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      Len Chandler, an Early Fixture of the Folk Revival, Dies at 88

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      A singer who performed alongside Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, he was known for his topical songs, some of which he wrote in minutes.Len Chandler, who was an early fixture of the folk music revival that swept through Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s and who sang alongside Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other higher-profile stars at civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, died on Aug. 28 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.Lew Irwin, a longtime friend who in the late 1960s brought Mr. Chandler to Los Angeles to provide music for an unusual new radio show he was creating, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Chandler had recently had several strokes.Mr. Chandler was a classically trained oboist when he arrived in New York from Ohio, where he had graduated from the University of Akron in 1957, and met the singer Dave Van Ronk at the Folklore Center, a Greenwich Village shop that sold records, books and sheet music and was a gathering point for folk musicians.Mr. Van Ronk “introduced me to the Washington Square Park folk scene,” Mr. Chandler said in an essay included in the book “Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival,” by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen (2015). “Every Sunday it was filled with folk singers. I remember learning to play on borrowed guitars in the park until someone said, ‘Buy your own damn guitar.’ I said, ‘OK’ and bought his for 40 bucks.”Mr. Chandler with Bob Dylan at Newport in 1964. Mr. Dylan recalled playing poker with Mr. Chandler in the back room of the Gaslight Cafe in New York. “Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” he said.Jim Marshall Photography LLCSoon he was playing regularly at the Gaslight Cafe, which opened in 1958 and was later famous as a proving ground for Mr. Dylan and others.“It was mainly a scene for poets,” Mr. Chandler said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song,” by Kristin Baggelaar and Donald Milton (1976), “and there wasn’t much happening for singers, except for me.”An executive from the Detroit television station WXYZ saw him there and in 1959 hired him to be the featured musician on “The After Hours Club,” a late-night variety show. By the time Mr. Chandler returned to New York about six months later, the folk music scene was in full swing at the Gaslight, Folk City and other clubs.That scene that included, among others, Mr. Dylan, Mr. Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens and Noel Paul Stookey, later of Peter, Paul and Mary. In “Chronicles: Volume One,” his 2004 memoir, Mr. Dylan wrote of the back-room poker game at the Gaslight where musicians would pass the time waiting their turn to perform.“Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” Mr. Dylan wrote. “‘You’ll never make it in this game if you don’t. Sometimes you even have to get caught bluffing.’”Mr. Chandler performing in New York City in an undated photo.PL Gould/Images Press, via Getty ImagesMr. Chandler, as John Christy of The Atlanta Journal once put it, “possesses a sharply honed guitar-vocal arsenal of ‘message’ songs, blues songs, jazz songs, country songs, and just songs.” But he was especially known for songs he wrote inspired by the news of the day. The first, Mr. Chandler said, was written in 1962 about a disastrous school bus accident the year before in Greeley, Colo.“Then I started writing many songs about the Freedom Riders and sit-ins,” he was quoted as saying in the “Folk Music” book. At the March on Washington in 1963, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, Mr. Chandler sang the traditional song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (Hold On)” with some updated lyrics. Ms. Baez and Mr. Dylan were among the backing singers.The next year he toured with Dick Gregory, the comedian known for sharp-edged material involving race. In the summer of 1969 Mr. Chandler was on the maiden voyage of the Clearwater, the sloop Mr. Seeger used to raise awareness of Hudson River pollution and other environmental causes, sailing from Maine to New York and staging concerts at stops along the way.In 1970 and 1971 he was part of a troupe led by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland that brought an antiwar revue known as “F.T.A.” (which stood for Free Theater Associates, or Free the Army, or something else involving the Army that is unprintable) to military towns and bases at the height of the Vietnam War.If Mr. Chandler never achieved the name recognition of some of those with whom he shared stages and causes, he did write at least one song with lasting appeal: “Beans in My Ears,” which the Serendipity Singers turned into a Top 30 hit in 1964. Aimed at adults but simple and repetitive like a children’s song, it was about people’s tendency not to listen to others. “I think that all grown-ups have beans in their ears,” the final verse went, with “beans in their ears” repeated again and again.Perhaps the song would have climbed higher on the charts had medical professionals in some cities not denounced it. “‘Beans in Ears’ Alarms Doctors Who Fear Children Will Try It,” a 1964 headline in The Indianapolis Star read over an article that said WIRE in Indiana had stopped playing the song. That step was taken by other radio stations as well.Len Hunt Chandler Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Summit County, Ohio. He started learning the piano at 9, but once he reached high school he wanted to join the school band, and the only instrument available was the oboe, so he began playing that.He continued to study music at the University of Akron, where he also showed the beginnings of the activism that would characterize his singing career. In a sharply worded letter to the editor published in The Akron Beacon Journal in 1954, he told of being barred from a public pool because he was Black.“When will we, the people of the United States, learn to practice the principles of democracy that we preach?” he wrote.After he earned his undergraduate degree, a $500 scholarship helped take him to New York to continue his music studies. He would eventually earn a master’s degree in music education at Columbia University, but by then he was immersed in the folk scene.By the mid-1960s Mr. Chandler was a familiar presence at coffee houses in the United States and Canada, and in 1968 his dexterity with topical songs landed him a seemingly impossible job at KRLA radio in Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Irwin was creating a current-events show there called “The Credibility Gap,” and Mr. Chandler was to write and sing three songs a day for the show, based on the news. The first song was due by 9 a.m., the second by noon and the third by 3 p.m.“Sometimes I start writing a half-hour, 20 minutes before the show,” he told The Los Angeles Times in November 1968, when he’d been doing the job for about five months, “so I rip it out of the typewriter and run upstairs without ever having played it on the guitar, decide what key I want to sing it in and put my capo in place. The engineer says, ‘Go,’ and I sing it.”In a Facebook post, Mr. Irwin estimated that Mr. Chandler wrote 1,000 songs from 1968 to 1970.“Reporters speak to the mind; Len aimed at the gut,” he wrote. “And always with gentleness to make his words land with the fullest impact.”Mr. Chandler was on the job at KRLA in June 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. A song he wrote for that occasion included these lyrics:Long line of mourners,Long lines of the slain,Long lines of teletypeSpelling out the pain.Long lines at the ballot boxCasting votes in vain.Long lines line the long, long trackOf another lonesome train.Mr. Chandler in 2009. After settling in Los Angeles, he was a founder of the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase and helped run it for 25 years.Brendan Hoffman/Getty ImagesMr. Chandler released two albums in the late 1960s, “To Be a Man” (1966) and “The Lovin’ People” (1967), though neither made much impact. He settled in Los Angeles, and in 1971 he and John Braheny founded the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase, where songwriters performed new material for music publishers and recording executives. They ran it for 25 years, providing exposure for up-and-coming artists including Stephen Bishop, Stevie Nicks and Karla Bonoff.Mr. Chandler’s survivors include his wife, Olga Adderley Chandler, who acted under her maiden name, Olga James, and was the widow of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who died in 1975. They also include a son, Michael Fox.“One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless,” Mr. Dylan recalled in “Chronicles.” “He didn’t suffer fools, and no one could get in his way.”“Len was brilliant and full of good will,” he added, “one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Roger Sprung, Banjo Virtuoso of N.Y.C. Folk Scene, Dies at 92

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      The “godfather” of progressive bluegrass, he grew up in New York, honed his skills in the mountains and flourished in Greenwich Village in the ’60s.Roger Sprung, a banjo virtuoso and key figure in New York’s midcentury folk music revival, whose innovative picking and genre-mashing audacity earned him the unofficial title of the godfather of progressive bluegrass, died on July 22 at his home in Newtown, Conn. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his wife, Nancy Sprung.A New York City native who honed his skills early on by playing mountain music festivals in Virginia and the Carolinas, Mr. Sprung began his career in the parks and folk clubs in and around Greenwich Village and went on to become an inspiration for the modern bluegrass known as newgrass.In the late 1950s, he played with a folk trio, the Shanty Boys, who recorded for Elektra Records. He later performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and made appearances on television in the 1960s backing the popular country and pop singer Kay Starr on programs like “The Jimmy Dean Show.”In 2020, Mr. Sprung was inducted into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, which cites the Kingston Trio and Béla Fleck as having been influenced by him. Steve Martin, another Hall of Fame member whose banjo prowess was a cornerstone of his early comedy act, has owned a Gibson RB-18 five-string that once belonged to Mr. Sprung.“An argument could be made that Roger Sprung was the first progressive five-string banjoist,” Johnny Baier, the museum’s executive director, wrote when Mr. Sprung was inducted. “While his contemporaries in bluegrass were experimenting in swing in the 1940s and ’50s, Sprung was expanding the acceptable banjo repertoire to include — in addition to swing — ragtime, pop and classical styles as well.”Mr. Sprung, left, and Mr. Wylie performing in Brooklyn in 1972. As a boy he learned bluegrass picking by slowing down 78-r.p.m. records.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesTo Mr. Sprung, musical styles existed to be cross-pollinated.“People say, ‘Do you play bluegrass?’ — and they expect ‘Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms’ and things like that,” he said in a 2006 video interview. “But bluegrass is an instrumentation, and if you do the instrumentation, you can play anything. I got Mozart, I got rags — ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ Scott Joplin.”In 1970, Mr. Sprung was proclaimed the World’s Champion Banjo Player at the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention in North Carolina. That same year, he drew a rave review from John S. Wilson of The New York Times for a New York concert, backed by the Progressive Bluegrassers, which included a longtime collaborator, the guitarist and singer Hal Wylie.Venturing into a “high register to get sound that resembles a mandolin,” Mr. Wilson wrote, Mr. Sprung “made an interesting use of glissandos, produced by twisting the string pegs, particularly in a schottische” — a traditional country dance — “that required a Hawaiian guitar effect.”Roger Howard Sprung was born on Aug. 29, 1930, in New York City, the younger of two sons of Sam and Ethel Sprung. His father was a lawyer. Roger took piano lessons while growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and was soon laying down boogie-woogie numbers.His musical direction changed one Sunday in 1947, when his brother, George, took him to hear a group of folk musicians jamming in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Before long he bought a banjo and began learning bluegrass picking by slowing down 78-r.p.m. records featuring Earl Scruggs, essentially the king of bluegrass banjo. Mr. Sprung was 20 when he began his annual pilgrimages to the South, where he steeped himself in old-time banjo techniques while playing festivals with the likes of Samantha Bumgarner, a celebrated mountain music banjo player.He also became skilled in the traditional clawhammer banjo style, which involves playing with the back of a finger and a thumb, as opposed to bluegrass style, which employs picks worn on the index and middle fingers and the thumb.He brought those rustic sounds back to his bustling hometown and was eventually credited with helping to introduce Southern bluegrass to New York’s flourishing folk scene. At nearly 6-foot-3-inches tall, with his colorful personality and trademark homburg hat, Mr. Sprung was suddenly an attraction.“I went to Washington Square every Sunday, weather permitting, and the crowd got bigger and bigger,” he said in a 2021 video interview with the American Banjo Museum.In 1963, Mr. Sprung released the first of several albums in collaboration with the bluegrass guitar master Doc Watson on Folkways Records. Folkways RecordsHe soon joined Ms. Starr on tour, and his career was on its way. He formed his first band, the Folksay Trio, in about 1954. In 1963, he released the album “Progressive Bluegrass 1 and Other Instrumentals,” on the Folkways label, with the flat-picking bluegrass guitar master Doc Watson. He also recorded two albums with his first wife, Joan Sprung, whom he divorced in 1972.Along the way, Mr. Sprung was a sought-after banjo instructor. His students included the singer-songwriter Harry Chapin.In addition to his second wife, Nancy, Mr. Sprung is survived by his daughters Jennie and Emily.Though he had made his living off the banjo, Mr. Sprung said later in life that he would not advise younger players to follow in his footsteps. “I wouldn’t make it a career, but playing a banjo is real enjoyment,” he said, adding, “As Kay Starr said, ‘It’s hard to play a sad song on a banjo.’” More

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      How the Head of Inside Broadway Spends His Sundays

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      There is usually a matinee in store for Michael Presser, who is the founder of Inside Broadway.More young people might be tuning into the Tony Awards this weekend thanks to the work of Michael Presser, the founder of Inside Broadway, a nonprofit organization that brings Broadway musicals to New York City schools and New York City schoolchildren to Broadway musicals.What started in the early 1980s as a free ticket program for local students to see “Cats” now reaches 75,000 students in 90 schools every year with its own touring productions and educational programs. Current shows in rotation include “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” “Sophisticated Ladies” and “Free to Be … You and Me.”Mr. Presser, 75, lives in Greenwich Village. Though his organization will turn 41 this year, he is not yet done marking its latest milestone birthday. “Since we work on a fiscal year, we’re still 40 until June 30,” he said. “We’re still celebrating.”QUIET FORMALITY I’m not a morning person, so I absolutely love to have quiet around me in the morning. No TV, no radio, and basically I prefer to settle in with the morning papers and spend a good period of time going through the news of the day. I never lie around in pajamas or athletic clothes. I am formal.“I very much enjoy the plants, and I very much enjoy my gardener who takes care of them. I’m not a horticulturalist.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesGREEN SPACE There is a garden connected to my apartment. It’s a lovely place to be on Sunday mornings with the newspapers and tea. I’m not a coffee drinker. I prefer black tea or green tea. Many times when I have guests visit me from outside of New York, they’re fascinated to see a garden in the heart of Manhattan. They assume all New Yorkers live in Times Square. I very much enjoy the plants, and I very much enjoy my gardener who takes care of them. I’m not a horticulturalist.ON THE TELEPHONE I do like to spend a little time in the morning making phone contact with friends and relatives from outside of New York. It’s a very good time to speak with people who are in different time zones. I prefer catching up by phone, because it allows for a more direct and personal exchange. Social media I think tends to be rather superficial.“This particular neighborhood is so rich in history and architecture,” Mr. Presser said of Greenwich Village.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesA GREAT HONOR I take a weekly walk through the neighborhood. This is something I started doing during the pandemic. Back then I was taking these walks daily. Even though I’ve been here a long time, I very much enjoy Greenwich Village. I think sometimes you maybe take for granted your immediate neighborhood. But this particular neighborhood is so rich in history and architecture. It’s a very special area of New York and I actually consider it a great honor to be a longtime resident.Mr. Presser often stops at Murray’s Bagels on Sixth Avenue. “That is lunch.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesPHILLY THROWBACK I always end up stopping for bagels and lox. That’s kind of a Sunday tradition from my childhood in Philadelphia. When I was a boy, one of my uncles used to deliver a bag of bagels and lox to our house every Sunday. It was truly something to look forward to. So I kind of continue it as a fond memory. I’ll stop at Sixth Avenue, Murray’s. I’ll take it home and sit outdoors in the garden. That is lunch.MATINEE Sunday, I feel, is the best day of the week to go to the theater, and I have always loved having a matinee performance to attend. While I do go to many performances during the week, on Sundays I’m well rested and can focus on the performances, something that’s sometimes harder to do during the week. I go to Broadway but also many other kinds of shows, Off Broadway and so on. It’s really wonderful, the wide variety of theater we have here. It’s a good time to sort of take that in. Recently I saw “Kimberly Akimbo” and a brand-new opera at the Metropolitan Opera, “Champion,” and I had a wonderful opportunity to see one of the final performances of “Phantom of the Opera.”“It’s really wonderful, the wide variety of theater we have here.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesTAKE ME OUT Sunday during the baseball season is a great time to get out to Yankee Stadium. I always liked baseball as a child, and then I sort of lost interest in it for a rather long time, and I seem to have rediscovered it again. I think it’s a fascinating game; the strategies, the players that have such unique skills. And during the summertime I think it’s a wonderful experience to be outdoors at a baseball game. Yankee Stadium is a real New York institution. I take the subway. All New Yorkers take the subway.Mr. Presser often meets friends for dinner on Sunday evenings. “We do not discuss politics,” he said. “That’s a firm rule.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesFIRM RULE We have a sort of gang of friends who meet for dinner on Sunday evenings at the Westway Diner in Hell’s Kitchen. It gives us an opportunity to exchange what we’ve been doing this week, particularly about the world of the arts. We have a lot of strong and interesting opinions, and I always encourage everybody to respect other people’s opinions. For instance, we frequently discuss who performed at the opera or what they saw this week. We do not discuss politics. That’s a firm rule. No politics.TRAVEL RESEARCH After dinner, it’s free time, and what I like to do generally is to plan projects and activities and especially travel I’m going to be doing in the coming months. Because I’m not a beach person, I almost always plan travel around major cosmopolitan cities. I can figure out what theater I might like to see and research key people I might like to meet in the local arts community.LATE-NIGHT STACK I’m an evening person. I can stay up late, until 1 a.m. or sometimes later. It gives me some time for personal reading. I am a great fan of the New York Public Library, which I feel is one of the great privileges of living in New York. I always have a stack of books that I’ve gotten from the library. I prefer biographies and history. One of the nice things about the library is you can borrow a book, and if you don’t like it you can send it right back.Sunday Routine readers can follow Inside Broadway on social media at @Inside_Broadway. More

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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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      Judy Henske, a Distinctive Voice on the Folk Scene, Dies at 85

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      Her versatile vocals were a trademark, as was her comic stage patter. The character Annie Hall owed her a debt.Judy Henske, who made a splash on the folk scene of the early 1960s with a versatile voice that could conjure Billie Holiday or foreshadow Janis Joplin, and performances full of offbeat stage patter, died on April 27 in hospice care in Los Angeles. She was 85.The death was announced by her husband, the keyboardist Craig Doerge.Ms. Henske played in clubs and coffee houses on the West Coast in the late 1950s and early ’60s — she opened for Lenny Bruce at the Los Angeles club the Unicorn — before heading east to be part of the vibrant Greenwich Village scene. By 1963, when Robert Shelton of The New York Times sampled the up-and-coming talent in those clubs, she had made a strong impression.“Standing head and shoulders above the new contenders,” Mr. Shelton wrote, “is Judy Henske, a six-foot hollyhock who is blooming with talent.”“She is praiseworthy for her singing of blues, folk ballads and popular songs,” he added, “as well as for her freely improvised patter, which has been called ‘cafe of the absurd.’”That same year, her debut album, called simply “Judy Henske,” was released, and she appeared in a feature film, “Hootenanny Hoot,” playing herself, alongside Johnny Cash, the Brothers Four and other musical acts.“I was the only folk singer who looked good in a swimsuit,” she told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 2000, explaining her presence in that forgotten movie.In 1964 her second album, “High Flying Bird,” was released. Its title track, written by Billy Edd Wheeler, was among her better-known songs, and the record also included a bluesy version of the standard “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” and a mournful cover of “God Bless the Child.”“The Death-Defying Judy Henske,” recorded live in front of an audience in a studio in 1966, captured some of her trademark banter. One of that album’s tracks, “Betty and Dupree,” is almost 11 minutes long and begins with Ms. Henske telling an improbable yarn about two octogenarians looking for love that goes on for four minutes before she starts singing. But the record also included plenty of folk, soul and blues.“Henske’s ability to mark her territory in all of these genres, define it, and then burn it down is decidedly spellbinding,” Matthew Greenwald wrote on the website Analog Planet when the album was rereleased some 40 years later.Ms. Henske performing with Paul Butterfield at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1968. Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn 1969 Ms. Henske and her husband at the time, the musician and arranger Jerry Yester, released the album “Farewell Aldebaran,” which took her into even more uncharted territory with its use of synthesizers and psychedelic flourishes. In the early 1970s she recorded with a quintet called Rosebud, but then — after her first marriage ended in divorce and she married Mr. Doerge, a fellow member of Rosebud, in 1973 — came a long absence from recording.In the late 1990s, though, people began to rediscover her, thanks to an internet fan site and to her mentions in the crime novels of Andrew Vachss, whose main character, a private detective named Burke, was a Henske fan.In 1999 she released her first album in decades, “Loose in the World.” The next year found her back onstage in Manhattan, playing the Bottom Line with Dave Van Ronk. Another album, “She Sang California,” came out in 2004. Old fans were surprised, in a good way.“They say, ‘Oh, you’re doing so well. We wondered what happened to you,’” she told The Marin Independent Journal of California in 2005. “It’s like I’m some kind of relative that they liked, or some kind of acquaintance they only had a good time with. And now here’s that person again. And they’re so glad to see me.”Judith Anne Henske was born on Dec. 20, 1936, in Chippewa Falls, Wis. Her father, William, was a doctor, and her mother, Dorothy (Thornton) Henske, studied nursing and worked for a time at the local woolen mill.While growing up, Judy sang at local events, including weddings — but only if her mother was in attendance.“I went to more weddings of people I didn’t even know,” Dorothy Henske told The Chippewa Herald-Telegram in 1962.Judy also sang in her church choir.“She told me once she had such a powerful voice because one of the nuns in Chippewa Falls stood on her chest on a book to help her develop vocal power,” Mr. Doerge said by email. “Hard to know if that’s true, but no one questions the power of her voice.”Ms. Henske studied at Rosary College in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. By 1959 she was in San Diego, performing at coffee houses; soon she made her way to Los Angeles.Ms. Henske with Jerry Yester at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, almost 50 years after they released “Farewell Aldebaran,” an album that took her into uncharted territory with use of synthesizers and psychedelic flourishes. Rebecca Sapp/WireImage for The Recording AcademyIn 1962 she was playing a club in Oklahoma City when Dave Guard, who had recently left the Kingston Trio, asked her to join a new group, the Whiskeyhill Singers. The group made two albums and increased Ms. Henske’s visibility, but it didn’t last long. After it broke up, she became a fixture in New York.Judy Collins, in her book “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music” (2011), wrote that Albert Grossman, the manager who had been instrumental in forming the group Peter, Paul and Mary, suggested that she, Ms. Henske and Jo Mapes form a trio, which he proposed to call the Brown-Eyed Girls. “You can get some brown contact lenses,” he told Ms. Collins.That idea fizzled, but Ms. Henske was doing fine on her own. Mr. Doerge said that he first met her when, home from college on Christmas break in 1964, he was asked to fill in as her backing pianist for a show she was doing at La Cave, a club in Cleveland.“Judy was already famous then,” he said, “and I was in awe.”That same year, Ms. Henske toured with a young comedian named Woody Allen, with whom she had sometimes shared the bill at the Village Gate and other New York clubs. In later years she was often said to have inspired Mr. Allen’s character Annie Hall (who like Ms. Henske was from Chippewa Falls), something she was asked about so often that, she said in the 2000 interview with the Santa Cruz newspaper, it irked her a bit.“Woody used a lot of people as models for his people in his movies,” she said. “Annie Hall was an amalgam of maybe three different people. I think it was Louise Lasser, me and what’s-her-name, the movie actress.”Diane Keaton? the interviewer prompted.“Yeah, Diane Keaton.”“So,” she added, “let’s move on from Woody.”In addition to her husband, Ms. Henske, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Kate DeLaPointe, and a granddaughter.Though Ms. Henske was best known as a performer, she also wrote or co-wrote numerous songs, many with Mr. Doerge. Their “Yellow Beach Umbrella” was covered by, among others, Bette Midler and Perry Como.Her witty shows, though, were something to savor — even when there were glitches. Mr. Doerge recalled a show they did in 2001 at Freight & Salvage, a performance spot in Berkeley, Calif.“At the last step up from the dressing room to the stage Judy tripped on her hem and fell flat on her face onto the floor while holding her banjo,” he said. The audience went silent.“She gets up and goes to the mic, pauses, and says, ‘Perfection is so lifeless,’” he recalled. “The crowd loved it, relaxed, and she had more or less won them over before we played one song.“Live, she was peerless.” More

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      Paul Siebel, Singer Whose Career Was Notable but Brief, Dies at 84

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      He arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-1960s and drew comparisons to Dylan. But he left the music business not long after.Paul Siebel, a folk singer and songwriter who drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in the 1960s and ’70s but dropped out of the music business, hindered by stage fright and disappointed by the lack of attention his work received, died on April 5 in hospice care in Centreville, Md. He was 84.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his nephew, Robert Woods, said. Mr. Siebel had lived in nearby Wye Mills.In the mid-1960s, Mr. Siebel (pronounced SEE-bel) moved from the folk music scene in Buffalo to the more thriving one in Greenwich Village.“He knocked me out,” the folk singer and multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg, who backed Mr. Siebel in performances and remained his friend for decades, said by phone. “He was a great singer and songwriter. But he had the worst stage fright of anyone I ever met. If not for the stage fright, he would have continued.”Mr. Siebel, whose music was infused with a country sound, sang in a nasal voice and wrote evocative songs with strong narratives. In “Louise,” his best-known composition, he sang about the death of a truck-stop prostitute:Well, they all said Louise was not half badIt was written on the walls and window shadesAnd how she’d act the little girlA deceiver, don’t believe her, that’s her tradeLinda Ronstadt, in her book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” (2013), recalled seeing Mr. Siebel at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1969.“We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise,” Ms. Ronstadt wrote.She recorded “Louise” and included it on her album “Silk Purse” (1970). It was subsequently covered by Bonnie Raitt, Leo Kottke and at least 20 other artists. Another of Mr. Siebel’s songs, “Spanish Johnny,” was recorded by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings and by Mr. Bromberg.Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra Records after Mr. Bromberg set up a concert for him at the Folklore Center, in Greenwich Village, so that Peter Siegel, a producer for the label, could hear him.When Mr. Siebel’s first album, “Woodsmoke & Oranges,” was released in 1970, Gregory McDonald, a critic for The Boston Globe, wrote that it “justifies his currently being compared with Bob Dylan.” He called Mr. Siebel “the big new name in folk music.”But “Woodsmoke & Oranges” did not sell well and neither did his follow-up album, “Jack-Knife Gypsy,” released the next year.There would be only one more, a live album recorded with Mr. Bromberg and the singer-songwriter Gary White in 1978 and released in 1981.“He was very critical of himself,” Mr. Bromberg said. “After those two albums, he wrote another bunch of songs, but he destroyed them. He said they weren’t as good as the ones on the albums.”By the early 1980s, he had left the business altogether.“I started drinking, things started coming apart,” he told the magazine American Songwriter in 2011. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted, and without that, how can you write? And then after a while I just couldn’t go out and do those same songs again and again. I soured. It soured.”Mr. Siebel in the 1970s. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted,” he said of his decision to leave the music business, “and without that, how can you write?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesPaul Karl Siebel was born on Sept. 19, 1937, in Buffalo. His father, Karl, was a farmer and restaurateur. His mother, Dorothy (Hosmer) Siebel, was a homemaker and seamstress.Paul studied classical violin as a child and later became proficient at the guitar. After attending what is now the University at Buffalo, he served in the Army in Europe before beginning to perform on the folk circuit in Buffalo. When he moved to New York City, he supported himself by working in a baby carriage factory in Brooklyn.Robert Zachary Jr., his manager, told Dirty Linen, a folk and world music magazine, in 1996 that, before Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra, he didn’t have a telephone. “I used to have to send him telegrams, you know, to get him to come uptown and see us and talk to us or sign a contract,” he said.After Mr. Siebel walked away from the music business, he became a bread baker for a restaurant and a county park worker in Maryland.He leaves no immediate survivors.Asked in 1996 how he thought he would be remembered, Mr. Siebel said: “He was a guy who wrote a couple of pretty good songs. What ever happened to him?” More

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      How Film Forum Became the Best Little Movie House in New York

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      It’s just before 8 p.m. on a recent Friday night in Manhattan, and a crowd of moviegoers is lined up to see “Great Freedom” (2021), an Austrian film that tells the tender and terrible story of a concentration camp survivor in Germany who’s repeatedly imprisoned for his sexuality. Sebastian Meise, the film’s director, and its star, Franz Rogowski, will be giving a Q. and A. after the showing, so there’s a palpable sense that this is an event.Outside on West Houston Street, the glow of the marquee — “Film Forum” written in curving, blue neon letters — beckons like a spaceship. Upon seeing it, I feel the thrill of catching a movie in an actual cinema: It’s my first visit to Film Forum since it reopened in 2021 following a nearly 13-month closure on account of Covid-19.In the lobby, there’s anticipatory chatter: film students talking into their phones and older Greenwich Village and SoHo locals (like me) discussing the state of the world. The reserved seating system — a measure instigated during the pandemic — ended this month, and the first-come-first-served rule resumed, bringing back with it the kvetching about grabbing a preferred seat. The theater director, filmmaker and painter André Gregory, a devout Film Forum fan, once left sweaters on a pair of chairs while he and his wife, the filmmaker Cindy Kleine, went for chocolate egg creams in the lobby and returned to find people sitting in them. “The woman said, ‘I don’t care. We’re not moving,’ and [her companion] threw my sweater in my direction,” Gregory says with a laugh. In 2018, the theater underwent a renovation — prompted in part by a common refrain, “Love the movies, hate the seats,” from guests in an audience survey two years earlier — and upgraded its chairs, which are now softer, wider and infinitely more comfortable.The rest of the interior is also welcoming, with big red columns, and walls hung with movie posters, film schedules and original art. At the lobby concession stand, there’s good espresso and great snacks, both the requisite popcorn and baked goods, including a particularly delicious orange-chocolate Bundt cake. The theater’s director, Karen Cooper, who has been in charge of Film Forum for 50 of its 52 years, may be fiercely political in her choice of films — tonight’s movie was her discovery — but she’s all doting mother when it comes to the sweets, most of which come from Betty Bakery in Brooklyn.The view from inside theater 1, which, since Film Forum’s 2018 renovation, features wider seats.Blaine DavisA corkboard display case in the lobby shows current and future screenings and events.Blaine DavisThe story of movies as art, especially in Manhattan is, in part, a tale of the rise and fall of independent cinemas. When I was a child, there was the Art on 8th Street, the 8th Street Playhouse and the Bleecker Street Cinema, all within blocks of one another. By the end of the 1990s, though, these had all shut down. But Film Forum, which opened in 1970, has always been special and thrives to this day, playing as many as 400 or 500 films every year (a fourth screen was also added in the renovation).It has spawned and nurtured a real community of cinephiles, who come to laugh, cry and argue. Sometimes, the audience feels like a part of the show — I once heard a fight break out in Russian in the back row. And before a screening of “Amazing Grace,” the 2018 concert documentary of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 gospel performances in a Los Angeles church, I witnessed a lobby packed with middle-aged women of all races singing “Respect,” as if they were teenagers about to enter a rock concert.For many, Film Forum is also a place to get an education. Peter Nelson, a cinematographer and director, most recently of the acclaimed honeybee documentary “The Pollinators” (2019), says, “In the early ’80s, when I was at N.Y.U. film school, their incredibly diverse program of indies, foreign movies and classics provided access to films that were often not shown anywhere else in town.” Nelson adds, “From time to time, I would do a ‘cinema binge,’ where I would finish watching a film, leave the theater and line up for a different one, often with a delicious brownie to hold me over.” Gina Duncan, the president-elect of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is also a fan. “Anyone who wants to run their own cinema imagines a place like Film Forum: a dedicated audience, good concessions and great programming,” she says. “It’s unpretentious, and I think that’s got a lot to do with Karen Cooper.”Karen Cooper, Film Forum’s longtime director, stands in a theater and against one of the space’s instantly recognizable red columns.Blaine DavisCooper was a newly minted Smith College graduate when she arrived back in her native New York City in 1970 and started looking for a job in the arts. In 1972, she became director of the nascent Film Forum, then located in a small loft space on West 88th Street with 50 folding chairs. “My annual budget was about $19,000,” she says. “And I made the coffee.” She’s held the same title ever since. In 1975, Cooper moved Film Forum downtown to the Vandam Theater; in 1980, she built a two-screen cinema on Watts Street. In 1990, Film Forum moved once more, this time to its current location between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue. Today, Cooper’s budget is around six million.At 73, Cooper, who lives in the far West Village and walks to work every day, is vividly articulate and fast moving, a dynamo who oversees a staff of 50 (give or take), the cinema’s fund-raising (Film Forum is a nonprofit with a board of 24) and much of programming. It’s Cooper who, along with the programmer Mike Maggiore and the deputy director Sonya Chung, looks after the new indie films and documentaries, while repertory director Bruce Goldstein handles revivals with the associate repertory programmer Elspeth Carroll. Cooper attends at least a couple of international festivals each year, and she’s rubbed elbows with everyone in the business from Werner Herzog to Robert Redford, but never name drops. “No one really knows celebrities,” says Cooper. “I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.”She believes the best documentaries can help change the world. “I grew up in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement — all essentially about human rights — and they move me deeply,” she says of the nonfiction narratives.The view of theater 1 from inside the projection booth.Blaine DavisCooper has brought in films like Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church, and, in March, Christine Turner’s “Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’” (2021), a documentary short about 20th-century postcards depicting scenes of murdered Black Americans and bloodthirsty white onlookers — once souvenirs — and the way Black activists repurposed them to combat the horrors of lynching.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Babi Yar. Context,” the devastating 2021 documentary on the 1941 Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews over two days at the Babi Yar ravine on the edge of Kyiv in Ukraine, is slotted for an April 1 showing, but was programmed months before the current Russian invasion. No doubt, Gregory, who was born in France and fled Europe with his Russian Jewish parents just before the Nazi invasion, will catch it. “I have a similar interest in films about fascism,” he says. Cooper confirms this: “André has seen every one of my Nazi movies,” she says, “and that’s saying a lot.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More