Only one musical genre captured America's struggle during the Great Depression.
Folk music.
This music has always reflected on news and current events.
In fact, the anthems for social movements like the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement were written and performed by folk musicians.
All in all, folk music has shaped our history and continues to bring truth to today's issues.
Tonight, the matriarch of folk music will talk about its impact today.
I'm so happy you're joining us.
From Los Angeles.
This is KLCS.
PBS.
Welcome to everybody with Angela Williamson, an innovation arts, education and public affairs program.
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Thank you.
Folk music came to America from every continent.
Immigrants brought their music.
People that were forced to leave came to this country and one thing you could carry is your music.
And the melodies and rhythms were brought from all over the world.
Really, folk music is a living art.
Form and it.
Creates history.
As it relates.
My name is Ellen Harper.
I run and manage the folk music Center here in Claremont.
It's a family music store.
We left New England.
My father wanted to teach and he was accepted at the Claremont graduate School.
So that's where the family landed.
In.
Claremont at that time in the late fifties was really an art colony.
There were lots of artists, art shows, and people were just ready for folk music.
And my mother immediately began teaching guitar and banjo lessons to everybody that wanted them.
And there was a huge interest at the time.
And my father repaired instruments for people, and the house became so full of musical instruments they decided to start a store so we could sit down on our couch and eat at our table with the banjos and mandolins in the way.
So there's just a big row of photos we have over that over time.
And there are back here and it goes all the way over.
I guess we're going to have to pretty much extend all the way past the guitars.
There's a picture of me and my son, Ben at the Santa Barbara Bowl.
It was one of the first times she invited me out to sing.
The house is old, even when it's dark, even when the grass is overgrown in the yard, even when a dog is too old to bark.
And when you're sitting at the table trying to stir.
I'm Cesar home.
My oldest son, Ben Harper, invited me on stage to do some songs with him.
So you've been all over, up and down the West Coast and Europe.
And then he said Monday, Hey, mom, let's make an album.
You got ten days, as do an album.
So that's what we did.
Is.
We do loan a lot of our instruments out to college professors.
They're teaching us in musicology classes to students and, well, there's just collections of instruments everywhere, drums from Haiti, maracas from all over the world.
So if teachers are studying in China or studying ancient Egypt or whatever topic, they could come in and borrow instruments of that era, of that area of the world and people enjoy them.
Our mission has really always been to have a place where people could touch and play the instruments know how do you know what your child is going to be attracted to if you just offer them like the flute and that's it, You know, let them experiment, let them play.
And so I was raised here.
I was a single mom with three boys, and they were raised here in that just feels more like home than home.
You know, I'd like to think that we'll always have live music here and teachers and teaching going on.
But I would like to be able to have concerts zoomed out to the world.
I think we'll have to see what 2022 brings us and hopefully we'll be fully open pretty soon in making music.
Wow.
That says so much about who you are and what you're doing with just people and educating them about folk music.
You really had to learn to pivot a little bit during this pandemic.
Yes, we did.
We initially, when everything was shut down, we were allowed to do to keep the repair department open.
So we were able to do appointment, only drop off, pick up repairs.
And we have a big repair department.
All stringed instruments and a lot of any other oddball things people can bring in that need fixing we fix.
And so that kind of kept everything going until we were able to open up bit by bit.
You know, there was the curbside and then one person at a time.
And and so we're pretty much back now.
But there's still with with the new variant having to be careful.
Definitely in and just like every business owner but it's a little bit different because it's a passion for you.
We talk a lot about that on our shows is a passion for you, but it's also something that was started by your parents and helped you as a single mom.
And so it means a lot more to its businesses, more than just a business to you, right?
The business is truly a second home.
Yeah.
And I started working there when I was in middle school or junior high, as we called it, and I would go in after school every day and help my grandfather.
It would give him a time for a break and I'm not sure I was a lot of help.
I think I'm more hung out with friends and play music than really helped, but and really did grow up there and went away, of course, to school and so on.
But as in in the show, in the film, I was a single mother of three boys, three sons, and they it became their home as well.
And every day after school, instead of a daycare or a babysitter, they would come down to the music store and do their homework and go get their snacks.
We had a little town east so.
Well, and it's really interesting because music I mean, it used to be a part of growing up and part of schools, but as a lot of education lost funding, That was the first program to go.
And so how difficult is it now for parents to try to inspire music into their children?
And is that where the folk music center can come into play?
Well, we I think we inspire people to play, but there is a lot more emphasis nowadays on for parents knowing that to expose their children to music.
It's it's a very important and I think it's more out there in our general culture and but we we're folk music so we introduce a different kind.
We're not traditional classical music, which is wonderful of course, also.
But kids come in and they learn to play and sing right away and they're playing the young kids love the ukulele, and we put a ukulele in young people's hands and they're just playing a few lessons.
YouTube and any song they want to know.
So And guitar, of course.
And, and it's you know, we could we do again in addition to repair we do lots of teaching and the teaching is coming back.
We have lessons and hopefully we be able to have group classes soon also.
But it's something about having a guitar in your hand, having a uke in your hands and being able to play and sing.
Within the first 10 minutes you know, it means a lot.
That's really interesting.
So with that, with those two instrument instruments, you can learn to play and saying right away within the first lesson.
Oh yes.
One of my employees, his name is Jerry O'Sullivan.
He and I teach a group ukulele class, so we'll have as many as 40 people in it when this was pre-pandemic.
Get everybody tuned up, sit down, play in the book and within 10 minutes they're playing and singing a song.
And this is I learned this technique from my mother, who learned it from a woman named Best Horse, who was the sister of John Allen Lomax, daughter of John Lomax, who were famous folk musicians and collectors.
And so it's it's been an inherited method.
And what we have found over the years, especially teaching adults, is a lot of people have been put off in school and maybe the choir director says, Could you just sing a little quieter or, you know, maybe and it when someone comments on your voice, it's comes it's your internal you.
And so we get people playing and singing right away.
And once you know you can do it, it builds a lot of confidence.
And it's also great fun.
And we hope we can do these big classes again soon.
We'll see.
Well, at least start off with four or five, because know because I'm thinking right now, when you said I mean, one thing is learning to play the instrument, what, right away.
But then you said, well, you can sing too.
And if you've heard in the past, oh, maybe you should just keep your singing in the shower.
You may be afraid to sing, but you encourage that because you're encouraging our voice.
Because.
Is that how the genre of folk music is?
I would say yes.
I think people folk music is meant to have a trained and beautiful voice, which is a wonderful thing, but it's to express what you're feeling in the first one.
You will later be less for the day.
I'll see the.
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a young blood sweat the night and touch the sound of silence.
I think over the centuries, folk music defines where we are in our lives.
It defines if we feel oppressed, if we feel we're treated unfairly, if we feel our rights are stepped on.
I think folk music fills in that.
That part of music for us.
And you don't have to have a beautiful voice.
You don't even have to sing on in tune necessarily.
And especially with a movement like civil rights movement or union movement, it's the voices that join together that give people strength and power.
You know, about to go astray.
Betrayed you, not bound for glory.
That's right.
They say they're not bound and they're not going to write about the rights as a whole and say, oh, they're right.
And you talked you mentioned the strength and power.
And when I was doing this, doing research and I realize that those anthems were actually they were written and sung by folk musicians.
And that power is all with comes from the unity of it.
So is that like the goal of folk music is to bring unity?
Because I feel that whenever I hear folk music in some of these major movements.
I think I think that's right.
I think it's the joining of the voices that gives people strength, excuse me, strength to continue in strength, to stand on a picket line or a strength to stand up for what they believe in.
And and I think that's where I learned folk music and that's how my family did that.
It's you know, it's a living art that expresses where you are at in life.
And and over time, though, it's become a profession.
It's become a separation, as is the audience.
And there's the performer and and it's a little bit removed from that.
You know, let's get together in our living room and then we're going to go out and march or that, you know, join and and sing for our families or and it's it's become professionalized a bit and in one in the way I think that the public thinks about folk music, because you mentioned folk music and people think 1960s limelight was Kingston Trio who came out of of of a traditional form of music.
And again, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but there's that kind of a divide, traditional folk music and you know, commercial folk music and in it and I have never felt that divide to be very clear myself.
I know a lot of people do.
And you know, you can't play that kind of music.
You can't use these instruments and you don't have to.
But I think this is a story of Blurred Lines because the commercialization of it brings it to more people's attention and more people think, well, you know, maybe I could do that.
And then they bring it to their families and communities.
So it's a it's a shared adventure.
George's Newport Folk Festival have been around for a few years by now, and this year a 24 year old Bob Dylan headlined, he decided to bring his Electric Fender Stratocaster to a folk music festival.
If I met Bob Dylan, I would thank him for making me famous.
I got a lot of baggage from my.
The news went viral.
If there was such a thing in the sixties, folk music purists despised him for going electric.
Listen to the audience on the tape.
And I notice that, you know, with folk music, it's almost in a way that it's multicultural, too, because I noticed how many different cultures take folk music and make it their own.
It's not a correct assumption.
It is.
It is correct assumption.
I think I think anthropologists would say that every culture in the world has some form of music, and I know what is it that I am?
If I can remember my anthropology, the cowardly in New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, they someone claimed they didn't have music, but they called their music bird song and a lot of their music was based in the actual songs of birds.
So anyway, that I think it's, it's something instinctive within us.
And I like to think that the very first sound babies hear is the rhythm of their mother's heartbeat.
And so we born to rhythm and we, you know, if children hear it and listen to it and it's available in their world that they they adapt to and they love it, I children love it.
Music.
That was a great teaser.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Oh, my pleasure.
I didn't know I was doing.
But that's just how we flow here.
I was putting songs aside with the hopes that we would finally get to it.
So when we did clear a path to do it, there was a body of work to pull from, you know, having a lifetime committed to blues.
I have a lifetime that's equally as committed to American music and folk music.
And it felt like a lifetime of creativity that was waiting to happen between the two of us on record.
Hey, well, I have a quick message.
It's about safe driving.
All right, let's go.
Anytime you drive and head to see bubble type, both hands on the wheel and your phone out of sight when not in your hands.
Want to take somebody's bet.
Because if the car might get snatched, the more the story just put the phone down, the people on the road will be safe and sound.
But your phone down, put your phone down, people on the road.
What they say this year.
How is old even when it goes, even when you got to run from the ones you love most scream don't broken page feel in front of locals whisper when they can leave.
Never house home Even when we've been born.
Even when you're there.
No, it is our home.
Ellen.
When we went to break, we were actually, I'm not going to say we.
You did a wonderful teaser to this book here, and I want to spend the second segment talking about this book because you mentioned it came out January 2020.
Yes.
So it came out not too long after our government was under siege.
So that was took up a lot of January.
And at the same time, where in California, I know L.A., the COVID had was it of the second wave or the third wave?
I think third wave was just horrendous.
The hospitals were full and anyway, that's when my book was released.
So it was a kind of a challenging time for a book to come out.
But it did, and we've continued on with that.
Yeah, I wrote it in a way.
I wanted to tell the history.
Well, you know, from my father had been a schoolteacher in in New England, in Massachusetts.
He taught math and English in middle school, and he was accused by someone of being a communist.
So we were very severely affected by the McCarthy era attacks on well, the attacks on virtually anyone that showed any challenge to the profit motive, you could say.
And he was fired from his job and and but what I wanted to to do with this book is to tell starting from that history, telling the history through a family, these eyes, you know, this is yes, this history is happening and you can read about it.
And there are tones, there's books to read.
But I just wanted to say this is how this affected me.
And this is how, you know, folk music affected us in that era.
And this is how, you know, my life was affected by other you know, impacted by history and tell the history of, you know, integration and interracial marriage and so on.
But you also talked about something in the video, too, that I wanted to ask you about, because you said when you were ready to go to college, you went away, but you came back.
I did come back.
So do you I mean, Claremont, there was there a tugging for you to come back to?
Claremont We just it's such a wonderful.
Well, there was a tug to come back to Claremont, and a lot of that tug was the folk music center.
It just it there was a lot going on.
I mean, gosh, through the sixties we had fabulous music from, you know, James Newton on his jazz flute to Brian McGuinn, Sunny Terry playing blues and Hettie West with it.
You know, it was we had wonderful music coming through our house because, well, my mother was known as a fantastic cook.
So when musicians came to town, they stayed at our house.
They wanted a good meal.
So we did.
We set down roots in Claremont, and that's where I came back.
I didn't finish college.
I came back home and met my husband.
And then before we knew it, we had kids and it kind what was an interesting place to raise kids at that time?
This is this seventies and there weren't very many mixed race couples.
They weren't very.
And so, you know, it was just interesting getting my kids through school and let this by the same token, it was a safe place to raise children.
We were very well known and my kids were known and kind of looked out for in the community.
And but at the same time, there's a lot of of cultural information that had not been transmitted.
I could say.
For we and our time today, because you are still in Claremont and you're opening back up and I can see your classes expanding now, because now that now that you've let the audience know that it's okay if we don't quite sing in tune, we can still saying we want to.
You tell us what's next happening with Ellen.
Well, there's a couple of things with with the book that are happening.
One is there's a little video that's going to be coming out, this little documentary.
She's being modest.
It's a documentary.
It's coming.
Out anyway.
And it shows a little bit of being in the studio and just interview it mixed in together.
And just a couple of days ago, I found out that the book had been chosen by the Claremont Libraries Committee as their sort of book to read this year.
So there's going to be events around the book, there's going to be a children's concert, there's going to be folk music centered tours, little tours in with them, demonstrations of some of the rare instruments and and typical instruments.
And in a talk by me and conversation.
Well we will make sure your website up everybody can follow you on social media.
We'll get that out there because people will want to do that, especially now that this book is known as the book to read for this year.
So people will want to know how to get it, how to read it, especially all of your followers in the Claremont area.
Wow, you are such an inspiration.
And I just want to again, thank you so much for being on this show, dedicating two segments to me and everything that you're doing just to keep folk music alive.
With Thank you so much for having me on your show.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate it in talking about my book.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
And we'll always keep in touch.
Okay.
And thank you for joining us on, everybody with Angela Williamson.
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Good night and stay well.