Cenizo Journal Spring 2016 | Page 8

Billy Faier The Life and Times of a Folk Musician by Billy Faier, with Chris Wand I was born on Dec. 21, 1930 at 7 p.m. I lived in Brooklyn my first 14 years. I hated every minute until we moved to Woodstock, New York in 1945. At that time and in that place I discovered that the world had good stuff in it. It was there that I had my first introduction to folk music. I had been singing songs all my life, but I didn’t know they were folksongs until then. Many of the artists, writers and musicians in Woodstock sang folk music and played guitar. There was a camaraderie among these folks that was new to me. Not only did they seem to like and understand each other, but they included me in that communal umbrella of friendly feeling, even though I was new to them and a 14- year-old kid. In Brooklyn I had been patronized, ignored or abused by most of my schoolmates. The same was true at Kingston High in Woodstock, but out- side school there was a group of people 8 Cenizo who accepted me. These were the artists of the Woodstock art colony. They had an intense love of the place where they lived, both the commu- nity of Woodstock and the Catskill Billy Faier performing at Gerdes Folk City, Greenwich Village, New York City, January 3, 1961. Irwin Gooen, courtesy of Chris Wand. Mountains. It gave me, for the well as adults, singing the songs we ness to devote myself to music and first time in my life, an intense feeling of came to know as folk songs. It was a women. For the next ten years I BELONGING to something bigger weekly gathering, outside in good learned to play the banjo and guitar.  than myself. I spent the next three years weather and moving indoors to Gabe From the age of 17 to 21 I lived in a enjoying and being encouraged by the Katz’s place when it got cold. For me cold water flat on East Fifth Street and creative people and energy of that artis- this was the beginning of the Urban Avenue D on the lower East side, about tic community. Folk Revival and a second introduction a mile walk to Greenwich Village. The My real awakening to folk music to the intense joy of group singing. I rent was $17 a month. Beside the happened in Washington Square Park, started playing five-string banjo, a truly people of the folk community, I New York one Sunday afternoon in American instrument. I gave up a knew many young poets, painters, October of 1947. It was there that I saw promising career in the world of busi- Anarchists, Socialists and all sorts of people, kids like myself as Second Quarter 2016