“The kids were immediately attracted to the guitar,” he said. During this period of the Great Folk Scare, the music entered the mainstream, culminating with the network TV show, Hootenanny.However, instead of showcasing the young folksingers that were spreading like wild mountain thyme from the Greenwich Village, Cambridge, and West Coast scenes, Hootenanny presented a homogenized, square vision of folk, though that was not necessarily its intention. Hardcore troubadours like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, among many others, had chosen to boycott the show in solidarity with Pete Seeger, who’d been banned from the airwaves ever since refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC had spent the ’50s investigating the political lives of suspected Communists, especially artists and others of influence in society, and Seeger, as well as others, had been unofficially blacklisted by them from performing. Which is also to say that between the red scare and the coming of the Beatles in a big way in ’64, any folkers who hadn’t yet made their mark would soon to be going out of business. Pearl must’ve seen the writing on the wall.

“By ’63, I decided to go traditional, pretty much. Not that I stopped contemporary… I really liked Stan Wilson, Carolyn Hester, she’s wonderful, I’m not saying she isn’t, but I wanted John Hurt and Skip James, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe,” he says. Pearl’s wisdom suggests these bookings impacted the young folk as much as Woody Guthrie shaped Bob Dylan singing his way out of Greenwich Village did, as much as Beatlemania launched a thousand bands and encouraged boys to grow their hair long. The folk and blues revival’s black/white, young/old, traditional/contemporary, country/urban music contrasts were now not only directly linked to the Civil Rights Movement, but to the nation’s changing social consciousness led by its youth.

Pearl remembers a young Jim (Roger) McGuinn walking in; according to Ash Grove lore, it was there that another folk enthusiast, David Crosby, met McGuinn for the first time before they would eventually form the Byrds. Sometimes it was just hanging around that set a young musician on course: Recently transplanted Mississippian Joe Chambers talked-up his brotherly band to Pearl while the pair went on a hairdressing errand for bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Eventually, at Hopkins’ request, the Chambers Brothers debuted at the Ash Grove in 1960, opening for Hopkins, Terry, and McGhee on New Year’s Eve. By 1965, the Chambers Brothers appeared at Newport Folk; in 1968, they had a Top 20 hit with their psychedelic soul classic, “Time Has Come Today.” But it was the Ash Grove’s two most regular musicians, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, who received the most up-close and hands-on tutelage from their Southern musical mentors, mostly by virtue of how much time they logged on the Ash Grove premises. The pair joined forces in ’65 as the Rising Sons, an innovative, ahead-of-the-curve West Coast folk-rock band, among the first of its kind to incorporate traditional instruments into their rockin’ country blues mix (today’s massive genre and culture known as Americana springs from the hybridization of traditional sounds).

Pearl prided himself on creating an atmosphere of seamless mixing across genre and racial lines, “… a concentration of the greats of white country and black blues. The white Southern and black Southern musicians came to the Ash Grove, because no one else would hire them. They were thrilled to be getting the money.” There was also a core audience for the legends, some of whom were no longer recording. “I never made any money on the Ash Grove, I want you to understand that. I wanted to charge $1… the most I ever charged was $3.”

Making his case for cultural transformation, Pearl recalls a time in 1963 when the Freedom Singers, a four-piece vocal group from Albany, Georgia, came to his Fairfax District folk club for an unprecedented six-week run on a fundraising and awareness campaign in the name of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Their songs provided inspiration to workers at voter registration drives and demonstrations in their hometown and throughout the South, and they’d been sent to spread the word though music in the less segregated West.

“The Freedom Singers were among the most important fulfillments of the Ash Grove vision that I had,” explains Pearl. “They were young at the time… and they were singing songs that came from the actual lives and struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. It was their culture… their music. All these younger people in the audience had already turned on to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bill Monroe and respected Southern culture from a distance… but here were young people involved in a nationwide cause.

“Some of the Freedom Rider buses used the Ash Grove to pick up people to go to the South. It was an important lesson to a younger generation of people,” says Pearl.

Dave Alvin’s Ash Grove

For a 14-year-old Dave Alvin, the Ash Grove was a window into worlds that he otherwise would not have known growing up in suburban Downey, California. Already a lover of rock, traditional, and old-time music, his first visit to the club alongside older brother Phil and a couple of slightly older teenagers lives large in his memory.

“June of 1970, T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, and Eddie Vinson with the Johnny Otis Orchestra. That was it. They were still in their prime—it was a real show, music stands, the whole thing. That was probably my favorite night ever at the club… it was the first time and such a stunning show. But there were other things,” says Alvin. More than just performances, the Ash Grove left its mark on him during his impressionable years.

“You’d walk in and there would be would be beautiful photographs by [musician/writer] Julius Lester. Then you’d go back in and there’d be posters of Chairman Mao and the Chinese proletariat, their arms raised going off into the future. I’m an FDR union guy—I’m not a Marxist. On the other hand, Ed’s presentation, while off-putting to some, was intriguing to me. It made you think and it made you put the music into a context—it was more than ‘let’s get drunk and boogie music.’ It was music that came from somewhere and had reasons for existing, and you had to ask yourself what those reasons were and all the complicated questions about that. It made the music deeper and richer.”

As years went by, Alvin, who comes from a labor family background, would often bring class-consciousness to his work. By no means pedantic or one-dimensional, Alvin also brings humanity to his songs. I once saw him appear at a late-night folky jam at Yosemite’s Strawberry Music Festival where I believe he debuted his song, “Ash Grove.” Moving the crowd with a combination of emotion and devotion, he effectively passed on a piece of under-reported LA cultural history to a mostly Northern California crowd. “Well, when I was a young boy, I used to slip away down to the Ash Grove to hear the old blues men play,” goes the song as it opens. He proceeds to spin a tale of how the music of “Big Joe and Lightnin’, and Reverend Gary too,” travels from the past with him, into the here an
d now. There are nights Alvin and his band seem capable of conjuring their spirits, too.

“You had people from East LA and South Central there,” remembers Alvin of the Melrose club. “From Beverly Hills. You really did have the rich rubbing elbows with the middleclass and the underclass. That made it really unique as far as clubs. If you go to the House of Blues now, you’re basically looking at one kind of audience. At the Ash Grove, there was everybody… hippies and radicals and black radicals and black nationalists and right wing truck drivers, too. That’s always hung with me. I’d like to encourage that at my shows,” he says, then laughs at his own idea, “though I don’t really know how you do that!”

Pearl’s LA Roots

Pearl didn’t set out to be a catalyst for music-making history, nor did he foresee his future as an activist. Rather, he describes a series of events that accidentally steered him toward his fate as a folk organizer.

Born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Pearl grew up in culturally diverse East LA and was always drawn to music. “I stumbled into all kinds of places where folk music was being performed. I met a girl whose parents went to the First Unitarian Church, so I heard Pete Seeger. I was 13 or 14. I heard Paul Robeson. I loved the music. I liked it better than what was on the radio, which was god awful.”

At 16, he was admitted to UCLA as a math and philosophy major. “I stumbled into the campaign to get Pete Seeger to UCLA,” he says. By then, it was the mid-’50s, the Cold War, the height of the blacklist period, the time when Seeger and politically active and socially conscious artists like him were under siege by the US government and subjected to investigations regarding their political affiliations. “We had the entire campus behind us except for the administration, the fraternities and sororities. They won, but we put on the show at the big Methodist church right off campus on Wilshire Blvd., and I made a lifelong friend of Pete Seeger,” says Pearl.