CD Set Inspires Musician to Strum Again

by Brandon Walters

A year ago Alfred Scott never imagined he'd spend the next 11 months rifling through thousands of hours of recorded folk music. It might have been easier to scout through the archives of Arlo Guthrie.

The process and the resulting eight CD box set "The Peter Stanley Collection: A Lifetime of Music," have been a labor of love for Scott and his family.

Two-and-a-half years ago, Scott's brother-in-law and friend, Peter Stanley, a renown folk musician now in his 60s who's played with legends Judy Collins and Joan Baez, nearly put his banjo and guitar down for good when symptoms of Parkinson's disease slowed his skilled hands to a halt.

The Orange County musician is no stranger to a good challenge. He quit his job as a stockbroker, he braved the Alaskan tundra with his wife and son even building their own cabin, he climbed Mt. McKinley and, most importantly, he stopped drinking.

But the Parkinson's was a battle Stanley seemed destined to lose. Until Scott took on a project of monstrous proportions: preserving 40 years of his brother-in-law's music.

"A man gets his self-worth out of what he produces," says Scott, a software developer and president of Sequoia Aircraft Corporation. And for Stanley, the timing of this project meant the difference between living and dying. Today Stanley's picking again.

Scott is producing 300 of the eight-volume collection that cost $96 apiece. Already he has orders for 50. "I knew he had a following in Virginia," says Scott. But the challenge, he says, is to sell Peter Stanley to the world - online. "If we just have fun and enjoy the music, that's enough," confides Scott. Most of all, he's glad his friend is back. "He almost wakes playing the guitar now."