Pete’s Word

Dear Friends,

Sam Hinton passed away on Thursday, September 10, at 4 p.m., surrounded by family and hearing his own songs.   It was a peaceful end to a long, creative and beloved life.  There is a sweet tribute to him at < www.samhinton.org>, the website kept by his grandchild Katrina Cooper and her husband Danny.

Please feel free to send this notice on to others, or send me the contact information for others who ought to be on this list.  We will keep in touch as plans develop for memorial gatherings.

Warm wishes,
Leanne Hinton

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Sam was one of the people whose love for and command of the music really inspired me.  His performance style was subtle, self-contained, and wonderfully intriguing.  His emphasis was always on the music, not the performer, and Sam always brought something special to each song he sang and tune he played.

My first encounter with his music was via a recording titled “How The West Was Won” (not to be confused by the film of the same title). It was a two Lp set with various artists, with an amazingly diverse range: from traditional-style performers like  Sam and Jimmie Driftwood to Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney!  You know, Rosemary and Bing did a pretty fine job at that!  In 1961, Sam was brought to Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater.  The audience was a bit on the thin side, but the performance made me a lifelong fan.

I imagine there are many people now a days that have never spent any time going through a major library’s card catalog.  Perhaps that’s a good thing.  I wiled away hours and whole days of my life in the UCSB library, researching bibliographies and such stuff back in the 60s when others were out playing poker, surfing, burning banks, and indulging other creative recreations.

Nevertheless, I grew to enjoy finding odds and ends in those immense card catalogs, finding things I hadn’t a clue existed anywhere in God’s creation. Things that made one stop and ponder, such as “The Barbed Wire Collector’s Journal”, complete with photos, descriptions, history,  and discussion of eighteen-inch strands of barbed (or bobbed) wire. I began to realise that for every topic I could think of, and some that I couldn’t, there existed a depth of knowledge that a card catalog could reveal to the unwary browser.

One of this country’s greatest treasures is the Library Of Congress, based -of course!- in Washington DC. I have friends back east that regularly take advantage of its facilities. I have managed one vist about 16 years ago and was sorry. Sorry because I was overwhelmed by all that great material – especially in its Folklore Dept. – which was unavailable to me on a regular basis, based as I am on the Left Coast. Now, computers and digital databases have replaced card catalogs and the ‘net has made it possible for all Americans to share some of the wonderful resources of what is now called the American Folklife Center. In the just-arrived Summer 2007 issue of the AFC News (as we know, the people in Washington work, live, and move in glacial terms) comes an article that announces the old card catalog once in use there has been digitized and made available on-line! What a great find and resource for thos eof us who still listen to the amazing collection of field recordings stored in the archives there.

CLICK HERE to enter the card catalog, and have fun browsing.

  

The UCSB Performance Ensemble Of Hill-Billy Music, in a program February 20, 2008. (James Wimmer, Barbara Taylor, Jared Stein, Philip
Murphy, Sean Anderson, Tim Cooley, Erin Putnam, Peter Feldmann,
John McDonnel, Justin Charbonneau, and Scott Burkall.)

I’ve been having a great time playing music with a group of students at UCSB under the auspices of the Ethnomusicology Department.  We’ve been learning about the music by performing it, and having a great time to boot.  Today, we gave a 50 minute show complete with lots of banjo – fiddle tunes, a Baptist lined-out hymn, play party songs, ballads,  a couple of country blues songs and a nice gospel quartet.  The weather was forecast to be rainy, but though there was some wind, we managed to get the sun to make an appearance as well.  As you can see, we had trios of fiddles, banjos, and guitars.  It would have been nice to get a jug bass in there, but no empty jugs made their appearance as of yet.  The class runs into March, and perhaps we’ll get a booking elsewhere in the community, if not on American Idol.

Thanks, everyone, for all your effort.