I REMEMBER, with crystal clarity, the first time I heard Peter Stanley sing. It was 40 years ago, at a picnic on our family mountaintop. I was a boy of 17, too young to mix with the college friends of my cousin, but as the sun went down, I sat outside the group and I heard for the first time a sound like none I’d ever heard before. Hard driving guitar picking. The Wreck of the Old 97. The Wabash Cannonball. Nancy Whisky. I lay on my back and listened as the banjo sparkled like the stars overhead.

Peter Stanley was a junior at Harvard, and earlier that summer, he had taken his guitar and hitchhiked around the country—a rite of passage for a 1960’s folksinger off in search of freedom, new songs and a taste of Woody Guthrie’s America. He set forth with a clean Brooks Brothers white shirt and a plan to camp before dark and stay outside cities.

In West Virginia, he met Wild Bill Brunty, the singing barber of Charleston, who played guitar in the Merle Travis style and gave Peter a free haircut. Then at Crestwood, Kentucky, outside Louisville, Peter lost $60.00 at the state fair. Having just finished a course on statistics at Harvard, he could easily see that the odds were good for winning, but he hadn’t counted on the carnival hawker having a hidden brake so he could stop the wheel whenever he wished —Peter’s “Tender of the Wheel” song was about this experience.

Through Nashville and down to Texarkana, Arkansas, Peter was dropped on the side of the road with the idea of hiking into the woods, but the road was in the middle of the rice paddies, and this made camping somewhat difficult!

Friends in San Antonio introduced Peter to Curley Denton, a fishing captain in Port Aransas, Texas, and Peter learned a number of songs from Curley. Then he headed north through Amarilla. After singing in a gas station, Peter met Ester Dirksen and her three-month old baby, both abandoned by her boyfriend and on their way to Denver. Ester and Peter joined forces, and they made it to Denver taking turns feeding the baby.

On to Aspen, and then at La Junta, Colorado, Peter contemplated riding a freight train, but he heard too many horror stories. About Short Ladder Jim, who jumped a freight, hung on the ladder but then couldn’t get in and had his fingers frozen off. Or about a guy who said he always rode in the back of the box car because he once had a friend who was always hanging out the door, but then the train hit the brakes, the door slammed shut and took the guy’s head off. The guy who told Peter about this thought it was all pretty funny, but Peter decided to stick with hitch-hiking.

As he thumbed his way into St. Louis, Peter asked if there was any folk music there, and he was dropped off at Gaslight Square and that night played at the Laughing Buddha. In the audience were Peter and Judy Weston. Weston taught audiology at Washington University, and Judy played the banjo. They immediately adopted Peter, took him home and while there Peter and Judy recorded most of these songs.

This is the music I heard that night on the mountain—the crisp driving style of the guitar and the smooth baritone voice. This is Peter Stanley in his third year of college, in 1960, and only weeks before the picnic on the Virginia mountaintop that lives on in my memory.

Peter remembers that night as well, and that my buxom cousin was wearing a pink angora sweater.—Alfred Scott

JUDITH ‘HAWK’ WESTON WAS BORN in New York City and learned to love folk music at an early age, when her parents bought her Josh White, Weavers, and Leadbelly records. At Bard College, she joined the folk music club and visited the Library of Congress many times and listened to old field recordings, often playing them a dozen times to transcribe the words and get the tune down. She married Peter Weston, and they moved to St. Louis. There they got to know Jim Kweskin, Judy Collins and Peter Stanley as he hitchhiked through town. The Westons moved to Bolinas, California, where Peter Weston died in 1977. Hawk spent from 1986 to 1998 in Mexico living and performing with Mexican folk musician Joel Burgoin. In 1998, she moved back to Bolinas, where she now lives. She had lost touch with many of her old folk music friends, but through this CD, Peter and Judy are now back in touch and renewing an old friendship. They hadn’t talked to each other in 38 years.