It was a beautiful summer afternoon, with breezes blowing off the Hudson River, as Tom Paxton picked up his acoustic guitar under a bright tent at the Clearwater Festival in Croton Point Park, some 30-plus miles north of New York City.
He turns 87 on Oct. 31. Currently performing with the Don Juans—Don Henry and Jon Vezner—he announced on Thursday at the City Winery in New York his plans to retire from touring, six decades after arriving in Greenwich Village as part of thewhich contained now-classic songs like the title track, “Bottle of Wine,” “I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” and “The Last Thing On My Mind.
Across the decades, generations of musicians have drawn inspiration from Paxton’s songs of love, laughter and political outrage: “Ramblin’ Boy,” “Bottle of Wine,” “What Did You Learn In School Today,” “Whose Garden Was This,” “The Marvelous Toy” and countless more. Said Judy Collins: “He writes stirring songs of social protest and gentle songs of love, each woven together with his personal gift for language.”
“We were writing songs together,” recalled Paxton, “and they said, ‘we’ve started doing some performances, calling ourselves the Don Juans, and we’d love to open shows for you and then accompanying you.’ I said that sounds like fun. And, in fact, that’s what it’s been. I don’t love the travel, but I love the performing and the co-writing and the friendship.”
But first Paxton did a stint in the U.S. Army, which brought him from Oklahoma to the Northeast. He served at the Army Information School in New Rochelle, N.Y. and then at a clerk-typist school at the Army base in Fort Dix, N.J.—both within a bus or train ride from Greenwich Village. He began spending every weekend in the clubs of the emerging folk scene—the original Gerde’s Folk City on West 4th Street, One Sheridan Square and, on MacDougal Street, the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight Cafe.
At that clerk-typist school in Fort Dix, Paxton, already a proficient typist, was bored silly. On his Army-issued typewriter, he pecked out the lyrics to what would become one of his most enduring children’s songs, “The Marvelous Toy.” Polished with the help of Noel “Paul” Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, the song also began one of the most significant professional and personal relationships of Paxton’s life, with the arranger, producer and music publisher Milt Okun.
But Seeger, having just learned the song, got the chorus wrong, singing “fare thee well, my ramblin’ boy,” not “here’s to you, my ramblin’ boy,” as Paxton wrote it. Afterward, from his travels, Seeger mailed Paxton a postcard decorated with one of his well-known banjo doodles. He wrote simply: “Dear Tom, Oops! Pete.”
“And the first thing that will do,” added Paxton, “is get you out of writing about your own boring life and your goddamn relationships. And it will put you out in the world—where Shakespeare wants you to be. The first-person is infinitely stronger in songwriting. And is almost never myself.”he re-recorded “Outward Bound” with its lyric of voyagers “upon a ship with tattered sail.”
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