Chia Greer:   Not being quite sure as with whom to begin the next part of this saga about Sam, I grabbed a bunch of file folders, glanced through the responses and started with one from my ex-husband, Palmer Parker Woods III (aka Parker Woods).

Parker Woods:  

My first impression was second hand from you, Jeanne and Phil Crocheron. Crisscrossing the country by car and trailer, around the world, he was doing what I had fantasized -- recording the audible shards of vanishing peoples: songs, games, memories -- the warp and weft of all of us.

CG:   Parker did go on to do some of that and did it very well from recording the bats leaving Carlsbad Carverns, Gulf sounds from Corpus Christi and philosophical reflections by Ernest Wood; but most recently from his home in Hawaii he's been producing a video tape of a visit to the art collection of the late Richard Smart, a cousin of his on the Parker Ranch at PuuHue -- the homeplace of Parker's father, grandfather and great-grandfather, James Woods.

PW:   When Sam pulled into Houston burly, strong and with a grin and laugh that would melt granite, I had to shift gears. Here was a communicator and a real man transcending mere pedantic scholarship. Then he sat back with his guitar on his lap and I knew that I would never be a wandering recorder of the sounds of our pasts, but might, just by being aware of this person record the present -- not a bad fantasy after all.
Then, years later he showed up without warning -- a new reality for me in Montana,...the same Sam with stories, songs with a way of lighting fires of interest in spin-off things. He sang a song, Henry Plummer's Grave, from a friend Tiger Thompson -- ex-copper mine electrician, newspaper writer, labor organizer and Wobblie who started out in Montana and ended up in California. Sam left the next day, but the seed he had sewn brought visits to us from Tiger and his wife and years of searching for me for the real story of Henry Plummer with mixed results, but much feeling and some knowledge of Western Montana's past.
Again, later, Sam pulled into Missoula with his guitar and a bunch of songs and an unappreciated duet with my dog Blackie (I wish I had kept the tape of that duet of Rye Whiskey) -- it were a hoot.
His last visit to our home in Montana was with Faith Petric  founder-president, patron saint of the San Francisco Music Club.  Another seed sown and another friend made. A long, long evening of songs, laughter and good feelings.
These are the legacies left by Sam Eskin -- pure gold and as lasting. Not much substance here, but the recalling of them does feel good. I hope you are able to find much to record -- this man should have a marker for people to know.

Faith Petric:   My apologies [for not writing] by now you must think I was ignoring your letter. On the contrary, I felt it sufficiently important so that I kept setting it aside until there was enough "time", and, of course, there never is.
I also hesitated because I really think I've nothing to contribute -- no pictures, letters, tapes or the like. I first met Sam about 1950, more or less, when he came to my house one evening and recorded a few songs I'd learned from migratory farm workers in 1940-41-42. Then, about 1963 we took one trip together, a month maybe, across the country. I never saw him after that. I do have a few nice mind pictures. We spent some time together when he was at one of the big Berkeley folk festivals. If you want a very brief memory thing, I might be able to dredge something up. I'm away for the summer starting tomorrow morning. ...Very best wishes. Faith.

CG:   The following October I received another letter from Faith.

Faith Petric:    I will give you what brief memories I have that might be relevant to your project. I first met Sam Eskin when he came to my house in San Francisco about 1948 saying that he had heard I knew some songs of the migrant workers and would I be willing for him to tape them?
I kept telling him of others I thought knew more and would do a better job but he persuaded me, brought in some enormous what-was-then portable recording equipment and I sang a few songs. I was so taken with what he was doing that if it had been suggested I think I would have tucked my then-3 year old daughter under my arm, gotten into his van and driven away!
I next saw him at one of the big UC Berkeley folk festivals that Barry Olivier put on in the 1960s -- I don't recall the year. We sort of formed a twosome, walking around and talking together and becoming friends. So that when I travelled east to my daughter's college in Vermont (Goddard) a few years later, I called at his home in Woodstock and, I think, stayed overnight with other friends. The one memory of this visit that I have is of a very small child -- a toddler really -- who was also visiting and of the lovely, free way Sam played and danced and made the child laugh and dance. It was charming. Also, he helped me prepare and send a large box of my daughter's things I couldn't get into my car. 
Later, we made one trip together across the United States -- he kept insisting that it was "my" trip but I know we visited two or three of his friends and admirers [see Parker Wood's comments above] and he quite refused to see some lads I wanted to visit in Chicago! These were not issues, it was a pleasant trip and Sam was certainly an excellent travelling companion.
Well, that's about it -- not much. He gave me some records that I cherish -- all 10 inch breakable OLD. The one I remember most is the recording he had made of an old music box -- playing Christmas music, as I recall. I still have it and the other records, but 78s just don't get played much! His intense need to record songs and sound he felt might otherwise be "lost" governed his life, I think; and a good and varied one it was, with his saving much that might otherwise have been lost indeed.

Barry Olivier:   I am very happy you are working on this. I'm afraid I have nothing to supply -- except fond memories of Sam !  He was a man with vision, honesty and a very generous spirit. I did have both an information file and a photo file -- which are in the archives I sold to Northwestern University Library in 1973. If you get to Evanston, Illinois, you might find something of interest. I'm not sure. Best regards!

CG:   Sam loved to dance and loved to watch dancers -- his first wife, Ann, was a dancer -- and, although he pretended to jump around like a clown sometimes, his innate sense of rhythm, his love of the choro-drama could not be missed, and that quality was always recognized by children. Had he been an evil man (and he definitely was not that) he had all the attributes of a Pied Piper!

Sam touched many lives, sometimes more than one realized. One whom he touched, my nephew, wrote the following "The Gentle-Man From Woodstock -- Sam Eskin, Remembered".

Robert E. (Bob) Crocheron:    I really don't remember exactly when I first met Sam Eskin. Sometime in my teenage years (the early 1960s). I was introduced to the gentle-man from Woodstock by my Aunt Chia (Lucia Crocheron Greer). Sam was a ruddy man, crusty with world travels and, yet, at the same time his hands told a much more tender story. His hand would totally engulf mine in a handshake, but it wasn't a grizzly bear's "Man-Power! Boy, that ain't a handshake" grip that left your hand red, white and blue. It was firm. Yet polite to a young hand. You knew he cared.
Sam was very much an enigma to me. Rumor had it that he had made his fortune through investments in United Parcel Service and was now able to travel the world recording folk music.
I once saw an English Ford van that he was traveling around in that was filled with electronic recording equipment. Man, the inside looked like my idea of what the inside of a Russian trawler looks like with all of its listening gear. Some said he worked for the State Department. Some thought he was an "intelligence gatherer" for our side. Whatever he was, he was a "free spirit". He embodied all of the clandestine aura of James Bond. All of the musical talent of the Smother's Brothers and all of the outspoken-ness of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in song. To this teen-age kid, he was a hero.  A wandering minstrel with a James Bond alter ego.  Sam was neat!!

I used to get letters and postcards from him with exotic stamps from all over the world, stuff the local stamp hawkers wouldn't see for months. I would think: "Wow, I've got a friend that's a world traveler and he sends things just to me." Then, every once in a blue moon he would come to town. I couldn't wait to see him. My mother says that I drove down from college in Huntsville (Texas) "in record time" just to see him at my aunt's house during the week.  I believe it. Best of all, Sam was a folk singer. His huge hands made a full-size guitar look like some kind of a 5/8-scale model, but boy! could he play. I remember sitting for hours, almost mesmerized by his singing and playing Rye Whiskey, Tom Dooley, South Coast and other folk tunes of the day. Some of his tunes were a bit bawdy for a young teen back then, but kid's comics have stuff like that in them nowadays. Sam could sing just about anything "folksy" and improvise a lot more.  He was a true musician. A real "character".

And, then one day word came that he was gone, dead? Impossible!  How did he die?  At the hands of some beautiful spy?  At the hands of some communist interrogator?  No. From something unseen, within him. Death had finally conquered the gentle-man. But his memory lives on. My Aunt Chia has a black and white picture of him in her living room playing a guitar. I can still hear his gravelly voice singing to his gentle strumming.."gimme whiskey, rye whiskey...gimme whiskey I cry...gimme whiskey, rye whiskey...or surely I'll die;" and his greeting me with a resounding "BOBBEEE".

I miss him. We all do. There can never be another Sam Eskin. The gentle-man from Woodstock. World-class friend. Traveler. Minstrel. Known to take an occasional sip of wine. May he rest in peace...

Chia Greer:   Just re-reading Bob's recollections of Sam reminds me, too; I think I can hear him singing -- his voice booming across all these years, full of life and promise. The songs he gathered, of course, are being sung now by other generations -- many who never even heard of Sam or know enough to whom to thank for this great contribution. So it goes.

Of course, without such visionaries as Emory Cook, Cook Records, and Moses Asch, Folkways Recordings, to name a few, there would not be even recorded recollections.

Smithsonian/Folkways Catalogue:   Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with Marian Distler in 1947. Asch had already launched other labels, including Asch and Disc, both of which ended in bankruptcy. But Folkways survived and thrived to become one of the largest independent record companies in the world -- one that had a tremendous influence on musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts who heard the sounds recorded on the more than 2,100 albums Asch issued between 1947 and 1987, just before the Smithsonian Institution acquired Folkways. So writes Anthony Seeger, Curator, The Folkways Collection, April 1991, at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies.

Cook Recordings:   The recordings Emory Cook released on his Sounds of Our Times and Cook Laboratories labels reflected his philosophy about sound. An audio engineer and inventor, Cook used his recordings to demonstrate his audio equipment and manufacturing techniques. From 1952 to 1966 he recorded, manufactured and distributed some of the highest quality audio recordings in the world. His releases included Euro-American classical, U.S. popular, Caribbean popular and traditional music, as well as a variety of mechanical and natural sounds. Emory and Martha Cook donated their record companies, master tapes, patents and papers to the Smithsonian Institution in 1990, where the collections join the Folkways Records collections. Every title is being kept in print and is available for purchase.

CG:  Shortly after Sam died, Parker Woods and I tried to combine our interest and recollections of Sam with others into either a book and/or a recording, whatever; but it didn't "take". We were urged on by Emory Cook and others, but the time wasn't right.
One of Sam's Woodstock friends, of long-standing, was Sidney Cowell, widow of composer, Henry Cowell. Back in the late 1970s, we corresponded.

Sidney Cowell:    Sorry, I have to be brief, I have an incredible correspondence and no secretary. I never had anything recorded in mind in memory of Sam; I had just thought it might be nice if some old friends set down bits and pieces of stories about him. I had no thought of doing anything about this except phoning a few friends, which I did; there was a notable lack of enthusiasm for various good and bad reasons so I dropped the matter.
I could not undertake to do any real work on such a project, I am involved in two books about my husband and one of my own, and I don't get done what I should for those as it is.

CG:   It took a longer period of living without Sam's visits, his rumbling into town announced or unannouced, that finally prompted this project.

SC:    Stanley (Sam's son) expressed an interest at one time in doing a book about Sam, as a kind of American type of his era, and he did a little interviewing for this.

CG:   Stanley G. Eskin is an excellent biographer -- his Simenon, a critical biography, is an unparalleled work of import about this great mystery writer (McFarland & Company, Inc. N.C., 1987).

Sidney Cowell:  ...it may be that we were all of us unreconciled to having Sam disappear, that we thought up impossible projects to "preserve" him in memory; but I don't find the memory dimming and probably nobody else needs reminders either.
That's all I know, except that we all miss Sam, every day, in every way. I met him first at one of the Striebel's parties, the year he bought his place here, or just before; about 1945 or 46, I think. ...Sorry not to be more helpful. But I am 72 (this was written in 1976) and this world is entirely too full of projects. Partly to break away from some several very pressing people I went abroad for 6 weeks in February and was met in Italy by a pressing request to do some research at the ...museum on the history of the Star Spangled Banner! Not my thing at all, but people seem to think I can do anything whether I know anything about it or no!  Best regards, Sidney Cowell.

CG:   How vibrant and timely her comments still are -- twenty one years ago and just as viable now!   What a shame that time and interruptions and other projects kept Sidney Cowell, me and others from gathering and putting together info on Sam sooner; but, at least, we're doing it now!

Folk singers and folk collecting cannot be mentioned that one does not think about the Seeger family -- Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Peggy, Pete, Mike, Anthony Seeger, and all the combined families -- their contributions to performance but especially to American music.

Pete Seeger:   Thank you for taking on this job. What a tragedy Sam didn't get his own books out. He had much to teach us all, we only met in passing, but I much admired his integrity, persistence, and skill in carrying on some old traditions. 

CG:   We sent a follow up to Pete when the website was established suggesting that he let us do a link to his website. We heard right back from Toshi, his wife.

Toshi Seeger:   We do not have a web site -- that I know of -- also no computer, just me!

CG:   However, there is a very representative page maintained by Jim Capaldi to which we draw your attention:  Pete Seeger Appreciation Page
Jim has presented a comprehensive collection of Pete's work. We thank Jim for the use of this picture of Pete.

Peggy Seeger, too, faithfully continues to perform, write and be active in this very needed world-community of music:    http://www.pegseeger.com/PeggySeeger   Nothing I can put here about her can equal that which appears at that website.   Please, don't miss visiting there.

Peggy Seeger:    I am sorry that I cannot help you. I met Sam once only when I was in my early, flighty teens. All I remember is a craggy jaw and the fact that my parents held him in the highest esteem. I lived most of my adult life (so-called) in England so I was not among the circles that Sam frequented. I am sure that you have tried my brother Mike...

Chia Greer:   Mike Seeger continues his intense dedicated commitment to old-time country music (he remains one of the foremost collectors and folklorists in the field) and his skill on a variety of instruments -- fiddle, banjo, guitar, autoharp, mouth-harp, even reed pipes.   From time to time he and my daughter, Crow Johnson, have appeared together on the same stages in years gone by.

Mike Seeger:  

Unfortunately,  I don't remember having met Sam Eskin. He collected some wonderful music, though, and I wish you the best in your search.  Please give my best to Crow. It's been a long time since we've been in touch. Sincerely, Mike Seeger.

CG:    Collateral associations with Sam are as important to our recollection and remembering of him as first hand ones. Kather Lee, has sung and recorded for more than 50 years and is acknowledged as one of the great singers and documentarians of cowboy songs and songwriters in America. She headlines cowboy poetry gatherings in Tucson and Prescott, Elko, and Ruidoso. She has a repertoire of over 300 cowboy poems, many of which she has set to music.

Katie Lee:   At least fifty times I started to answer your letter, put it away in the "do" file and decided I'd already answered it until it turned up today -- again! I doubt that it's really important since I never met Sam, only heard Harry Dick Ross talk about him many times since he was the one responsible for the final and very beautiful melody to Shanagolden's "South Coast" (originally "The Monterrey Coast"), Harry, Eve (Henry Miller's ex-wife) Emil White and I used to sit around and try to sing it back to the melody they first used just shortly after Sanagolden wrote the poem, which was "Goodnight Irene" if you can possibly imagine! 

I'll always be grateful for Rich Dhere going up there and 'uncovering' the song as Sam wrote it, because it is far and away one of the greatest 'folk' melodies ever to come along. If Sam never did another thing in his life (which he did, and plenty!) he gave us a true marriage of lyric and melody in that poem. He should have had much more reward for it than I'm sure he got, except the satisfaction of knowing. He truly felt the essence of Big Sur.    I wish you all the best with this worthy project and thank Crow for putting you in touch. Keep them singing!

CG:    Katie's mention of Emil White brings back an almost-forgotten exchange Emil and I had in the 60s and my subsequent visit to Big Sur.  A search through the correspondence files brings many of those memories rushing back. When I first corresponded with Emil sometime in 1961 or so I was not aware that he and Sam knowing each other and I recall it came as a pleasant surprise to me.

Emil White:   Dear Chia, yes, I'm still around and kicking. [This had to have been about 1975-76.]  Getting more and more shocking reports of friends dying (like Sam Eskin). My younger boy (20) is in Big Sur, the older (22) is working as a fisherman in Australia and may be here next year. My lady friend is from Helena Mont.; used to have a book shop there "The Book End." Have been in own house since 1968. Greetings, Emil.

CG:   A recent "hunt" for Emil did not locate him, but maybe this posting will bring some feedback.
Here is a print from Emil's painting, entitled "Tiger, Tiger." 

Another "collateral" contact, one who knows Sam in a way none of us has had the opportunity, is Lee Livney. Temporarily, I've lost track of Lee and don't know what he is doing now, but a few years ago he was Grants Manager at the Historic Hudson Valley, a museum consisting of five nationally significant historic properties in the Hudson Valley region of New York state. Previously he was a graduate student at the Cooperstown Graduate Association (SUNY Oneonta) where, as an independent study project, he catalogued the "Sam Eskin Papers."  By his own admission, he is also a guitar player and folk music aficionado.

Lee Livney:   ...you already know that as a graduate student at the Cooperstown Graduate Program (SUNY Oneonta) I catalogued a collection of Mr. Eskin's papers at the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA).   It has been ...years since I worked with the material, but there are a few things about Mr. Eskin that I remember well.
The main thing that struck me was his "made-for-television" biography, which I don't think I have to tell you about. Here was a guy who worked at everything from cattle ranching to railroading; pioneered the use of the tape recorder in song collecting; traveled the world in search of music; and was friends with many of the performers, scholars and collectors who were at the center of the folk music revival of the 1940s and 50s -- including Bess Lomax, Butch Hawes, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Moe Asch. Wow!
Not knowing him personally, I would only add two additional facts about the man: He was an appalling record-keeper and perhaps one of the most "unique" vocal stylists and guitar players ever recorded by Folkways Records (and, thus, possibly a major influence on Bob Dylan). I only wish I had a chance to meet him.
I am sorry that I cannot provide more information. But I want to thank you for including me in your publication research.   If I can be of further assistance, please let me know.

John H. Mitchell:   I believe that Faith Petric had a note in Folknik...relating to your project. I don't feel that I knew Sam Eskin very well, but had heard a great deal about him before I came to California. My friend Bill Brooks told me stories of how his father was responsible for getting Sam interested in folk music. His father, now deceased, was Earl Brooks of Arden, Delaware. He was a folk dance teacher and square dance caller. Bill himself still teaches folk dancing. [This was in 1992. Alas, we've lost contact with Bill Brooks.]   Bill had some stories about Sam, one I recall in particular had to do with a plan to sail around the world which voyage was both tragic albeit humorous in the telling.  The trip as I recall got as far as Chesapeake Bay.
1963 is a long way back in my fading memory; I do remember that Sam and I hit it off from the start partly because we had Bill and Earl as mutual friends. I was the local talent, so to speak, and not the professional that most others were. Sam knew that I was pretty nervous and not at all sure of myself. I recall in particular that at the concert at the Greek theater, which was the grand finale, Sam stood at the edge of the stage when I went on; I guess he wondered as I did whether I could make it through. We had had only a few hours sleep the nite before and waited underneath the stage for four or five hours before the performance began.
Later, I think it was 1970 or 71, my wife to be and my two sons stopped to visit Sam at his place in New York.  He put us up in his guest house. He asked me if I wanted to perform on the boat Pete Seeger was running up and down whatever river that is in New York. I told him that I decided that I liked singing and playing, but really didn't care that much about performing.
I never saw Sam after that. I picked up some 78 (rpm) records he recorded and had given to The Salvage Army here.   I think I still have the old 78s though the quality is not very good.

Chia Greer:   Anyone knowing of the whereabouts of Emil White, Lee Livney or Bill Brooks or John Mitchell -- please drop us a line. E-mail Casa Chia Library.