Good folk
Picking a life of song

By Greg Glassner

Peter Stanley's life has been a lot like the folk songs he sings and plays on his guitar.

It has been a saga of adventure and misadventure, soaring highs and plunging lows, loves lost and found, successes achieved and abandoned, and joy in life's simple pleasures and family values.

With an acoustic guitar never far from reach, Stanley hitchhiked around the country, shared a stage with legends-to-be Joan Baez, Jim Kweskin, Tom Rush, Judy Collins and Pete Seeger, and observed the war in Vietnam, returning to sing out against it.

Stanley became a successful investments broker, then turned his back on it and built a cabin in backwoods Alaska. He danced with "Nancy Whiskey," came to terms with his addiction and became an alcoholism counselor helping others.

Stanley trekked Nepal, canoed through Lapland, and climbed the highest mountain in North America.

Once a top high school and college wrestler, Stanley now wrestles with Parkinson's disease. It has cut down on his musical performances and thrown the timing off in his once-nimble fingers. He still plays, however, sometimes attaching the pick to his thumb and forefinger with Super Glue before taking the stage.

It would take more than one song to capture Stanley's life. His brother-in-law, Alfred Scott, has attempted to do so by reducing 40 years of taped music to an eight CD set with performances arranged in loose chronological order.

The eight CDs, which Scott distilled from a mind-boggling 70 CDs of source material, document Stanley's life through his music. They also represent four decades of American folk music.

The music and CD liners follow Stanley's odyssey from Boston's Club 47 to the Laughing Buddha on St. Louis' Gaslight Square, and to the Sidetrack Coffeehouse in Raleigh N.C. They take the listener to another coffeehouse in Stanley's hometown of Richmond, to three years in Talkeetna, Alaska, and to The Briary, the farm in Rapidan the Stanleys settled on over 16 years ago.

Peter Stanley was born in Richmond in 1938, when it was still a genteel southern town. Growing up there, he became aquainted with folk music by listening to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Weavers on the radio.

"I first heard Pete Seeger in the early 50s, when I was a kid. I took a trip to Boston on the train when I was 13 and brought my ukulele with me. The conductor took me from car to car to play to the passengers," Stanley said.

As a student at Harvard, Stanley began playing guitar at clubs and coffeehouses. "I was playing at Tula's Coffee Grinder and going to the Club 47, it was there that I first heard Joan Baez singing. That was in '58 or '59. She was making $10 a night, but it was apparent she was a great talent.

When he got up the nerve, Stanley asked to play at Club 47, where he shared the stage with Baez, Jim Keskin, Tom Rush, Eric von Schmidt, Ralph Kahn and Geno Foreman. "I was making $15 a night, which was a big deal then. Jim Kweskin and I became partners, performing together," Stanley said.

The first CD in the collection, "Fire at Club 47," contains more Rush, Kweskin and Baez than Stanley, who recorded the performances on a small tape recorder and hand-held mike that picked up the sound of beer bottles clinking together. The sound quality is marginal, but Baez' crystal voice -- even as a 19-year-old college student -- is unmistakable on "Emmet Till" and "I Never Will Marry."

Folk music at that time, around Cambridge, Massachusetts, "was something magic, a really powerful experience," Stanley said.

Although he ended up getting a degree in psychology, Stanley flirted with folklore. "I took several folk courses and was urged by one professor to make a career of folk music -- If that wasn't an irresponsible thing for a Harvard professor to do," he joked.

"Right after my junior year, I wanted to get on the road and sing and master flatpicking. My mother dropped me off somewhere on Route 60, with my pack, sleeping bag and guitar.

"I was an experienced camper by then. The previous summer I hiked the White Mountains of New Hampshire and I'd canoed through Norway and Finland to the Russian border," Stanley said.

Wearing a white dress shirt and clean blue jeans -- and carrying his guitar -- Stanley looked more musician than roustabout. He had no trouble getting rides.

"I never got into any trouble and I never stayed in town, unless I had a place to play. I'd also been 174-pound AAA Wrestling Champion in high school, so I could take care of myself.

"I spent the first night in West Virginia, singing in a truck stop there. They liked my music. The truckers bought me breakfast and even offered me money. I'd sing anywhere -- truck stops and bus stations. I got great feedback. If they didn't like what you were playing, they wouldn't listen," he said.

Stanley met "Wild Bill" Brunty, the singing barber of Charleston, who gave the young musician a free haircut and some lessons in playing guitar in the Merle Travis style.

His thumb took Stanley through Nashville, down to Texarkana, Arkansas, and San Antonio Texas, then up to Aspen, Colorado, before he headed east again.

"When I got to Joplin, Missouri, I asked where folksingers played. They sent me to The Laughing Buddha, at Boyle and Olive Streets.

"For two weeks I was the sole entertainment there. Judy Collins had the next two weeks. She arrived early and picked up 'Man of Constant Sorrow' from me."

Peter and Judy Weston heard Stanley and opened their home to him. Stanley played and sang some with Judy Weston, a banjo player. Their voices blend well in "Greenland No More," the second CD in the collection.

"I was offered $125 a week to return the next summer," Stanley said.

Weston encouraged Stanley to perform for Al Grossman, an agent who represented Mary Travers and Noah Paul Stookey, but Stanley said he had to go back to college.

"In my senior year, Club 47 was really blossoming. Bob Dylan, who was just starting out, came up and nobody had heard of him. People thought he couldn't sing or play. But he got up on stage anyway," Stanley said.

Stanley in 1985, atop Mt. McKinley, the tallest peak in North America.

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in psychology, Stanley stopped in New York's Greenwich Village on the way home to Richmond, his car full of gear. He missed an opportunity to sing with his hero Pete Seeger when someone broke in the car and stole everything. He would eventually share a stage with Seeger in the summer of '65, when they sang together at Village Gate.

Stanley went back to St. Louis for another appearance at the Laughing Buddha and then went on to Oklahoma City, "where I was fresh meat. Nobody had heard me before. It was magical, I couldn't do anything wrong," Stanley said.

Somewhere along the way, Stanley taught himself to use his remaining fingers to finger pick while flatpicking. "Not too many people do that," he said.

The long arm of the Selective Service System caught up with Stanley while on the road. He volunteered for three years, entering the Army on Oct. 8, 1961.

"I signed up for the Army Security Agency. The idea was to learn a language. But 1 found myself picking cigarette butts out of the ice at Fort Devens. The Army had invested in my security clearance and didn't want me anywhere else." Stanley said.

Finally, a Harvard professor with some Pentagon connections arranged Stanley's reassignment to Walter Reed Medical Center, "Where I worked with alcoholics, schizophrenics and NASA space monkeys -- and taught behavioral psychology to psychiatrists who didn't understand Skinner at all.

While at Walter Reed, Stanley immersed himself in the D.C. folk scene and got to perform with Judy Collins.

"I played at the Unicorn and Crow's Toe, two clubs near Washington Circle. I got to play with Mississippi John Hurt -- a real gentleman, the nicest person you'd ever see."

Toward the end of his hitch in the Army, Stanley was part of a four-man team sent to Vietnam to do a study called Psychological Concomitants of Hostilities.

"Somebody at Walter Reed had the idea Vietnam was going to be no small thing -- there were only 30,000 troops there then. I really enjoyed the Vietnamese people. My orders were to duck when firing broke out, and we could flag down a helicopter and go anywhere. I was in Saigon during coup that toppled Big Minh."

The team returned from Vietnam and wrote "a 1,500 page report that was reputedly read by Lyndon Johnson as part of his bedtime reading. Although, if he read it, he disregarded it, Stanley said. Stanley re-entered civilian life as an opponent of the war. He wrote several protest songs and sang them at New York's Village Gate. "Pete Seeger asked to hear them and anything else I wrote on the war," Stanley said.

"After the Army, I did a project for my father -- a study of a small business in Goldsboro, N.C.

"I didn't know anybody, so I walked over to Raleigh looking for folk music. I found the Sidetrack Coffee House, winding up with a job. I played for a half hour and everybody went wild."

On "At the Sidetrack," volume 3 in the CD collection, Stanley plays ''Old 97, State of Arkansas, Abilene, Reuben James" and "Darling Corey."

"But home was Richmond," Stanley said, "and I was driving back and forth. I guess I was one of first people there. Peter Yarrow came and sang after a gig at the Coliseum. I played for him, and he played for me.

"I returned to business school at the University of Richmond. My mother had a stockbroker, Jim Wheat, who had made money for her. It did more for my mother than a roomful of psychiatrists," Stanley said.

"I talked to Wheat about a job, but Merrill Lynch was coming to town, and they said, 'forget business school, we've got our own training program.' I went with them in July, 1965. I had to mix stock arbitrage and Carter Family picking after that.

"I had exceptionally good luck. I went to work as the market topped so my first experience was stocks going down, and I found a way to win, a sophisticated game to play. I did my own research and went with small companies where I could speak with the president.

Clockwise, from top, young Christopher Stanley, Alfred Scott, Meredith Scott, Ginny Stanley and Peter Stanley at a family gathering during the 1970's

"Then I began to run into a problem. My customers were all doing well, but at Merrill Lynch the research department was supposed to do the research.

"Then I picked one that went down. I didn't resign. I just took a leave of absence, because they said, 'You're our number one over-the-counter trader.' I never really thought of myself as an organization man, though," Stanley said.

Stanley picked up his guitar and started playing and singing at Richmond-area nightspots, including the Crossroads Coffeehouse in the basement of St. James' Church.

"For six months, I played a lot of guitar and financed several small start-ups. Clients kept calling and saying, 'We need you back.' So I started a Hedge Fund. I looked at what Warren Buffett was doing."

That year, 1967, was a benchmark for Stanley. He raised several million dollars from investors and started his Hedge Fund. He also married Virginia, his wife of 33 years.

Stanley paid a price for that quick success, however.

"I got more and more involved. I wasn't just an investor -- I was on the board of directors of these companies. I was kind of working up to what drove me out of the marketplace and into the woods," Stanley remembered.

"I was beginning to get into 'demon rum' for relief of pain. After taking my first hit in the market, I called up my partners and said I was going to take a year off and go to Alaska. I was concerned about my drinking and walking around New York City with a client's $500,000 check in my briefcase.

"I got out of my stocks just before the market was hammered," he added.

"I took Virginia and Christopher, our son, on a camping trip to Maine in November and December, 1971. We found out our son could thrive in ten-degree weather.

"We took off for Alaska in June, '72, arriving in Fairbanks June 26. I drove all the way with my wife, two-year-old son, and German shepherd in a vehicle loaded with chainsaws, snares, and traps of all kind."

Stanley made preparations for the trip, honing up on wildemess survival. "Plus, I could afford to do it," he said. Once there, however, he met many men and women who came with very little and survived.

"A friend arrived with an old Volkswagen, chainsaw and $200 in cash. Nobody starves up there. There's a lot of moose," Stanley added.

The Stanleys met a bush pilot on the "Al-Can Highway" who offered to fly them around and scout out homesites.

"He flew me over Talkeetna. I started hiking from Talkeetna looking for a place with good water, good flora and a view of Mt. McKinley," Stanley said.

"I ended up camping on a lake. When I woke up, there was a wolf across the lake and a cow moose with her calf, and I said, 'This is just great!" (Ginny Stanley's first reaction to this location, which was about 120 miles due north of Anchorage, is unrecorded. She later observed, "It's the sort of thing that either broke or made a marriage.")

Peter and Ginny cut and hauled logs and built the cabin they lived in for three years. Two of their children were born there.

While finishing the cabin, they called a double-walled Army tent "home," surviving temperatures that dipped to 20 and 30 below zero.

Stanley continued playing and singing to his family and on stages in local inns and restaurants. He helped launch a folk music revival there. Talkeetna now hosts a folk festival.

"There was one old guy with a couple of songbooks playing there when I arrived," Stanley said. When he departed three years later, Talkeetna had a thriving music scene.

"I'd snowmobile into the Fairview Inn and sing. They'd provide room and board for my family and $70 a night to perform. I played at the Malamute Inn at Fairbanks, and did indeed drink myself under the table there."

The stay in the wilderness provided enough adventure and anecdotes to last most folks a lifetime.

The prospect of raising three boys in a remote cabin without running water finally sent Peter and Ginny Stanley back to civilization.

"Winters were beautiful with the northern lights, but it was dark all the time, and it was hard," Ginny observed.

Stanley went back to work at Wheat First Securities In Richmond in April, 1975. "At the interview, I said, 'I'm an alcoholic.' He shot back, 'I'm blind.' He hired me," Stanley remembered.

The move back to civilization did not cure Stanley's thirst for adventure, however. In 1980, he trained for and completed the Richmond marathon as a way to quit smoking. "I was told I'd either quit smoking or quit running and it worked," he said.

After a couple of years in the city, the Stanleys moved to The Briary near Rapidan, a farm Ginny's uncle owned.

Stanley commuted for a while, then tried his hand at being an alcoholism counselor In Charlottesville. He briefly tried to make a living as a guitar maker, but discovered "You can make a good living repairing guitars, but making them is devastating." One of his handmade guitars hangs on his living room wall.

"When I came here to Orange County, it was a major sobriety date for me. I was sober for 16 years, had a small divergence, and have been sober another seven years. I feel good about it."

Peter continued to sing and play at the Randolph House, the Orange Gourmet, the Four County Players in Barboursville, at the Swinging Bridge Pottery festivals in Criglersville and, more recently, at Hootenannies at the Rapidan Fire Hall.

Virginia Stanley indicated she is happy her husband prefers home and hearth to the existence of a road-going troubadour.

"We went to hear Jim Kewskin and the Jug Band at Wolftrap and went backstage. He ended up coming back and staying with us for a few days. He wouldn't get up until noon and that really threw my schedule off. He told Peter, 'If you'd just get rid of your wife, you could join me in a commune in California.' I was glad to see him go," she admitted.

In 1985, Stanley went back to Alaska with his college roommate, Sam Huntington. The two men climbed Mt. McKinley, which at 20,320 feet is the highest peak in North America. To tune up for it, they stopped in Washington on the way and climbed to Mt. Ranier's 14,410-foot summit.

Ginny Stanley listens to husband Peter play.

A year ago, the Stanleys moved from the farm in Rapidan to the edge of Orange, a sign, perhaps, that age and Parkinson's Disease is slowing him down some. Stanley closed his office on Main Street in Orange, but handles some investments for old clients from a computer-equipped room in their new home.

The Stanleys still own the cabin in Alaska. "We go to visit. Ginny and I have been back five or six times. It's had an enormous impact on our lives. All three boys worked up there, and they've taken friends there -- 50 or 60 kids at least," Stanley said.

Over the past two decades, Stanley has had a profound influence over a number of budding musicians. He sang with Victoria Young, who with husband Dick Harrington now perform as the Afton Mountain String Band. Terry Allard and Stanley's son Christopher, who has his own band in Richmond, are other musical collaborators.

Young and Stanley harmonize on Volume 6, "Coming Home," which contains "Mr. Bojangles," "House of the Rising Sun, "Don't think Twice," and a Peter Stanley original, "Jefferson Hotel."

Peter and son Christopher combine their talents on "When You and I Were Young," Volume 8 in the set. This CD includes "Carleton Weaver, "Satisfied Mind," "The Water is Wide" and "Dueling Guitars."

Alfred Scott, a Richmond entrepreneur who is married to Stanley's sister Meredith, herself a folksinger and musician, took on the task of creating the 130-song Peter Stanley Collection part as "a labor of love" and part out of an appreciation of Stanley's wizardry with a guitar.

The Scotts and Stanleys sing together on Volume 5, "Hard Times in the Country," which contains a selection of classic and contemporary, including "Darcy Farrow" and "Old Dogs & Children & Watermelon Wine."

"Peter is a packrat beyond description. Everything on the CDs is from his old tape recordings -- old reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, in some cases old studio recordings," Scott said.

Because Stanley rubbed shoulders, shared mikes and learned from so many folk performers over 40 years, the Peter Stanley Collection comes close to being a definitive anthology of the genre. Stanley sums it up thusly:

"From Harvard Square to Amarillo, from Talkeetna to Katmandu, from Saigon to Sioux City, I have had so many people who taught me songs, guitar licks and about life. I am indebted to them all."