Read A Freewheelin' Time for Free Online

and gave me a cute skirt to wear so that I’d look less like a kid. I was still very awkward, but progress was being made. They schooled me in a few dance moves and made sure I knew the words to the Gene Vincent song “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” I was happy. Usually my sister treated me like a bug she needed to swat away, but life had radically changed a few months previously with the death of our father, and now I was getting some friendly attention.

    With Carla and my mother, ca. 1959
    I had a great time at the party. There was no way to hide in a corner with this group. Right away a few boys headed my way, to my amazement. In school I was another sort of bug, to be avoided by boys and even some of the girls. In contrast, this party was heaven. I felt less like an outsider with these people. We actually had things to talk about. One boy read the same poetry I did and told me he was learning to play classical guitar. The other boy liked opera; I didn’t think anybody knew about opera but my family, some of our friends, and the man who played it on the radio. He invited me on a date (a date!!) to go to the Amato Opera House on the Bowery to see a performance of
La Bohème
the following week. The boy who read poetry looked a little miffed. I lied and said I was fifteen when he asked my age and for my phone number. He was sixteen, and I thought he was very intelligent.
    After that life definitely improved. I was more confident and my circle of friends gradually grew over the next few years. Most of them lived farther out in Queens than I did or out on Long Island. Because we went to different high schools, we would arrange to meet in the Square (as Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village was called) to listen to the folk musicians who gathered there to play on Sundays. Folk music was the antiestablishment music, the music of the left. In addition to traditional folk songs there were songs about unions and fighting fascists, about brotherhood, equality, and peace.
    Most of us were children of Communists or socialists, red-diaper babies raised on Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Pete Seeger. We had listened to Oscar Brand’s
Folksong Festival
on the radio while still in our cribs. The pop radio stations played ridiculous treacle, the worst of which was a song called “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” sung by Patti Page.
    Late at night Carla and I would listen to WWVA, a country music radio station out of Wheeling, West Virginia. We heard Les Paul and Mary Ford, Hank Williams, Faron Young, the Everly Brothers, and others on a program called
Grand Ole Opry.
This was new and exciting for us; I adored the Everly Brothers and Hank Williams, especially.
    The atmosphere in Washington Square Park was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. A banjo player gave me an ebony banjo peg and I wore it on a string around my neck for a long time. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trot-skyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers. Children played in the playground while their mothers talked together on the benches. The occasional religious zealot held forth, waving a Bible, haranguing sinners about redemption. Everything overlapped nicely.
             
    I looked forward to Sunday in the Square with my friends and to that particular atmosphere. On Friday or Saturday nights we would meet and go to folk concerts—hootenannies—at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, and a concert hall that no longer exists and whose location I no longer remember, the Pythian. Pete Seeger, who personified the power of folk song, was the draw, heading the roster of a list of performers that included his sister Peggy Seeger and her husband, Ewan MacColl, who