I Got a Song

Оглавление

Rick Massimo. I Got a Song

Отрывок из книги

I GOT A SONG

A HISTORY OF TUE

.....

Second, Cohen saw the Stanley Brothers with a young girl who had seen the Ramblers rehearsing on the back of a truck: she was “barefoot, looking at us with a rose in her hair. I was immediately attracted to her, and she started asking about us, and she and I walked around, this and that, and when the Stanley Brothers played … she and I were right next to the stage, and she’d never heard this kind of music…. And the next evening, she and I were standing around, and suddenly she says, ‘I’ve got to go on the stage; this guy’s inviting me up.’”39

The guy was Bob Gibson, a frequent performer at Grossman’s Gate of Horn and a lower-tier star through the early 1960s. The girl who had attracted Cohen’s attention was Joan Baez (or, as the Providence Journal mangled her name, “Joan Byers”), whose spectral soprano rose out of “Virgin Mary Had a Son” like a revelation. Gibson once described Baez as “bare feet, three chords, and a terrified attitude!”40 But years later, Oscar Brand would recall other members of the Ramblers, as well as would-be headliners the Kingston Trio, running out into the audience to see the teenager’s first major public performance, and Dave Van Ronk would remember immediately recognizing her performance as “the start of something big for all of us.”41 For Gibson’s part, he later eschewed any credit for having helped bring Baez to the limelight: “It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon. I may have introduced her to her first large audience, but do you think that girl was going to stay unknown in Cambridge?”42

.....