Redbird Stanley Ferguson and Starfinder Stanley of the Owsley Stanley Foundation introduce a newly released 1973 recording of folk legends The Chieftains on their first tour in the U.S.
The Chieftains appeared at the Boarding House on October 1, 1973, at Jerry Garcia's personal invitation. The Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist was playing banjo in the rollicking bluegrass band Old & In The Way, and after Jerry appeared with The Chieftains on Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue’s radio show on KSAN, he wanted them to open for him.
During the KSAN broadcast, Jerry explained the influence of Irish traditional music on American country and bluegrass music, saying that "the nature of the songs is like what the fathers of country and western music, American music, grew up singing." Perhaps Jerry was also resonating with his own heritage when he invited The Chieftains to open for Old & In The Way— after all, his grandfather William Clifford was Irish American. In any event, when Jerry brought these two bands together onstage, he was reuniting two musical traditions separated by an ocean and centuries of migration: bluegrass and its Irish progenitor.
Listen: The Foxhunt (Live At The Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 1976)
You can actually hear exactly what Jerry had in mind by listening to this recording of The Chieftains at the Boarding House along with the set from Old & In The Way, also recorded that night by our father, Owsley "Bear" Stanley, and eventually released in 2013 as Live at the Boarding House: The Complete Shows.
The experience is the perfect pairing of traditional Irish music with American bluegrass, and a rare opportunity to join the audience for a full recorded-by-Bear rendering of both bands from the same night. Bear started recording when he was the soundman for the Grateful Dead so he could develop his technique, evaluate his equipment, and fine-tune his mic arrangements. He called these recordings his "Sonic Journals," and they helped to improve his approach to live concert sound.
The Owsley Stanley Foundation, our nonprofit organization, is dedicated to preserving all of Bear’s archive of Sonic Journals. The preservation process continues to reveal real gems, and Bear’s recording of The Chieftains’ 1973 performance at the Boarding House is one of them.
Listen: Carrickfergus/Do Bhí Bean Uasal (Live At The Boarding House, San Francisco, 1973)
It is cut from the same sonic cloth as the legendary debut album of Old & In The Way, recorded one week later by Bear at the same venue (with mostly the same equipment) on October 8, 1973. That album cemented Bear's reputation as a master of live recording and is still one of the best-selling bluegrass records of all time.
The recordings Bear made of The Chieftains’ 1976 performance at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall (GAMH) are another great find, and one that pairs wonderfully with the 1973 recordings. Both Sonic Journals capture the acoustic character of these two very different venues. You can hear that the Boarding House sounds like an intimate club, while the GAMH sounds like a spacious hall—each is distinct even though we believe Bear used a similar mic’ing technique at both venues. The Boarding house was not only smaller and wider, but also had sound-dampened walls and a shorter span that created early sound reflections. In contrast, the larger GAMH has a high flat ceiling, hardwood floors, balconies on three sides, faux marble pillars along the sides of the hall, and more surfaces to reflect the sound back. The differences you hear are due in large part to the internal architecture of each venue. Bear’s goal was to capture how it sounded in the hall each night as precisely as possible so that he could improve his own craft and account for the differences between venues.
Listen: The Morning Dew (Live At The Boarding House, San Francisco, 1973)
He also encouraged musicians to listen to the tapes to see if the house sound system accurately reflected what they had intended to create through their craft onstage. Bear’s passion for recording sound was matched by his lifelong passion for music of all kinds, especially folk and bluegrass. With deep family roots in the Appalachian region of the United States (in fact among the very first colonial settlers of Kentucky), he developed an early love of bluegrass and it remained among his favorite musical traditions. In his youth he was influenced by the rise of folk music in the United States, and by the 1950s he had a close group of friends that played traditional music from around the world, including Irish, English, and Scottish tunes. When Bear came to the Bay Area in the 1960s, he was delighted to find a flourishing folk and bluegrass music scene.
accompanying the new reissue, shortly prior to his death in 2021
So, while he had not heard The Chieftains play live before mic’ing up the Boarding House stage in 1973, he was primed and ready—his intimacy with traditional instruments and love of the idiom informed his approach. After the 1976 shows at the GAMH, Bear’s partner at the time, Isabelle Liddle (née Wheeler), remembers discovering with dismay that The Chieftains had scant opportunity to see the sights while traveling the world on tour. So she invited them to escape the hotel for a moment of precious downtime and come with her and Bear on an adventurous hike through the old growth redwood forest of the Muir Woods National Monument. Several members of the band happily accepted the offer, and what began as a musical appreciation culminated in a personal connection.
In celebration of The Chieftains' 60th anniversary, we now invite you to walk among the giants—to join us on a sonic adventure and travel back to a time when this great band was just making its mark in America.
Bear's Sonic Journals: The Foxhunt, The Chieftains Live in San Francisco, 1973 & 1976 is out now, via Cladagh Records
