Blue Groove Moves
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According to club owner Brendan Witcher, it wasn’t what happened inside but what went on outside, once the bar was closed. “We would get done at two and everyone would leave and hang out on Lincoln just outside the club, just yelling and screaming, turning up the radios in their cars,” says Witcher. When four pricey new condo developments cut their ribbons within a block of the club toward the end of last year, he guessed the new neighbors might have a low tolerance for the noise, and tried to nip potential confrontation in the bud. He and de la Pe–a began making announcements, pleading with fans not to loiter, but to no avail.
“Quite frankly, the neighbors were right,” says Witcher. “I knew that this would happen, and I warned people about it, but no one listened to me. It’s a shame. I loved the night and I loved the regulars.”
See, though Folkways is best known for its uncompromising recordings of folk, jazz, and blues legends like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Mary Lou Williams, Big Bill Broonzy, and Dave Van Ronk, also among its more than 2,000 titles are spoken-word collections, language instruction recordings, and lots of other uncategorizable things–who could forget the 1964 classic Speech After the Removal of the Larynx? When Asch died in 1986, his estate sold Folkways to the Smithsonian Institution on the condition that it would keep every one of those titles in print. Anthony Seeger, Pete’s nephew, was hired as curator of the collection and director of the new Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a position he still holds today.
