Joe Crookston

If you were to look for the perfect folk song, it would be hard to find a better one than one called
"Fall down as the Rain." It encompasses life, death, reincarnation....
in short, the mysteries of the
universe.

Bear witness:
When my life is over / And I have gone away
I'm gonna leave this big ole' world / And the trouble and the pain
And if I get to heaven / I will not stay / I'll turn myself around again
And fall down as the rain
And when I finally reach the ground / I'll soak into the sod
I'll turn myself around again / Come up as goldenrod.


This song took second place in the 2003 John Lennon Songwriting Contest (We can't educate everyone).
The song encapsulates the essence of its creator… Joe Crookston. It's the title track of his fourth CD.
In a short span it manages to represent the pillars of his upbringing and his life's goal: to live an interconnected life
and be an integral part of life's mystery.


Joe Crookston grew up in Randolph , Ohio, about an hour south of Kent. Besides Joe, the family had one other
boy and two girls. Joe was second youngest. His father had been a roofer -- then later became an electrician.
Joe's great-grandfather invented the "roofing" hammer and had the patent on it. The family takes great pride
in this. Joe checks out yard and estate sales and buys the old "Crookston" hammers whenever he finds one.
They have the initials AJC --for Anthony Joseph Crookston -- on them. Joe has collected four at this point.
The work ethic is strongly ingrained. During childhood and up through college, Joe worked on local dairy farms.
He described himself to me at one point, pre-musical career, as a "dairy farmer"

The Crucible
His mother suffered from mental illness and was very religious. She died in 2002 from ovarian cancer.
Both her living and her dying had a tremendous impact on Joe's music. As he puts it: "My mother's fascination
and obsession with imagery and with applying meaning to the world around her, I believe, resulted in a direct skill
and a gift that she gave me as an artist. I can look at the world around me and the physical items that I live with
and around and I can find meaning in the mundane, everyday objects in the world that we live in. That's largely
because of her finding sacred meaning to everything around her. I grew up with this sense of magic, or mystery.
Mystery was all around you, and you just had to look for it and keep your eyes open for it. The imagery that comes
into my music -- the attempt and the desire to find the mystery and magic in the everyday -- both lightness and darkness.
It's not about fluffy lightness. It's the polar opposites. Finding those dark places -- and the lightness and the magic
and mystery. My mom was about, like: 'Let's go out in the back yard and watch the blue butterfly land on the fence
and talk to it like it's God.'" Joe thought: "Whoa! This is a little weird, but I guess this is what normal is." When he got
older and moved away, he "disassembled" the earlier experiences and allowed chosen parts to be part of his present
state without the need for rebellion against parts he found "no longer useful."
Joe's mother's way of applying religion was indeed different. Joe stated: "In a way, although as much of a Catholic
as she was, she was like this creative pagan person, too. She had this intense appreciation of writing songs or
painting, or writing songs or making a sculpture -- I was always building a sculpture; I was always doing oil paints;
I was always writing a song. There was always an unconditional support of the creative act. That was a sacred thing
to do in the world. My mom would say, 'Please, the world needs what you have to offer.' She thought of me as a
kind of prophetic person. I was to do good work in the world." And so it would come to pass. Joe has brought art,
literature and music to hundreds of disabled and incarcerated youngsters.

Exploring the Inner landscape
When Joe was 12, his mother had to be hospitalized for psychosis. At the same time, his dad entered the hospital to be
treated for another malady. Joe remembers: "I was put into group counseling with the doctors at the hospital.
I sat in a circle with other families who had issues." Joe had to process his emotional state with professionals in
a group session, dealing with the entire dynamic of his family and the outside world. This was not mere self-absorption.
He needed to unlock the key to health and sanity. He remembers thinking at that time: "I have to go in deep and
find out what is real and sane for me."

Music to the Rescue
"Music" he says, "was an absolutely vital part of me in beginning to express those pieces and parts."
In Northeast Ohio, Joe was surrounded by accordion music and Polka music. His mother was an accomplished accordion
player. She played at dances and parties. At a certain point she put the accordion away because it didn't fit - Acoustic Live in NY Jan 2007

By Matt Mumau

MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS


Enthusiastically bouncing from student to student to discuss the minutia of their songs, Joe Crookston seems at home. Feb. 21 is the third day of a four-day songwriting workshop he organized for the Community School of Music and Art in Ithaca. The Southside Community Center room, where Crookston and his students spend four hours each day to compose music, is swathed in sunlight from an overhead window. Three teens lounge on a few couches in the center of the room, strumming guitar parts and thumping bass lines. As Crookston casually praises segments of music streaming from his students’ instruments and persuades them to explore some licks over others, the young musicians, lost in their visions, smile to themselves. Making the rounds, Crookston stops by a cove carved out by Iwan Azis, an economics professor at Cornell University, and his daughter Mariko in the midst of concluding a song they had co-written. The pair excitedly explain how much Crookston has helped them learn to finish songs, something they’d struggled with previously. “With Iwan and Mariko, it was about the chord voicings and the structure of the songs,” Crookston explains. “Their verse was way too long and I said, ‘You know what? You gotta chop it in half.’”

For Crookston, who has toured the country toward two ends––pursuing his career as a singer-songwriter and teaching youngsters his craft––the peaceful Southside session was the epitome of what he tries to do during the workshops he has organized at juvenile detention centers and schools throughout the country. Pointing out that workshop participants are both male and female and of diverse ethnicities, Crookston says he’s not trying to turn students into the next bread-winning pop stars. Instead, it’s all about learning to come together as artists.

“More than someone making it their career, for me it’s racial diversity and gender,” Crookston states. “To me, this group right here is it: diverse in every way.”


Acoustic Café

A native of Ohio, Crookston, 34, settled in hippie-haven Ithaca in December 2004 as part of a circuitous journey as a musician and self-made music educator. He is responsible for coordinating a series of workshops throughout the Ithaca area similar to the one he gave at the Community School of Music and Art, and will soon embark on a project that involves traveling throughout New York state to collect stories from locals as source material to record a new album of story songs.

Although Crookston may boast success as a musician now, it all began the way so many musicians’ stories do: with a teen love for the guitar. As a 14-year-old, Crookston was captivated by a few of his guitar-playing peers, so he asked his mother, herself a songwriter, for an instrument of his own. He ultimately decided to study classical guitar at Kent State University, enrolling in 1996. But after giving it a go, Crookston realized classical guitar wasn’t for him. He began paying attention to the folk scene in Ohio, and it changed the direction of his life.
“Basically I went to the Kent State Folk Festival, and that’s where I discovered this band called the Horseflies,” Crookston notes. “And that was it for me: This is what I want. Classical music is fine and I studied some jazz but when I went to this folk festival that was basically it. I sold my classical guitar and I bought a steel string and that’s all I’ve done since.”


MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO



He dropped out before finishing his classical guitar degree, so Crookston immediately had to look for a way to make a living in 1990. Fortunately for him, it didn’t take long. Appel Farm Arts and Music Center, located in Elmer, N.J., contacted him shortly after he’d asked for help from the Kent State career center and offered him a position to teach songwriting to kids. Essentially a legitimate version of a 1960s hippie commune, the 200-acre Appel Farm harbors art-loving kids during summer camp sessions, hosts a prestigious folk concert series and serves as a central nervous system for arts outreach in New Jersey.

Crookston hadn’t found what he was looking for at Kent State but Appel Farm provided the artist exactly what he needed. “When I started working at Appel Farm Ani DiFranco would come and do a concert and I’d sit down and have lunch with her,” Crookston says. “I just got to talk to all these great artists like Laura Nyro and Ray Brown, and these performance artists who would come from all over the world, and that for me was like, ‘I’m in college now.’”

Crookston spent three years at Appel Farms during which he was also asked to perform at nursing homes and hospitals for children with cerebral palsy. An eager musician, Crookston embraced the opportunity to perform in front of live audiences, even if they weren’t the creme de la creme. Unlike the namesake character in the 2002 film Death to Smoochy, Crookston looked at those experiences as a way to learn how - The Syracuse New Times Cover Feature Article

Thursday, September 20, 2007 | Advanced

THE ITHACAN ....ITHACA COLLEGE

Songwriter inspired by story of Finger Lakes Region
By Liz Taddonio Senior Writer | September 13th, 2007


Many pop singer/songwriters are self-indulgent. Instead of reflecting the times, music reflects a musician’s ego, relationships and broken or happy heart. Joe Crookston was bored with that.

“I just asked myself what it would be like to go out and intentionally look for songs and stories, instead of sitting in my room all introspective, asking ‘how do I express myself?,’” he said.

Crookston’s idea took shape when he received a grant from New York State Music Fund. The grant allowed him to spend a year in the Finger Lakes region, talking to people, taking photographs and writing songs. Like a modern-day Woody Guthrie, who had a similar project in a small section of Washington state during the 1950s, Crookston created a musical portrait of the region, which will be showcased tomorrow in the Finger Lakes Song Festival.

An Ohio native who moved to Ithaca after living in Seattle for nine years, Crookston said he was drawn to the area because of its strong local culture.

“I’ve done a lot of traveling, but upstate New York and the Finger Lakes is a hidden place,” he said. “It’s not nearly as developed, the land and rolling hills. But yet it’s populated — it’s not just Montana and open spaces.”

Crookston spent months talking to the residents of the region. He placed ads and sent e-mails and said people, for the most part, were very willing to share their local culture. Through word of mouth, Finger Lakes inhabitants gave Crookston something to write about.

“I have one song about a local rooster whose food was actually a kind of beer barley,” Crookston said. “This guy told me about this rooster that would get ... drunk around the town of Corning.”

Song subjects range from silly to serious but all reflect everyday life. One story is about a woman from Poland who immigrated after surviving a concentration camp and another covers the first rutabaga curling championship in Ithaca.

As part of the grant, Crookston also became the artist-in-residence at the Community School of Music and Arts in downtown Ithaca. During the summer he taught four free weeklong songwriting workshops on the art of folk music and storytelling.

Lee-Ellen Marvin, a lecturer in folklore and storytelling in Ithaca College’s speech communication department, was the project director for the songs of the Finger Lakes project. She said the workshops were an exciting way to involve the community.

“Some people came having never written songs or even not making very much music of their own, [and] some came with extensive song repertoires,” she said. “Everyone worked hard and recorded at least one new song.”

Karl Fitzke, a sound and audio/visual producer in Ithaca, recorded and mixed tracks for the students’ songs. He said people brought great attitudes, and it was important to see them come out of their shells.

“I got more inspired as a musician myself,” he said. “You see how much fun people are having. I said the reason I got into [the project] was music and sound.”

Tomorrow night’s show will not only include Crookston’s collection about the Finger Lakes, it will also feature a selection of the best student work. Crookston said the project turned into less of a traditional portrait and more of a cohesive collage.

“It’s kind of like a really random quilt,” he said. “Every patch is completely different, but when it’s all done and put together it’s really unified. I wouldn’t say it’s abstract, it’s more of a mosaic.”

Marvin said the project was important as a representation of a smaller area of the United States.

“It’s a rare project — it’s substantial, for this part of the country,” she said. “You see it in big cities but not so much the little regions.”

Fitzke said he left the project with an appreciation for the art of storytelling and folklore, two important arts he said are underrepresented in popular culture.

“People don’t tell stories anymore, they only tell them if they’re literally true,” he said. “Songs can be a great way to mix half truths and reality to tell a story that means something.”



The Finger Lakes Song Festival will take place at 8 p.m. tomorrow at the Community School of Music and Arts, 330 E. State St. Doors open at 7 p.m., admission is free.



- The Ithacan...Ithaca College

Ithaca Times, September 2007
Listen up

By: MacKenzie Ryan
09/12/2007


Singer songwriter Joe Crookston explains the Friday, Sept. 14 concert hosted by the Community School of Music and Art is a "culmination of a yearlong grant project." Beginning at 7pm, the free concert will feature not only Crookston's music as its headliner, but his students and the stories of their folk songs.
Crookston and the Community School of Music and Art are the unusual beneficiary of poetic justice. When Governor Elliot Spitzer was the attorney general, the folk singer says, he fined Sony Music $30 million from a payola violation. The corporate label had paid off disc jockeys around the country so as to ensure that certain albums would rise on the music charts. Spitzer caught the Manhattan-based super-company and demanded that it distribute the massive fine to New York State musicians. Crookston calls the move "an amazing, brilliant use of the money" because Sony had to give funds to the very people it ultimately had ripped off.
Receiving a grant from these monies, Crookston was commissioned to facilitate, teach, and lead four songwriting workshops around Tompkins County during the months of February, March, April, and July. A wide, diverse range of people came to the free workshops, Crookston says, with recording engineers also lending their services to the 65 participants.

The second half of the songwriter's grant requires him to travel around the Finger Lakes, and interview people, collecting stories and creating songs based on what he learned. Some of the songs, Crookston says, are not about the region directly. For example, one woman he met and befriended was a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz. Some of the songs retell a particular history of the Finger Lakes. "Red Rooster in the Mash Pile," by contrast, is the story of a rooster who lived in Corning during Prohibition. The rooster would eat the fermented corn used to make liquor and get drunk every day after eating it from the mash pile.
Crookston expressed his excitement about the project called "Songs from the Finger Lakes," adding that he thinks of himself as a social archaeologist. The singer is especially enthusiastic about his song, "Dear Elliot Spitzer," which asks the governor to step up and take a stand against the City of Rochester's sale of 7,000 acres of land and Canadice Lake. Used as the city's water supply for the past 100 years, the lake and surrounding area is completely untouched and undeveloped. Camping is not even allowed, Crookston offered. Canadice is one of the places where the bald eagle propagated, he argues, allowing it to come off the endangered species list.
New York City investors have told the City of Rochester that they will give it a blank check to purchase the land, which they will use for vacation developments, Crookston claims. The singer expressed his horror about the situation, saying, "there are not many places like it left in New York." Thus, he has written and will perform "Dear Elliot Spitzer" as a call to action. Crookston says his goal is to raise awareness about the lake, noting that it is a problem at a very critical point.
"What was really important to me in this song [was] not to diss anybody," Crookston says. "I wanted to recognize the governor and Rochester for the positive things they've done and not to demonize them because they have to sell it." Crookston calls the song, "a really honest look of what's possible...[that's] more effective to me than just pissing people off or accusing them."

- MacKenzie Ryan ©Ithaca Times 2007
- Ithaca TIMES

CD REVIEW Joe Crookston
Able Baker Charlie & Dog 2008
by Ceci Gilson www.MaineFolkMusic.com

It seems Ithaca, NY-based Joe Crookston can hardly set a foot wrong these days. Several of his songs have made it into some of the more prestigious national songwriting competitions; John Lennon, Mountain Stage, Great American Song Contest, Performing Songwriter, etc. The audience at the 2007 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival named him one of the Top 4 “Most Wanted” Emerging Artists. This honor landed him a spot on the 2008 Falcon Ridge Preview Tour and at the 2008 summer festival.

Crookston has a wonderfully supple and highly personable voice. He puts across light-hearted songs with spirit and charisma. On the flip side, he delivers heart-breaking lyrics with sensitivity and poignancy. He manages to take the pop hit “The Logical Song” (Supertramp) and give it new life with great acoustic guitar and fresh vocal phrasing.

In 2006, Joe received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to travel around the Finger Lakes area of New York, interviewing local residents, collecting stories and writing songs based on his experiences. The project was inspired by Woody Guthrie’s work in 1941, collecting stories and writing songs in Washington State on a federal grant. Six of the songs appear on Able, Baker, Charlie & Dog.

The disc has an almost vaudevillian feel to it - it’s highly entertaining and chockfull of variety. There’s something new at every turn; character sketches, stories, stomps, a churchy ballad, some madcap piano, a rousing sing-along concerning a drunken rooster, and another about sports involving rutabagas (you heard me right). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll have some fun. Definitely worth the price of admission!

“John Jones” comes from the Finger Lakes collection. An escaped slave lands in Elmira, NY, where he longs for his mother whom he had to leave behind. Judy Hyman of the Horseflies lends some spare beautiful fiddle playing that underscores the poignancy of the situation.

The rollicking “Red Rooster in the Mash Pile” gives us the very fine image of a Prohibition-era rooster drunk on fermented mash (“The boys are making whiskey and the rooster’s drinking too”), crowing til all hours of the night and sleeping through his wake-up call. It’s likely you’ll catch yourself singing this one in the aisles of Hannaford’s….

Joe Crookston’s star is rising. Versatile songwriting, excellent musicianship and a charismatic stage presence should earn him a permanent place on the national folk scene. We hope to see him in Maine soon! Catch him in concert – at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in this summer in Hillsdale, NY. www.joecrookston.com ---Ceci Gilson



- Mainefolkmusic.com

Able Baker Charlie & Dog
Joe Crookston
Available from Joe Crookston's web site.

A review written for the Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange
by Frank Gutch Jr.
(frank.gutch.jr@gmail.com)

And the award for the most intelligent semi-folk-rock-roots album goes to… Man, you have to wonder where they're hiding the music. The major media doesn't seem to care, their involvement seemingly limited to the yellow journalism crucial to the sensational headlines which make news news, as if it even approaches news these days. What it is, though, sells and isn't that what business is all about?

Joe Crookston obviously doesn't think so, though in Able Baker Charlie & Dog he has put together a package professional and slick enough to rival anything the majors could produce. It is beautiful, this foldover digi-pak, from the excellent graphics to just-right liner notes, and maybe it will attract the occasional glance but it takes a distant second to the music within. Distant.

Picture Crookston on a beer can a la Olympia Beer, whose ancient containers held the motto, "It's the Water", only with him, "It's the Music". Thing is, as fine a songwriter as he is, he's savvy enough to kick things off with a cover: Supertramp's The Logical Song. Now, wait a minute. Before you kick this to the curbside, hear me out. This is not Supertramp's Logical Song. This is Joe Crookston's Logical Song presented with a Simon and Garfunkel edge with a little Americana thrown in for good measure. Sure, Supertramp's Roger Hodgson wrote it, but beyond that, it's all Crookston. Kind of. Sort of. Truth be told, I was halfway through it before I could put my finger on who did the original and before I did, I was looking toward the folk rock side more than anywhere. This is good. Hodgson would approve.

Crookston's tribute to the underground railroad slides right in after, John Jones an epic folk tune based upon the research of one Jim Cunningham from Waverly NY. With voice reminiscent of the best of the golden age of folk music (maybe a cross between Bob Lind and Glenn Yarbrough with the sensitivity of Gordon Lightfoot), he tells the story of a man who helped free over 800 slaves in an era during which he could have been punished severely.

If you have to cover someone, Dan Fogelberg is as good as they come and his excellent Wandering Shepherd is among the best he composed. Crookston does an absolutely outstanding job capturing the aura of what the song can be. The used copy of Fogelberg's High Country Snows cost him a buck and was worth a thousand times that. It will make you scour the racks for Fogelberg, guaranteed.

Most skateboard songs are surf-oriented, Ventures-like Rickenbackers cranking out the pulse. Not so with Freddy the Falcon, a view of why sometimes things don't work out and how we hang on to the strangest things to survive.

Another true story turned into a musical epic, Brooklyn In July tells how inequality can push one over the edge. In this case it is Frank, an African-American who snapped and tossed a rock through the window of a cafe and spent "a good part of his life" in jail because of it. Presented in jazzy folk/swing fashion, it captures the tragedy of it all through simple chord changes and vocal timbre.

Crookston turned humor into song after hearing a tale of drunken roosters, courtesy of an 83-year-old named Walt Losey. Red Rooster In the Mash Pile, upbeat and downright humorous, has that '30s jazz feel, thanks to the light jazz piano and violin as well as upfront vocals and great chorus. Crookston includes a live version of this song toward the end of the CD and when you hear it, you know why. A real crowd pleaser.

Joe's grandpa was in The War (The Big One) and just before he died, told the story of laying runways for the planes which would carry the nuclear bombs to Japan. They named the runways Able Baker Charlie & Dog and the song ranks just below Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald as truth in song.

Crookston borrowed from Robert Frost a bit on Mending Walls, a fine pop/folk song about maybe finding yourself in others. Maybe. A good song, no matter what you get out of it.

Father to son. It's as old as the world and Hands Metal and Wood lays it out as well as it has ever been. There is even a story in the liner notes about his great-grandfather which is as good as and actually part of the song. No, I'm not going to spoil it. Buy this and read it for yourself.

If I didn't know better, I would think that Gordon Lightfoot had written Blue Tattoo. A beautiful song about a Polish mother and her daughter and a conversation which involves a trip to the States and a tattoo. And a war. May we never forget.

Bird By Bird is as close to folk as Crookston gets and there is a reason. Inspired by an Anne Lamont book, it is a song of healing and maybe rehabilitation in simple terms. After hearing it, you will agree that no other genre could have gotten it quite right.

Crookston finis - by Frank Gutch Jr.