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"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: My grandmother was alive. She took me at the Northrop to see Andres Segovia. He sat up there on that stage alone with no amplification and filled that hall with a guitar.

It just knocked my socks off. I was about 15. I'd never seen anything like it.

I was a rock and roller, Elvis and Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. It killed me, man.

So I asked my parents for a guitar. My grandmother had sold guitars to the B. A. Rose Music Company. They were on, I think, on Hennepin or Nicollet at the time.

They took me down there and bought me a little Gibson C100. I even remember the guitar. It was a nylon-string guitar. And I started taking lessons for classical guitar, which lasted for about a year-- lasted for about a year until I heard some tapes of Lead Belly, at which point I bailed completely on any formal training and began spending about 12 hours a day in the basement trying to learn these tunes and went on from there.

SPEAKER 2: What was it about Lead Belly that suddenly made you change direction so radically?

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Well, for one thing, I was a testosterone-charged teen. So changes in direction is nothing surprising-- shouldn't surprise anyone. It was the immediacy of it, the power of it. It was just-- it was something that I thought-- I suppose in retrospect, I imagined that I could get a hold of that power quicker than I could get a hold of Segovia's.

It was a more readily accessible-- I didn't think of it as being Black music or necessarily as blues or anything else. I just thought of it as there was something to do. And it was instantly gratifying, instantly rewarding, socially acceptable thing to do.

It wasn't until later that I found out I was playing Black music and that had had certain negative connotations for some people. But at the time, I was just captivated by it. It just knocked my socks off.

It's like anything else. It's like reading some great poet the first time you read it. It just kills you. You want to do it, especially when you're a teenager.

SPEAKER 2: Tony Glover has been-- the harmonica player Tony Glover has been probably your longest single--

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Definitely.

SPEAKER 2: --sort of sidekick and partner. How did you two hook up? He was older than you and--

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: He was a few years older than me, a couple of years older than me. It was through that Minnesota Folklore Society. It's very hard for people to relate to what it used to be like. It was really a cultural desert as far as those kinds of non-mainstream kinds of music and art around here in the '50s, early '60s.

There was like very little going on. So it just wasn't happening. And one of the ways that it did happen, one of the outlets for it was this Minnesota Folklore Society. I wish I could remember the names of some of the principles in it, which I can't. And they'd have regular meetings. And you'd go and discuss folk music and, you know, somebody would play.

And anyway, you go and play. Somebody would do a little mini concert or whatever and it was all folk singers. It was like "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." College, man.

And then there was me and Tony and maybe a couple of other people that were digging in a little more deeply or in another vein, put it that way. I don't want to sound superior about it because that's not the way I really felt about it. But we were interested in a little different vein than most people were.

And I think that's probably, if you really started asking people why they were impressed by that first effort in the 1961 or whatever it was, I think that they would say that it was because it was so weird. Nobody had ever heard that stuff before. And unless you really dug in, you just didn't hear those records.

It was a very cult thing. It was a real inner circle kind of a deal that. Nobody up here had those records.

SPEAKER 2: At age 19, you made your first record, is that right?

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: I think I was about 19.

SPEAKER 2: And that was the record that many people look back to with great fondness.

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: The first "Spider" John Koerner, Dave "Snaker" Ray, and Tony "Little Sun" Glover.

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Little Sun Glover. Yeah, Yeah, a lot of people mentioned now, especially since it's been reissued just last year. Red House leased it from WEA and reissued it. A lot of people come up to me and say what a pivotal experience that was for them, which always alarms me. I never know quite what to make of that.

SPEAKER 2: What year was it?

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: '61, '62, something like that. This guy named Ed Nunn, who was the Ed Nunn of Nunn Bush shoes. And he made audio file records. That was the name of the label, but it was also what they were.

He liked to make those early stereo adventure records where the train comes in the left speaker, goes across the room, comes out the right speaker. He really got off on that kind of stuff. Without making any qualitative judgments about what was on the catalog previously, needless to say, there was nothing like Koerner, Ray and Glover on the audio file catalog. But he made the arrangements for us to go out there.

We drove out to Milwaukee. He set up his little thing, his portable studio deal, which actually was considerable number of cases of weird, too, all tube-driven stuff, magnificent recording quality. And we sat in there for 13 hours, broke for lunch, and made the-- saying every tune we knew and didn't pay us hardly anything that I remember. I don't remember what we got paid, but it wasn't much. Pressed up about 600 of them.

We came away with the impression that he was-- that he thought that he was dealing with some of the most radical, left-wing threat to everything that he held dear in society. I don't think he held us in very high esteem either as musicians or human beings. But the thing got released.

Well, once it was out, we sent two copies, one to Billboard, I think, and 1 to Elektra, Jac Holzman. So we sent him a copy of the record and months later, he wrote back and said that he would like to buy the rights to it. So I flew out here, contracted us, and then from then on, we went out to New York and made the rest of them for him.

SPEAKER 2: Major label picks it up on the first shot out.

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Something like that. That's the way it would read today. But in those days, of course, it was so low key and there wasn't a lot of money involved, and no hoopla or fanfare or anything.

SPEAKER 2: Yet a lot of people view that record-- viewed it at the time and view it now as being a seminal moment.

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Yeah, I know they do.

SPEAKER 2: Why do you suppose? You're surprised.

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: I've always been puzzled by it. And I suppose it's because I did it. So then whenever you do something yourself, then other people comment on it. You go, well, what's the big deal?

[FOLK BLUES MUSIC]

(SINGING) It was a cold, dark day in the month [INAUDIBLE]

My mother gave birth to a boy as a jest

He was 6 feet tall on the day he was born

All the women was gathered outside his home and cried one day you

I know stick a little here

I'll send you out the door, baby, and I declare you ain't getting too near

Now, when the train pulled up, everyone jumped out [INAUDIBLE]

They come in to shout

They crying, treat me better

Oh, yeah

Now, I want to tell you, baby, how I'm going to take you there

Because I'm here

All the world know that I'm here

Yeah, I'll be here

At that time, I thought of myself as being an interpreter of the music and not a real originator of it. And I had a pretty coherent argument together that what I was really trying to do was preserve a culture that few others were trying to preserve. I was a white guy from Minnesota and well-educated, you advantaged middle class kind of a guy.

And I didn't hear anybody else playing blues. Especially there was certainly not a significant number of Black people that were playing, or reproducing it, or writing in that genre except for rhythm and blues, which was active in Chicago and elsewhere. But there really wasn't a big country blues deal going on, still isn't.

So I kind of thought of myself as carrying the flame. And I think Tony felt that way, too, and so did John. But nowadays, of course, I just consider myself a blues musician. And I'd rather consider-- I'd like to get to the point where I consider myself a jazz musician.

SPEAKER 2: What is it that you, as a self-described white, middle class, overeducated Minnesotan, bring to a Black, poor, uneducated Southern genre? What do you think it is that you do with the blues?

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Well, see, that's what always amazes me when people say that they thought that record was pivotal. I go, well, you should hear the original stuff if you think that's good.

[LAUGHS]

I don't know how to answer that. I don't think of myself necessarily as bringing anything to it.

SPEAKER 2: You suspect or do you sense that you're in some ways more of a scholar of the genre than a--

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Well, I used to think that until I started-- until I got older and then checked out people like Pete Seeger, Rolf Cahn, a bunch of people like that, that I actually came-- they were several years older than I was and been in the thing before I got into it. But after I got into it, they ceased to have as much significance for me as they did originally. And I think the reason why is because they put that intellectual barrier up between themselves and the tunes. And I have systematically-- of course, I've always relied on that because that's the way white middle class Midwesterners do. They erect some thing there so that they can hide behind it, so they don't have to approach directly what it is that's on their mind.

SPEAKER 2: They think about it so they don't have to feel it.

"SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER: Exactly. So I have systematically been trying to tear that down. And I've been successful on certain occasions, I think, and actually using the thing to express my own feelings instead of just trying to show what somebody else might have felt. And that to me, that's art.

["SPIDER" JOHN KOERNER, "I BELIEVE I'LL DUST MY BROOM"]

(SINGING) I believe I believe I'll dust my broom I believe I believe I'll dust my broom I'll quit the best girl that I'm loving y'all to give the boys my room I believe. I believe I'm going down slow I believe I believe I'm going down slow Nobody to feed and care for me, baby Nobody to tell me which way to go

I'm going to write a telegram and telephone every town I know I'm going to write a telegram, baby and I will telephone every town I know I don't find a girl in New York city, man She must be an East Monroe