Music & Poetry of Gary Green

Music & Poetry

Late one Atlanta night in the black-and-white 1950s, Gary Green's mother woke the kindergartener up out of bed and marched him in front of a snow-image television screen to see a guest on Steve Allen's Tonight Show. A wild man named Jerry Lee Lewis was pounding a piano like no one had ever seen. Gary's mother, a North Carolina-bred piano teacher and church organist, wanted her toddler to see this maniac rock and roll. From that moment on Gary Green wanted to make music.

In the summer of 1973 Gary Green sat down on the edge of a flatbed trailer truck in the corner of a car dealership parking lot in Knoxville Tennessee with the mother of country music, Maybelle Carter. Johnny Cash had said that meeting Mother Maybelle was like meeting the Queen of England.

Mother Maybelle slid Gary's capo up to the fourth fret of his guitar and worked with him until he could exactly mimic the famous "Carter-Lick" guitar style with his thumb.

Less than three years later, Gary was recording on New York's small but highly prestigious Folkways Records and had been introduced by Marjorie Guthrie as "the greatest singer/songwriter since my husband" (the late Folk Music icon Woody Guthrie).

Today Gary's three legendary Folkways sessions are part of the Smithsonian's permanent Folklife collection and have been custom reissued both on cassette and CD by the museum.

His refusal to yield the 1960s confrontational activism of his lyrics combined with his unwillingness (or inability) to separate from his traditional southern country and rockabilly roots of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, and even Jerry Lee Lewis kept him from earning the endearment that many folk artist of the era went on to signify.

Though it has been decades since he regularly stood on a stage or at a rally with his guitar picking out Carter-Family melodies to his social commentary inflammatory lyrics, Gary Green still keeps a piano and guitar nearby where ever he goes.

Click on the links below to learn more about each of these legendary recordings:

These Six Strings Neutralize The Tools Of Oppression: In the cold winter of 1976 when Folkways founder Moe Asch heard Gary's demo tape he handed him an advance check (something Moe rarely did) and the first "open" contract with Folkways he had given to anyone since Woody Guthrie.; "Field Recorded" (as Moe liked to say) in a trailer park in Charlotte, NC, this album of originals is largely from that demo tape. Heavily influenced musically by Carter and Guthrie, this album was called by the Midwest Record Review "the last of the 1960s "protest singer" albums". True to the Folkways tradition of not allowing re-takes or overdubs, Moe Asch left in the sounds of barking dogs outside the door and a jet flying over and rattling the aluminum walls of the 12' x 60' singlewide.

One of the most un-noteworthy tracks on the album, Dear Mister Kelly At The FBI, a song about Gary's attempts to obtain his FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act, was a minor pop hit in Europe in early 1977, becoming the number one song in Sweden that year.

Allegory: By 1977 (the summer of New York's power blackout, the Son of Sam murders, and he hottest temperatures on record) Gary had left the South and was living in New York City with Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen in their apartment/office of Broadside Magazine. Cunningham had been the accordion player in Woody Guthrie's group The Almanac Singers and she and Friesen had founded the topical music magazine with Seeger, Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Rolling Stone founder Ralph Gleason. This album was recorded in Sis & Gordon's New York magazine office and apartment and strongly reflects the influence of Friesen's painful McCarthy-era blacklisted bitterness.; Acting as associate editor for three issues of Broadside Magazine, Gary also co-produced three albums for Folkways and Broadside (including Phil Ochs Sings For Broadside Volume 2, a compilation of New York street musicians called Streetsounds, and the now-infamous album Bob Dylan vs. A.J. Weberman ― for which he also wrote the liner notes and was eventually sued for $636-million).; With fellow folksingers Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs and the Rev. Frederick Kirkpatrick he founded the I Hear America Singing topical music project only weeks before Ochs' death (which was ruled a suicide but Friesen always maintained was murder). After Ochs' death, Gary Green left New York and radical politics to return to the South as a newsaper journalist.
Still At Large

Since Folkways

Shortly after the release of his third album, Gary became the sole owner of Baltimore's landmark Bread & Roses Coffeehouse and re-instituted the 1960s Hootenanny tradition there. The Smithsonian Folkways achieves hold two unreleased live albums from that era: Hootenanny 1980s Style and Gary Green Live From Bread & Roses. Both were pending release when Moe Asch died.

In 1993, before leaving Baltimore for the last time, Gary appeared at a Bread & Roses Reunion Concert that marked not only the end of an era in music but what was to have been Gary Green's last performance of the 20th century.

But in 1995, at the urging of old friend Justin Tubb (son of the legendary country and western star Ernest Tubb) Gary finally made that last 20th Century performance on live radio during the Ernest Tubb Midnight Jamboree following the Grand Ole Opry on WSM radio in Nashville, Tennessee.

Early in the 21^st century Gary had been flirting with a musical return to his fusion traditional country/folk/rockabilly roots with digital technology, but hesitated to explore that route because of the almost-bitter resistance to his music 30 years earlier from both the New York folk community and the Nashville country world.

Currently only The Smithsonian and occasionally an eBay auction keep Gary Green's music alive.

Click on The Buttons Below To See The Album Covers, Read The Lyrics, and learn more about each album