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10
Aug 2008
Erik Darling, 1933-2008
Posted in Home Page, News - U.S. National by Michael Kornfeld at 10:26 am |

Erik Darling, a singer, guitarist and banjo player, who replaced Pete Seeger in The Weavers 50 years ago and was part of the folk music revival of the 1950s to early 1960s, died of Lymphoma on August 3.  Darling, who also was a member of The Tarriers and The Rooftop Singers, as well as a solo artist and an accompanist on recordings by other notable folk artists, was 74.

Darling, who lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in New York’s Finger Lakes region.  It was there that he first became interested in folk music, although his involvement in the music scene developed, along with his interest in group singing and harmony, after his parents divorced and he moved to New York City with his mother.  He became a regular during the Sunday afternoon hoots at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where an active folk music scene was burgeoning.  As a young teenager, he started learning guitar and viewed Burl Ives and Josh White among his musical heroes.  It also was then that he acquired an interest in Haitian Calypso music and Jamaican folk songs that would later manifest itself in “The Banana Boat Song,” his adaptation and partial rewrite of two old Jamaican work songs, that became a hit for The Tarriers in 1957 and helped spark the popularity of Calypso music, although Harry Belafonte’s version later eclipsed it in popularity.

Inspired by the vocal harmonies and arrangements of The Weavers (and turned on to the five-string banjo by Pete Seeger), Darling formed a quartet known as the Tunetellers that later evolved into The Tarriers in 1956.  That trio – which toured throughout the U.S., Canada and parts of Europe — was originally comprised of Darling, Bob Carey and Alan Arkin, who went on to become an actor.  Two years later, when Pete Seeger left The Weavers, Darling was invited to take his place.  After working with them for four and a half years, he left to pursue a solo career and traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada playing coffeehouses and clubs. 

Darling later joined forces with two friends – guitarist Bill Svanoe and jazz singer Lynne Taylor (who had stints with Benny Goodman’s and Buddy Rich’s bands) – to form The Rooftop Singers.  The folk-jazz trio scored a hit in 1963 with Darling’s re-worked, pulsing, up-tempo version of “Walk Right In,” a song he learned from a 1929 jug band recording by Gus Cannon and his Jug Stompers.  Darling’s arrangement, his biggest commercial success, featured two 12-string guitars playing the same melodic line in a percussive style, creating a sound that was new and became popular at the time.  (Indeed, 12-string guitars were hard to come by then).  However, The Rooftop Singers were relatively short-lived.  As Darling once related, the group “never found another song which quite matched us as well as {that one] did” and disbanded in 1967.

Darling also recorded a number of solo albums over the years for several labels (most recently Folk Era/Wind River Records), provided instrumental accompaniment for Ed McCurdy on several of his albums, and can be heard on recordings by such notable artists as Oscar Brand (on whose long-running WNYC radio program, Folksong Festival, Darling performed), Judy Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the Chad Mitchell Trio and Jean Ritchie, among others.

Shortly before he died, Darling wrote an autobiography entitled “I’d Give My Life!”: A Journey by Folk Music  that also includes a 24-track CD.  Prior to that, he released Revenge of the Christmas Tree on CD in 2006.

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