Life from the Hearthside

In the potluck, fast-buck world of pop music, the Beers Family is like not with it. They sing, of all things, for the sheer enjoyment of it. They are folk, not folkniks; they offer no burning messages, no protests, no shaggy manes, no bizarre costumes--just good old-fashioned harmonizing. Their concerts are as homey and relaxed as a Saturday-night song-swapping session in some backwoods farmhouse. That, in fact, is the source of their repertory--a rich and rewarding evocation of the musical life that made the hearthside a little gayer in the long decades before the dawn of TV.

Last week Bob Beers, his wife Evelyne and their daughter Martha, 20, performed their annual children's concert at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, and it was rare Americana all the way.

Among the "knee-bouncing" children's songs they sang were The Lamplighter's Hornpipe, in which Evelyne accompanied Beers's down-home riddle playing with the clackety-clack rhythms of "limberjacks" (a pair of loose-legged, hand-carved puppets), and a square-dance tune in which Martha played a squawky solo on the "cornstalk fiddle" by drawing a shoestring bow over the strands of a cornstalk.

Shimmering Ancestor. Their song bag includes a wealth of old ballads, reels, ditties, jigs and riddle songs, many of which Beers learned at the knee of his grandfather--onetime champion fiddler of North Freedom, Wis.--who gave him his "concert grand" fiddle with a snake rattle inside ("to make it sound good"). In one demonstration song, Beers carves a whistle out of a twig and then plays a tweeting lullaby; in other numbers, Evelyne beats out a counter rhythm on the fiddle strings with spears of buffalo grass or "fiddlesticks." Many of the songs reflect the lore and rough-hewn poetry of rural America. My Las' Ride Comin' on the Heavenly Train is the lament of a luckless wanderer who Come from the far countree, in a railroad car, To this mizzable place 'hind the jailhouse bars.

One of the loveliest ballads that Beers has preserved is Dumbarton's Drums.

Evelyne sings in a pure, unaffected soprano voice accompanied by the shimmering, harplike refrains of Beers's psaltery (an ancestor of the harpsichord):

'Tis he alone that can delight me. His graceful eye it doth invite me, And when his tender arms enfold me, The blackest night doth turn today. Tame Coyotes. Beers's grandfather taught him to play the psaltery, but his real ambition was to be a concert violinist. He played with the St. Louis Philharmonic at 15, later graduated from Northwestern University as a music major. Only then, noting among other things that he was one of the world's few psaltery players, did he realize "that my inherited knowledge of folklore was something extraordinary. Suddenly I felt an obligation to perpetuate it."

But the demand for psaltery players and country fiddlers was not exactly booming. For two years, Beers and his family lived in a prospector's log cabin in New Year, Mont., a ghost town where, according to one of their songs, "the people are wild and the coyotes are tame." Their only food was wild game that Beers hunted in the mountains. When possible, they stuffed their 150-lb. psaltery, dulcimer, fiddles, banjos, guitars, buckskin drums and camping equipment into and on top of their Volkswagen and toured the mountain towns and country fairs. Then, when the fad for folk singing mushroomed in the late 1950s, everyone was suddenly stuck on the psaltery.

Today Beers, 46, a burly, sandy-haired Scotch-Irishman, lives with his family in Petersburg, N.Y., on a 180-acre estate that was once the hideout for "Legs" Diamond during Prohibition. Last summer, in a leafy hollow on the estate, they launched the first annual Beers Family Festival of Traditional Music and Arts, at which more than 100 country musicians performed before 8,000 people.

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