As the CD continues, I notice Dyer-Bennet's guitar. He strokes luminous arpeggios with the long, slow melody of "The Sally Gardens," and urges "The Earl of Moray" forward with a subtle, sonorous military strut. Toward the end, he switches from British, Scottish and Irish songs to American material, and here he's just as much at home. "I'm a Poor Boy," a meditation on a Tennessee mining disaster, seems to leap straight from his heart, complete with blue notes and keening mountain wails. No, this isn't the wailing you'd hear from someone who lived in the mountains, but in Dyer-Bennet's re-creation it's just as direct, and just as honest.
Who was this man, surely one of the most powerful singers ever recorded, and now, I fear, half-forgotten?
His biography is easy to sketch. Born 1913 in England; British father, American mother. Grew up in Canada, California and Germany. Sang for Welsh miners in the '30s, and in New York clubs in the '40s. Toured for the legendary classical impresario Sol Hurok. Smeared in the McCarthy witch hunts of the '50s, which damaged his career. Suffered a stroke in 1972, which damaged his performing. Taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Spent his last years performing Robert Fitzgerald's translation of "The Odyssey." Died in 1991.
But what's not recounted here, of course, is everything that really matters. Dyer-Bennet was a pioneer, singing folk music at a time when most educated people dismissed it as "cowboy songs." He sang it with a deep concentration, which extended even to his tennis game, says his widow, Melvene, a psychotherapist who (a pioneer in her own right) worked not only with what her patients said, but with how they moved. "You forgot the space around you when he played tennis," she remembers. "You'd focus only on the ball."
When she first met him, she says, "the nightclub was so noisy, I couldn't hear a word he sang." But what seized her was "his posture, the way he held his lute," and also his relation to his audience. "He didn't bring them into him; he looked out to them, telling them a story."

Starting with this album, he recorded only on his own Dyer-Bennet label, which, his partner Harvey Cort recalls, he started with no hope of glory. "He thought he'd use the records for promotion, and I was getting married. I was going to give them away at my wedding," says Mr. Cort. But when "Richard Dyer-Bennet" was released, something almost unbelievable happened -- an ad appeared for it, taken out by an impressed, but otherwise competing record label. Tributes like that helped build Dyer-Bennet's reputation, and, says Mr. Cort, the 15 Dyer-Bennet records "certainly justified their existence." They even "made a small profit."
Here, too, Dyer-Bennet was a pioneer, recording himself a generation before such a thing was common. "He was meticulous," Melvene Dyer-Bennet says, "and drove the engineers crazy. If he made a mistake, he wouldn't let them splice from another take. He'd start at the beginning, and record the whole damn song again."
In concerts, though, he was just the opposite, never knowing what he'd sing until he saw his audience. He could be "devilish," his widow also reports, starting his 1944 New York concert debut with something unaccompanied, then playing one guitar note at the end, to show the critics that -- unlike a cowboy -- he'd stayed on pitch. Not, though, that he disdained his simpler listeners. "When he was on tour, true folk singers would come backstage, poor people, from the hills. And he'd spend the evening and long into the night with them," she adds.
Which helps answer a tricky criticism. One writer, contemplating the reissued "Richard Dyer-Bennet," condemned the man for inauthenticity, for not singing roughly, the way "real" folk singers supposedly do. Now, to me, this takes a sadly patronizing view of "real folk," by fantasizing that all of them are -- and should be -- unrefined. But if they themselves liked Dyer-Bennet, then where's the argument? Besides, as Dyer-Bennet's widow stresses, her husband was close to folk artists no one ever challenges, including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and, above all, Leadbelly, who became a close friend. Do their votes count?

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The "Richard Dyer-Bennet" CD should be in larger record stores and those that specialize in folk music. Or it can be ordered from Smithsonian Folkways (800-410-9815), along with 14 other albums on the Dyer-Bennet label, available for now only on cassette.

[This was one of the most gratifying reviews I've ever written, though I thought I'd never find the words to describe what I hear in Dyer-Bennet's voice. But after this was published I got e-mail from Dyer-Bennet's daughter, Bonnie: "Wow!.…I am struck by how you captured the heart, spirit, gifts, and intent of the man; a man you didn't know." I'm quoting this not because I want to boast, but because she touched my heart, and made me feel I hadn't done so badly after all. My only goal was to bring her father alive, as well as I could, and to help make him better known.

I've also heard from Harvey Cort, Richard Dyer-Bennet's partner. He was kind enough to send me copies of some of the original Dyer-Bennet LPs, still in their shrink wrap. Now that I've heard more, I'm doubly sure of my impression. And there's an aspect of Dyer-Bennet I didn't mention: He was a superb, irresistible storyteller, and had a bawdy streak that's a complete delight. For proof, contact Smithsonian Folkways, and order a cassette copy of Mark Twain's 1601, on which Dyer-Bennet reads a tale about Queen Elizabeth and her court, and shows us that Mark Twain was as much a pioneer in writing explicit language as D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller.

I'm told that my review generated a flurry of sales, and that makes me happy, too.]

Wall Street Journal, February 18, 1998

To hear Richard Dyer-Bennet for yourself -- and in fact to see if you hear the first song on his album the way I do -- just click here for a RealAudio excerpt. Or you can download the RealAudio file. (204k)