A stranger sent me a link to his obituary in Britain’s Guardian. I would otherwise have missed it. He was 78.
Langhorne was a studio musician. He was in the background even then when his guitar was musically in the foreground. The studio musician is not a star. His peers know who he is. The public doesn’t. He rarely gets rich. He makes union scale. But without him, the world is a little poorer. The studio musician sticks to his knitting. The result is a tapestry.
In the 1960’s, the folk music revival peaked. It had begun in the 1950’s when the Weavers had several major hit songs, most notably Leadbelly’s song, recorded a year after his death, Goodnight, Irene. Then came the huge and unexpected success of the Kingston Trio’s version of the traditional folk song, Tom Dooley, in 1958. For the next decade, folk music was a significant subset of American popular music.
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
In that era, Bruce Langhorne, was in the background playing guitar, and making performers sound better than they would have sounded all alone. The Wikipedia entry on him reports:
Langhorne worked with many of the major performers in the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, including The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Carolyn Hester, Peter LaFarge, Gordon Lightfoot, Hugh Masekela, Odetta, Babatunde Olatunji, Peter, Paul and Mary, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Tom Rush, Steve Gillette, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. He first recorded in 1961, with Carolyn Hester, which is when he met Bob Dylan. He later said of Dylan: “I thought he was a terrible singer and a complete fake, and I thought he didn’t play harmonica that well….I didn’t really start to appreciate Bobby as something unique until he started writing.” In 1963…