“What the Ash Grove did,” says Ed Pearl, “was change the face of popular music.” Of course, Pearl would think that: He is the folk impresario (if that’s not an oxymoron) behind the Ash Grove, a fabled roots music club that stirred it up on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles from 1958-1973. It was the kind of place some folks dream about, a place where legends the likes of Muddy Waters and Doc Watson, as well as Flamenco dancers and street poets, took the stage on the same bill; a community center where everyday people—activists and laborers, millionaires and grifters—all made the scene. So why would anyone want to burn it down, not once, but three times?

The gospel of the Ash Grove, according to Pearl, demonstrates how the traditional music of the American South came to the West Coast, entered the popular culture in the early ’60s, launched the folk revival followed by the creation of folk-rock and its protest-orientated repertoire, and contributed to the transformation of culture. Though what you are about to read may or may not prove that claim, like one of those traditional ballads that gets handed down and slightly rearranged over time, it’s the writer’s hope that the essence of the song is pure, while its mystery remains.

The Step Into Tradition

You can’t ask Pearl to recount his most memorable nights at the Ash Grove without plumbing the depths of cross-cultural exchange that defines American music history. “Bill Monroe on my stage… the first time I heard Doc Watson on stage… the thrill of Mississippi John Hurt… it was like meeting Brahms or something like that,” he says. His memory of “the step into ancient tradition that Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Islanders provided” is followed by the plantation history of South Carolina’s John’s Island. “They didn’t even have a causeway ’til after World War II,” he emphasizes. So the islands are a little jumbled, but what he lacks in details he makes up for in passion: Pearl’s thing is musical tradition. In the case of Jones and the Georgia Sea Islanders, it was musical expression that preserved their Gullah heritage and their stories of slave ancestry. And on the West Coast, it was the Ash Grove that rose to be the venue for voices from the South, like Jones’, to be heard. Pearl then leavened that tradition by drawing young players and listeners to those sounds and ideas, resulting in the creation of a forward-thinking youth culture weaned on folk music. There is no doubt that Pearl succeeded in his mission to introduce traditional music and culture to an urban audience that might not otherwise have been exposed to it. Go deeper into the story and you’ll find you’re peeking behind the bittersweet shadows of the counter-cultural revolution that began in the late ’50s, peaked in the ’60s, and went down in a ball of flames in the early ’70s.

Fifty Years of Folk

“In LA, in west Los Angeles, you could have this education, like no other place at no other time, end discussion,” Ry Cooder says in the film Ash Grove Burning, a documentary in production by Aiyana Elliott, a branch off the Ash Grove’s family tree herself as daughter of folksinger Ramblin’ Jack. Musician Cooder wasn’t yet 20 when he made it down to the club. “People say, ‘How did you learn music?’ I said, ‘This was how I learned music… by being in the Ash Grove with Ed, at the bar, at my chair.’” Cooder is known for his unclassifiable brand of genre-traversing sound, whether collaborating with rock’s Rolling Stones, Malian master musician Ali Farka Touré, or German film director Wim Wenders. He’s also among the alumni who showed up in April of 2008 for Pearl’s and the Ash Grove’s golden anniversary of merging music with progressive politics.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Taj Mahal, and Arlo Guthrie all came to pay their due, as did the poets and other performers who benefited from an Ash Grove education. Alongside the club’s originals came second-generation folk like Laura Love (her dad Preston played with R&B pioneer Johnny Otis), Ben Harper (his mother, Ellen Chase, was a singer), and California singer-songwriter Dave Alvin (also of the Blasters and the Knitters), a one-time teenaged regular at the club. All in all, about 100 artists and a few thousand celebrants gathered—at a two-night gala at UCLA’s distinguished Royce Hall, as well as for three days of free workshops, offered in folk festival tradition—to express affection towards the nightclub and its booker.

Taking full advantage of the free events in my immediate community, I slipped into the darkened campus auditorium in the middle of the afternoon, feeling a little like a time traveler. I had come to witness American music history-makers like the Freedom Singers, the Watts Prophets, and Len Chandler return to the LA stage, but what I got was as authentic of an Ash Grove experience as one could have in LA, 2008. The spirit of the old place was palpable as the performers who spoke up against injustice in the early ’60s delivered messages that were right on time today. But not just that: Pearl had a habit of hosting master musicians in their 60s and 70s—performers who audiences thought they may never get the chance to see in their lifetime. On this weekend, the Ash Grove’s youth were now its survivors. Waiting for the show, sitting side by side with the old-timers, I was among the youngest people in the house. Which kinda had me musing: If I’m the youngest, then where have all the young folk gone?

The Old Guys

“I started with the perfect show,” says Pearl who launched the club at 8162 Melrose in 1958. “Brownie McGhee, Guy Carawan, and my Flamenco guitar teacher, Geronimo Villarino.” McGhee was the Southern folk-bluesman who, at the time, hadn’t quite yet formed his famous alliance with harmonica partner Sonny Terry; Carawan is best known for adapting “We Shall Overcome” with Pete Seeger. As for legendary Flamenco artist Villarino, he was officially one student down as Pearl traded his guitar for a business license and left the playing to his brother Bernie (a blues guitarist).

“I always had two or three cheap recorders going at the Ash Grove,” he explains. “I’d just turn them on because I wanted to listen,” mostly to personal favorites like Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, though he regrets neglecting to consistently record his club’s two most famous graduates, Cooder and Mahal, still in the midst of gaining experience and catching a backstage glimpse of their respective futures. “… Ry, Taj, and the rest of us liked to listen to the old guys,” shrugs Pearl, by way of explaining his scattershot archive.

The so-called “old guys” brought a depth to the new ’60s folk scene that, say, the rock clubs and their riots on Sunset Strip didn’t have to offer. The Ash Grove was the place where real folk came to play in LA; in fact, it was among the few places in the world you could hear these artists period, outside of European festivals and a handful of East Coast venues. The short list of legends who came West and filled the club with their music starts with Maybelle Carter, Roscoe Holcomb, Robert Pete Williams, Sleepy John Estes, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and Doc Watson. It continues with Mississippi John Hurt and Mississippi Fred MacDowell, and grows longer with the three Bigs: Joe Turner, Joe Williams, and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. There are hundreds more.

“The only person who carried a gun into the Ash Grove was Big Mama Thornton because I owed her $50 from her last bill, and I said, ‘Big Mama, how can you do that? You know I’m going to give it to you.’ She started crying and that was that,” says Pearl.

Naming the club after a genteel Celtic folk song, the Ash Grove was a tight-knit operation of fa
mily and friends who comprised the fiercely loyal staff overseen by Pearl. By all accounts, the boss was notoriously stubborn though tirelessly devoted to the work of maintaining a space where he said he could present “top-notch Israeli groups and Balkan dancers” alongside politics that were reflected in the lectures, slide shows, and installations in the club’s lobby.

From the budding traditional music scene of the late ’50s, in the early ’60s Pearl moved into popular folk acts of the striped shirt and slacks variety, like Bud and Travis and the Limeliters.