Yes, it was great to be a living legend
by Leslie Korshak  
A story about Bob Gibson

Leslie was a long time companion to Bob Gibson 
and recently moved back to Highland Park.
 
Bob Gibson is one of the great forces of American music. He and his banjo climbed aboard "A Horse Named Bill" in 1954 and began an incredible journey, as unique to the world of music as it was to the lives he touched and the people he inspired.  There is probably no other talent as widely respected and influential within an industry who is so nearly unknown, yet taken for granted outside of it. Often alone, and sometimes with friends, he has ridden across fifty years of American musical history, producing sounds that have been interpreted by artists as diverse in talent and approach as Henry Mancini and the Byrds; John Denver and David Crosby; Peter Paul and Mary and Simon and Garfunkel; Shel Silverstein and the incomparable Odetta.
 
Although his body finally succumbed to the ravages of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy several years ago, his influence on even those who were not yet born prior to his semi-retirement, continues to assert itself, becoming their inspiration. Even the irony of his disease did not escape him. The man who never thought he could handle pressure had, under its oppressive weight, become a true study in grace.
 
Always thought of as being of and from Chicago, where he lived and indeed did become a "living legend," he was actually born and raised in New York City, where as a child he breathed to the sounds of Greenwich Village and  gravitated towards the musicians hanging out near the arch in Washington Square. Studs Turkel, a lifelong friend, remembers: "When the kid with the blond crew-cut first appeared on stage, plunking at his banjo, I thought," another one"…It was no more than a passing glance I tossed, there had been so many kids of like build and appearance, clones of Pete or Woody. But when he began to sing out - that's what he did, sing out - I knew he was special. It was a desultory night at the Gate of Horn (a Chicago club), yet Bob sprang it to life. I forgot the song, but it caught the scattering of listeners that was there that night. It was the excitement of Bob's performance that spread the word and the scatterings became sold-out houses. It was Bob, the house artist, who more than any other performer, established the Gate of Horn and Chicago as a citadel of folk music...There was always an ebullience to Bob's way with a song. It makes you feel exhilarated. I guess you'd call it a life force that Bob has.  When I think of Bob, I think of a time of hope and delight. Even for old gaffers like me. It is that contagious."
 
Bobby's life is so much apart of the country and its music that it's often hard to distinguish between the "Wayfaring Stranger" and the music of his creation. He's important to our world in ways most of us are unaware and he's always seen it as his service.  Ask David Crosby, upset at not being able to perform at a benefit for Bobby at the time of his liver transplant, or Roger McGuinn, perhaps the best interpreter of Gibson's guitar mastery, the influence Bob's had on their musical careers.
 
He was the kid who ran away from an upper-middle-class home in New York in order to hitch across the country, working as he went. Bobby once picked lettuce all week in a state of near frostbite in order to afford a pair of long johns that cost his entire paycheck. Warm again, he hitched a ride to the valley floor and a temperature of 115 sweltering degrees. 

He was fourteen years old when he left home for the road, ready to take on the world. As a mere boy, he was living the adult life Woody Guthrie chronicled.  Chin out, glistening with raw, un-molded talent. He took what he learned and made a kind of music no one had ever heard before. What notes those country roads must hold, of that young voice rehearsing to become itself, in preparation for that huge, lifelong, adventure.
 
It is no accident that when you look under "Folk Music" in the World Book, it is Pete Seeger’s and Bob Gibson's pictures you will see. He did things with a twelve string guitar that weren't possible, except that he was doing them. I remember being fourteen, sneaking off to hear Josh White Sr., Bobby Gibson, and Hamilton Camp and I remember knowing that it was never going to get any better than that... it never has.
 
Shel Silverstein was another regular at the Gate of Horn and his liner notes on the masterful "Gibson and Camp at the Gate of Horn" record album sum it up pretty well: "I'll tell you a little bit a about the old Gate of Horn…Gibson would be up there cool and cocky, playing that 12-stringed and singing and Camp would be like a little rooster with his head back screaming and bouncing up and down and it was really something…they must have weighed about 45 pounds together…Gibson and Camp and (Herb) Brown they were up there singing, shouting and playing and stomping and wailing and yelping and barking and dropping raw eggs on the floor and yelling at Ray about the lighting and wearing straw hats and drinking beer and joking with the audience and doing encore after encore and we did a set together on Betty and Dupree and we must have done fifty-five choruses and everybody in the club was screaming and it was great and if the walls had collapsed right then and there it would have been very poetic.  But they didn’t.  And finally it broke up and everybody went away…they left their carnations laying around on the floor with the raw eggs and that was the end of the old Gate of Horn…and if you missed it you missed something.” 

Even the name of the place, Gate of Horn, held magic. Greenwich Village named its club 'Gate', after Chicago’s Gate of Horn on Dearborn, but hardly anybody knows the legend behind the name. Gibson did, and was so moved by it's import that years later he put the story on his self-produced cassette.  There are two Gates of Dreams, that of ivory and that of horn. Dreams that delude pass through the ivory gate. Those which pass through the gate of horn, however, come true.
 
Bobby chose to walk through the gate made of horn and only rarely looked back on the path not taken. "..But New York messed up my head, I got strung out on reds and Bob Dylan, came along and copped my style..." (from the song “Living Legend,” by Shel Silverstein.)  "I'm really a saloon singer," said Bobby.  And so he is, as long as any gathering of people of any age or experience qualifies as saloon singing. " [Gibson] establishes such a rapport with the audience that the performance seems more like a visit on the back porch than a formal concert." [Denver Post] Bob Gibson can't help malting music. It's in the way he thinks, speaks, stirs his coffee or paces a response. More than the synergistic combination of his Bozo guitar, banjo, and talent. Bob himself, is his instrument.
 
 A year or so before he couldn't, Bobby and Shel Silverstein cut an album for Asylum Records. They were friends and sometime partners since the night they met some thirty-seven years before. Shel was a young cartoonist for Playboy Magazine and one night after a conversation with Bob [now Hamilton] Camp, he presented Bobby with some lyrics he'd scrawled on a piece of cardboard. Well over two hundred songs later, I learned to simply call them, Gib-stein. The session was so much fun no one wanted it to end and so, sometime during the next twenty-nine days, we three had lunch in a local, real "Mom and Pop” restaurant, with Chet Atkins and a few of the boys who came by to say hi and reminisce.  At one point, Atkins leaned over to Bobby and asked if he was "still doing that stuff with the guitar?" Bobby looked back quizzically, blue eyes flashing, and asked what "stuff" he meant? "Oh,” came that guitar master's response, “the-stuff-that-nobody-can-figure-out-how-you-do-it stuff"...That happened a lot. Country, folk, rock - he did something and everyone wanted to know how.

We all spent several warm, wonderful evenings with Shel, Kyle Lehning of Asylum records, John and Marie Hartford in their welcoming hug of a home, embracing the Cumberland River. As no less a master musician than the singer, fiddler, dancer and writer of "Gentle on my Mind," John Hartford,  says:  "Bob Gibson may have been the world's greatest folksinger. He took what Pete Seeger did and pushed the envelope with the twelve string guitar and the five string banjo. He lit up Chicago and the rest of the world, and became the leader of the folk boom…his spirit pervades all where people get up in front of other people with string instruments."  His work, "Makin’ a Mess," with Shel Silverstein, is out of print although used copies are still available for purchase.
 
Bobby was, overall, happier to be "the man who introduced, discovered and influenced," rather than the "conquering hero of the Tribune's second page." He used to like to say that, "discovering Joan Baez was like discovering the Grand Canyon."  Sure, but how many other [young, especially] entertainers would have first introduced, share the stage, and then after two songs, leave the stage, to an eighteen year old “Grand Canyon?”

He allowed the world of the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, and later the rest of us, to find and fall in love with his magical friend, Joan, who wrote: " I first met Bob Gibson in Chicago at the Gate of Horn nightclub. I was frightened to death of being away from home, away from my parents, and all alone in a strange city. The club featured Bob, who was at the time a very popular singer who played twelve string guitar and banjo. And of course, I developed a huge crush on him. He was marvelously sarcastic and funny, drank too much, sang both serious and silly songs, and cracked jokes in between them. He actually “entertained” people. Bob then invited me to appear as his guest at the very first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. There were 13,000 people there that evening and I had never been so nervous in my life. Bob introduced me and gave me his bright and cheery and his cocky look which meant that life was only one big joke anyway. We sang "Virgin Mary Had One Son". He played his twelve-string, and with eighteen strings and two voices we sounded pretty impressive! We made it to the end and there was tumultuous applause, so we sang our "other" song, an upbeat number called "Jordan River". The appearance with Bob Gibson at the Newport Folk Festival was not only a turning point in my singing career, but a turning point in my life. I am deeply indebted and grateful to Bob for his gracious help in launching my career and for continuing to be such a positive influence throughout my life."
 
Bobby missed most of the sixties. His hell was as personal as the world's ills were public. He made furniture, ran a little place in Chicago's Old Town called Hobsen's Choice, where he sang, cooked chili, (you 'gotta use heart) and wrote. Oh how that fellow wrote!
 
There are over two hundred songs in his catalog. Songs we sing and lines we take for granted, because he made them our presents. The large health consortium using "well, well, well" as a slogan, wouldn't have been able, had Bob not created the instantly recognizable song made famous by friends, Peter, Paul and Mary.  And wasn't that David Geffen seen exiting a concert recently, wearing an “I Ching” t-shirt with those words across his chest? It's been generations, and it's been hundreds of bitty things like that, and nobody knows from where it came. That was always unique to Bobby's career - hundreds of those 'little things" that were his to give away as if they just slipped into the American consciousness from out of the ether.
 
 Peter Yarrow, a dear, and loving friend of forty years, and Bobby last hung out and performed together two years running at the glorious, miniature of a folk festival held each October in Napa, that part of California devoted to the making of wine. Hamilton Camp was the host and the last year Bobby was able, Odetta sang as the special guest. It was inspiring to see, and through their gifts, become part of the magical spell they wove with every note.
 
Peter said:  "When Bobby sang with you it was a gracious act. He never sang too loudly, he always sensed the moment of movement to a softer or louder part and he listened, listened intently, so that his voice would merge just right with your own. He never interfered with the flight of your melody, he just danced around it - and if you gave him leave - he'd invite you to dance around his. Singing together became two people agreeing to respect each other's special and unique flights. If you listen to Peter, Paul and Mary, you will hear Bob Gibson."
 
It was the way he entertained - up there alone. Making the astounding seem so easy, so simple that he sometimes believed it himself and then felt like a fraud. He played so hard, he wore down the solid brass frets on his Bozo guitar. His other hand wore through its face.  He loved us right back, for loving his “offerings.”
 
Tom Paxton remembers when he first heard Gibson: "One night in 1959 a friend of somebody's flopped in the house we actors were renting . He was just in from Aspen and had two reels of tape to play for us. They were live performance tapes of somebody unknown to us - somebody named Bob Gibson. We were blown away by Bob's playing and singing. I remember the sheer beauty of "Virgin Mary had a Little Baby". The chord progression was far richer than any we had learned so far. He also sang a piece of whimsy by Pete Seeger called "The Foolish Frog.” 

“Bob played both banjo and twelve string guitar and this may have been the first time I’d heard the twelve string ring like an orchestra. Bob Gibson, became in that single hearing, one of my heroes. He remains a hero to me long after he became a friend, partner, producer, co-writer, confessor. He [Bob] produced some ten albums for me, co wrote a bunch of tunes and shared a whole lot of stages. To stand on stage with Bob Gibson was to have no worry about what was to come next. If you needed support, he provided it; if you had a moment of inspiration he just automatically made space for you to run with it, he is just such a pro. Above all, Bob is such a gentle man. We've been friends now for many years . I can't count the hours and days we've spent and I treasure them all."
 
Bobby never cared much about credit.  He cared instead about singing.  As he put it:  "If you don't like your work, you'd better have a damn fine car. If there's very little pleasure when you get where you're going, you sure as hell better enjoy the ride."
 
What individual notes we all have from this grand, shared memory. From kids on the "Train to Morrow," to middle-aged groupies singing "Well, well, well" and about "Frankie and Johnnie's" shoot-out and old Dupree's hanging, where "Alberta" let her long hair down.  He boarded "This Train" to visit those good folks in "Abilene."  Oh, let me tell you what he said about that. People always asked Bobby which Abilene he meant, Texas or Kansas? And the truth is that he didn't have the foggiest idea. Then, several years later, he became involved with the Kerrville Folk Festival.  One night when he began to sing, watching seven or eight thousand Texans get up, hands over hearts, singing right along with him, he said, "Why, I knew right away, I must have meant Texas”.
 
He sang his heart out that night.  He sang his heart out every night.
 
We each have our times, and memories.  I traveled well over thirty thousand miles crisscrossing this land with  Bobby: from Door County, Wisconsin to Salt Lake City, Utah; from Redding, California to Tampa, Florida; from Boston to Philadelphia; from New Orleans to Denver. He sang in living rooms, called "house" concerts, which he loved, and amphitheaters, which he didn't, alike. This glorious man played in saloons, concert halls, and at Christmas, for the homeless, just before he helped insulate their trailers with the acres of bubble-wrap left over from our move. He sang to raise money for presidential candidates and local volunteer fire departments - and it was the same everywhere. He belonged to them, His was the voice that was singing their song. His career was a present given and a gift received. And somehow, his moments always seem to be the ones that make us feel better about ourselves for having had them.

I remember back to a long ago, spellbinding night in St. Thomas where Bobby, Josh Jr. and that beacon named Odetta, were all performing under the Caribbean stars, shining back up their own light. There they were, along with the memories of Josh's daddy. The world had come so far since the days when Josh Sr., Odetta, and countless others could not sleep in the same hotel in which they'd just entertained... They sang of those years, as several hundred West Indians, usually reserved to "Continental" entertainment, became a part of the synergy of those histories and would not let them leave the stage for many hours as they sang along, harmonized and fell into the trance of the night.
 
Josh [Donnie] White Jr., son of the legend, whose voice soars in such pure, loving clarity, remembers the first time he saw Bob perform.  He wanted to: "get in his face for singing with my dad…The next time, I wanted to genuflect…It is a source of great pleasure," Josh said, "to sit at home watching the first annual folk music awards knowing the first three inductees are Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie and Bob Gibson for having the most impact on generations of performers and their contribution to humanity."
 
"I was called," Odetta reminisces, "to Chicago's Gate Of Horn to sing on the bill with Paul Clayton, the most recorded folksinger, and with Bob Gibson, the most energetic, joyous and charismatic performer I had ever witnessed. Gibson was open, generous and welcoming to me. I'm eternally grateful, because I was one scared puppy in those days…The celebration coming to us as Bob performs is something that cannot be taught or learned. This gift is his very own and while there are hundreds of thousands of us, too few of us have partaken of it…What do I know of Bob Gibson?  The loving spirit that made me comfortable in his space, the loving spirit that embraces us all.  I love Bob dearly, I only hope he knows it."  Shortly after that letter, he was able to tell her, he did.
 
This man was so much more than his music. he was the rare human who chose, after years of “stops along the way,” to actually live his ethic. It's why his voice and message ring true. They ring true, because he did. Perhaps the person best to tell you how Bobby felt about his life and life here on our planet, is Bob Gibson himself. On the '90's, and our entrance into this new millennium he wrote (1994):
 
"The age of anxiety seems to be the legacy of the 90's. I cringe every time I hear about downsizing.  It's a very confusing time for people because they're realizing that their lives are controlled by outside forces. I'm finding a great parallel to the technological changes of the 1950's. People are having a hard time keeping up. Downsizing is a techno-babble for putting people out of work. They may have served the interest of their million dollar salaries, but they have not served America."
 
 "We keep going, and the ultimate corporation of the future looks like it will be the one that hires nobody, produces nothing, but turns a profit. Our future depends on our rediscovery of the environment, as that is where the jobs are going to be.  This apathy will soon be exchanged for a new era of caring and commitment. Because it's never what you have, but what you contribute, that matters in the end."
 

And as to his nearly fifty year contribution?

 "We [folksingers] are really cheerleaders. We're there to convene with a group and sing and see that we are not alone. Sometimes, out there, it feels like our voices are lonely, but we come together for the songs and we cheer the singer in ourselves, and we think - this is the way to be and don't feel so alone. We, the folksingers deliver that service." Oh yes, this man was far more than the music he made. He was the spirit, the very essence of the music of harmony all around him. When he walked by the ocean, the waves danced to the tune of his presence. When he laughed or related a story, there was music in the air around him. When his friends were low, his warmth soothed their ails.
 
He sung for the country, for the poor, for the worker, the children and for anyone who's ever been afraid, vulnerable, strong, or alone. He made a safe harbor for that part of our collective psyche that hurts. And when at the end of his time here, after he became unable to play the guitar, plunk a banjo, or even sing out in that golden, honeyed, bear of a voice, it no longer mattered. Because in the end, after the notes and chords were replayed and re-sung ten thousand times over, it was Bob Gibson himself who was the true contribution.  This world is better because he was here.