ArtistInfo

Roy Berkeley

1935-2009 US
Folk and Country
A.k.a. Roy Gellen Berkeley

Born 2 June 1935, Brooklyn, NY, USA Died 24 April 2009, Bennington, VT, USA Born in Gotham and raised in Washington DC, Roy Berkeley returned to the city of his birth, graduated from Columbia University in 1956 and worked as a writer and photographer for a couple of local newspapers as well the Port Authority of NY/NJ. As a self-taught guitarist, Berkeley was a Sunday afternoon regular at Washington Square Park during the late 1950s folk boom, often playing with the 'balladeers and blues singers' clique alongside Paul Clayton (2), Happy Traum, Dick Rosmini, Dave Van Ronk and others. Though a member of the fringe left Shachtmanites and nicknamed the "Traveling Trotskyist Troubadour", the politics of Berkeley's youth had little bearing on his early songwriting or an undue influence on subsequent career decisions. When forming the Folksingers' Guild, an ad-hoc trade union for basket house musicians in 1957, he and anarchist co-founder Dave Van Ronk purposely avoided latent ties to the American Communist Party or a quid pro quo with the Young Socialist League. The following year, Berkeley lampooned the earlier Folk Revival generation's pro-Soviet tenets and the movement's Stalinist positions in the "Ballad of Pete Seeger", later retitled "Ballad of a Party Folk Singer" in subsequent printings of the Bosses' Songbook. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Berkeley straddled the folk genre and ignored expectations. Credited as the first musician to perform in a coffeehouse, Greenwich Village's Gaslight Café, he went on to cut a pair of obscure Rockabilly singles for Coral Records, Inc. in the early 1960s and followed up by collaborating with Tom Paley in the Bluegrass outfit Old Reliable String Band on Moses Asch's Folkways Records label . By the close of the decade, Berkeley supplemented his writer's income by giving traditional, American style guitar instruction advertized as "quick and painless". As a contestant on Jeopardy! in 1971, Berkeley won the maximum number of five subsequent games and used the proceeds to build a house for he and his wife, Ellen, in Shaftsbury, Vermont. During his years in the Green Mountain State, he published numerous books under 14 different pseudonyms, recorded a pair of albums with fellow New England collaborator Tim Woodbridge and wrote "The Spy's London" under his own name in 1994. In later years, Berkeley's political ideology took a rightward shift to the Republican party, serving as an NRA sanctioned firearms instructor and local deputy sheriff. At the turn of the millennium, he retired from sporadically performing and teaching due to his weakened voice after 6 prior bouts with cancer. Some 11 months prior to his death in April 2009, Roy was featured in Alex Ross Perry's debut indie film, Impolex.

Genres

• Folk
• Country

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