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      When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

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      There’s a resurgence of interest in the pioneering singer-songwriter who disappeared when she was 50.Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. graduate student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”Seventy-five years ago, Ms. Converse was just another young artist trying to make ends meet in the city, singing at dinner parties and private salons, and passing a hat for her performances.She knew that her songs did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This type of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing company, where she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “lovely, but not commercial.”In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was never seen again.Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and though she was intensely private, she kept a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that were left behind after she drove away for good, offering clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and sites around the city that provided the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.The 1940s: Bohemians of the Upper West SideRiverside ParkIn 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote articles about international affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the topics she covered,” said the contemporary international relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “remarkable.”She lived on the Upper West Side. The image of her in Riverside Park, above, was found in an old filing cabinet that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is one of the first known images of Ms. Converse in New York.The Lincoln ArcadeMs. Converse, left, plays for friends at the Lincoln Arcade.Lois AimeSome of Ms. Converse’s closest friends lived and hung around the bohemian enclave known as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway between West 65th and 66th Street. With a reputation as a haven for struggling artists, it had been home to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the last of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court late at night. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, told me that Ms. Converse would often be clattering away at a typewriter, at a remove from the rest, though sometimes she did things he found shocking, like climbing out the front window well past midnight to stand on a ledge, several stories above the street.The 1950s: Making Music in the Village and Beyond23 Grove StreetPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her studio apartment at 23 Grove Street, where she wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and began a new phase of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was here, while living alone in a studio apartment at 23 Grove Street that Ms. Converse wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog (including everything on “How Sad, How Lovely”).The Village at that time “was the Left Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese told me, and it had “whiffs of the future in it” in terms of its permissiveness about lifestyle choices. Nicholas Pileggi, a writer and producer, suggested that given her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no problem hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.The upstart book publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was close to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, where jazz musicians often played, as well as the more respectable Village Vanguard.Grand CentralPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her first and only appearance on live television: The Morning Show, with Walter Cronkite. There is no recording of the live performance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCHer first and only television appearance was in 1954, on the “The Morning Show” on CBS (hosted that year by Walter Cronkite), though how Ms. Converse secured the appearance and what she played and talked about may never be known (shows at this time were broadcast live; no archival footage exists). Because the program was staged in a studio above the main concourse at Grand Central and shown live on a big screen in the hall, everyone bustling through the station that morning could have looked up and caught the young musician’s one and only brush with success.Ms. Converse was extremely close to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the first time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly kept diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”Hamilton HeightsMs. Converse took a photograph of the street below her W. 138th St. apartment in 1958.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCIn 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Street, in Harlem, a block away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat with her older brother, Paul, his wife, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a situation she called “a cost-saving measure.” The new apartment had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since lost), a series of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a song cycle based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophesy and then cursed to be never understood.Circle in the SquareThe 1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” which Ms. Converse attended. Sam Falk/The New York TimesAn avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and effectively launched the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I mention that I saw an in-the-round production of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ last month?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some four and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the last 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”The Blue AngelAt this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Street, unique at the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in covering Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make at least two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her show for decades to come.1960: The Lost Tape; Goodbye, New YorkNational Recording StudiosNational Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for only a year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to record an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just one or two takes of each tune, only took a few hours. The recording was a rumor until 2014, when Phil Converse unearthed a reel of it in his basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she made, remains unreleased.Upper West SideMs. Converse in her apartment on West 88th Street, her last known residence in New York. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by moving back to where she’d started: the Upper West Side. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Street, a half block from Central Park. This was her last known New York address; by 1961, she was gone.Her music, mostly made in isolation or at small gatherings, was nearly lost but for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could; David Garland, who played her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the students who, decades later, introduced her work to a new generation.“The first time I played a Connie Converse song for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula said. “From that moment I knew Connie’s magic would reach at least a few more people in a deeply personal and special way.”He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we first put out the record? Absolutely not. But also, yeah, kind of!”Howard Fishman is the author of the new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      Digging Into Bob Dylan and Lou Reed’s Archives

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLast month, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, Okla., offering researchers unparalleled access to Dylan’s archives and peeling back the layers on his songwriting process, long the object of study and fascination. And this month, “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” opened at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center — it’s the first exhibition drawn from Reed’s archive, which was acquired by the New York Public Library.Both of these seek to offer deeper understandings of these rock icons, but they also offer the opportunity for alternate narratives to emerge. Dylan and Reed always carefully tended to their own mythologies — now the behind-the-scenes tools are available for all to see.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the value of even the unlikeliest ephemera, the difference between public and private archives and the specific ways Dylan and Reed found methods to distance themselves from their pasts.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Ronnie Hawkins, Rockabilly Road Warrior, Is Dead at 87

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      Besides performing, he mentored other musicians, including stars like Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko, who went on to form the Band.Ronnie Hawkins, who combined the gregarious stage presence of a natural showman and a commitment to turbocharged rockabilly music in a rowdy career that spanned more than a half-century, died on Sunday. He was 87.His daughter Leah confirmed his death. She did not specify where he died or the cause, though she said he had been quite ill.Mr. Hawkins started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s and became a legendary roadhouse entertainer based in Canada in the 1960s, his music forever rooted in the primal rock ‘n’ roll rhythms of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.For all of his success, his biggest claim to fame was not the music he produced but the musicians he attracted and mentored. His backup musicians of the early 1960s, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, went on to form the Band, which backed Bob Dylan and became one of the most admired and influential bands in rock history.But those musicians, like many of Mr. Hawkins’s fans, never lost their reverence for the man known as the Hawk.“Ronnie’s whole style,” Mr. Robertson once said, was for he and his band to play “faster and more violent and explosive than anyone had ever heard before.”Ronald Cornett Hawkins was born on Jan. 10, 1935, two days after Elvis Presley, in Huntsville, Ark. When he was 9, his family moved to nearby Fayetteville, where his father, Jasper, opened a barbershop and his mother, Flora, taught school. His musical education began at the barbershop where a shoeshine boy named Buddy Hayes had a blues band that rehearsed with a piano player named Little Joe.It was there that he began to imbibe the crazy quilt music of the South, with blues and jazz filtered through snatches of country and the minstrel and medicine shows that traveled through town. Before long, something new was added, the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll, which was percolating out of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio in Memphis.Mr. Hawkins brought to all that an element of danger — as a teenager, he had driven a souped-up Model A Ford running bootleg whiskey from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma, making as much as $300 a day.He put together bands, enrolled in and dropped out of the University of Arkansas, joined the Army in 1957 and then quit the same year, intent on making it in the music business. While in the Army, he fronted a rock ‘n’ roll band, the Black Hawks, made up of African American musicians, a daring and usually welcome effort in the segregated South.Demos he recorded at Sun after he left the Army fell flat, but he and the guitarist on his Sun session, Luke Paulman, put together a band with Mr. Hawkins as the athletic frontman given to backflips and handstands. Over the years, his trademark became the camel walk, an early version of what became Michael Jackson’s moonwalk decades later.In 1958, the country music singer Conway Twitty said American rock ‘n’ roll bands could make a killing in Canada. Heeding that advice, Mr. Hawkins moved to a place he once said was “as cold as an accountant’s heart.” Toronto and other places in Ontario turned into his home base for the rest of his career.Mr. Hawkins in the 1970s. While he was known for performing in roadhouses, he also appeared in movies, including the disastrous 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Hawkins liked to talk, perhaps with some embellishment, about regular parties, brawling, sex and drinking that, as he put it, “Nero would have been ashamed of.” But there was nothing glamorous about being a rock ‘n’ roll musician playing nonstop in bars and roadhouses on a circuit centered on Ontario, Quebec and U.S. cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland.“When I started playing rock ‘n’ roll,” he said, “you were two pay grades below a prisoner of war.”He built up a loyal following based on his magnetic stage presence, the proficiency of his bands and the raw energy of his music. He had modest hits with “Forty Days,” his revised version of Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and “Mary Lou,” a Top 30 hit on the U.S. charts.Later successful recordings include “Who Do You Love?” and “Hey Bo Diddley.”Morris Levy of Mr. Hawkins’s label, Roulette Records, billed him as someone who “moved better than Elvis, he looked better than Elvis and he sang better than Elvis.” He saw a vacuum he thought Mr. Hawkins could fill as the original rockabilly artists slowed down or flamed out. But Mr. Hawkins was not so sure, as he watched clean-cut teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Bobby Rydell take over from their more rough-hewed progenitors.To Mr. Levy’s chagrin, Mr. Hawkins opted to own the road in Canada rather than to swing for the fences as a recording star in the U.S., building up a remunerative career working nonstop, even though he never built an epic recording career. He also became known as a one-of-a-kind character and raconteur.“The Hawk had been to college and could quote Shakespeare when he was in the mood,” Mr. Helm wrote in his autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire.” “He was also the most vulgar and outrageous rockabilly character I’ve ever met in my life. He’d say and do anything to shock you.”Mr. Hawkins was more than just the consummate rockabilly road warrior. In 1969, he hosted John Lennon and Yoko Ono at his ranch outside Toronto during their world tour to promote world peace as the Plastic Ono Band. Bob Dylan was a longtime fan who in 1975 cast Mr. Hawkins to play the role of “Bob Dylan” in his experimental and largely panned movie “Renaldo and Clara.”Mr. Hawkins in an undated photo. He started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s before settling in Canada in the 1960s.Michael Ochs Archives / StringerHe also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 concert film “The Last Waltz,” as one of the invited stars who joined the Band in the final performance of the original group at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. (The Band later reunited without Mr. Robertson.)Mr. Hawkins growled and hollered his way through a memorable performance of “Who Do You Love” with the Band, good-naturedly fanning Mr. Robertson’s guitar with his cowboy hat as if cooling it off after a particularly torrid solo.And he became a friend of his fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton when he was governor, as well as a conspicuous part of the Arkansas entourage during President Clinton’s Inaugural in 1992. Mr. Clinton also paid tribute to Mr. Hawkins in a 2004 documentary titled “Ronnie Hawkins Still Alive and Kickin’.’’Mr. Hawkins did other acting, including a supporting role in Michael Cimino’s disastrous 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate,” and he morphed into a respected elder statesman of Canadian music. He invested wisely, lived like a country squire in a sprawling lakefront estate and owned several businesses.Still, he was a master of honing his bad-boy image and playing to type, including in his 1989 autobiography, “Last of the Good Ol’ Boys.”“Ninety percent of what I made went to women, whiskey, drugs and cars,” he said. “I guess I just wasted the other 10 percent.”Besides his daughter Leah, survivors include his wife, Wanda, and two other children, Ronnie Jr. and Robin, and four grandchildren.Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting. More

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      Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82

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      He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.Bob Neuwirth, who had credentials as a painter, recording artist, songwriter and filmmaker, but who also had an impact as a member of Bob Dylan’s inner circle and as a conduit for two of Janis Joplin’s best-known songs, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.His partner, Paula Batson, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Neuwirth had a modest, eclectic string of albums to his credit, including his debut, simply titled “Bob Neuwirth,” in 1974, as well as a 1994 collaboration with John Cale called “Last Day on Earth” and a 2000 collaboration with the Cuban composer and pianist José María Vitier, “Havana Midnight.” But he was perhaps better known for the roles he played in the careers of others, beginning with Mr. Dylan.Mr. Neuwirth said that he first encountered Mr. Dylan at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Connecticut in 1961. Mr. Dylan was still largely unknown but, Mr. Neuwirth said years later, the singer caught his eye “because he was the only other guy with a harmonica holder around his neck.”The two hit it off, and Mr. Neuwirth became a central figure in the circle that coalesced around Mr. Dylan as his fame grew. When Mr. Dylan held court at the Kettle of Fish bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Mr. Neuwirth was there. When Mr. Dylan toured England in 1965, Mr. Neuwirth went along. A decade later, when Mr. Dylan embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Mr. Dylan’s contemporaries and biographers have described Mr. Neuwirth’s role in various ways.“Neuwirth was the eye of the storm, the center, the catalyst, the instigator,” Eric Von Schmidt, another folk singer active at the time, once said. “Wherever something important was happening, he was there, or he was on his way to it, or rumored to have been nearby enough to have had an effect on whatever it was that was in the works.”From left, Bob Dylan, Mick Ronson and Mr. Neuwirth performing in Toronto in 1975 as part of Mr. Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, for which Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Frank Lennon/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesIt has often been suggested that as Mr. Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak, from Mr. Neuwirth.“The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,” Bob Spitz wrote in “Dylan: A Biography” (1989). “So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.”Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame.“Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,” he wrote, “a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.”Mr. Dylan, in his book “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth.“Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth,” he wrote. “He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.”Ms. Joplin, too, benefited from Mr. Neuwirth’s influence. Holly George-Warren, whose books include “Janis: Her Life and Music” (2019), said that Mr. Neuwirth and Ms. Joplin met in 1963 and became fast friends.Mr. Neuwirth performing in Brooklyn in 1999. Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images“In 1969, he taught her Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ after he heard Gordon Lightfoot play the then-unknown song at manager Albert Grossman’s office,” Ms. George-Warren said by email. “He quickly learned it and took it to Janis at the Chelsea Hotel.”Her recording of the song hit No. 1 in 1971, but Ms. Joplin was not around to enjoy the success; she had died of a drug overdose the previous year.Mr. Neuwirth was also involved in “Mercedes Benz,” another well-known Joplin song that, like “Bobby McGee,” appeared on her 1971 album, “Pearl.” He was at a bar with her before a show she was doing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., in August 1970 when Ms. Joplin began riffing on a ditty that the poet Michael McClure would sing at gatherings with friends. Mr. Neuwirth began writing the lyrics the two of them came up with on a napkin.She sang the song at the show that night, and she later recorded it a cappella. She, Mr. McClure and Mr. Neuwirth are jointly credited as the writers of the song, which on the album is less than two minutes long.Ms. George-Warren said that this anecdote was revelatory: Mr. Neuwirth nudged along the careers of artists he admired, including Patti Smith, in whatever ways came to mind.“Though Bob was renowned for his acerbic wit — from his days as aide-de-camp to Dylan and Janis — when I met him 25 years ago, he epitomized kindness, mentorship and curiosity,” she said. “That is the unsung story of Bob Neuwirth.”Robert John Neuwirth was born on June 20, 1939, in Akron, Ohio. His father, also named Robert, was an engineer, and his mother, Clara Irene (Fischer) Neuwirth, was a design engineer.He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and dabbled in painting over the decades; in 2011 the Track 16 gallery in Santa Monica presented “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth, 1964-2009.”After two years at art school, he spent time in Paris before returning to the Boston area, where he began performing in coffee houses, singing and playing banjo and guitar.He appeared in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary, “Dont Look Back,” as well as in “Eat the Document” (1972), a documentary of a later tour that was shot by Mr. Pennebaker and later edited by Mr. Dylan, who is credited as the director, and Mr. Dylan’s “Renaldo & Clara” (1978), most of which was filmed during the Rolling Thunder tour. He also appeared in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” the 2019 Martin Scorsese film.Mr. Neuwirth was a producer of “Down From the Mountain” (2000), a documentary, directed in part by Mr. Pennebaker, about a concert featuring the musical artists heard in the Coen Brothers’ movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”“It’s all about the same to me,” he said, “whether it’s writing a song or making a painting or doing a film. It’s all just storytelling.”Mr. Neuwirth, who lived in Santa Monica, is survived by Ms. Batson.Mr. Neuwirth could be self-deprecating about his own musical efforts. He called his collaboration with Mr. Vitier, the Cuban pianist, “Cubilly music.” But his music was often serious. The Cale collaboration was a sort of song cycle that, as Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times when the two performed selections in concert in 1990, “added up to a shrug of the shoulders in the face of impending doom.”“Instead of breast-beating or simply wisecracking,” Mr. Pareles wrote of the work, “it found an emotional territory somewhere between fatalism and denial — still uneasy but not quite resigned.” More

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      Sam Lay, Drummer Who Backed Blues Greats and Bob Dylan, Dies at 86

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      His distinctive double-shuffle groove, which he likened to “three different drummers playing the same beat,” enlivened records by Howlin’ Wolf and many others.Sam Lay, a powerful and virtuosic drummer who played and recorded with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, was a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and backed Bob Dylan when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 29 at a nursing facility in Chicago. He was 86.His daughter, Debbie Lay, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Lay’s exuberant, idiosyncratic drumming was known for its double-shuffle groove, which he adapted from the rhythms of the hand claps and tambourine beats he heard in the Pentecostal church he attended while growing up in Birmingham, Ala.“The only way I can describe it is, you’ve got three different drummers playing the same beat but they’re not hitting it at the same time,” Mr. Lay said in “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” a 2015 documentary directed by John Anderson that took its name from an album Mr. Lay released in 1968.The harmonica player Corky Siegel, a longtime collaborator, said the double-shuffle groove was part of Mr. Lay’s broader ability to do more than keep the beat.“He just made you fly,” Mr. Siegel said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t held back by the concept of groove and time.” He added: “People think he played loud. No, he played delicate, but he used the full dynamic range, and when you do that, and you get to a crescendo, it’s powerful, like a locomotive coming toward you. But with Sam, it was like five locomotives.”After arriving in Chicago in early 1960, Mr. Lay played in bands led by the harmonica player and singer Little Walter and the singer Howlin’ Wolf, with whom he recorded songs that became blues standards like “Killing Floor,” “The Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious.”Once, after being fined by Howlin’ Wolf for wearing pants without a black stripe on them, Mr. Lay argued that no one could see his pants behind his drum kit. When their dispute persisted, Mr. Lay pulled a Smith & Wesson gun and held it to Howlin’ Wolf’s face.Mr. Lay left Howlin’ Wolf to join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963, lured by the prospect of making $20 a gig, nearly three times what he had been earning. Led by Mr. Butterfield on harmonica and vocals, the band — which also included the guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, the bassist Jerome Arnold and the keyboardist Mark Naftalin — was racially integrated, a rarity at the time, and bought the blues to a white audience during an intense period in the civil rights movement.Bob Dylan rehearsing for his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with, from left, Mike Bloomfield, Mr. Lay, Jerome Arnold and Al Kooper.David Gahr/Getty ImagesThe band played at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. Hours after their set, Mr. Lay, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bloomfield were part of Mr. Dylan’s backup band when he stunned the audience by performing an electric set, which began with a bracing version of his song “Maggie’s Farm.”Soon after that, Mr. Dylan asked Mr. Lay to back him on the title track of his album “Highway 61 Revisited.” In addition to playing drums, Mr. Lay played a toy whistle on the song’s memorable opening. (The organist Al Kooper has said he was the one who brought the whistle to the studio).“I blew it and it sounded like a siren,” Mr. Lay told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “Bob said, ‘Do that again.’ So I did it again.”Later in 1965, the Butterfield band’s first album, called simply “The Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” was released. One track, “I Got My Mojo Working,” featured Mr. Lay on lead vocal.An illness caused Mr. Lay to leave the band in late 1965.Samuel Julian Lay was born on March 20, 1935, in Birmingham. His father, Foster, a Pullman train porter who played banjo in a country band, died when Sam was 17 months old. His mother, Elsie (Favors) Lay, cleaned Pullman cars.Growing up, he listened to country music; as a teenager, he took drumming lessons from W.C. Handy Jr., the son of the composer. He dropped out of high school (which ended his dream of trying to run faster than the Olympic champion Jesse Owens) and in 1954 moved to Cleveland, where he worked in a steel mill and started to discover his musical path.One day, he stopped into a wine bar after hearing the sound of a harmonica being played by Little Walter, who asked him to sit in when he learned that he played drums. In the late 1950s Mr. Lay joined the Thunderbirds, a blues and R&B group.When Little Walter was shot, Mr. Lay helped nurse him back to health. Once in Chicago, he joined Little Walter’s band. But he didn’t stay long; he was soon hired by Howlin’ Wolf.Mr. Lay was a slick dresser who wore elaborate capes and hats and carried a walking stick. He styled his hair for a while after Little Richard’s. And he brought his windup eight-millimeter camera to clubs in the 1960s. It didn’t have sound, but he captured images of Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Buddy Guy and others onstage.“As soon as Howlin’ Wolf knew that a camera was watching him, you’d think he was possessed in some kind of way,” Mr. Lay said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.Footage he shot was used in Mr. Anderson’s film and in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 public television series, “The Blues.”In 1966, after he had begun to play with the harmonica player and singer James Cotton, Mr. Lay heard from Muddy Waters that an enemy of Mr. Cotton’s, who had shot him years before, had just been released from jail and was going after him. Mr. Lay rushed to his house, got his Colt .45, drove to the club and prepared to defend Mr. Cotton.But while Mr. Lay waited for the gunman (who never came), his gun went off, he told Phoenix New Times in 1999. He shot himself in the groin.“I’m still recuperating,” he said in the interview.Mr. Lay recording at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kan., a former church, in 2000.Cliff Schiappa/Associated PressIn 1969, Mr. Lay was part of the all-star band, which also included Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield, that recorded the album “Fathers and Sons.” It reached No. 70 on the Billboard chart.Over the next 50 years, he performed with Mr. Siegel’s ensembles the Siegel-Schwall Band, Chamber Blues and Chicago Blues Reunion, as well as leading his own blues band.But the blues did not pay all of Mr. Lay’s bills. For many years, he moonlighted as a security guard.Mr. Lay was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, as part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and into the Blues Hall of Fame three years later.In addition to his daughter, he is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth (Buirts) Lay, died in 2017. His son Bobby died inn 2019, and his son Michael died last month.Mr. Lay did not lack self-confidence.“I don’t know nobody in the world who can follow a band as good as I can, specifically if it comes to blues and that old-time rock ‘n’ roll,” he said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.“The secret,” he added, “is paying attention to what everyone else is playing and keeping your eyes open, and your mind.” More

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      Hargus Robbins, Pianist on Country Music Hits, Dies at 84

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      A revered member of Nashville’s A-Team of studio musicians, he was a major contributor to Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album.NASHVILLE — Hargus “Pig” Robbins, one of country music’s most prolific session piano players and a key contributor to Bob Dylan’s landmark 1966 album, “Blonde on Blonde,” died on Sunday. He was 84.His death was announced on the website of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. It did not say where he died or specify the cause.A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.An instinctive melodicist who valued understatement over flash, Mr. Robbins helped establish the piano as an integral part of the smooth, uncluttered Nashville Sound of the 1960s. He also was a big reason that folk and rock acts like Joan Baez and Mr. Dylan began traveling to Nashville to adopt the impromptu approach to recording popularized here.The former Kingston Trio member John Stewart referred to him as “first-take Hargus Robbins” when, on the closing track of Mr. Stewart’s acclaimed 1969 album, “California Bloodlines,” he listed the Nashville session musicians who appeared on it. Mr. Stewart was acknowledging Mr. Robbins’s knack for playing musical passages flawlessly the first time through.Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.“Of all the musicians on my sessions, he stood the tallest,” the producer and A-Team guitarist Jerry Kennedy said of Mr. Robbins in an exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame.“He has been a backbone for Nashville,” added Mr. Kennedy, who worked with Mr. Robbins on hits by Roger Miller and Jerry Lee Lewis, and on “Blonde on Blonde.”Mr. Robbins acquired his distinctive nickname, Pig, while attending the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville as a boy.“I had a supervisor who called me that because I used to sneak in through a fire escape and play when I wasn’t supposed to and I’d get dirty as a pig,” Mr. Robbins said in an interview cited in the Encyclopedia of Country Music.He lost vision in one of his eyes when he was 3, after accidentally poking himself in the eye with a knife. The injured eye was ultimately removed and Mr. Robbins eventually lost sight in his other eye as well.While at the School for the Blind he studied classical music, but he would also play jazz, honky-tonk and barrelhouse blues.Mr. Robbins’s wide-ranging tastes served him well, equipping him for work on soul recordings like Clyde McPhatter’s 1962 pop hit, “Lover Please” (where he was inscrutably credited as Mel “Pigue” Robbins), andArthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him),” a Top 10 R&B single from 1962 covered by the Beatles.Afforded the chance to stretch out stylistically on “Blonde on Blonde,” Mr. Robbins played with raucous abandon on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the woozy, carnivalesque No. 2 pop hit hooked by the tagline “Everybody must get stoned.” He employed a tender lyricism, by contrast, on elegiac ballads like “Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”Hargus Melvin Robbins was born on Jan. 18, 1938, in Spring City, Tenn. His first big break came in 1959 when the music publisher Buddy Killen secured him an invitation to play on Mr. Jones’s “White Lightning.” Spurred by Mr. Robbins’s rollicking boogie-woogie piano, the record became a No. 1 country single.Another opportunity came two years later, when the producer Owen Bradley, needing someone to fill in for the A-Team pianist Floyd Cramer, hired Mr. Robbins to play on the session for Ms. Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” Mr. Cramer soon embarked on a solo career, creating an opening for Mr. Robbins on the A-Team.Mr. Robbins flirted with a solo career in the ’50s, recording rockabilly originals under the name Mel Robbins. “Save It,” an obscure single from 1959, was covered by the garage-punks the Cramps on their 1983 album, “Off the Bone.”One of Mr. Robbins’s instrumental albums, “Country Instrumentalist of the Year,” won a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance in 1978.Working as a session musician was nevertheless his stock in trade, as a scene from Robert Altman’s 1971 movie “Nashville” memorably attests. Upbraiding his recording engineer when a hippie piano player nicknamed Frog shows up to work on their session instead of Mr. Robbins, the narcissistic country singer played by Henry Gibson shouts, “When I ask for Pig, I want Pig!”Mr. Robbins performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2012.Wade Payne/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Robbins was named country instrumentalist of the year by the Country Music Association in 1976 and 2000. Even after he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012, he continued — then in his 70s — to do studio work with latter-day hitmakers like Miranda Lambert and Sturgill Simpson.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Losing his eyesight may or may not have helped Mr. Robbins cultivate a keener musical sensibility. His playing, in any case, revealed a commitment to listening and imagination that had him responding to his collaborators with a singular depth of feeling.“Pig Robbins is the best session man I’ve ever known,” said Charlie McCoy, a fellow A-Teamer, at a reception held in Mr. Robbins’s honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “Anytime Pig’s on a session everyone else plays better.”“If you’re going to be a good player,” Mr. Robbins said at the event, “you have to come up with something that will complement the song and the singer.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Mockingbird,’ Once a Broadway Smash, to Pause Production Amid Omicron

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      “Girl From the North Country,” a musical using the songs of Bob Dylan, also closed, with hopes of reopening in the spring, as the surge in virus cases continues to upend the theater industry.The producers of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a hit play that had been packing in audiences before the pandemic, announced Wednesday that they would shut down the show until June, lay off the cast and crew, downsize the production and then reopen in a smaller theater.At the same time, “Girl From the North Country,” a heart-tugging musical that uses the songs of Bob Dylan to consider the Depression-era plight of a group of down-on-their-luck Midwesterners in the town where Dylan was born, said it would end its Broadway run on Jan. 23, and would try to reopen in another theater this spring.They became the seventh and eighth Broadway shows to announce temporary or permanent closing dates since early December, when the Omicron variant sent coronavirus cases soaring in New York. Their plans for short-term layoffs follow an example set by the musical “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which recently said it would close for nine weeks.The “Mockingbird” move is dramatic, especially for a show that had been playing to capacity crowds before the pandemic. The show had been contemplating for some time whether a move to a smaller theater could make it more sustainable for a long-term run, and the decision to do so now allows it to avoid a period when attendance on Broadway is soft, and expected to remain so, because of the Omicron surge.“Mockingbird” plans to end its current run on Sunday and resume performances June 1 in the theater where “Girl” has been playing. “Mockingbird,” one of the rare nonmusical productions to realistically anticipate a long stay on Broadway, has been playing since late 2018 at the Shubert Theater, which has 1,435 seats. It plans to move to the Belasco Theater, where “Girl” has been running, and which has about 1,000 seats.“Mockingbird,” of course, is adapted from the novel by Harper Lee, which is one of the most popular in American history — just last month, New York Times readers chose it as the best book of the last 125 years. The play, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, had been selling strongly and is set to expand; a North American tour and a London production are both scheduled to begin in March.“Mockingbird,” which has long since recouped its $7.5 million capitalization costs, originally had Scott Rudin as its lead producer, but he stepped back from active producing after accusations of bullying, and the production is now overseen on a day-to-day basis by Orin Wolf as executive producer and Barry Diller as the lead producer.The show originally starred Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch; he returned to lead the cast when the Broadway shutdown ended, and the character is now played by Greg Kinnear, who is expected to return when the show does.“Girl From the North Country” has had a tough run on Broadway: It opened on March 5, 2020, just a week before the coronavirus pandemic forced all theaters to close. And then it was deemed ineligible to compete for that season’s Tony Awards, because too few voters had managed to see it before the industry shut down (it is eligible to compete this season).Caitlin Houlahan, left, and Colton Ryan in 2020 in the musical “Girl From the North Country.” The show is closing, but hopes to reopen in the spring. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical, with a book by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, resumed performances Oct. 13, 2021, but, with its dark tone and small scale, never really found its footing, despite strong prepandemic reviews in outlets including The New York Times, in which critic Ben Brantley called the show “profoundly beautiful.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The Omicron surge. More