DIRTY LINEN, http://www.dirtylinen.com, World & Folk Music #84 October/November '99, pages 13-14 Linen Lites
RICK LEE
Old Time Roots
By Tom Nelligan
Rick Lee is a tall man with a resonant voice that's as comfortably weathered as the songs he sings. He's a singer, banjo picker and piano player who has been part of New England's traditional music scene since the early 1960s. Originally performing with his former wife, singer/dulcimer player Lorraine Lee, and then with the tradition-focused quartet Solomon's Seal, he now plays solo and with various old friends, reaching back to capture the sounds of rural music from both Yankee and Southern traditions.
Lee was born in New York City, but he grew up in Cedar Hill, Texas, near Dallas, and that was where he first started listening to music some 50 years ago. His Tennessee-born grandfather introduced him to radio broadcasts of swing bands like the Light Crust Doughboys and the Texas Playboys as they played in a Fort Worth ballroom, as well as local broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville. Singer/banjo player Uncle Dave Macon was a particular favorite. "He was a big star of the Opry at that time," Lee explained in a recent phone conversation from his suburban Boston home. "My grandfather would talk about how he was from the same part of Tennessee, and that these were tunes he grew up with. He kept trying to cajole me into playing the banjo. Some years later he put my mother and aunt up to buying me one. I did learn to play, but he died before I got to play it for him.
"I sang with him a lot. He sang mostly religious songs, just by himself or in the church choir." Lee's grandmother and mother both played piano, mostly classical and church music, but occasionally other things. "They improvised boogie-woogie, sort of R&B. I just began to pick stuff out on the piano, and I took a few lessons. I never learned to read music very well, but I got rudiments of harmony from a dozen lessons. Otherwise I was just picking up stuff I had heard. There was music in that house all the time."
Lee's family moved back to the Northeast when he was a teenager, and he wound up at Amherst College in Massachusetts just as the 1960s folk revival was gathering force. A college roommate, Andy Leader, had learned banjo techniques and songs from Hedy West, and soon Lee and Leader were working as a coffeehouse duo. "We were really into the New Lost City Ramblers, who were really good at putting people on to their sources," Lee recalled. "They'd tell you where they learned the material, which was mostly from old commercial recordings. So we tried to track down sources. This became an obsession during my college years."
During his sophomore year at Amherst, a group of area college students, who included Bill Keith, Jim Rooney, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and the young bluesman who would become Taj Mahal, organized the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society, an organization that sponsored both concerts and a lot of informal picking sessions. It was an exciting and diverse group that introduced Lee to a lot of music, and while still a student he became its second president.
"I met Lorraine in '62 at a folk music festival," he continued. "We moved to Cambridge in 1963. Lorraine and I played mostly at the Club 47 in '63 and into '64. Then two things happened that took me out of the music scene for a while. I worked at WGBH Radio as a weekend announcer and producer, and I was getting more and more busy, doing more and more things at WGBH. Our son Peter was born in 1964, and so that took both of us out of the scene for a while, except for playing with friends. We did occasional festivals, or places like the 47 or the Unicorn. But we weren't playing out that much until I left WGBH in the summer of 1970 and went back to graduate school. We went back into the music business because it was a way of earning money."
For the next decade and a half the duo of Rick and Lorraine Lee were a popular fixture in the Boston folk community, both for their own performances and for the way they generously helped little-known visiting musicians like Archie Fisher and Stan Rogers get a foothold in the local scene. They released a series of informal, friendly sounding albums, all now sadly out of print, including two as part of a quartet called Solomon's Seal that also featured fiddler Jane Orzechowski and flute/whistle player Sarah Bauhan. The Lees' marriage ended in 1986; their musical partnership lasted only slightly longer. Lorraine later married guitarist Bennett Hammond, with whom she now performs and records as Lorraine Hammond.
These days Lee plays solo or as part of a trio with mandolinist Bill Walach and guitarist Dave Howard. He also tours periodically with singer and multi-instrumentalist Bob Zentz, with whom he has played on and off since the 1960s.
Lee has released two CDs in recent years, Natick (1995), which contains material recorded with various combinations of friends between 1989 and 1994, and There's Talk About A Fence (1999), both produced by singer/guitarist Andy May for the Waterbug label. The acoustic arrangements feature Lee's keyboards and banjo, often reinforced by guitar, mandolin, and harmony vocals. Tracks range from stark versions of traditional Child ballads like "The Daemon Lover" and "Tam Lin," to old-time American songs like "The Prodigal Son," to traditional-sounding contemporary songs by Lee and others. "The roots of both albums," he says, "are the musical roots of my family, which I guess are Celtic-Appalachian.
"My great-grandmother was from Scotland and came to the U.S. in the 18th century. We did some material which is that old, and which is directly from those roots. Some of that is very plain and very straightforward, just banjo and voice, like 'Dives and Lazarus.' And then there's music that builds on those roots, which has grown up either in the U.S. or Scotland or Ireland, and then some originals. The roots are essentially Celtic via Appalachia, and then whatever turned us on after that.
"Fewer of the people I hear coming up now are as obsessively or fanatically devoted to the roots as the people I grew up with. If you listen to a lot of traditional music, you realize how much you don't know, no matter how old you are. I think that makes a difference. Part of it has to do with roots, meaning old music, but part of it also has to do with listening to other singers and other musical traditions." The best young musicians, he says, are those who "listen to all kinds of music, for the quality of the song."
Aside from his ongoing touring schedule, Lee's current plans include two collaborative CDs. He's writing and recording an album of nautical material with Bob Zentz that will be released next year in connection with a planned "Tall Ships" visit to Hampton Roads, Virginia. He's also working on an experimental project in Germany that he describes with a laugh as "space music," playing traditional and improvised keyboard melodies accompanied by various sounds from gongs.
Finally, he is a regular participant in the Dreaded Banjo Orchestra, a twice-yearly onstage gathering of far too many banjo players, organized by Cambridge old-time music guru Sandy Sheehan. "I still love old time music," he concludes with a chuckle. "I will always go way out of my way to touch base with that operation!"
Rick Lee website: