Are you now or have you ever been . . . a folksinger?

David Laibman on the front cover of one of his CDs, in a pose that is exactly the way he used to sit on the wall of his front porch when he was a teenager and I was a little kid.

When I was about 8, I used to wander down to the other end of our (fairly short) block, on Belmar Road in Cleveland Heights, and talk to a guy who was seven years older than I, because I had started guitar lessons a year earlier, and this guy, also named David, would sit on his front porch or front steps playing his guitar. I used to ask him to show me how to play things on the guitar that my ancient, old classical guitar teacher would not and could not teach me.

I was taking lessons at Motter's on Coventry Road. Back then, there were very few dedicated guitar teachers in music stores because there just weren't that many guitar players—until 1958, when the Kingston Trio started the big commercial folk music wave, and then, again, in 1964, when the Beatles arrived in the U.S. So, my guitar teacher, like many back then, was an old Italian cello teacher, born in the 1890s, who happened to know how to play classical guitar.

I found out about this young folk guitarist guy when my parents went to a party on our street, and the next day my mother told me about this teenager who had been there, playing and singing folk songs. Singing folk songs was not at all a common thing back then—not till a few years later. This was still during the time when, if you played folk music, Republican congressmen would accuse you of being a Communist or Socialist.

Since I had been 3 or 4, I had been listening to my parents folk music record albums, like those by Josh White, Burl Ives, Odetta, and the Weavers, who, of course, were accused of being Communists or Socialists, and blacklisted during the 1950s. 

In fact, as late as 1968, Gerald Ford, who was then the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and only a few years from becoming President of the United States, tried to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on a variety of grounds, including his “liberal opinions,” and for accepting $350 for an article he wrote on folk music in the magazine Avant Garde. In the Congressional hearings, Ford said, “The article itself is not pornographic, although it praises the lusty, lurid, and risqué, along with the social protest of left-wing folk singers.”

And I’m sure it’s a coincidence . . . but my folksinger neighbor on Belmar, David Laibman, grew up to become the editor of Science & Society, a quarterly Marxist journal founded in 1936. He also received a Ph.D. in economics, with a dissertation that dealt with problems in Marxist value theory. Laibman, the author of five books, taught economic theory, political economy, and mathematical economics at the City University of New York (CUNY).

But he also became an influential fingerstyle guitarist, becoming known for arranging and playing early-20th-century ragtime music (mostly originally written for piano) on guitar. He recorded an album, The New Ragtime Guitar, for Folkways Records in 1970, and a solo album, Classical Ragtime Guitar, for Rounder Records in 1980. He worked with a variety of artists in the early folk world and also recorded a guitar instruction DVD.

I tracked him down, online, and communicated with him a few times over the past 15 years or so. He told me that before he left Cleveland for New York, he played at Cleveland’s top folk music club, La Cave, in the early ‘60s, opening for Jose Feliciano for two weeks. He also said that he found the folk music scene in this country “rather tough going.” He said, “I spent a year in England, where the folk scene was much friendlier.” It made him decide against a professional music career. “I went the academic route instead.”

I guess I’m glad I had only a few lessons with him, and, thus, did not have a chance to get too influenced by him. And I don't mean politically. I'm talking about occupations, because it turned out that I made the opposite choices from David Laibman, opting out of academics in favor of music. Those might not have been the best decisions, but they were definitely the right decisions.