Introduction

Daniel Steinberg’s Intro
I met Kevin Carr on a street corner in Mendocino, CA in 1978. He was playing the banjo and I joined him on flute for a few tunes, little knowing that he would become one of the most important people in my life. A few years later, Kevin had moved to the Bay Area and he joined Paul Kotapish and me to play a few contradances together. After one dance, we decided that we should have a band name. Paul rattled off a few band names that had come up in a similar discussion recently, and when he got to “Hillbillies from Mars” Kevin said “Ohh, I like that!”  That was the start of a 45-year relationship that had its ups and downs, like any relationship, but was the most musically satisfying ensemble I’ve participated in, and my friendship with Kevin has been a cornerstone of my life. A fiddling powerhouse, multi-instrumentalist, player of an enormous array of bagpipes, licensed therapist, devoted husband and father, and quite literally the best storyteller I’ve ever heard, Kevin’s own story deserves to be preserved. When Steve and Leda Shapiro asked me to interview Kevin, focusing on his musical development, i was honored and readily accepted, though he hardly needed any prompting to relate the autobiographical narrative presented here.  Everyone’s journey is unique and personal, but I hope that this glimpse into Kevin’s life helps to inspire others on their own musical journeys. – Daniel Steinberg, Feb 2026

Kevin Carr’s Intro
I have been incredibly lucky in this shooting star of a life to have met a very large number of wonderful people – family, friends, mentors, inspirations, dear companions, life savers. They have literally been the making of me. At 75 I am indebted to each and every one. I am profoundly grateful for the people I met in school, for colleagues and clients from my career as a family therapist, and for those I met through my deeply treasured wife and children. But this reminiscence is focused on those I met through my life as a musician and storyteller. Spending a large chunk of my life amongst those who love traditional folk music and lore, I have graced with a rich community, constant inspiration, an endlessly inviting sense of connection to humanity, and great oceans of fun. To all I’ve met along the way, thank you. I love you.

Here’s a song that came to me as a young man, and is even more relevant as an old man:

Friends

We live out our lives, they say all alone,
from the time we arrive, till it’s time to go home,
but it’s only just lately I’ve come to accept,
the Grace I’ve been given in the company I’ve kept.
As the seasons pass quicker, my head starts to spin.
My body grows older, my hair it grows thin.
Well, I’ve learned to take refuge in the sight of a friend.
The moment we meet up, my heart says amen.
So listen up friends and I’ll tell you what’s true.
Of all things in life, the best things to do,
are to always stay happy, and never to fear.
But if you can’t do that, make sure good friends are near.

_________________________________________________________________

Interview

Daniel Steinberg:
Talk about your childhood.

Kevin Carr:
Well, storytelling was in my life from a really young age. My maternal grandfather loved to tell me stories. He had folk tales of Pennsylvania and all kinds of things. It’s funny, many years later, after I started playing the fiddle, I was visiting my mother, and she heard me playing an old time tune, and she came out and said she thought her dad had played that tune. I was gobsmacked. Turned out, unbeknownst to me (my grandfather had died when I was eight) he had called dances in Pennsylvania and been a fiddler.

My father’s was a writer. He started writing for radio, then television, then all the major westerns of the day, as well as dramas, and later movies.  But he would always tell us the stories of whatever scripts he was writing. When we’d watch the shows, I realized that I liked him telling them as stories better than watching them on TV.  He wrote this one script I remember in particular, which became an independent movie made by David Carradine. It was from a book called The Perfect Round by Henry Morton Robinson but the film was called Americana.  I was just entranced by the story – I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. And when I saw the movie, though I thought it was good, I was disappointed because the experience wasn’t as rich as having heard him tell it to me as a story.

When I had my kids, I naturally told them stories. And when they went to school, at an alternative K-8 in Menlo Park,  I began to do  a lot at the school, including telling stories in classrooms and in the library. About that time I had started accompanying a grand storyteller and wonderful harpist, Patrick Ball. Patrick plays a wire strung harp in the ancient Gaelic style and is an absolutely mesmerizing performer. I recorded a little bit on a couple of his CDs, and we did a few gigs together, including  going  to Montreal to play a big festival, where I got to  spend a little time with Liam O’Flynn and Donal Lunny,  who were two major musical heroes of mine. Super trip, and wonderful fun. At some point after that I realized I had memorized a story Patrick often told, from the book, the  “Crock of Gold,” by James Stephens. So I started telling it at my own gigs, and shows with the Hillblillies from Mars. I had long loved collecting books of folktales, and I added some of them to my repertoire. Then I discovered a book called “Up Eel River,” by Margaret Prescott Montague, full of stories about Tony Beaver, who was a cross between Paul Bunyan and the Buddha. I was smitten by those tales and started telling them whenever I got the chance. I recorded my first storytelling CD, “The Big Music” inspired by those stories. Since then I’ve recorded another story CD, “The King of the Piper’s” and told stories as part of shows large and small, around this country and overseas. I think my Dad and Grandad would appreciate that I’ve carried on the family tradition.

Daniel Steinberg:
Talk about how you started playing music. What made you want to play and what happened?

Kevin Carr:
When I was twelve, for some reason, my Mom, and I have no idea why, got me guitar lessons and a little nylon string guitar, and I liked it. It was just fun. When I got to junior high school, I guess I was in eighth grade, I got to be friends with Tom Virgiel, who was a drummer in the school orchestra, where I played french horn, and he was asked to play in a rock band, and he asked if I wanted to come along. But I had to get myself an electric guitar because nylon string guitar did not cut it. I got a Silvertone guitar, but I didn’t like the color. So I spray painted it. I hated how it came out, so I painted over it again. And again. Pretty soon I had this guitar which had about a quarter of an inch of paint on it. This was fine most of the time. but this particular guitar had a moveable bridge on it. When we had our first gig, a dance at the junior high, there were three notable occurrences. First was that we wore extremely uncomfortable Beatle wigs. And then, there were the hot lights on the stage, which softened the lovely but thick paint job on my guitar, to the point where the paint began to melt all over my clothes, and caused the bridge to begin moving around each time I strummed a chord. So, because the guitar was never in tune the whole night. I spent the majority of my time on stage tuning. Then Tom, who was really enamored of The Who, and had seen their finales where they destroyed equipment, got inspired. He took the cymbals off of his set and he hurled them into the crowd. It was only afterwards he realized he very easily could have killed people. Though we were not invited back to that particular venue, the band kept going, and we got gigs for the next couple of years, especially when I got back from living in Mexico. The leader of the band was a wonderfully intense, smart, funny, musical kid named Ed. He’d get us gigs at synagogues and different places. Then we found out that Spencer, our bass player, had an uncle who owned a recording studio. It was an R&B studio, and Spencer arranged for us to record there. The tunes we recorded were takeoffs on Wipe Out and Walk Don’t Run, written by Ed.

Daniel Steinberg:
What do you mean by takeoff?

Kevin Carr:
They were . . . derivative.

Daniel Steinberg:
Were you doing covers or doing originals?

Kevin Carr:
They were originals.

Daniel Steinberg:
But they all sounded like Peter Gunn songs.

Kevin Carr:
Exactly. Like a poor man’s Ventures. We were only in the studio that one time recording. As we were loading in, this band was coming out. They were literally the scruffiest, dirtiest, stinkiest people I had ever seen – long haired, bad skin, pockmarks, just hideous looking people. Though they looked like they hadn’t bathed in a month, they were quite friendly. I remember a large woman, a slender woman who would’ve been gorgeous except for her terrible hair and skin, and two tall squalid looking guys. So when we were done, we went back into the uncle’s office and he was listening to the tapes of that band playing. They were singing their song: California Dreamin’.

Daniel Steinberg:
Who were they?

Kevin Carr:
The Mamas and the Papas.

Kevin Carr:
Needless to say, the career trajectories of their band and our band were not the same. The name of our band at that time was The Playboys. Then when The Byrds came along with their name spelled with a Y, we renamed our band to The Rabbyts with a Y. We once played in a battle of the bands that was on TV, on some obscure channel. We played against  the Bobby Fuller Four. And they played, I Fought The Law, And The Law Won. And they won.

I quit the band shortly after they changed the name again to The Candles of Truth, which was in the early days of psychedelic music. That’s when I got more interested in folk music. I began playing open tuned improvised 12-string guitar, which I played during the rest of high school and for the first two years in college. I went to UC Santa Cruz with a class of fascinating, intriguing young people. I remember I had a bluegrass banjo, but didn’t know how to play it. A student named Darrol Anger came up one day and asked if I’d loan it to him. At the end of the semester he gave it back, having taken all of two months to master it. When later he became quite a famous fiddler, I was not surprised. I kept up playing my improvisations, which stood me in good stead when I busked while I was in Europe with Marty, my college sweetheart, who was doing a year abroad with the UC program in Padua, Italy. She left in September of my 20th year, but my Dad had begun another cycle of illness, so I couldn’t travel with her to Italy as we’d planned, because I had to give my parents the money I’d saved for the trip. I worked for three months to replenish my funds, and Marty and I met in London at Christmas break, then flew to Majorca, and when she went back to school, I hitchhiked across Spain and Southern France to meet her in Italy. But I heard that one could occasionally buy a VW van cheaply in front of American Express offices as tourists had to sell their vehicles under the pressure of imminent plane flights. So that is what I did with my last $200, in Amsterdam. Then I drove to Switzerland, and, as an undocumented worker, found work under the table, in a book publishing house, and busked in my spare time.
That summer Marty and I drove down the coast of Yugoslavia, across Bulgaria to the Black Sea, back through Romania and Hungary, Austria, and France to Spain, where Marty wanted to spend a second year studying. I returned at Christmas and went back to Santa Cruz, where I picked up banjo instruction books by Pete Seeger and one by John Burke, who would later become a good friend, and I started playing 5 string banjo. I would occasionally busk on the streets of Santa Cruz, where I heard far more accomplished musicians than I, including the Bonny Doon String Band. At that time I had various jobs – waiter in a steak house, paper boy driving a 50 mile a night route through the mountains, and unemployed poet. At some point I got interested in Ireland and I began reading – folklore, poetry, ethnography, and fiction. I was searching for identity and roots I think. So I saved up money and went to Ireland. I was 23 then.

Daniel Steinberg:
You were interested in Irish music at that point, or just Ireland?

Kevin Carr:
No, just Ireland. Irish culture. Irishness. My family always said we were Irish. My Grandfather said, “We’re Irish, Scots and Welsh, but forget the Welsh.”. His people had settled in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania coal miners, the Irish and Scots, were natural allies, because they spoke mutually intelligible dialects of Gaelic, while the company police were Welsh, whose language, though also Celtic, was from a different language branch and was not mutually intelligible to the Gaels. Because they couldn’t understand each other, the company could turn them against each other. 

Anyway, I finally got to Ireland, after flying into Switzerland to visit old friends, and stopping in London  where I bought another VW van in front of American Express. Arriving in Dublin I was flabbergasted. It felt so familiar. Though my Grandparents didn’t speak with Irish accents, the way they spoke had the same syntax, vocabulary, and the same music in it. ” Mind your head there,” “mind the dresser.” My people still kept that. And that was the trip that I had my “experience.”  But the first thing that happened was that I took my banjo and I went into Moran’s pub, where there was a folk club presided over by Kevin Conneff, a prince of a guy, who later became very well known as the singer and bodhran player with The Chieftains. At that point I had decided I was not going to be shy anymore. I was going to open up and try things. I had already made that decision once, when I first went to college, but it didn’t last. Time to try again.

Daniel Steinberg:
What kind of banjo were you playing?

Kevin Carr:
At that point I played a few old time Appalachian songs on open back 5 string banjo, and was just getting into frailing and learning the various banjo tunings. It was that banjo and those songs I played that night at Moran’s pub.