Charles Alexander 'Sandy' Paton (1929-2009)
2010; Volume: 9; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2056-6166
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoCharles Alexander 'Sandy' Paton died peacefully on 26 July 2009, at the age of eighty. He leaves behind a legacy of important and lasting contributions to the field of folk music, through a career that spanned over five decades as performer, collector, researcher, writer, and record producer. Sandy was born in Florida in 1929. His father worked in many locations for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, so Sandy was widely travelled by the time he was a teenager, at which time he left home on his own with guitar and sleeping bag to travel around the country. He studied and worked as an artist and actor before concentrating on folk music research and performance from the mid-1950s. He performed from the west coast to the east and spent hours researching the collections at the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song. Early in 1957 he met his wife-to-be, Caroline Ann Swenson, at a concert in Berkeley, California. They married that year and spent the following year in the British Isles performing and researching local folk song traditions and repertoire. Their first son, David, was born at that time. They returned to the USA for more performing, and in 1960 moved to north-west Indiana, while Sandy worked in the recordings department of Brintano's Book Store in Chicago. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I recall my first meeting with Sandy at the 3rd Annual Intercollegiate Folk Festival at Oberlin College in Ohio in May 1959.I thought I knew a bit about folk music through my own performances and graduate folklore studies at Indiana University, but I was immediately struck by his vast repertoire and thorough knowledge of the songs he sang, and his personal acquaintance with the singers from whom he had learned them. He was the first to introduce to us Americans a number of songs from the British Isles that have now become standards in our repertoire, particularly 'Wild Mountain Thyme' from the McPeake family of Belfast. Sandy made his first LP for Elektra Records in 1959, The Many Sides of Sandy Paton. By 1961 he had begun field recording in the United States, starting with banjo/ dulcimer player and singer Frank Proffitt of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. A resultant LP of Proffitt on the Folkways label was not particularly pleasing to Sandy, who yearned to have more control over the editing and production processes. So, in October 1961, Sandy and Caroline, in partnership with Lee Haggerty, were able to establish Folk-Legacy Records in Huntington, Vermont. At first he concentrated on high-quality location field recordings of Frank Proffitt, Horton Barker, and other American folk performers whose voices were not readily available to the general public. …
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