Tom Paxton ranks up there with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and that much-covered old tunesmith Trad. for the number of songs he's written that everybody seems to know.

In a career that is now approaching the 40-year mark, this affable singer/guitarist has written enduring campfire classics like "Ramblin' Boy," "The Last Thing on My Mind," and "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound," as well as dozens of perceptive pictures of people in love, in trouble, or in transition. He's written children's music that's clever and bright in a way that brings smiles to both kids and their parents, and an ongoing series of topical songs — some deadly serious, some hysterically funny — that cover the years and the news from the Vietnam War to Monica Lewinsky. After more than 30 albums and thousands of performances, he's still adding to his catalog of songs, one of the few folk performers who came of age in the 1960s who seamlessly blends music that is both classic and contemporary. And it's clear to anyone who sees one of his shows that he still enjoys his chosen line of work.

Both on stage and off, Paxton is a very approachable legend, a man who projects the image of a wise old uncle who offers friendly, if opinionated, advice with a steady twinkle in his eye. His special talent lies not in his singing or guitar playing, which are smooth and comfortable but not spectacular. Rather, his skill is in observing the world around him and capturing its essential moments in songs whose structure is straighforward and immediately accessible, whose melodies are readily singable, and whose stories and messages offer universal lessons about daily life. He lives these days in northern Virginia, and he talked about his music one evening last June, before a show at Rhode Island's Greenwich Odeum Theater.

Paxton was born in Chicago in 1937, but he considers Oklahoma his home. "My father was born in Oklahoma City, and his sister lived in Bristow. When I was seven, in the summer of '45, I spent the whole summer there with my aunt and uncle, and I think I wore nothing but a pair of shorts all summer." Three years later, when his chemist father sought a postwar job change, the family moved from the big city environment of Chicago to dry and dusty Bristow, a town of 6,000, where Paxton played high school football and basketball. He also played trumpet in the high school band and began discovering a bigger world of music. "I listened to everything that everyone else around me listened to. I was in junior high in the early 50s when all the R&B began to cross over to white audiences, and we heard all these really raunchy recordings. And we loved them. They were all about sex, and they were fabulous!"

"At the same time, I loved all the square stuff. I always loved classical music. We had a 78 r.p.m. phonograph, and somehow we got this recording of Tchaikovsky's 'March Slav.' I would conduct it. I also liked Fred Waring a lot. He would use folk material arranged for chorus — very homogenized versions, but I liked them anyway. I didn't know you called them folk songs; I just knew there was something special about them for me. And that's probably where my tastes began to differ from my classmates. I began to hear Burl Ives; got a couple of recordings and played them over and over. I got a guitar from an aunt, from her back closet, and I began to play those songs."

In 1955, Paxton entered the University of Oklahoma, where he majored in drama. "Actually, acting training is almost useless when it comes to performing," he noted with a smile, "because acting is all about subsuming yourself in another personality, and performing is all about remaining yourself under very strange conditions. I was always in school plays, and I love the theater to this day."

It was in college that his musical career began. "It was beyond my dreams that I could sing. But I loved folk songs, and I guess it was about my second year at OU that I asked for a secondhand Gibson guitar and got it. I was in such a desert for this kind of music; there was so much I didn't know. I had to listen to recordings and figure out how they were doing these strums and things.

"By the time I got out of college in the spring of '59, I loved this music so much that I had to try it, although I was still inept on the guitar. And the main thing that had tipped the balance was hearing The Weavers at Carnegie Hall recording. That just had a profound effect on me. A friend put it on, and out came Pete's banjo introduction to 'Darling Corey.' And I've told all the Weavers that by the time that album was over, I had undergone a chromosomal change, from someone who loved this music to someone who simply had to do it! And it's been that way ever since."

Photos: Charmaine Rohde
This is an excerpt from Dirty Linen #85 (December '99/January '00)