"Far too original to envy"

"Frank played a harp guitar sometimes. It had extra six strings, bass strings – and he played the daddy banjo. He was far too original to envy."

—Don Sanders, 21 March 2017, Houston Folk Music Archive oral history project. Interviewed by Norie Guthrie, archivist at Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. 

[Note: Don, who was an integral part of the Houston folk scene, died last Saturday, 21 July 2018.]

Frank & Kay: "My Girl"

On the 1963 LP Look, It's Us -- which documented folk singers who performed at The Jester club in Houston -- Frank Davis and Kay Oslin recorded a haunting duet of the folk song "My Girl."

Frank's understated, weary singing effectively contrasts with Kay, whose voice just soars, beautifully.

To hear it in its entirety, CLICK HERE.

"My Girl" (not to be confused with the song of the same name by The Temptations), has a long and complicated history. Like many folk songs, it is a hybrid of more than one song, and is known by more than one title.

Folk song collector Cecil Sharp published it in 1917. 

The earliest known commercially-recorded version, under the title "In the Pines," was done by Dock Walsh in 1926. 

Bluegrass legend Bill Monroe recorded it in 1941 and again in 1952, and Lead Belly recorded it numerous times in the 1940s, under the titles "My Girl" and "Black Girl."

It has since been recorded many times, most famously by the rock band Nirvana on their MTV "Unplugged" show.

Hally Wood

Click photo to enlarge.

Hally Wood (1922-89) was a folksinger from Texas who was involved in the New York City folk scene in the 1940s. She was married at the time to John Henry Faulk, a fellow Texan who was a popular radio personality. 

Hally recorded solo albums for Elektra and Stinson in the 1950s.

In the late 1950s, she married her third husband, Dr. R.C. Stephenson, a professor of Russian literature and folklore at the University of Texas. They moved to Puerto Rico and lived there until the 1970s.

In 1976 she moved to Houston, where she met Frank Davis and associated with members of the Lomax family. She lived there until her death in 1989.

With the help of Joseph Lomax (d.1988), she privately issued an LP called Songs To Live By in 1979. (Joseph was a grandson of John Lomax, Sr. His father was John Lomax, Jr. His brother was John M. Lomax, aka John Lomax III. His uncle was Alan Lomax.)

Songs To Live By consists mostly of Hally singing folk songs without accompaniment. Two tracks are by Frank Davis. His rendition of the Lead Belly song "Old Man" features the Daddy Banjo.

Her comments below regarding Frank Davis and "Old Man" is taken from the liner notes booklet that accompanied Songs To Live By.

Click photo to enlarge.

Flyer for performance at Domy Books in Austin, 2010

Recording The 13th Floor Elevators

John M. Lomax:

In your engineering days you had a lot of contact with the 13th Floor Elevators. What did you think of them?

Frank Davis:

They made an incredible impression on me because, aahh, well Roky, his vibrance was so incredible. These people were just far out there. I thought they had instantaneous communication wiih some foreign sphere. Felt that they were really right there.

This song, "Slip Inside This House" [from Easter Everywhere]. We had been mixing it all night and all day; it's a real long, complicated song. Its got eight tracks. It was the weirdest goddam mix because of the way these people put their stuff down. They'd talk all the way through it. They'd be arguing about some of the craziest shit you ever heard. I mean it just didn't make any sense whatsoever and you'd start snapping and get back on the knobs and all of a sudden you're way out in space.

So we finished the mix, and they heard it, and Tommy Hall -- he was the writer -- just really spaced out. They didn't really talk about anything after that, after the final mix ...

So I ... Roky was there, he was the last to leave ... I said I thought this was this way and Roky said, "No man, wait just a second."

He told them [the band] to go on and he stayed and said, "C'mon over here and sit down." He just got yellow all over, this little, little thing all around the edges of his head started getting yellow.

His head was real wide and he had lots of hair, y'know. His eyes were just ... Phew! Like saucers, standing about three inches out from his head.

Yeah, so I just gave in to it right then. This happened to me on yoga one time, but it was nothing like this; this was very liquid. The whole top just started turning, and it was way up here [touches his head] and it was something not in vision.

It opened up like that, like a vortex right down into my head and he was up there looking down like that saying, "C'mon, like this."

And bong! I went out and I don't remember a thing after that for two or three days. I thought I was floating around the room. I thought I was levitating. I swore that he was levitating me. And after that I thought I could. I thought I did it once after that, too, which was a completely different scene.

Source: KPFT Radio Guide (June 1975)

The Birth of Psychedelic Music

Frank Davis, 1975. (Photo: Bob Novotny)

Chris Ziegler / LA Record:
Do you think psychedelic music was born in Texas--specifically, Kerrville?

Frank Davis:
I have no doubt that is true. There's so much in Kerrville, Texas, and I have no idea why except for there were lots of native hallucinogens in that area. That goes back way way to the cowboy days. Cowboys were taking hallucinogens all the time. And some of the boys that came from that area, their fathers and grandfathers were in that tradition. Guys spent their lives outdoors and knew the land and they had their own religions. I hate to say 'white Indians' but they lived off the land and had great respect for it because they knew it. Eating peyote is quite different than taking mescaline. Just a religious experience. And they lived in that experience, and they were on their own, in a world that no one else was really available to understand at the time. And their children and their children's children had both worlds. Whole families were involved in music. The skies there are the most gorgeous things in the world, it's the most beautiful property that ever existed—you go camp out and put your head on a huge granite bowl that the Indians would leave when they traveled and walked paths under holy skies. And they'd have all that they needed. A box full of corn, peyote—running along. That was life in those days. That was where some of those kids came from.

Source: LA Record, Issue 118, SWSW Coachella 2015

The Daddy Banjo Remembered

The following was posted here in 2000 by John Pollock. 

When I first crossed paths with Frank Davis, in 1965, he was playing guitar and singing as part of a duo called Frank and Kay, performing their somewhat twisted "folk" repertoire in Houston coffee houses, ice houses and the occasional art gallery. The act broke up when Kay left town upon the long odyssey which culminated, twenty years later, in her overnight success as country singer/songwriter K. T. Oslin.

Bereft of his duo partner, Frank turned his imagination loose upon the problem of performing solo. When I next saw him, around 1970, he had created the world's first Daddy Banjo.

After dismembering a Fender Stratocaster (the same one, he claimed, heard on the circa1960 instrumental hit record "Raunchy"), Frank reassembled it-- with a snare drum for a body. Two of the guitar's three pickups sensed the vibrations of the strings; the third pickup he fastened to the bottom head of the drum, now the back of the Daddy Banjo, to pick up the vibrations of the snare. More about this below...

Inside the drum, Frank mounted a bass drum pedal. A string attached to the pedal emerged from a hole in the rim and terminated in a loop around his foot, which was thereby empowered to create the Backbeat from Hell. But wait... there's more!

Protruding from the rim was a gooseneck, which supported a microphone, which fed a mixer mounted mostly inside the instrument; mostly, because the controls sported knobs of the type common on mixing boards of the 1950s, which is to say that they were about two and a half inches in diameter. These knobs sprouted from the rim like a row of mushrooms, leading away from the gooseneck. The audio output of the instrument went to the house sound system-- but Frank controlled the entire mix himself.

Remember that pickup positioned to sense the snare? During a performance, Frank would laboriously tune the snare, by ear, to provide an amorphous drone sound, its pitch roughly centered on the root note of the next song's key. During this lengthy process, he would tell ethanol-fueled tales which never seemed to end, but of such hilarity that the song itself was often an anticlimax. In fact, sometimes during a story he'd change his mind about what the next song was to be. If that involved a different key, the retuning process would begin again. It was not unknown for Frank to play only two or three songs in an hour, but no one seemed to object...

Following a concert one evening in one of Houston's less fashionable districts, Frank was relieved of custodial responsibility for the Daddy Banjo, by a lover of the arts who, in the process, also relieved him of an upper incisor.

Genesis of the Daddy Banjo

"...so I went over to this artist's studio [Jim Love's on Main Street in Houston] and welded this guitar neck to a snare drum. And it wasn't a snare drum anymore. And it wasn't a guitar neck anymore. It was a daddy banjo."
—Frank Davis, KPFT Radio Guide (June 1975)