Dick Oakes: Musician?
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Here's a photo taken at the "new" Mike's Camera, Boulder, Colorado, in May of 1973. During a live advertising promotion being carried on Radio KBOL, "Jim Turner on the musical saw and Dick Oakes on the doumbek" gave an impromptu musical performance. Shown in this Jerry Cleveland photo, in addition to Jim and me, are the store's owner Mike Partayan, Mike's brother Albert Partayan, and Mike's wife Helga Partayan.
On March 25, 1969, Jim, with his musical saw, was one of the guests on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show. On his "Well Tempered Saw," Jim recorded Textures for Musical Saw & Percussion. Although not a drum expert, with a little training, I also played the tupan, a large Balkan drum, in performance with the Storm Mountain Folk Dancers in the 1970s. |
My First Folk Dance
What was my first folk dance? Well, it wasn't really an entire dance. Here's the rest of the story . . .
At Marcus Whitman Elementary School in Richland, Washington, it seems that we youngsters were expected to have, as part of our physical "education," some kind of dance training. Of course, the person tagged for the job was the physical education instructor.
The PE instructor was comfortable teaching the "manly" sports; after all, he was a man himself. Even to us at our age, it was obvious that this task was an onerous one to him.
His method of attack, probably prescribed by the texts of the day, was to start us out with the simple locomotor actions of walking, running, and skipping. With record player and speakers blaring, we "locomoted" around the gymnasium to the sounds of 78-rpm recordings.
As you can guess, 20 minutes into a 55-minute period, it was becoming a bit boring. Then the instructor put on a lively tune called "Pop Goes the Weasel" and set us off a-skipping in a large circle. Already having glimmerings of the free-style dancer that I would become later in life, every time the melody hit the first word in "Pop Goes the Weasel" I would "POP" up into the air. I was feeling quite satisfied with myself as I was going into the fourth or fifth "pop," when all of a sudden, my arms were clamped to my sides by two very strong hands and I was lifted entirely from the floor and carried to one of the walls where I was set down and turned to face our large, burly phys-ed instructor, now quite red in the face.
He grabbed me once more in the same grip, lifted me as high as he could reach, hung me up on one of the climbing pegs by my belt, then turned around and left me hanging there for the remainder of the period. I suppose he expected that he had humiliated me and that I'd never do anything like that again, but I really enjoyed watching the other poor wretches having to put up with his ineptitude until I was lifted off the peg and set down to go to my next class.
I guess you could say that was when I first recognized that I had a folk dance hang-up.
Cheers,
Dick Oakes
P.S. I had so much fun "popping" that I went the next weekend to a local recreation center and learned my second dance, a mixer called "Oh Johnny, Oh."
Sherbourne Rules
During my folk dance teaching years, I moved around a lot. One of my "homes" was at the Sherbourne Apartments. Here are the rules that were posted in the first-floor hallway.
- No Pets
- No Children
- No Musical Instruments
- No Drinking
- No Hi-Fi
- No TV
- No Parties
- No Visitors
- No Shaving Against the Grain
The Management