Don't Tell Me How I Looked Falling: The Ballad of Peter La Farge

by Sandra Hale Schulman

But take those high frail nerves and wire them to such reality symbols as horses, rodeos, cowboys, Indians, that whole other America waiting across the mountains and you can begin to see what Oliver Jr. was becoming.

"Broadsides" frequently were songs written on the spot at an event--a hanging, for instance--that described the scene, the crowd, or the story surrounding it. The lyrics--along with the name of a familiar tune that would provide the melody--might be duplicated and sold for a few pennies as a kind of "musical journalism" or souvenir of the event.

Selections from the tapes were released in 2000 on a five-CD box set, The Best of Broadside, 1962-1988, on Smithsonian Folkways.

La Farge was signed to Columbia in 1960 by John Hammond, around the same time that Dylan was making his way as a session man on Carolyn Hester's albums, but his relationship with Columbia was short-lived due to his worsening drinking problem, lasting for one commercially unsuccessful album called Ira Hayes and Other Ballads, which has never been re-released.

By far the greatest part of Asch's Folkways recordings were collections of folk and ethnic music from all over the world and every corner of the US. His release in 1950 of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, was a watershed event, teaching the basics of folk music to thousands of revivalist musicians in the 1950s and 1960s.

Asch was never financially secure, and by the early 1970's had lost control of the Folkways catalog. He spent the next decade slowly buying back his label from Scholastic Books, regaining control of the label in the early 1980's. After Asch died in 1985, Folkways was purchased by the Smithsonian Institution,

“Washington Square Park was the informal folk scene in NYC for some 17 years. When the sun shone singers came from all 5 boroughs of NYC and traded songs. It was a great tradition largely unnoticed by NYC until a new park commissioner, Newbold Morris, decided to revoke the permit. A protest was staged by some 300 folksingers and some 3,000 onlookers. The riot squad was called.

Bob Dylan is 21, Phil Ochs is 22, Mark Spoelstra 23, Len Chandler and Tom Paxton 25, and Peter La Farge is the oldest of the bunch at 32, but then his life “skipped” a few years when he was sent to Korea.

Their production is terrific – Paxton at last count had written 105 songs in 18 months, Ochs 60, Chandler 50, La Farge has a third LP of his own material in the works. Dylan creates so fast the words seem to flow completed out of his pen. In fact he has developed the interesting theory that they already exist in the air around him

Peter was published as a poet in a 1964 book along with heavyweights Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, and Bob Dylan in Poets of Today, A New American Anthology, edited by Walter Lowenfels. His submission was one of his songs, “Vision of A Past Warrior”, that appeared on his As Long As The Grass Shall Grow Folkways album.

Peter had serious health problems, some due to his rodeo accidents and some due to schizophrenia or manic depression, and he had been under the long term care of various doctors. Probably the most damaging experimental treatment Peter was subjected to in the 1950s was being injected with cobra venom.

According to Pat Sky, Inger’s sister Esther, Povy La Farge Bigbee and several others, Inger was finally granted outpatient status from the psych ward to work a part time job at a dress shop. Three months after giving birth, she went home on October 27, 1965, began making Peter dinner and went in the bedroom to find him dead.

The mystery of Peter’s death is documented in several places. Folksinger Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers writes in his book “ He committed suicide in my bathtub.”

“Peter La Farge died in a midtown hotel room in 1965. He was 34 years old. The man rodeo hands called Peter Bucking Horse had lived five or six lifetimes in a few short years. His death was attributed to a stroke, though Peter was in bad psychic shape at the time and friends believed it was suicide – the wrong combination of drugs or medication.

“Peter was in pain a lot from his rodeo injuries. He was a heavy drinker. Four Roses that was his drink. He must have been drinking and took some tranquilizers the night he died. You just need one too many for that to happen.

Inger told me he took some and laid down when she was making dinner, she went in to wake him and he was dead.

Shirley M., Social Worker at the Health Institute: April 13, 2005 “Karen is seriously delusional but no harm to others. She stares at herself for hours in mirrors and believes she loses her soul through her urine and feces, so she saves them in bottles and boxes and ingests them. This causes diarrhea and flares up her hepatitis C. A sweet girl, she makes excuses and lies when confronted with her behavior and its consequences. She is constantly trying to flee and is considered a flight risk so is in lock down. She will need therapy and medication the rest of her life. Her mother Inger was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was in Bellevue in NYC when Karen was born. All the info we have on her is that she went back to Europe and has not been in contact with Karen for many years.”

SS: She had married an Apache named Jerry Gomez, had a daughter Alexandra in 1989. She was 29. Illness was showing up, she was into drugs, was a very wild child.