I was still at City College in the early 1960s when Marc established himself in New York. We who were a few years younger looked up to him as a source of wisdom about guitars, as a tastemaker, and as a superb guitarist who was well ahead of what the rest of us were doing. It wasn’t easy to explore the byways in those dark ages before transcriptions and reissue LPs. And people had different personalities, goals, and agendas. To play beautifully (by, say European standards of touch and timbre) or with a bit of rough? To be puritans or progressives or somewhere in between? To gentrify, or affect the aboriginal? To follow the money, once there started to be money? And many of us (I speak for myself here) were too dumb to think as hard about singing as we did about playing.
Marc is not a guy who imposes, but he does enjoy being a guru. A generous one. When he presided over Fretted Instruments, he shared not only his guitar lore but also his music. He was playing beautifully on beautiful guitars. He was singing well, but I’m not sure people noticed it because it seemed unaffected and he was already finding a voice in his own voice and his acolytes were mostly picker. He could play like the old masters, but freely adding and departing and rearranging. Sometimes he’d come up with what you’d now call a singer-songwriter music, and not necessarily within the confines of the folk tradition. He invented new licks. (I can still pull out two Marc Silber licks, maybe verbatim.) He sang, wrote, and played bass guitar with a bunch of other misplaced folkies in a Beatles-ish rock band, Children of Paradise that actually went somewhere, though not far. There was a whole cohort of us at work on extending blues fingerpicking styles, adding new chord grips, harmonies, and bass lines—sometimes faddish and to the detriment of elegance and timekeeping and just plain musicality—but Marc would never backslide that way. He seemed uninterested in becoming recognized as a professional performing artist—was it some other reluctance, or did he simply know how freeing that is?
And he already had a foundation to grow on. Just as he’s a little too old be be properly called a boomer, he’s a little too old to be properly called a folk boomer. He was imprinted by his first teachers, precursors and pioneers of the revival movement like Al Young, Richmond Talbot, Jon Lundberg, Harry Smith, Mario Martello, Dave and Vera Frederickson, Chris Strachwitz, the luthier Eugene Clark. Mostly old Berkeley people, from before there were Beats and Hippies. And by favorite musicians like Furry Lewis and Dock Boggs and the King Solomon’s Mines of the Folkways Anthology. He’s never held back from honoring his mentors’ role in his formation. Though he was as attracted as any of us by skill, he put soulfulness first, and that quality pervades his own music.
After I left New York—and so did Marc—we’d run into each other every so often. In the summer of (I think) 1969 he was a resident performer at Harry Tuft’s Denver Folklore Center, where I hung out for a few weeks. By then his musical demeanor had become more refined. (Also—and my chronology may be a bit off—I recall he had suffered some episode of nerve damage and had had to recreate his guitar technique and mechanics.) His ethos had become more pristine. Maybe he had more fully cultivated the personality that was always there, or maybe it just happened. For many of us urban traditional revivalists, we were US and the folk were THEM. Marc had become one of THEM. It wasn’t enough that he could inhabit a song—already a great achievement. He entered tradition. He thought the way THEY did, and so his music could cross over into timelessness.
We’ve been in and out of touch over the years—more in touch lately, with email, and Marc’s public and private sharing of his work. I like some pieces more or less than others. Some are deep, deep. I treasure them all for their honesty and soul. People who can hear and value that, hear and value that. Others just enjoy it.
As for me, Marc was part of my own formation. Thanks, Marc.
— Larry Sandberg – August 2024