Folk music icon Tom Rush to perform at Calvin TheaterDate: 5/3/2022 NORTHAMPTON – An icon of contemporary folk music for more than six decades, New Hampshire-born Tom Rush isn’t ready to slow down. He recently premiered an online subscription series, “Rockport Sunday,” named after the fingerpicked, instrumental composition that he paired with his oft-covered “No Regrets,” in 1968.
He will be appearing with Lep KOttke at the Calvin Theater in Northamtpon on May 12.
“‘Rockport Sunday’ is a notion I came up with when COVID [19] shut down the live shows,” Rush said from his Kittery, ME, home. “I do a song a week, tell a story, and post it online.’
Rush is usually not alone when he prepares the program. “My keyboard player, Matt Nakoa, is a monster talent. He writes great songs. He’ll do a song of his own once in a while and also back me up. I’ve had other guests like Jonathan Edwards. I’m trying to get Gordon Lightfoot.”
No stranger to technology, Rush’s cover of “The Remember Song” has drawn more than seven million YouTube viewers. “I heard someone play it in a club,” he explained, “and it lit me up. I got in touch with Stephen Walters (the songwriter) and asked if he had any more songs. He sent me a couple of CDs of quasi-religious songs, very serious stuff – totally unlike ‘The Remember Song’.”
The YouTube clip was videotaped live. “I was invited to be part of a concert that Judy Collins was doing out in San Diego,” Rush said, “and they filmed the whole thing, a six-cameras shoot, very nice production. I had access to my material from that show. Dan Beach was running my website and posting things on YouTube. We posted several songs, and I said, “We should put ‘The Remember Song,’ on, maybe someone will like it.’ It’s the one that took off. My daughter says that all the plays were by one guy who can’t remember anything.”
Billed under the Club 47 banner, Rush’s appearance at Northampton’s Calvin Theater on is more than your typical concert. “Leo Kottke will be starting the evening,” he explained, “but, after the intermission, Matt Nakoa, Monica Rizzio, and I will be taking over the stage. This will be our third show with Leo. Club 47 shows have been fun over the decades.
Established artists and newcomers, that’s what Club 47 means to me.”
Club Passim’s predecessor, Club 47 was the flagship of the early-60s Boston/Cambridge folk scene. Rush was a freshman at Harvard University, majoring in English, when he wandered into the club. “I was a folk music fan,” he recalled, “but I got into music in the ‘50s when the rock and roll boom was going on. It was so compelling – Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, on and on and on. I loved that music. I got a guitar and tried playing some of those songs. Then, on a trip cross-country with my parents, we stopped in Jackson Hole, WY. I ended up living there for 12 years not too long ago. I heard my first Josh White recording. I was stunned. I had never heard a guitar played like that before. I decided that I wanted to be Josh White, which didn’t work out well. When I got to Cambridge, I was told ‘No, Josh is commercial. We want people who live in cabins in the woods and built their own banjo.’ I got sucked into that. I still love Josh White, but that was the way the wind was blowing.”
Rush entered a new world at Club 47. “It was a block from my dorm room at 47 Mt. Auburn Street,” he said. “It was irresistible. It had a big glass window in the front that would fog up in the winter. It sat around 80 people. You could squeeze in 100. They hosted all kinds of music. They were unique among the coffeehouses. They made a point of bringing in the legends. You could sit in this little venue and listen to the Carter Family, Flatt & Scruggs, Bill Monroe. They brought in a lot of the old blues guys. They were used to playing bars, in the deep south, with chicken wire in front of the stage because people threw beer bottles at them. Here they were in Cambridge and white students where listening to them with reverence. I was a whole different world.”
Becoming host of a weekly half-hour show, “Balladeers,” on Harvard’s radio station, Rush “would play a theme song,” he remembered, “and a guest would do a song or two. There’d be some chitchat and that was all there was to it. I had to go out and find guests to appear on my show. I thought I would go to hootenannies, what we now call open mics, and discovered pretty quickly that I could get in for free if I had a guitar with me. The assumption being that I was going to play. Then I discovered I could get in for free if I had a guitar case, so I’d put a six-pack in the guitar case and head off to the hootenanny.”
The plan worked until Rush “got caught at the Golden Vanity in Boston,” he recalled “The boss man said, ‘Hey, kid, get on stage.’ I had to borrow a guitar. I was terminally nervous but did well enough that he called, a week or so later, when somebody got sick, and asked me to be a substitute folk singer.”
The rest is history.
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