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Sean Folsom makes music on eclectic collection
By Anne Papineau, The Carmel Pine Cone January 19, 1989
To call him
Hurdy Gurdy Man is to put too confining a label on Sean Folsom.
His home, perched on a Carmel Valley mountainside, resembles a repository for musical instruments. Elaborately carved out of wood and festooned with ribbons, mirrors and ivory, they are of the type that few raised in the age of synthesized sound have ever heard - much less seen.
Hurdy gurdys are but one substrain in Folsom's musical treasure-trove. Here are found divergent reed pipes, Chinese shengs and more. And then there is his "herd of goats."
This is the musician's name for the Middle Eastern branch of his family of bagpipes. Their gasping bags and bellows are frequently made of goatskin, and as testimony to this fact, Folsom has a skin curing in a pan on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator.
The catalogue for it all resides in Folsom's brain. But possessing all these instruments is not the point. Folsom can actually make music with each instrument in his eclectic "herd."
On one bagpipe he plays Amazing Grace - in the Islamic scale. Folsom performs Oh Suzanna on a Chinese Instrument that was the forerunner of the harmonica. He can sing a French ditty to the accompaniment of a "vielle a rou" or wheel fiddle - and waxes Gaelic when playing an instrument from Ireland.
"I grew up in the Valley," Folsom asserts. "I remember it before it was a golf course."
Folsom came to Carmel Valley with his family in 1956. He has since visited and lived in other places around the world,always building on his musical knowledge. In October '87 he returned to the valley, to the place where as a student at Tularcitos School the musical teacher told his parents that Folsom "has no musical talent."
"I was always enthralled by music. I had my 78s and listened to Rudolph the red Nosed Reindeer," he recalls. "Music was the tip of the iceberg. To know any culture is to know their music. In schools they teach geography, a lot of statistics, names, dates and history. But when you really think about it, the whole genius of any given people goes into their music."
Folsom was bitten by the musical bug as a child and it has never deserted him.
"I took beginning band, playing the clarinet, in 1962. I was usually the smallest kid in the class - the one they'd take the ball away from. The upshot of my music lessons was no jock took my clarinet away."
Folsom studied at the now-defunct Academy of of Music in Monterey and was tutored by Francesco Lucido. But he also discovered he had an aptitude to teach himself how to play different instruments, and in this way he also learned oboe, flute, guitar, saxophone and trumpet.
"The bagpipe was the first instrument I couldn't just pick up and play. I'd listen to records and listen to how they'd tune the drones," Folsom states. "Later, when I got going on the bagpipes, my friends thought I was nuts, totally square. But I was amazed by the astonishing amount of literature for the pipes. There's a low part and a high part, and I learned this was the influence of the harp on Irish and Scottish music."
Folsom merged his knowledge of performing rock and jazz music with bands and applied it to improvising on the bagpipes. "My old rock'n'roll sax riffs would work on the Irish pipes," he explains.
Should anyone doubt the possibility of this musical merging, Folsom recorded and album in 1987 with Ron Wilson, the drummer immortalized in the surf music classic, Wipeout.
One of the pieces on their album is Louie, Louie, as Folsom notes "the only song analyzed by a Congressional hearing found to be unintelligible." Louie, Louie has been recorded scores of times, but in Wilson and Folsom's version, the drummer is backed by Folsom playing the highland bagpipes.
"A radio station in San Francisco said they had every version of Louie, Louie, but when they heard ours - they couldn't believe it. They loved it," the piper asserts.
Folsom seems to enjoy sharing his knowledge of musical lore. He is a fixture at folk and ethnic festivals around the state, where he tries to dress the part - whether attired as a Sicilian piper or Irish "wild man."
In Folsom's collection is a zampogna, a very large, double-reed bagpipe from Naples. He remembers that at one Italian festival in San Francisco, tears came to the eyes of an elderly man in the audience when Folsom played the zampogna.
"He realized that was the instrument he had heard played during holidays when he was a child," he says.
In his travels Folsom has collected bagpipes from Poland, Hungary, Croatia and the Middle East - debunking the myth that Scotland holds the patent on pipes.
"Not all bagpipes are loud, you know. Some produce a refined, drawing room style of music," he notes.
An admittedly "enormous amount"of maintenance work goes into his collection of instruments. When visiting dry places like Los Angeles, Folsom puts whiskey or vodka inside the bellows to moisten them. A multi-pipe instrument like the zampogna requires meticulous wrapping of the joint-like tenons with layers of thread.
And, he adds, "It takes a certain kind of single -minded perserverence to make the reeds for this thing."
the fickle nature of the instrument is revealed when Folsom attempts to play a tune on it.
"That sounds like a demented carnival," was the musician's pronouncement of the discordant honk.
Folsom shares his knowledge freely. He has been asked to lecture on musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and has been invited to play at a hurdy gurdy festival in France this July. In addition, he is writing a book on bagpipes - which will include their folklore, mythology and technology.
Folsom will share his knowledge and his instruments on Friday, Jan. 20 at the Carmel Valley Library. Admission is free to his concert, which will begin at 7:30 pm in the library, located at 65 W Carmel Valley Road in Carmel Valley Village.
The folklorist can never predict what form one of his performances might take. First he must decide what instruments to bring - a bowed lyre, perhaps, from Ireland; or a German device whose name, when translated, means "fart bucket."
"I'm a true eccentric. And I went where my eccentricity took me," is Folsom's self description.
excerpt from Great Scot!
coverage of the 35th Annual Monterey Scottish Highland Games and Celtic Festival
Photo by Cole Thompson, Local/State, Monterey County Herald, August 4 2002
Sean Folsom, a multi-instrumentalist and historian, captivated the audience before the opening ceremonies Saturday.
A tour of Scottish Musical History
Photo by Clay Peterson, Local, Monterey County Herald, April 7, 2003
![Photo by Clay Peterson. Sean Folsom of Carmel Valley sings and plays the [lowland Scots pipes] while showing a variety of his instruments from periods of Scottish history at the second annual Tartan Day at Devendorf Park in Carmel on Sunday.](images/press_6.jpg)
Sean Folsom of Carmel Valley sings and plays the [lowland Scots pipes] while showing a variety of his instruments from periods of Scottish history at the second annual Tartan Day at Devendorf Park in Carmel on Sunday.