The Double Life of Banjo Fred Starner

It was Folk Music Night at the Storyteller and the man they call Banjo Fred was in fine voice. Unfortunately for Banjo Fred, it just so happened that a rather large family had decided that the Storyteller would be a swell place for a birthday party. They invited a bunch of kids, who were in fine voice too.

Amid the raucous laughter, Banjo Fred Starner gamely pushed on. He offered traditional tunes and sang one of his originals--a protest song that condemns “the Marlboro Man.” He mused a bit about the state of music today.

Why is it, he asked, that critics heap praise upon a rapper called “Dog something” simply because listeners can understand his lyrics? “Folk songs,” he noted, “have been doing that for centuries.”

He finished his set with “Turn, Turn, Turn.” The words are from the book of Ecclesiastes. The adaptation and music are by Pete Seeger, an old friend.

To everything, the song says, there is a season. Here in Southern California, which used to boast of itself as the land of the endless summer, autumn has come in more ways than one. Exactly what season this is for Fred Starner, at age 54, is hard to say.

Five years ago he quit an excellent day job in Wisconsin and moved to L.A., choosing the life of a minstrel. He performs at cafes, coffeehouses, churches and campuses.

Sometimes they appreciate what they hear. Starner likes to show off the reviews UCLA students offered after he performed on the Westwood campus. “UCLA stole my soul,” one wrote. “Fred gave me a little of it back.”

And sometimes they don’t even try.

“That is the bane of your existence--if you’re a songwriter and nobody listens,” Starner says.

Minstrels are supposed to be blithe spirits. But a certain resolve is required as well.

“I have to hand it to Fred for not giving up,” Pete Seeger said in a telephone interview from his home in Beacon, N.Y. “Perseverance is a very important thing to have in this world. If it wasn’t for perseverance there are a lot of people we wouldn’t have heard. Rachel Carson was 50 years old when she published her first book . . . .”

Back in 1969, Starner performed alongside the likes of Seeger and Don McLean (“American Pie”) as a member of the Hudson River Sloop Singers. They traveled the Hudson on a sailboat called the Clearwater, spreading the gospel of environmentalism.

“The river today is halfway cleaned up partly as the result of that crazy boat,” Seeger says.

Fred Starner is a tall man with broad shoulders. His hair is red and blond and gray. There’s a distance in his blue eyes.

For many years he followed two career paths. When Seeger introduced Starner to the audience, he would mention something that Banjo Fred now hides like a dirty little secret.

Starner isn’t on the lam. It’s not like he killed a union buster or escaped from Sing Sing.

Seeger would tell people that Fred Starner isn’t just a folk singer. He’s also a professor of economics.

That’s the secret. Banjo Fred’s evil twin is Professor Starner. Or is it the other way around?

“That thing has gotten me in more trouble with folk singers and economists,” Starner said.

Starner eventually asked Pete not to mention his academic background. The problem, Starner says, is that people had a hard time accepting that a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse could pursue folk music as something more than a hobby. Fellow economists thought his past time was frivolous. Some folk singers, he said, regarded him as “an interloper.”

And audiences, Starner points out, don’t like to think of a folk singer as someone with such an Establishment job.

Would those students at UCLA had liked him so much if they thought of him as a professor? One student wrote: “Bring him back and pay him next time!” Would she have said the same if she knew that he was teaching part time at Glendale, Moorpark and Ventura community colleges?

“It’s not something I’m ashamed of,” Starner insists. “But it’s not something I talk about.”

Other people see a contradiction, but not Starner. As he points out, what is “John Henry” but a tale about man’s struggle with technology?

He approaches folk music with a scholar’s enthusiasm. Folk music, with its tradition of social commentary, often comes as a revelation to young people accustomed to the cacophony of rock and rap. Folk singers, he says, “are moral philosophers. That’s what gets us into trouble.”

Starner and other folk musicians will return to the Storyteller in Canoga Park on Oct. 24. Maybe this time, there won’t be a birthday party.

Pete Seeger, no less, says audiences shouldn’t be offended to learn that the folk singer knows something about Keynes and Marx. Not all profs are members of the Establishment. Seeger’s own father was a professor of music at UC Berkeley from 1912 to 1918.

He was fired, Seeger says, for making speeches against U.S. imperialism.