The Rich Folklore of Club Passim

“I look back on it and it was history in the making, but who knows it’s history when you’re just doing it,” Betsy Siggins Smith says of the past 50 years of Club Passim. Opened in 1958 as Club 47, Passim has served as a launching pad for several legendary folk musicians, including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. Siggins Smith, the club’s artistic director, began her career at Passim as a waitress in 1959, crossing over the Charles from Boston University to Cambridge with close friend Joan Baez.

Today, Passim continues to provide opportunities for unknown artists while also attracting established musicians. “The ability to get really big names is not only because of the reputation, but because they remember the fact that when nobody else would listen to them, people at Club 47 or Passim would,” Susan Scotti, the club’s gallery coordinator, says. “I think there’s no other club in the country like that that has that kind of history.”

The plans for the year-long celebration of the club’s 50th Anniversary—marked by the return of over 20 artists for a January hootenanny, a March Joan Baez concert, and a concert this Saturday by Mavis Staples, Chris Smither, and Ollabelle—is evidence of this fact.

According to Millie Rahn, the Club Passim folklorist, “The Saturday concert is really special because it encapsulates the history of the club.” Staples began singing in the club in the early 1960s with her family band, the Staples Singers. Smither, a Louisiana native, has continued the blues tradition and is a still regular performer at the club, while Ollabelle, a New York-based group, represents the new generation of folk musicians.

From the beginning, Harvard students were actively involved with the club and benefited from its rich music scene. Regular performers at the club included the Charles River Valley Boys, Tom Rush ’63, and Eric Sackheim ’56. “When we first started the original Club 47, we had a lot of Harvard students and Harvard graduates who were involved,” executive director Dan Hogan says.

The club also drew singers from across the nation, including many musicians from the Deep South, who brought a new perspective on civil rights to the students during the turbulent ’60s. Siggins Smith was deeply affected by the stories the singers carried with them from the South, noting that the audience at Club 47 revered them in a time when race-based inequalities prevented many blues singers from getting opportunities to perform.

“The club was wide open without any kind of thought about where this might go, how important these people were, how this would affect us, particularly the students at Harvard. I would without boasting suggest that this was a course they didn’t have to take but they did and it made them more cognizant,” she says.

The diversity of the musicians who came to play at Club 47 opened up the eyes of the community to the struggles being faced all across America. “In a week or two weeks or a month’s time you could see a symbol of a great deal of America through song, the labor movements, the wars, economic hardships, the Woody Guthrie songs of the depression, Joni Mitchell just starting to write some of the most amazing music that we’ve had written in the folk genre,” Siggins Smith says.

As one of the leaders in the organization, Siggins Smith sees a need to reflect and interpret the Passim’s history. The club is now building up its vast archives, which include never-before-heard recordings, unseen photographs, and other artifacts.

“At 50 years, no matter how we got here, we got here and now we need to make sense of our own history, which of course includes the history of America, the culture, and the politics of the ’60s,” Siggins Smith says. “If these things are going to live in perpetuity, and they’re going to be helpful to scholars and students and kids, we have to take care of them.”

As Club Passim looks to the future and expands its presence both locally and nationally, it continues to cherish its history. Hogan seeks to build a larger venue to house the archives, but has no plans to move the current location of Club Passim on Palmer Street. The club’s cultural role in the community continues with the creation of the Passim School of Music and its Culture for Kids program, which seeks to make up for the lack of arts education in public schools. Passim hopes to create a traveling archive that will allow students to listen to recordings of legendary musicians, while also learning about culture in the ’60s and ’70s.

Passim also continues to strengthen its ties to Harvard students. In addition to offering 10-dollar rush tickets to Harvard undergraduates for special events like their anniversary concert, it has formed a close relationship with Veritas Records, a student-run group that provides musicians on campus the services of a record label. Starting last spring, the club has scheduled roughly two nights a semester for Veritas Records that will give student musicians the opportunity to perform for an audience, and it will also create a CD compiling the students’ best performances of the year. “They’ve provided an opportunity for student musicians to get out and start a music career,” says Anthony M. Spaniola III ‘10, the CEO of Veritas. “A lot of musicians really only get to play on campus. It allows us to broaden our reach out into the community.”

Still, as Scotti notes, there are many student musicians WHO are not aware of the opportunities offered by Club Passim. “I don’t think a lot of them realize they can walk from their dorm to this great place and just have a seat, hook it up on stage. I think that’s a really important thing, not just for Harvard, but for all kids,” she says. “There’s nothing like that out there.”