New England Music Scrapbook
Chelsea House (1974-1981)

Song Swap at Chelsea House Folklore Center
West Brattleboro, Vermont

The Chelsea House Cafe, as it was then called, opened in the barn of the Old Locke Farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont, on Friday, August 30, 1974.¹ I believe opening night was the show that John Roberts and Tony Barrand² got started with a great performance of the sailor song, "New York Girls." John Roberts is a wonderful banjo and concertina player, and Tony Barrand may be the best male a capella singer I've ever heard. That evening, Margaret MacArthur, an expert on Vermont folksongs and much more, went next. It's fitting that she should be featured at the first concert, since MacArthur had supplied Chelsea House founders Carol Levin and Bill Gehman with many ideas that they worked into their plans.

In the illustration that appears at the top of this page, the two people I recognize for sure are Carol Levin, in a red dress on the left, and luthier Brad Litwin, showing off his famous foot, at the top of this small circle of friends in a Chelsea House song-swap.³

Fiddler Allan Block played for the first Sunday evening dance. The other acts I remember best from the first Chelsea House calendar (pictured elsewhere on this page) are Michael Cooney, concertina-ace Alistair Anderson, blues-singer and Bob Dylan-mentor Victoria Spivey, and legendary U. Utah Phillipsologist Saul Brody.

Co-Founder Bill Gehman
After His Chelsea House Years
At Gemini Studios, Londonderry, Vermont

The Chelsea House, with its concerts, contradances, songswaps, workshops, and more, certainly made an effort to offer diversified activities to the people of Southern Vermont, Southwestern New Hampshire, and Western Massachusetts. Later came the Brattleboro Folk Festival;⁴ and the barn was used as a space for both concert and studio recordings.

Lest anyone should think that '70s coffeehouse-circuit folkies have all hung up their fingerpicks and gone into other, less-artistic pursuits, let's consider the Pine Island String Band. Pine Island recorded an album at the Chelsea House--Live Inside (LP, Fretless, 1977). Fiddler David Gusakov, I believe, later toured Russia as a member of Banjo Dan and the Mid-Nite Plowboys. Gordon Stone was terrific in a personal-favorite new wave rock band out of Burlington, Vermont, the Decentz, and he's now the leader of the roots-fusion Gordon Stone Band. And then there's Pine Island mandolinist Jim Ryan. Ryan has been in too many bands to name in this piece; but after Pine Island, he played in the Decentz with Stone. From the '80s well into the '90s, he was in a remarkable group, the Blood Oranges, with Western New England local hero, Cheri Knight. Treat Her Orange was a side project with Mark Sandman, who was then best-known for his work in Treat Her Right (and through the '90s, with Morphine). Lately, Ryan has been making beautiful music in the studio and on tour with singer-songwriter Catie Curtis whose "Kiss That Counted" recently won a Boston Music Award.⁵ And though we haven't had the good fortune to hear it yet, it's worth adding that Jimmy Ryan has a new solo album.

The following paragraphs come from a Summer 1978 profile of the Chelsea House:

The Chelsea House operated during what we now know to be an extraordinarily bad time for folk clubs.⁸ Following the Vietnam War, drinking ages were lowered state by state; and many young music fans drifted from coffeehouses to establishments with liquor licenses. This was the era when generic blues and funk groups--"boogie bands," as they were then called--predominated in the nightclubs of New England.⁹ In addition to renewed competition from bars, the Chelsea House weathered the storm of the '70s second oil crisis, which coexisted with, and contributed a lot to, a strange and hitherto little-known economic condition then called "stagflation"--a stagnant economy coupled with a high rate of inflation.

The Chelsea House relied on a lot of folkies driving in from Massachusetts, while the cost of operating a motor vehicle was becoming much more expensive. At the same time, interest sharply increased in conservation, including such techniques as staying the heck off the road. That the Chelsea House survived into the 1980s, under such circumstances, can be seen as little short of miraculous. Greg Worden, then with our local newspaper, wrote:

With a small space, a steady number of people must attend the shows so the Chelsea House has enough money to pay its bills.¹⁰ During the period when the barn was being used almost nightly and on weekend afternoons, attendance was high enough to turn a profit for the center, Ms. Levin said. But as the number of activities began to dwindle and the audiences became more sparse, problems arose.

On February 4, 1981, this lamentable headline ran in the Brattleboro Reformer over Greg Worden's byline:¹¹

Weekly Chelsea House Concerts Drawing to a Close

Carol Levin was back as acting executive director, following the brief tenure of Neil Ross.¹² Worden's article led off with this: "Hard times have forced major cutbacks at the Chelsea House, the folklore center which for 6½ years has brought national artists and diverse audiences together in West Brattleboro. In fact, the organization appears on the brink of closing down." Yet the same article reminisced that "in 1977, folk concerts, folk dances and similar fare were taking place at least five and sometimes seven days a week. Patrons were coming from as far as 75 miles away on a regular basis to see and hear the musicians on national tours of folk centers."

By 1978, the Chelsea House board of directors had started the process of purchasing the property on which the coffeehouse operated. Speaking of 1977, Carol Levin told much of the story of hard times on the corner of Route 9 and Sunset Lake Road. "That was our last good year. It was before we bought the property and before the gas hike." The Brattleboro Reformer article also mentions the opening of a rival club in Northampton, Massachusetts, which I take as referring to the mighty and now venerable Iron Horse. "[T]he local crowd," wrote Worden, "began to dwindle."¹³

Ross said that people saw the Chelsea House as an isolated organization catering to a fringe group of people.¹⁴

It wasn't always like that, though, and we remember the Chelsea House for the good times, which came in abundance. One of the best performances of any sort that I ever heard was given by Roy Bookbinder (sometimes his name is written as Roy Book Binder) and George Gritzbach at a Brattleboro Folk Festival outdoors blues workshop. Evidently, though, even this was not Bookbinder's best show at the Chelsea House. We still find people who remember an indoor concert, apparently opened by Brad Litwin, where the audience was so spellbound that the entire place went silent after the last note decayed. I was a huge fan, too, of George Gritzbach and would love to hear him sing "The Sweeper" (or just about anything else) once again.

My crowd basically attended concerts, workshops, and the folk festival. I was, myself, a no-show at dances and only attended the song swap once. The Chelsea House had so many great concerts, there's no way to mention them all. David Bromberg played a benefit in the Chelsea House barn to a crowded house, and tickets must have sold out in record time. Jim Kweskin's nod to his early days in Boston, "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me," was worth the price of admission all by itself.

Local hero Margaret MacArthur caused quite a stir when it became known that she would debut "Mary Shiminski I Love You" there. The song, "Mary Shiminski," was inspired by words that were elegantly spray-painted on a railroad overpass hereabouts. And the mystery surrounding this romantic message was eloquently reported by Dayton Duncan, who may be best known for taking part in several Democratic political campaigns including serving as presidential-candidate Michael Dukakis' press secretary in 1988.

I had to work the night Elizabeth Cotton played and arrived during an encore. When she finished, Cotton left the stage, walked down the aisle, stepped up to me, smiled and said, "I'm so glad you could make it."

David Mallett was essentially unheard of here when he first played the Chelsea House, and most of the audience came, directly or indirectly, on my own say-so. (His reputation has since spread far and wide.) I was out on a limb, having not heard him live, myself, since the days of his '60s group, the Mallett Brothers. Fortunately, the audience loved him.

Once I believe it was Tony Trischka who sat in with his friends, Burt Porter and Tom Azarian. When those guys swung into the Hank Williams classic, "Kaw-Liga," the whole audience joined in on the chorus. Afterwards, Porter commented that, out of all the songs on the night's program, that one is the last he'd expect to turn into a singalong.

One musician, who turned up many times, played an electric bass that was about the size of a small-ish guitar, with strings that he fussily wound himself, by hand. It sounded great. A banjo player, whose name I don't recall (Andy something?), reminds me a bit of Jonathan Richman, if you can imagine such a thing. He would play these long banjo lines while telling great extended-play stories.

As I recall, Bill Shute played on the '60s bubblegum hit, "Ding Dong! the Witch Is Dead," or something like that. He played acoustic guitar at the Chelsea House with his regular partner, Lisa Null, as well as accompanying various other artists. On one occasion, his playing showed so many tricks that I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing. Vin Garbut was likewise incredible on a real tin tin-whistle, and he showed similar skill on the silvery kind. One evening, he creatively worked nearly everything he was seeing and hearing into his between-songs monologue.

A festival appearance at the West Village Meeting House was something of a homecoming, I think, for mandolin-picker Joe Val of the New England Bluegrass Boys. I once read that he performed over WKNE radio in nearby Keene, New Hampshire, in the early 1960s. On the same bill was Scott Alarik who was still based in Minnesota at the time. He has since gone on to become one of this country's most influential folk music critics, contributing feature articles and regular columns to Sing Out and the Boston Globe.

Finally, no Chelsea House page would be anywhere near complete without mention of the food, which was quite good. This area has many veterans of the wonderful fare of the Chelsea House kitchen, and the Chelsea Royal Diner may be seen as something of a successor.

-- Alan Lewis, revised November 29, 2002

1. I was the first paying customer at the Chelsea House on opening night. Some folks on the guest-list got there well ahead of me.

2. Scott Alarik called John Roberts and Tony Barrand "English folk delights." -- Boston Globe, 5/2/2002 (today), Calendar section, p. 8

3. For the uninitiated, a song-swap is somewhat akin to an open mike, though not necessarily with an actual microphone.

4. A flyer for the 1978 Brattleboro Folk Festival and Traditional Craft Fair says this was the "4th annual" festival. I have subsequently learned that documentation of a fifth Brattleboro Folk Festival is among the holdings of Middlebury College. As I recall, the first small folk fest was held indoors at the Chelsea House. The following year, the festival was moved to West Brattleboro's West Village Meeting House. Then I believe there were two outdoors festivals on Chelsea House land. Since the festival also included a crafts fair, perhaps I should mention that, under the Chelsea House concert room, Ellen Pine operated a potter's shop. In the adjoining space, Brad Litwin built and repaired guitars.

The West Village Meeting House was used for concerts featuring established stars such as Odetta, Oregon, and personal-favorite Gordon Bok; and it seems to me that Joe Val and others gave big shows there, as well.

5. We have been in recent contact with other musicians who played the Chelsea House including Lui Collins (whose star, perhaps, shined brightest at the Folkway in Peterborough, New Hampshire), Purly Gates, Brad Litwin, and Linda Worster, as well as members of Banjo Dan and the Mid-Nite Plowboys and Jacob's Reunion. We regret having lost contact with Steve Green of the Arwen Mountain String Band.

6. The three Chelsea House recordings alluded to here would be Jacob's Reunion by, uh, Jacob's Reunion (LP, Chelsea House, 1975); Five of a Kind by Arwen Mountain (LP, Chelsea House, 1977); and a Jim Labig (1944-1995) album that seems to have gotten lost in the intricacies of alphabetical order. Other recordings made at the Chelsea House were released on various labels, such as the Pine Island album mentioned elsewhere on this page. And incidentally, Arwen Mountain's Norman Rogers, in his earlier guise as Red Rocket Rogers, was a member of the '60s Boston psychedelic rock band, Quill, which played the original Woodstock festival.

It's worth interjecting here that the Chelsea House programs were not all folk music. Jim Labig was basically a country singer. It seems to me it was Jaime Brockett who showed up once with a rock band for backing. Boston folk-rockers Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl had a strong following at the Chelsea House. (Popular regional acts like Mason & Jeanie and Bill Staines, as well as national acts such as Rosalie Sorrels and Mary McCaslin & Jim Ringer, helped keep coffeehouses open at a difficult time.) An incredible local modern jazz band, Antares, played several times to appreciative audiences. Tape recordings of Antares' live performances, heard over the Chelsea House sound system, sounded fantastic. Danny Russo played incredible blues harmonica both with Victoria Spivey and later on his own hook. Bill Gehman assures me that Pioneer Valley rock legend Ray Mason played the barn several times. Mason's new disc, Three Dollar Man (CD, Captivating, 2002), is compact, punchy, '60s-inspired rock and roll and may be his best album yet.

When Bill Gehman recorded Jacob's Reunion, the first LP for Chelsea House Records, it was a big event in this area's music community. It's interesting, then, that the Chelsea House could live on in the Jacob's Reunion album--which is easily among my all-time favorites. Bass-player Richard Block came across the master tapes, not long ago, and he and John Coster are giving some thought to the prospect of having the recordings remastered for CD reissue. A compact disc could be a wonderful monument to the contributions of Jacob's Reunion and the Chelsea House. With any luck, it'll happen.

7. Burlington Free Press, "Vermonter" supplement, 8/20/1978.

8. Hard times had already hit the coffeehouse circuit by the time of the Burlington Free Press article quoted here. Directors and managers throughout the region were well aware of the situation, though the fact that the decline would grow much worse and last for years was probably little imagined.

9. The boogie band phenomenon is well worth remembering. When a vibrant alt-rock community started coming together in New England, particularly in Boston and Cambridge, it was the omnipresent boogie bands that the new sound stood as an alternative to.

In the early going, it was a lot more common for the new music to be called "college rock," as it was heard most commonly on college radio stations. It's ironic, then, that Greg Reibman, one of the notable figures in Boston's alt-rock establishment of the early '80s, did a '70s roots broadcast here in Windham County, Vermont, from the Windham College station in Putney. I particularly recall a show featuring the great guitar picker, Doc Watson.

10. "Another problem is the size of the Chelsea House barn. It seats only about 80 people comfortably and has high ceilings and is costly to heat." -- Greg Worden, Brattleboro Reformer, 2/4/1981

11. Today, Greg Worden chairs the Brattleboro Select Board.

12. Neil Ross served as Executive Director of the Chelsea House Folklore Center from August 1980 to the end of the year. Family considerations kept me from stepping out for concerts through his tenure, and I don't recall ever meeting him. Since posting this page, though, we have made one another's acquaintance by e-mail. His messages have proven to be very helpful.

13. I believe it's not mere coincidence that the Cambridge-based Real Paper, which was then associated with a hippie population that was starting to age, had its peak years at just the same time as the Chelsea House. A typical Chelsea House crowd in those days looked like it could easily be made up of Real Paper readers.

14. "I wanted to move our office downtown to be in closer contact with businesses and other arts organizations. To survive in a non-profit arts organization, you have to share things." "I came to learn that community support for the Chelsea House as well as funds was lacking. It was shocking." -- Neil Ross, Brattleboro Reformer, February 4, 1981

This seems to represent a major decline in community involvement since the time when funds were first being raised for purchase of the Chelsea House property. Times were hard and it appears that more than a few local givers may have moved on to other causes. Incidentally, Neil Ross' comments are not included here necessarily as the final word on the Chelsea House's demise. No doubt they reflect a high degree of personal and professional frustration, and members of the board may have held diverse points of view. Yet Ross was the director in what came close to being the last five months, and his published perspective is important and readily available. Managers of present-day cultural organizations might do well to learn from the history recounted by their counterparts at the Chelsea House.

The Brattleboro Arts Initiative is presently purchasing the Latchis building in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, as part of an ambitious effort to establish a sizable performing arts center here. It will be interesting to learn whether the group's experience follows that of the Chelsea House, particularly as described by Ross.

Notes copyright © 2002 by Alan Lewis.
All rights reserved.