Charles Alexander "Sandy" Paton (22 January 1929 — 26 July 2009) was a folksinger and folksong collector, a recording engineer, and a record label executive. As a performer, Paton was hailed by critic
John Greenway as "the best interpreter of traditional singing in the English-speaking world, with the possible but not probable exception of
Ewan MacColl
James Henry Miller (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989), better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the ...
." As a song-collector and field-recorder, Paton recorded folk singers in both the US and the UK, including
Jeannie Robertson (assisting
Hamish Henderson, a noted Scots folklorist),
Jean Redpath
Jean Redpath MBE (28 April 1937 – 21 August 2014) was a Scottish folk singer, educator and musician.
Career
Jean Redpath was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to musical parents. Her mother knew many Scots songs and passed them on to Jean and her ...
,
Horton Barker
Horton Barker (August 23, 1889 – August 12, 1973) was an Appalachian traditional singer.
Barker was born in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, USA. Blind nearly all his life, Barker learned his unusually wide repertoire at the School for the Deaf an ...
, and
Frank Proffitt
Frank Noah Proffitt (June 1, 1913 – November 24, 1965) was an Appalachian old time banjoist who preserved the song " Tom Dooley" in the form we know it today and was a key figure in inspiring musicians of the 1960s and 1970s to play the trad ...
, whose song "
Tom Dooley" later became a million-selling record by the
Kingston Trio.
Paton believed that modern
high fidelity recording technology offered listeners the chance to experience the "richness" and "musicality" of folk music performances in a way that earlier, less-sophisticated recording technologies did not.
With his wife Caroline Paton and friends Lee and Mary Haggerty, Paton founded
Folk-Legacy Records, a premier folk music recording label. One of his obituaries notes Paton's wide-ranging work on the label's releases, including not only in production and engineering but also in photography.
Sandy and Caroline Paton also wrote liner notes for many of their label's recordings, contributing "a wealth of cultural knowledge" to the printed materials accompanying these albums.
Sandy and Caroline Paton appeared three times on the
Studs Terkel
Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008) was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for '' The Good War'' and is best remembered for his oral his ...
radio show on
WFMT. Recordings of these programs are in the
Studs Terkel Radio Archive The Studs Terkel Radio Archive is an archive of over 1,000 digitized audio tapes originally aired over 45 years on Studs Terkel's radio show on WFMT-FM or used in his oral history collections in the books ''Division Street America'' (1967) and '' ...
.
For their accomplishments in performing, recording, and preserving folk music, in 1993 Sandy and Caroline were named "official State Troubadours" by the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. They also received awards from the California Traditional Music Society as well as folk festivals in Tennessee and Massachusetts.
Sandy Paton was born in Florida, USA on 22 January 1929, and died in Sharon, Connecticut USA on 26 July 2009.
References
External links
* Discography at Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/artist/1524993-Sandy-Paton
* Sandy Paton sings "
East Virginia Blues"
{{authority control
American folk singers