I do believe Barker would chuckle at the title. I hope so. Sandy Paton’s liner notes for Horton Barker, Traditional Singer paint a vivid portrait of Barker’s keen inventive mind:

There’s no stopping him — Horton Barker, sightless since childhood as the result of an accident, Horton Barker is filled with an irrepressible sense of humor.
Even the cane he uses to help him find his way about is given a name and a personality. “I’ll just hitch ‘Old Morgan’ here on the doorknob while we eat. ” “Old Morgan” does considerably more than let Horton know when he’s approaching
a step or an obstacle. He listens to the echo of the tapping metal tip and can surprise you with what it tells him. For instance, he told me when we were passing a car parked fifteen feet or more to one side of our path. As a boy, he would jump off of a cliff into eighty feet of water and then swim back to the base of the cliff, locating it by the echo of a clicking noise made with his tongue.

I wrote yesterday about listening to this recording. Today I’ve been musing over another strong delight: Sandy Paton’s lively, empathetic prose. So I decided to find out a few things about Sandy Paton … and discovered two obituaries (both in English newspapers) that described an artist of enormous talent whose devotion to folk music led him through a life of what I can only call great philanthropic value–a life characterized by the love of humanity.

Founded in 1961 by two families–Sandy and Caroline Paton, a married couple, and Lee Haggerty and Lee’s sister Mary–Folk-Legacy Records was acquired in late 2019 by the Smithsonian Institution’s Folkway Records.

Turns out Caroline Paton was herself a folksinger of no small accomplishment. She and Sandy concertized frequently and put out several records themselves, though it seems Sandy was always a little reluctant to use his own label to release family recordings.

As a student of language and a lover of words, I’ve been looking through some of the liner notes (which Folkways has wisely made available as free downloads) to the Folk-Legacy Records releases. The notes to the Sandy and Caroline Paton albums are a kind of episodic memoir, sometimes combining the written voices of Sandy and Caroline in a way hardly less fascinating and pleasing than their voices lifted together in song.

A sample, from the liner notes to their first album for Folk-Legacy, Sandy and Caroline Paton, released in 1966:

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA
For those of you who don’t know· us who buy this album “cold”, so to speak – I guess we ought to write something about who we are and how we got this way. Now, I’m usually the one who gets paid for writing notes around here, but, in the past nine years, I’ve gradually begun to get it through my head that it’s an unwise husband who presumes to speak for his wife. I have, therefore, asked Caroline to tell you about herself:

“I grew up in Whiting, Indiana, an industrial suburb of Chicago. Two poets who grew up there, David Wagoner and Jim Hazard, have sometimes turned their critical gaze upon their old home town, and the resulting poems describe Whiting better than I can. I understand that David’s poem, “A Valedictory to Standard Oil of Indiana,” published in the New Yorker (January 1, 1966), caused quite a sensation back home. He now lives in Washington State, and Jim is living in Wisconsin, so it seems that Whiting is the kind of place one might prefer to contemplate from a distance.

“I am the eldest of four children in a closely-knit family. Although my mother has been ill for many years, we had a wonderful family life. This was largely due to the hard work and remarkable temperament of my father, Reuben A. Swenson. He has been a research chemist at American Oil (the new name for Standard Oil) ever since he finished college, and for years he came home from work to start dinner and put clothes in the washer. Dad had to be both parents to the four of us; he is of hearty Swedish-Ameri­can stock, and had energy and patience equal to the task. He felt that household responsibilities should not keep us from our schoolwork or extra-curricular activities, and he gave us the freedom to develop many interests.

“I first became interested in folk music at summer camps where I was a counselor, and by the time I started college this interest was well-established. After two years at Oberlin I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I got a B.A. I also took off six months from school to go to a work camp in Europe under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee….”

And on it goes, for pages, wry and insightful and sincere and often hilarious. Even the jacket notes are that way, written by Lee Haggerty about the “shotgun” he had to buy to persuade Sandy to make the record.

Here’s a little more, as Sandy describes the song notes that follow his introduction:

THE SONGS
(Caroline and I collaborated on the following notes, but I have an incorrigible tendency to write in the first person, singular, which explains the occasional shift from “we” to “I” and back again. I (we) hope this won’t be too disconcerting.)

And this from Caroline to introduce “Dry Bed,” one of the Patons’ most-requested songs in concert:

Side I; Band 7. I WOKE UP IN A DRY BED
Here is positive proof, as if any were needed, that the great Woody Guthrie could write a song about anything. Please note that the correct title is simply “Dry Bed”,
something we neglected to do before sending the jacket copy off to the printer. Marjorie Guthrie Cooper told us that Woody wrote this song for Arlo, his son, sometime before 1952, when it was first published by Ludlow Music, Inc. The changes we have made in the text evolved, quite by accident, over the years we have been singing the song. We apologize for them, and strongly urge that the listener learn the correct text, which may be found in Folk Sing, edited by Herbert Haufrecht and published by Hollis Music, Inc., in 1959 (reprinted in 1961).

I woke up in a dry bed; Mommy, come see.
I woke up in a dry bed; Daddy, I did.
I woke up in a dry bed, dry feet and a dry head;
I am a big boy now.
Hey, look at my dry bed;
Come feel my dry bed.
My bed’s all dry, dry;
I’m a big boy.

The entire recording, we learn from Sandy, was made in the dead of night:

The recording sessions were held at night, out of absolute necessity. Ours is a ten-party telephone line, but our neighbors are mostly farmers, which means that no one uses it after ten P.M. Our two boys are naturally noisy, and my Malemutes are inclined to join in on choruses at unpredictable times, so we had to wait until all were asleep before we could record without danger of interruption. These sessions proved to be both grueling and hilarious. For instance, Caroline and I once decided that we had taken a particular song too fast and very carefully recorded it again. Timing the two takes later, we discovered that the difference between them was exactly one second out of a total of two hundred and seventy. I’m not even sure, now, which one we ended up using, but I do know that the second run-through sure seemed a lot slower than the first. Often we would get takes that I considered acceptable, at least, and Caroline would find something wrong with them, and vice versa. At last, we both realized that we were agonizing over the “infinity complex” that frequently plagues artists of all kinds. Under its influence, a man can go on working on the same painting for years and never consider it finished; there is always one little detail that needs reworking. This is the compulsion to perfection that can keep paintings hanging indefinitely in an artist’s studio, novels in manuscript form, or whittle huge blocks of well-seasoned walnut into elaborately carved toothpicks. It’s a damnable disease.

There are twenty-three single-spaced pages of this stuff. Lyrics, certainly, but primarily notes, writing so full of character that it amounts to a third layer of accompaniment for the guitar and singing.

And then of course there’s the music. You can hear samples on the Smithsonian site. I encourage you to do that now, if you haven’t already.

Sandy Paton passed away in July, 2009. Caroline Paton passed away almost a decade later, in March, 2019. Her obituary led me to this short video from 1975, a moving portrait of the Patons’ life and work together:

And for a lagniappe, to bring us back to Horton Barker, here’s something quite astonishing: an Artificial Intelligence-based musical video remix of Barker’s “Wondrous Love.” From the French composer Benoit Carré. Perhaps not to all tastes, but that it even exists is a wonder to me. (And I freely confess I find it weirdly compelling, an uncanny representation of part of how I feel when I listen to the original recording.)