Joellen Lapidus on Hitch-hiking in 1965
How to Explore Communities and their Music on the Road
March 2024
me: So, something we have in common: Hitchhiking around the country! But yours was more focused. Your purpose was hitch-hiking to and from festivals, correct?
JL: No.
me: No? or at least once…
JL: Well, we hitch-hiked to the Newport Folk Festival. I met this guy in Provincetown. He was a wonderful singer; I don’t think he played an instrument. We teamed up, and then we hitch-hiked to the Newport Folk Festival. He had a lot of connections; he got us press passes, and that’s how I saw the Richard Fariña concert. So I have to be really grateful to him, because it changed my life. But then we hitch-hiked to New York, and we played in little New York coffee houses for a couple of weeks. And then we hitch-hiked up to Canada and all the way across Canada to the end of Newfoundland. (editor: we’ll come back to this.)
me: I’ve told people once in a while (that I hitch-hiked) and they’re aghast. “Oh My God!”
JL: It was a different world then. I would never hitch-hike now, unless my car broke down or something.
me: I don’t think it would even work the same anymore.
JL: That was 1965 when I did all that hitch-hiking, and the world was such a different place. Especially in Canada. Canada was much more friendly and open, especially if you had musical instruments. People would pick us up, bring us into their homes, feed us, want us to play music, and give us money. I grew up in New York; everything’s locked. This was just amazing. We only had one time this guy picked us up and he offered John $10 for me to give him a blow job.
me: I had something like that. He offered to drive us all the way to San Marcos if we’d make out in the back seat and let him watch. NO. I’ve met a lot of interesting people that way. There was the guy that drove the pants truck…his company was World of Jeans and his truck looked like a pair of pants.
JL: We had a fun experience that was a little life-threatening, but it was fun. And it’s a great story. We got off at this train station and were just looking around. This guy came up and started talking to us; I guess we looked interesting. We mentioned that we needed a place to stay. He said, “My dad is a lawyer, and there’s this house – the woman died, and nobody’s in it. If you don’t make ANY NOISE you can stay there.” So it’s like an old lady’s house with tea china & knick-knacks everywhere, and frilly lampshades, and John decides he needs to take a shower. And there was somebody living upstairs; that’s why we had to be quiet. I said I didn’t think it was a good idea. So he took a bath, and we went to sleep. And we’re woken up by the sound of a man’s voice. He’s standing in front of us with a shotgun pointed at us.
me: ::squeak::
JL: …and he says, “What the hell are you doing here?” We explained; it was the kid’s father. He said, “You have 20 minutes to get out of here.” In the process of putting our clothes on and getting our gear together, there was a newspaper article on the floor about an ethnomusicologist in Nova Scotia. So we took the piece of paper, we go to Nova Scotia and check this woman out. So we knocked on the door – and I’ll never know if this was true or not – but she said the woman wasn’t there. She was the housekeeper. But we could come and stay. She let us in.
We talked with her and told her what songs we sing, and she said, “You know, you’ve got to be careful in these parts. Because in these parts, people own songs. People of Scottish and Irish descent, people own their songs. And you can’t play a song if you don’t own it. But maybe they’ll accept you because you’re from the States, and you didn’t know better.” And also, they don’t play with instruments. These songs have 20-30 verses…you know the end is there because they speak the very last line.
She invited all these musicians over to the house. They just laughed at us. They thought we were so funny, singing these ballads that we had no experience with, ballads about lumber and trains and heartbreak and murder, with a guitar and a mandolin. But they really liked us, and they sang their songs to us; in fact, some of the songs we sang were songs that they owned, from their families. It was a very rich experience. Apparently, the musicologist was away. She never came back during the time we were there. To this day I don’t know whether the woman who greeted us at the door really was her, pretending to be the housekeeper.
me: That’s wild – the process of how that came about.
JL: Yeah, the newspaper article on the floor. And the shotgun. It’s like a movie.
me: …or a ballad. An almost-murder ballad.
JL: then we went to the end of Nova Scotia. At the end of Nova Scotia – wish I could remember the name of the town. It’s the furthest tip. And we couldn’t get any work. He wasn’t willing to go into a bar and play; a lot of the bars were men-only. This was a long time ago. It was 1965. He wanted me to fly to England with him and get married…I wasn’t romantically involved with him. We were just having this trip. So I called my father, and he wired us money to fly back to New York. If he hadn’t, I guess I would have called somebody else to borrow some money. I went back to college to finish my senior year, and I have no idea what he did. He was very angry at me.
me: Because you wouldn’t go to England and marry him?
JL: Yeah. I’ve tried to locate him. There’s a few people on Facebook with his same name. This one guy might have been him, so I sent him a message: “Are you the so and so and so and so who hitchhiked across the country with Joellen Lapidus in 1965?” Anyway, I never heard from the guy. He has a wife, and a whole family…
me: He might be that mad at you still. It’s a good final verse for the ballad. “never forgave ya till this day…”
JL: I wish him well, and we had some pretty rich experiences together. I mean, we camped in some funny places. It was late at night, it was dark; in the morning we heard all this sound, and machines. We had camped in a dump. Garbage dumps in Canada are not the same as in the United States.
me: Are they very polite?
JL: They’re huge, and we didn’t camp in the area where they were dumping and pushing all this stuff. Another time we camped in a log jam. That was pretty cool. I’d never seen anything like that, all the logs. Montreal, there’s this little folk club we discovered. We didn’t know where to stay; they said, “take the bus over the river. There’s this little town – just mosey around. There’s a lot of resorts. You’ll be able to camp on one of those resorts.” And we did. And it was some big festival. It was August, so it must have been some kind of fall harvest corn festival. They had a bonfire; I had never seen a bonfire. They roasted the corn; they had a French-Canadian band playing, and everybody got really, really, really drunk. We just passed out on the lawn, and woke up the next morning.
It was just seeing how music exists in different cultures. It’s not just in a little café or on a stage. That was really revelatory. I got that with my guitar-maker, Freddy Mejia, because they just lived out on his ranch, and just played music. It wasn’t on a stage. It was just to play music.
Read on to hear Joellen Lapidus talk about inlay: how to start & how far to take it.
Joellen Lapidus on Hitch-hiking in 1965
How to Explore Communities and their Music on the Road
March 2024