What immediately distinguishes Spider John Koerner from the majority of performers on the American folk circuit is that he actually performs American folk music. Back in the 60s, he was a major force in the revival of acoustic blues. These days, he specializes in the sort of songs that everybody knows, but hardly anybody sings.
A tall, thin man with a near-perpetual look of bemusement on his face, he settles onto a stage clutching a beat-up 12-string guitar, a harmonica hung around his neck. Leaning forward off the edge of his chair, he starts to pick out a syncopated rhythm on the 12-string, pounds his foot to the beat, blows a line or two on the harp, and, with his eyes closed and something that at first is disconcertingly close to a grimace on his face, he launches into a song like "Careless Love," as old a chestnut as American music can claim. He works hard when he plays, but the smile that follows each song makes it clear he’s having fun. Needless to say, so is the audience.
Now well into his fourth decade as a singer of American roots music, Koerner described what he does as "playing traditional American folk music, 60s bar style." That includes a lot of familiar old songs like "Casey Jones," "Wabash Cannonball," and "Froggie Went A-Courtin’, "as well as occasional obscurities and originals, all played in distinctive, percussive arrangements that hold their own against the background buzz of a typical tavern, with field-holler vocals that are sometimes closer to shouting than singing. His record label has billed him as a "Legend of Folk," and it’s a role he approaches with an ironic shrug. Offstage, he’s a laid-back, soft-spoken guy who seems to think carefully about every word before he speaks.
Koerner was born in 1938 in Rochester, New York. A strong interest in aviation brought him to Minneapolis in 1956 as a student of aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota. Nothing much of a musical sort happened until an encounter in 1958 changed his life. "I had no notion whatsoever of this stuff until I was 20 years old," he said. "I was going to the university, and a guy named Harry Weber living in the dormitory invited me to listen to some folk music. He played some records, and he had a guitar and played music himself. There was a variety of people he played, like Josh White, a slick blues player, but he also had the real credentials. I became friends with the fellow. I had never heard those things before, and there was something very piercing about the words, what they’re saying to you, the poetry of it, and also the way the instrument and the voice were handled. This blues thing seemed to have an interesting bite to it, and some of the stuff was really quite amazing. So I got sucked into that. It looks a little weird, I must admit, but that’s what happened."
Probably weirder still is that after Koerner quit college to join Weber for a bit of Kerouac-style transcontinental rambling, he wound up joining the U.S. Marine Corps. That lifestyle experiment didn’t last very long. A late-night altercation after a few beers during basic training at Camp Pendleton led to a discharge. By the fall of 1959, he was back in Minneapolis, where he became part of a small but vibrant folk scene that included the teenaged Bob Dylan, with whom Koerner briefly shared an apartment and some weekend gigs at a coffeehouse called the Ten O’Clock Scholar. Koerner was a major source for the blues songs and blues stylings that Dylan briefly adopted during that early period. (Among the other people who would credit him as an influence were Eric Clapton, John Lennon and Bonnie Raitt.)
But more important in terms of Koerner’s own career was a singer/guitarist named Dave Ray, who in turn introduced Koerner to harmonica player Tony Glover. "They were interested in what I loosely call country blues," Koerner recalled, "basically old black blues guys from the South who in the 20s, 30s, and 40s made recordings. We would get records and try and copy things off them and try to imitate those guys. We were sort of unabashed in our own approach — we didn’t know what other people were doing around the country. I think that when we finally came on the scene, that’s what surprised people and got us some interest.
"In the old days, you were just jumping into the music, going to parties and sitting around trading songs. That was folk music, from blues to Elizabethan ballads to coal miner songs. Sam Charters put out a record called The Country Blues that had quite a variety of old recordings on it. That to me was very rich. It sort of opened up a concept to me which was real useful: It doesn’t have to be this kind of blues, or that kind of blues. You have to be true to a concept, but you’re allowed to do any of it." One singer that Koerner lists as a particular influence is Big Joe Williams, "One of the old-time blues guys, a real funky guy from Chicago who used to come up to Minneapolis to play." And since nicknames seemed mandatory for blues singers at the time, Koerner adopted the "Spider" moniker that had been coined along the way by someone inspired by his long, gangly arms and legs.
The American folk scene of the time was a mix of slick commercially-driven groups like the Kingston Trio and committed populists like Pete Seeger, along with traditional singers and song collectors who often concentrated more on scholarship than feeling. The loose trio of Koerner, Ray, and Glover, more interested in partying than politics, were in their own way revolutionary in their spirit of playing music just for fun. Their 1963 album, Blues, Rags and Hollers, is a classic, a collection of African-American country blues songs affectionately taken as their own by three freewheeling white kids from the upper Midwest. "We were having fun with everything at the time," Koerner remembered. "There were certain things that didn’t seem right to us. Trying to make it slick was one of them. Being political was another."
Although they made their mark quickly, the group’s heyday lasted only a couple of years, with two more albums and a series of legendary gigs that included Newport and other major folk festivals. After they recorded their third album in 1965, diverging musical and lifestyle interests led to an amicable winding down of Koerner, Ray and Glover as a regular group. Ray and Glover made several additional solo and duo albums in the same basic style, and occasional trio reunions continue to this day.
Koerner’s closest brush with commercial success came in 1969 with another classic album, a set of original boogie and blues, written and performed with honky-tonk piano pounder Willie Murphy, called Running, Jumping, Standing Still. "At one point, like ’67 or ’68, I was trying to write songs, and there was always the potential of moving up from being somebody who’s a folk musician to somebody who’s got a little higher-intensity thing going with the music. I had written a few songs, and I took them to Jac Holzman, who was running the place [Elektra Records], and they said I should go back to Minneapolis and put a band together and work these up. And when I went back to Minneapolis, I started asking around, and someone said you should talk to Willie Murphy, and I did.
"Willie turned out to be the man. He was real knowledgeable. He could play the guitar, electric bass, and piano real well, understood music in a way I didn’t and still don’t. So we just worked out those songs together. It was a time when experimentation was in the air, so we felt free to try stuff out and just go with stuff that seemed interesting to us. We went to a studio in northern California, we were given other musicians to use whenever we needed them, and we just laid it out."
An album of goodtime blues seen through a psychedelic-era lens, Running, Jumping, Standing Still was applauded by reviewers and became one of Rolling Stone magazine’s picks of the year. Koerner and Murphy toured nationally on the rock circuit, opening for bands like Jefferson Airplane. But in the end, the album’s critical acclaim wasn’t matched by sales, and the rock lifestyle brought its own problems. A venture into experimental film making didn’t seem to work out either, and so in the early 70s Koerner decided to retire from performing. "I ran into one of those things where you question everything. I started questioning music, for example, and came up with some interesting answers, and at one point made one of those rash moves of sort of abandoning everything." Koerner and his Danish wife, who were living in Boston at the time, packed up and moved to Copenhagen. "In 1972, I quit playing music forever," he says with a wry smile. "That lasted about a year."
His return brought a shift to the style of American roots music he performs today. "When I started up again, I didn’t want to go back exactly to what I had been doing before. I was living in Denmark at the time, and we had some folk music collections around. I started looking through those and finding quite a number of songs which I thought were, as far as being a good story or good poetry or one of those things, as good as anything around, including what I had been writing. So I dove into that with the idea of trying to liven these songs up, to feel out a style and make it my own, and put a little punch into it, and see if I could bring these songs out. It took quite some time before it started to gel, but I kept at it. Now it’s at a point where, especially if I have a couple guys playing with me, it kicks into gear in the way I was hoping for. I’m hoping that the people can hear the words, because that’s sort of the most important part, or at least one of the important parts, and I hope the music is interesting to folks at the same time. Sometimes we seem to get away with it."
In 1974, while visiting Minneapolis from his home in Denmark, Koerner recorded an obscure album marking this change of direction, called Some American Folk Songs Like They Used To, for the small label that Ray was running at the time, Sweet Jane. In 1977, single again, he moved back to Minnesota for good, built a cabin in the north woods, and worked assorted non-musical jobs like construction and bartending while doing occasional local gigs. What really re-launched Koerner’s career, at least in terms of national visibility, was the album called Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Been, released in 1986 on Minnesota’s Red House label. Based on tapes recorded at a one-day studio session several years earlier, it features a group of Minnesota and Boston musicians that included Peter Ostroushko on mandolin, Butch Thompson on piano, fiddler Chip Taylor Smith (who still regularly records and performs with Koerner), and percussion master John "Mr. Bones" Burrill. From a repertoire that had previously been based on African-American country blues and goodtime rocking originals, Koerner had shifted his focus to what he simply describes as folk songs, like "The Old Chisholm Trail" and "Sail Away Ladies," sung in his unique barroom style that manages to be both traditional and contemporary.
Koerner’s live shows these days are a catalog of American music, and as far removed from the current singer/songwriter mainstream as you’ll find in a folk venue. He’ll happily bounce along from the Irish tune turned settler’s story, "Acres of Clams," to a washtub bass-pumped version of "Shortnin’ Bread," to an occasional song of his own, like "I Ain’t Blue," made famous by Bonnie Raitt’s rendition. Songs like "Stewball" and "Days of ’49" take on renewed energy when driven by his Leadbelly-style, 12-string picking and foot percussion. When asked how he chooses the particular songs he covers in live shows or on recordings from the thousands that make up the body of American roots music, his answer also seemed to describe the universal process by which traditional music evolves and endures.
"In every case I would say it was having the words in front of me from one source or another, looking through the words and reading the thing and seeing if something was particularly interesting in there — a story of some sort, or a voice or attitude, or a way something was said. If it caught my eye, I’d try it out. I went through quite a few books and gleaned out of them what seemed to be interesting. If I was lucky, I’d have more than one version of the song, and then I would cobble that together into what I thought was whole in my own mind, trying not to make mistakes. But it was always something about the story that interested me. There had to be something that I felt pertained to the human condition.
"That to me is the value of folk music in particular. It’s that you have songs which are not usually connected to any particular author, so that part is lost, and on the other hand, they have been worked over by the community or the culture. You have a completely different thing than a singer/songwriter here. You’re not listening to one person, you’re listening to the culture. It accepts the song and modifies it, and if those things have happened, it survives, and you have a piece of what I call folk music.
"In each of these songs that I put out, there also had to be another qualification, that in some way in my own psyche, I had a way of relating fairly directly to it, one way or another. There could be a distance between me and what that person did, time-wise and many other ways, but there was something in it that made me feel I could get in there myself. So that when you’re singing it, you can be singing it and be meaning it at the same time."
Koerner’s experience is that audiences, too, relate to the songs, even in non-folk environments like rock venues. "There’s a club in Minneapolis that’s set up for monster-sound bands, and they’ve had me open up a few times in the past year or so. The first time they hired me, they said the crowd might not be exactly hostile, but they might not pay too much attention. I figured, well, I’ll see what that’s like, and it turned out quite otherwise. I wound up playing way louder, five times louder than I normally play, because of the way they set the dials, and I figured there’s only one thing to do, just play hard and let them figure out how loud it should be. I had quite a few young people coming around the stage, getting real into it. Later on they were even singing along.
"The feel for that sort of music is still somewhere in the culture because young people have come up to me and said they never heard that kind of music, but they like it. So you can see that it’s in there somehow."
Another legacy of his time in Denmark is a strong interest in astronomy and telescope making that began one night as he was looking out from a Danish ferry. "You could see stars all the way down to the horizon, dead clear all the way to the horizon," he explained. "And suddenly I realized that there were stars below the horizon and that we’re sitting on this rock in the middle of everywhere. It just blew my mind. The main idea is to get the cosmos into your head on a regular, straightforward basis. Getting a full-blown realization of where you are changes your life. It doesn’t make me feel small, but it makes everything else look real big!"
Hence the pun in the title of Stargeezer, Koerner’s most recent solo album, recorded in New Orleans with a loose, lively band led by old friend Willie Murphy. He’s begun writing songs again — nearly half of the tracks on the CD are originals — but they come slowly. "I wrote a bunch of songs before the time I went to Denmark. I felt I was in a genre and it wasn’t hard to do stuff. Then I didn’t write a song for 15 years, pure and simple. Now, it’s a little more like pulling teeth." And although he plays mostly solo these days, he also revisits his old partners with some old material and some new arrangements, in the live set captured on the recent Koerner, Ray & Glover reunion CD, One Foot in the Groove.
"We made that record, and it was the first recording we’d done together in over 30 years. Previous to that we had occasionally played together in Minneapolis, or at a couple of festivals. But the making of this record got us familiar with each other fairly solidly once again, and it also provided us with quite a few more tunes that we can play together. In the old days, there were very few things that we did together, and nowadays we can do a show where most of it is all three of us. So we thought, now we’re a little more viable than we used to be and we can get some work, and there was a little flurry of activity, but now it’s kind of settled back, which surprises me a bit, actually.
"Last year we played the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and somebody wrote a review of it and said we were the memorable act of Saturday night, and somehow it seems to me that, as representatives of the old days and of a particular kind of approach to music, that it shouldn’t be that hard for us to get playing around now and then. Part of it’s probably because we’re a little scattered, but it would be nice to have more of that. It’s kind of easy playing with those two guys."
Like the old blues singers that he first emulated nearly 40 years ago, Koerner has become something of an old master himself, singing his music not only to grey-haired contemporaries, but also to an audience that, for the most part, wasn’t born when he began his musical career.
"It’s been fairly recently that I’ve been getting that feeling, and it happens because people come up to you and look at you that way. It’s hard to see yourself like that, but when other people do, you realize it’s happened. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable because I’m the same old whatever, cooking along and trying to make the next thing come out OK. When you see that happening, it’s a little enlightening as to what that process is — you don’t quite know it until you get there. I don’t know what to do with it except hope it doesn’t get weird. You know what your own flaws are, and that keeps you from getting on a high horse about it. Hopefully, you wind up being a good example. That to me is probably the most important thing. You don’t want to waste that aspect of it on being stupid, if you can help it. That’s the idea, anyway.
"From the 1960s on up to now has been a real amazing trip. It’s been quite a roller coaster ride in a lot of ways. I got to travel a lot and meet a lot of interesting people and have a lot of experiences. I can’t quite do it at the same pace I used to, and that’s OK, but it was real interesting. I feel real privileged to have gone through that."
Spider John Koerner had unexpected heart surgery in January. He is now home in Minneapolis and doing better.
Mary Jane Mueller-Ray has set up a fund at First Bank Lake in Minneapolis for those who wish to help John & his family with the staggering hospital & doctors bills.
Donations may be sent to:
The John Koerner Fund, PO Box 14770, Minneapolis MN 55414-0770