Stomping ground of the stars turns 50
Concert series celebrates Passim
In the basement of an unmarked building, surrounded by structures bearing the Harvard name, on a space scarcely larger than living rooms in the Tory Row mansions a block away, Club Passim has survived.
For the past 50 years, the legendary Harvard Square venue has hosted iconic folk and acoustic musicians from Joan Baez and Bob Dylan to Suzanne Vega and Lori McKenna.
That history is being celebrated with a series of concerts, including a sold-out show featuring Baez on Friday, as well as displays of artifacts from a half century of music making and community building.
In looking ahead at the prospects for another 50 years, the club's executive director, Betsy Siggins, sees the location as an apt physical metaphor for the challenges of being one of the few remaining cultural institutions in Harvard Square.
"This organization is very lucky to be alive - it's the engine that could and did," said Siggins, who roomed with Baez at Boston University and was on the club's board of directors in the 1960s.
"The Brattle [Theatre] and Passim are the only two nonprofits left in the Square that are not owned by Harvard," Siggins said, "and I think in the past few years we've proved to Harvard that we're serious about what we do.
"We can look at our 50 years and say, 'Something important happened here.' We're not food and we're not shelter, but we're good for the soul and we give kids a place to play."
The club's early days, when it was known as Club 47, were turbulent but fruitful, Siggins recalled: Even as Cambridge police were shutting the venue down for violating local blue laws, people were cramming into the club and peeking through the window to catch a glimpse of Baez, Tom Rush, Jackie Washington, and the Charles River Valley Boys.
"If we looked at the audience in the '60s and saw ties and jackets, we knew it was the Harvard contingent. If we saw blue jeans and sweatshirts, it was the townies," she said. "Music was the equalizer."
As the decade drew to a close, many of the musicians drifted toward Woodstock or California, and the location was sold to a couple who transformed it into a card shop and cafe.
Siggins returned to Club Passim in 1995, when the locale's very survival was in doubt, with a mission to rescue the club as a newly established nonprofit organization.
This effort now involves nurturing a base of musical talent, preserving the club's wealth of archival documents, and providing children's programming through public schools in Cambridge, all on an operating budget that will hit $1 million in 2008.
Between 50 and 60 percent of the revenue comes through Veggie Planet, the restaurant that shares a space with the club, with an additional $140,000 from club memberships, donations, and grants.
The archives are crucial to the organization's continued existence, Siggins said, and last year, Club Passim engaged the services of local folklorist Millie Rahn to help collect and document the club's wealth of recordings, photographs, and other memorabilia - from a calendar listing weekly performances by Jim Rooney and Eric Von Schmidt in December 1962 to a photograph of Baez, Dylan, and Siggins sitting around a swimming pool at the Newport Folk Festival in the mid '60s.
"Most of our collection comes from personal collections, Betsy's in particular," Rahn said. But the project, which also involves archival researchers from Harvard and Cambridge, is growing. "Increasingly, people are downsizing or cleaning out their attics, and I get phone calls about once a week."
Siggins and Rahn intend for the archive project to become a premier resource for scholars and fans of folk music, and they see it as a chance to connect the past of folk music with its future.
"It's a part of our social and cultural history - we're telling the story of American history by the individual history of Harvard Square," Rahn said, adding that groundbreaking singers such as Carolyn Hester and Doc Watson, who performed at Club 47 in the 1960s, offered different perspectives in a culturally monolithic landscape.
"There weren't many women on stage at that time," she said, "and when we had blues singers come up from the Deep South to sing about their history as descendents of sharecroppers, well . . . there weren't a lot of sharecroppers in Harvard Square."
Rahn presented pieces of the collection to an Elderhostel gathering last Monday at Club Passim, where the brick walls showcased the works of well-known photographer and blues promoter Dick Waterman.
A folk music performance following the presentation featured 22-year-old Somerville resident Elizabeth Butters, whose set included the Appalachian classic "Wildwood Flower," which she strummed on a dulcimer slung across her knees, and "Tell Old Bill," a grim blues ballad with lyrics by Carl Sandburg.
Butters, dressed in a black eyelet sweater and vintage orange skirt, closed with "Goodnight, Irene" and an invitation for a sing-along during the refrain. The room filled with a steady chorus, and many in the audience filed out humming its lilting, undulating melody.
As she listened to Butters' gentle, high-pitched voice, Rahn connected the self-composed young singer to the club's past and future.
"Elizabeth grew up here and went to college here," she said. "She's a young local artist on stage just like Joan was 50 years ago. So much of what we do here is reaching forward into the past." 