Evo continues with interviews regarding early Fresno folk history. Tom Ninkovich was raised on a farm outside of Sanger. He graduated from high school in 1961. In this interview he was explaining to Evo what got him interested in folk music and the folk scene around Fresno, starting around 1962.
l-r: Will Spires, Larry Hanks, Merritt Herring and Sunny Goodier at Sweet’s Mill
I was trying to find people who had an interest in folk music because I was trying to go back in time with the music as best as I could, in order to understand it better. I just got the feeling that there was some stuff older than Joan Baez. Knowing nothing about it, and not knowing anyone who knew anything about it, I had a hard time tracing anything back. Then I found that there was a folk club in Fresno producing concerts at Beverly Hall. It was my friend Judy Knapp (later Bixler) who first told me about this club.
I started going to the monthly concerts, and got to know Virgil Byxbe, Gene Bluestein, Pete Everwine, Alan Oaks, Mike Crill, Jon Adams, Mark Spoelstra, Rich Calderwood and those people who were the basis of the folk club at that time. This was the spring of 1963.
I went to school in Berkeley in September of 1964. That’s when I ran into Larry Hanks, Roger Perkins and various folkies, who were playing at coffee houses: Kabal Creamery, The Jabberwock and The Blind Lemon. I also got a job with the Berkeley Folk Festival. I just walked up to Barry Olivier (festival director). I knew who he was and I ran into him as he was walking on campus. I asked him for a job and he gave me one right there, hanging up posters all over Berkeley. That was also in September of 1964. I worked for the festival for two years and got to know a lot of people that way.
I guess it was a combination of knowing folkies from Fresno, and meeting up with Faith Petric (of the SF Folk Club) when she was having folk club gatherings at her house every other Friday, that showed me a community that existed around folk music. I wasn’t much of a musician, and so the community became my main interest.
When I discovered the folk groups in Fresno and San Francisco, it was the first inkling I had that there was something else out there happening culturally and socially. This was important to me because it showed me that there was more going on in the world than a farmer’s existence. The folk community showed me something that was different and interesting.
Faith Petric and Kenny Hall at Sweet’s Mill
About Sweet’s Mill
This thing happening east of Fresno in the mountains – Sweet’s Mill, in other words – was the best thing happening in folk music on the west coast. At the time, I was going from folk festival to folk festival, checking them all out, UCLA and San Diego, Idlewild. Sweet’s Mill was the least academic. It was a community of people just getting together and having a good time but some of them did have an interest in the academic part of it.
In 1963 and 1964, Gene Bluestein was the only academic involved with the Fresno folk group. For some of us, he was our hero in a lot of ways. I remember a time when Gene gave a lecture up at Sweet’s Mill – I couldn’t call it anything other than a lecture. It wasn’t an informal talk; he talked behind a podium. And he got a standing ovation. I don’t remember any musicians ever getting a standing ovation. The audience was sitting in the grass and leaves, and they stood up to applaud him because he was explaining things they really wanted to know.
We had a kind of innocence though. Most of us were into the music vocally – shape note hymns and Carter Family. We were singing and having a real good time and feeling good about it. This was all new to everybody. This music wasn’t going on in our families. We didn’t grow up with this stuff, so it had a tingling of newness. Discovering something like this when you’re eighteen and nineteen years old is really a great thing. I remember getting goose bumps listening to people sing Carter Family the first time. The first time I heard shape note singing with all the parts, that was incredibly moving, emotional for me. I’ll never forget that. It was probably up at the Mill in 1964.
The local people who were involved with this vocal thing were just chording along on their instruments. A few years later, the instrumentalists arrived, like Eric Thompson, Jody Stecher, Hank Bradley and Kenny Hall. These were professional-level musicians. They brought a whole different realm to what was originally going on.
Photos Courtesy of the George Ballis Photo Archives. Special thanks to Maia Ballis.