Bob Gibson

While Bob Gibson’s recordings might appear to be run-of-the-mill folk to contemporary listeners, he played a significant part in popularizing folk music to American viewers in the 1950s at the start of the folk growth. His 12-string acoustic guitar style affected performers like Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Chapin; he was a mainstay at among the first founded folk night clubs in the U.S., the Gate of Horn in Chicago; and he had written tracks with Shel Silverstein and Phil Ochs, aswell as performing inside a duo with Hamilton Camp. Primarily, he was among the 1st folkies for the picture — when he started performing and documenting in the middle-’50s, there is hardly other people playing guitar-based folk music for an informed, relatively affluent viewers. Gibson was a salesman to get a developmental reading business before he was motivated by consider up folk music in 1954, after hearing Pete Seeger perform. He discovered Jamaican music while functioning cruise ships off Florida, and trained some towards the Tarriers, who documented “Banana Boat Tune” (produced well-known by Harry Belafonte). On his initial recordings for the Riverside label in the past due ’50s, he performed banjo and 12-string acoustic guitar with light accompaniment, showing a wide range of traditional folk music, aswell as some originals. Gibson helped Joan Baez and Phil Ochs within their start, and was handled by Albert Grossman, who later on dealt with the affairs of such giants as Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. Actually, Gibson has stated that Grossman wished to group Bob and Hamilton Camp up with a lady singer before striking upon the same kind of trio strategy with Peter, Paul and Mary, although Gibson wasn’t thinking about the theory. But Gibson most likely was a touch too vintage for big-time folk achievement in the ’60s anyhow. He was more than a lot of the performers around the picture, and his strategy as well tame and clean-cut, despite the fact that he and comparable performers experienced helped produced the sparks from the folk growth simply by playing such materials in the first place. In the second option amount of his existence he did continue steadily to perform in Chicago, and help you with applications for that’s city’s Aged Town College of Folk Music. He passed away in Sept 1996 at age 64.