Joe Crookston
Living and Creating: An Artist's Journey
If you were to look for the perfect folk song, it would be hard to find a better one than one called
"Fall down as the Rain." It encompasses life, death, reincarnation &endash; in short, the mysteries of the
universe. Bear witness:
When my life is over / And I have gone away
I'm gonna leave this big ole' world / And the trouble and the pain
And if I get to heaven / I will not stay / I'll turn myself around again
And fall down as the rain
And when I finally reach the ground / I'll soak into the sod
I'll turn myself around again / Come up as goldenrod.
This song took second place in the 2003 John Lennon Songwriting Contest (We can't educate everyone).
The song encapsulates the essence of its creator… Joe Crookston. It's the title track of his fourth CD.
In a short span it manages to represent the pillars of his upbringing and his life's goal: to live an interconnected life
and be an integral part of life's mystery.
Joe Crookston grew up in Randolph , Ohio, about an hour south of Kent. Besides Joe, the family had one other
boy and two girls. Joe was second youngest. His father had been a roofer -- then later became an electrician.
Joe's great-grandfather invented the "roofing" hammer and had the patent on it. The family takes great pride
in this. Joe checks out yard and estate sales and buys the old "Crookston" hammers whenever he finds one.
They have the initials AJC --for Anthony Joseph Crookston -- on them. Joe has collected four at this point.
The work ethic is strongly ingrained. During childhood and up through college, Joe worked on local dairy farms.
He described himself to me at one point, pre-musical career, as a "dairy farmer"
The Crucible
His mother suffered from mental illness and was very religious. She died in 2002 from ovarian cancer.
Both her living and her dying had a tremendous impact on Joe's music. As he puts it: "My mother's fascination
and obsession with imagery and with applying meaning to the world around her, I believe, resulted in a direct skill
and a gift that she gave me as an artist. I can look at the world around me and the physical items that I live with
and around and I can find meaning in the mundane, everyday objects in the world that we live in. That's largely
because of her finding sacred meaning to everything around her. I grew up with this sense of magic, or mystery.
Mystery was all around you, and you just had to look for it and keep your eyes open for it. The imagery that comes
into my music -- the attempt and the desire to find the mystery and magic in the everyday -- both lightness and darkness.
It's not about fluffy lightness. It's the polar opposites. Finding those dark places -- and the lightness and the magic
and mystery. My mom was about, like: 'Let's go out in the back yard and watch the blue butterfly land on the fence
and talk to it like it's God.'" Joe thought: "Whoa! This is a little weird, but I guess this is what normal is." When he got
older and moved away, he "disassembled" the earlier experiences and allowed chosen parts to be part of his present
state without the need for rebellion against parts he found "no longer useful."
Joe's mother's way of applying religion was indeed different. Joe stated: "In a way, although as much of a Catholic
as she was, she was like this creative pagan person, too. She had this intense appreciation of writing songs or
painting, or writing songs or making a sculpture -- I was always building a sculpture; I was always doing oil paints;
I was always writing a song. There was always an unconditional support of the creative act. That was a sacred thing
to do in the world. My mom would say, 'Please, the world needs what you have to offer.' She thought of me as a
kind of prophetic person. I was to do good work in the world." And so it would come to pass. Joe has brought art,
literature and music to hundreds of disabled and incarcerated youngsters.
Exploring the Inner landscape
When Joe was 12, his mother had to be hospitalized for psychosis. At the same time, his dad entered the hospital to be
treated for another malady. Joe remembers: "I was put into group counseling with the doctors at the hospital.
I sat in a circle with other families who had issues." Joe had to process his emotional state with professionals in
a group session, dealing with the entire dynamic of his family and the outside world. This was not mere self-absorption.
He needed to unlock the key to health and sanity. He remembers thinking at that time: "I have to go in deep and
find out what is real and sane for me."
Music to the Rescue
"Music" he says, "was an absolutely vital part of me in beginning to express those pieces and parts."
In Northeast Ohio, Joe was surrounded by accordion music and Polka music. His mother was an accomplished accordion
player. She played at dances and parties. At a certain point she put the accordion away because it didn't fit into her quest
for spirituality. "It wasn't holy or faithful enough." Joe was somewhere between 14 and 16. The accordion went into the closet.
Joe has it now. He had picked up enough technique to play it and used it on a couple of tracks on his last CD. Joe plays it
"well enough to get by,"as he put it. He's still working on it.
He also listened to his mom play her "pride and joy," a D-18 Martin. Every day she would make time to go off in a room
and write a song to exalt her religious viewpoint. She would allow no interruptions and would come up with a new song
nearly every day. "She was always pullin' 'em down from the sky," Joe says. She knew 4 or 5 chords, nothing fancy.
The point was, it mattered enough for her to sequester her self away from the family and dedicate the time to create.
This made its impact on Joe. While he liked to listen to the "Kasey Kasem Countdown" on radio as a kid, nothing had
the influence to compare with his mom's creativity and musicality.
The Big Connection
One auspicious day, Joe sat next to a friend in his freshman year in high school and saw the friend's songbook of
The Best of The Who. The friend was studying the song "My Generation." His friend had plans to form a band with
some other boys. A moment of revelation occured when he realized that the chords in "My Generation" were the
same as his mother used. Up to this point, his mom's playing had semed kind of "dorky." All of a
sudden it became kind of "cool." The people he was interested in all used those same chords: The Who, Bob Dylan
and Neil Young. She loved the E minor chord and Neil's "Heart of Gold" started with that chord. When he told his
mom he wanted to learn how to play, she pulled out a black-and-white Harmony guitar from behind the bed and
Joe started practicing on it. His mom showed him some chords and he also learned from songbooks. From that time on,
he didn't put down the guitar except much later, in his late 20s, when he spent a week backpacking in the Olympic
Mountains in Washington State and did not bring an instrument.
Time to Pick It
For a long time, Polka music had been more of an influence, but during his freshman year at college, folk music took over.
At Kent State, at a friend's urging, he attended his first folk festival. He saw John McCutcheon, The Horseflies, Joel Mabus,
and Harvey Reid among others. Joe was transformed. He had studied classical guitar for 2 1/2 years but then got a steel
string guitar and began writing songs. He also switched to studio arts. He began getting commissions for large paintings.
Simultaneously, he was writing songs and getting commissions to make large paintings. One painting was 25 feet long
and 5 feet high. Pursuing a degree stopped making sense. He dropped out of school and moved to New Jersey where he
worked at Appel Farms Arts and Music Center in 1990, getting involved with theater arts and photography. He lived and
worked there for three years and helping to coordinate the annual Appel festival. This enabled him to connect with performers
such as Greg Brown, Ani DiFranco, Tom Paxton and Laura Nyro. In addition to, hosting, he got to talk to them, which
expanded his knowledge of what it took to be a performer. At first, he was just a "creative soul" who was totally focussed
about unfolding as an artist. However, the job gave him parameters and structure to learn and "grow" his artistic vision.
It was, on the one hand a lonely, isolated existence at times, being on his own, but at other times he was surrounded by
mentors in a vibrant, non-profit artistic community. He met many great artists and both watched them and was watched
by them. After three years, he was able to form his own vision of the possibilities in the art world -- as a business person
-- traveling, playing, booking, and grant-writing.
Goin' "South"
After three years, the isolation at Appel forced the need for a change. Philadelphia was next biggest place that he had
connections to and he moved there for a year and a half. He was determined to surround himself with creativity and it
enabled him to carve out places in the art field instead of working the usual assortment of odd jobs that so many folk
musicians resort to. He looked for teaching jobs and got a grant from an organization he had connected to while at Appel.
This allowed him to work for a year as a music therapist with children who had cerebral palsy. Although the techniques he
used were primitive, they showed imagination. In one project, popsicle sticks were taped to the children's toes so they could
press on a keyboard to make music which he then then taped onto a four-track recorder. Although Joe was a player, he
viewed himself as more than a performer. Joe wa seeking an answer to the question: "How can I connect with other people
through the creation of music and art?" Being a mentor for kids with cerebral palsy was a means to answer that question.
Since then Joe has done a lot of similar work.
In 1994, Joe moved to Minneapolis for two years. Here he worked at a group home for children with autism. As the music
person for the home, he worked with the children to nurture their musical expression and would bring in drums, keyboards
and his guitar. Additionally, he was also the music instructor for four or five different elementary schools. On top of that,
he began to play more gigs in Iowa and Minnesota, honing his skills as a performer.
The Seattle Blues
The impetus for Joe's next move was a failed relationship. He moved to Seattle ostensibly for a couple of months, to distance
himself from an open wound and also to get some separation from the emotional burden of his mother's deteriorating
condition. He wound up staying for eight years. As a going-away gift, the woman he was leaving gave him a fiddle (they
are still friends today). Adrift, for the first time, and in a mournful state, for solace, Joe played the fiddle every day for as
many hours as he could find. He fell into a group of old-time and celtic musicians. While he was still playing guitar, the fiddle,
a new friend, became a kindred spirit, in expressing his innermost feelings. It was his "saving grace." It was a place for him to
put the darkness he felt. "Even though I'm not the best fiddle player, it brings out the deepest part of me that loves music,"
he says. In Seattle, he switched from singer/songwriting to old-timey, bluegrass, and traditional styles. He believes his music
today is an amalgamation of both.
While he was in Seattle, Joe also worked at the King County Detention Center. For a year and a half, he conducted creative
writing, poetry slam poetry, song and rap workshops with detained youngsters from 15-18 years of age. Using their life
stories filled with anger and angst, he got them to write about the roots of their pain and then put music to it with keyboards
and beatboxes. The creative works were then captured with a digital recorder. While sometimes fraught with failure, Joe's
efforts brought forth moments of empowerment and enlightenment to some shattered lives.
Here's Joe playing fiddle, jamming in the community room, at the
2006 Northeast Regional Folk Alliance Conference
Love's Victory
Fate has a way of stepping in. Joe's future wife was in a music store, seeking guitar lessons when he met her. From here,
his life changed direction and found new purpose. It was now time to take everything he'd been preparing for and crystallize
it. He and his wife moved east to Ithaca, New York, to be able to afford to live and pursue his dream of being a performing
artist. Joe and his wife now have a two-and-a-half year old daughter, Josanna.
Joe plays with his usual trademark verve at the
Acoustic Live guerilla Showcase at NERFA 2006
The Breakthrough
From Ithaca, Joe has found that he can play coffeehouses in the Northeast with relative ease, then building a wider itinerary.
He teaches banjo, guitar and fiddle at the Community School of Music and Art in downtown Ithaca, a non-profit. The school's
director found out about a grant from through the New York Music Fund and The Rockefeller Foundation. It was up to Joe
to devise a project.
Joe drew up a plan for traveling around the Fingerlakes region, collecting stories and sayings and writing songs about them.
In his travels, he asks the question, "Can you remember from an uncle, grandmother, or grandfather a saying, an expression
or one-liner or catch-phrase that was used, or is still used, in your home a lot?" He is writing songs based on those expressions
and stories. One catchy phrase he got was, "Get good before you get fancy." A keeper, I'd say. Another one is from a
grandfather, a fine woodworker and furniture maker, who, because of modern automation, had to become a worker on
a furniture assembly line. Performing just one segment of job that was finished down the line, in exasperation and revulsion,
he'd tell his grandson, "Don't hang your straight door on someone else's crooked frame."A new album of songs of Joe's
personal songs is due in a few months and the grant project album, which will be called Songs from the Finger Lakes will
follow at some point.
Joe is now involved in a project at a middle school where the students tell stories from their lives to be recorded, much as
he did at Kings County Center in Seattle.His new album will be jam-packed with new, riveting stories. Among them,
the chilling "Able Baker Charlie and Dog} was written about his grandfather Joe Gnap, a navy Seabee (Construction
Batallion) on Tinian Island during WWII. His Grandfather's job was to build the runway that Enola Gay took off from
to bomb Hiroshima.
We never knew what the runways were for /
They said our job would be the one to end the war.
The themes will, of course be universal. They will all be connected. And it will all be… Joe Crookston.
Web site: www.joecrookston.com
Upcoming gigs include:
Jan 12 Wolman Conference Center Deerfield, MA
13 Mozaic Room Coffeehouse 119 North Main Street Avon, MA Opening for Garnet Rogers
14 7pm Acoustic Celebration Concerts $15 Ridgefield, CT Opening for Garnet Rogers
20 8pm Rosegarden Coffeehouse Concerts Mansfield, MA w/ Liz Carlisle
27 Light in Winter Festival Concert Ithaca, NY
Feb 3 Uncle Waldo's 20401 Hilliard Boulevard Rocky River, OH
10 Buffalo Friends Of Folk Concert Village Meeting House Buffalo, NY Hosted by Buffalo Friends Of Folk
17 7:30pm Folk Music Society of Huntington Hard Luck Cafe Congregational Church of Huntington, LI
30 Washington Drive, Huntington, NY
Mar 2 7pm Peaceful Gatherings Corning, NY
3 Amy's Place House Concerts Livingston, NJ
23 U of M Crookston Crookston, MN "Crookston in Crookston!"
Apr 16 7:30pm Maplewood House Concert Maplewood, MN $10
22 6:30pm Groton Community Church Groton, NY
24 7:30pm Songwriters in the Round Rochester, NY
28 Stone Soup Coffeehouse Slater Mill Historic Site Pawtucket, RI opening for Red Molly