wandered.  At various times, he was a lumberjack in Oregon, a sheepherder in Wyoming, and a laborer in a salmon factory in Alaska.
    Eventually he became a seaman, and his travels took him all over the world.  In his journeyings, he continually added new songs to his repertoire.  A fellow wandereer taught him to play the guitar.
    "I found out that I loved to sing," Eskin said.  "And people seemed to enjoy listening to me sing," he added.
    Eskin had two brief bouts with domesticity in the 1920's and 1930's, when he was married, twice, and became the father of two sons, one by each wife.
    "I'm afraid I never got very domesitcated," Eskin laughed.  He gently fingered a slender guitar that was lying on the huge low table in front of the fireplace.  "I'm still a hobo; the only difference is that now I'm a fancy hobo."
    Once Eskin had acquired children, though, he did settle down to a steady job.  For many years, right up until 1945, when he retired to hoboing again, he was a systems and methods man for a national deliverey outfit.
    Howevere, the minstrel wasn't imprisoned to a desk during that time.  He traveled constantly on his job, and while he traveled, he sang, and as he sang, he gathered songs forom the people.
    By 1945, Eskin had made enough money so that he could quit his job and spend all of his time collecting folk songs and giving singing lectures.  His sons, Stanley and Otho, are in college; Stanley is working for a Ph.D. at Columbia, and the other son is at a college in Maine.
    During the past eight years, Eskin has been traveling all over the United States and Mexico.  Sometimes he goes by jeep, and often he journeys in his silver trailer.
    "How do you get people to sing their songs to you?" I asked.
    "Well, when I get to a strange town, I usually walk around for a while, carrying my guitar," he replied. "Then, any number of things can happen.  People will ask me if that thing plays, or they'll aks me to sing for them.  Sometimes I visit the ministers and teachers in small towns, and they give me the names of people who sing folk songs."
    Eskin tries to make recordings of people who can sing unknown ballads.  He says that they are often shy at first, but after they hear the records when they are played back, then there is a lengthy outpouring of songs.
    Eskin's home is equipped with a radio, tape recorder, amplifier, disc recorder and record player.  He himself constructed a flaring wooden tunnel for the speaker system, so that music pours into the room without any loss in range or volume.
    Eskin has recorded three commercial albums; two of popular folk songs, and one of sea chanteys.
    He is an avid collector of curiosities from all over the world.  Most of these rarities are musical instruments.
    Along with masks from Africa and Java, there is a deep-toned Balinese gong; dulcimers from the South Apalachian Mountains; an African stringed instrument; and Peruvian pipes.
    Nostalgic of earlier days in America, Eskin has some old music boxes that work by a crank.  He greatly enjoys playing a real, old-time nickelodeon that he bought from Harry Siemsen in Sawkill.
    "I guess I just like things that make noise," the folksinger said.
    But Eskin's real live is folk music.  In order to collect and sing the songs of the people, he is not only a musician, but also a sociologist, psychologist and anthropologist.