This Bell Still Rings by Barbara Dane

Author:Barbara Dane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597145824
Publisher: Heyday

23

WAKE UP AND SING!

Ten years had passed since I had my foray into the early days of TV with my show, Folksville USA. Now it seems that the suits upstairs had gotten wind of the fact that folk music was beginning to boom, and they wanted more, hoping to draw in younger audiences.

Wake Up and Sing was a weekly half-hour children’s show I was drafted for in 1962 on KPIX-TV, one of San Francisco’s major television pioneers. I used Woody Guthrie’s trusty “Wake Up, Wake Up” as the theme song. I also introduced Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes” on that show, and drew on a considerable amount of our own favorite family songs to share as generously as possible with all these young potential folk music fans.

One week I lacked a babysitter and so had to bring two of my little ones, Nina, four, and Paul, seven, along with me. On the way over the bridge, I heard the sound of a harmonica in the backseat. Busy with all the other daily struggles, I hadn’t been aware that my budding little musician was making all this progress on his own, so to encourage him I asked that he play along with me on some song I was thinking of using when we got to the taping session. He fell right in with the idea of fearlessly improvising either harmony or call-and-response parts, maybe picked up from having watched trad jazz bands or Sonny Terry rehearse for half his life, and I decided on the spot to have him play on the show.

We continued this game until we arrived on the set, where I instructed Paul to stand in a corner far at the rear, and explained that when I nodded toward him, he should start slowly walking across the back of the set while playing along with whatever I was singing, and then “disappear” on the other side. We may have run through it once, maybe not. Studio time was always limited. But I know that the taping came out very well. And who could predict that during the early years of the twenty-first century, Paul would be the one to introduce the blues harp to Cuba?

Beginning in June, I sang frequently with trad jazz bands on a nationally syndicated variety show called PM East/PM West, based on the idea of switching between live audiences on the two coasts. I heard Barbra Streisand for the first time on the PM East part, just a kid doing her first TV work and stunning everyone with that voice.

Around the same time, I was asked to perform in an episode of Checkmate, a popular TV show inspired by that master of detective fiction, Eric Ambler, filmed mostly on the Universal backlot. My scene in the episode, called “Side by Side,” is set in a recording studio, and I am irrelevant to the plot, just someone cutting a record, a “gospel singer from the Rockies” who stands in bare feet behind the glass separating the control room, strumming her guitar and singing .

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