7 minute read
After decades playing music, Frank Hamilton isn’t done yet
Mark Woolsey
In a career that spans more than seven decades, Frank Hamilton has had ample opportunity to burn out on music, especially his passion for folk music. Endless road gigs, session work and clashing egos would seemingly be a recipe for retiring to a front porch.
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But Hamilton glows with the enthusiasm of a fresh-faced youngster playing his first chords.
“I relish learning,” the 87-yearold guitar, banjo and stringedinstrument virtuoso said. “I think is that it’s a choice and that you make the choice. I believe it was Clint Eastwood who said ‘I never let the old man in.’ That’s a great statement.”
The Southern California native who now lives in metro Atlanta and co-founded the Frank Hamilton (music) School in Decatur caught the music bug early, courtesy of a recordcollecting stepdad. He became enamored of folk and blues and applied himself to learning guitar.
Although he took classes, the bulk of his learning was off-thecuff, as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie mentored him at various times. “You don’t study folk music formally,” he said. “You trade licks and ideas and you’re influenced by them.”
After he hitchhiked to New York, Hamilton joined musicologist/performer/partner Guy Carawan and folkie Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and embarked on a 1950s-era tour of the South, collecting and learning folk songs and seeking out performers they’d heard on Library of Congress recordings. They eked out a living busking and performing live on tiny radio stations across the region.
Those wanderings strengthened Hamilton’s bond with folk music’s emphasis on hard times and struggle: divorce, failed relationships, being thrown out of work, battling demons. “There are elements of folk in all kinds of music,” he said. “You have Americana, you have jazz and rock, all of those things contain elements of folk.”
Back in New York, he became a regular at Sunday afternoon folk sessions in Washington Square, holding forth with the likes of Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary and songwriter/performer Eric Darling. “Joanie” Baez and Bob Dylan would turn up now and then.
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In addition to recording a couple of albums and working as a side man, he did gigs large and small. One of his biggest star turns was his 1962-63 tour with the Weavers, a folk quartet co-founded by Pete Seeger.
Some dissonant notes developed.
“I wasn’t exactly what they would call a perfect fit. (A cofounder of the group laid that out in a written performance review.) We did some good shows, so it wasn’t all for naught. I would just say that my sojourn with the Weavers was not to their liking much.”
Then there were lower-profile and even unusual performances. Stopped by a local law enforcement officer hitchhiking across Kansas, he was threatened with being jailed for vagrancy.
The officer looked at Hamilton’s Silvertone guitar case and demanded that the virtuoso prove that he was a musician, not a hobo. “He took me to a little café and I sang some Woody Guthrie and country songs and it was wellreceived, people applauded. He then put me on a Greyhound bus for the next town,” chuckled the veteran musician.
A much more significant stop was in Chicago, where he performed at the first-ever folk nightclub and gave lessons in a friend’s living room. That led him, that friend and another talented local musician to jumpstart the still-thriving Old Town School of Folk Music in 1957.
There, Hamilton played a key role in several careers including that of Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, instructing what he called a “very shy” kid in 12-string guitar. John Prine also learned licks there.
A 1984 move to Atlanta came as his late wife Mary pursued her career with Delta Air Lines. After her death in 2014, he talked to a friend, singer-songwriter and entrepreneur Bob Bakert. “I said I wanted to do something like we had done in Chicago, but I’d like to do it down here because I think there’s interest in it and it would serve the community,” said Hamilton.
The Frank Hamilton School has stayed right in tune on both fronts. Inclusivity and a push toward diversity has carried them a long way.
“We start with the basic premise that music is not an exclusive club. It’s a birthright for anyone who wants to study it,” Hamilton said.
As Hamilton sees it, folk music “is not music made for money. It’s not music made for the popular music machine. It’s for people to relax and enjoy,” Hamilton said. He thinks his influence stems from the personal connections he’s formed over decades and his commitment to teaching.
His school offers classes mainly in playing stringed instruments, but also teaches songwriting, playing in a group, melody and improvisation and music theory. An expansion is in the works.
Hamilton believes teachers are students and that students can be teachers. “We all learn from each other” by picking and socializing instead of laboring solo in practice rooms, the veteran teacher said.
Not only is Hamilton genial, positive and sunny with a ready laugh, he’s a humble guy, as well, for someone once described as as playing “a seminal role” in the evolution of American folk music.
These days, in addition to teaching and recording, he’s working to beef up his knowledge of jazz guitar and pursing bebop. He’s also working on his memoirs.
Even a recent bout with melanoma failed to slow him for long, although he laments that his radiation treatments did cause some vocal damage.
Still, the veteran picker has no plan to stop instructing students, quite a few of them seniors. “Never,” he said firmly when asked if he’s ever contemplated retiring.
“I am on a journey continually,” he said, “and the journey isn’t over until life is over.”
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