Sea Airs and Striking Dreams

Folk Singer Gordon Bok fills empty vessels

A neighbor in Camden offers an observation: "Just because your cat's got kittens in the oven don't make them biscuits." And, for outlanders, an amplification: "Both his parents come from Philadelphia. He's not a down Easter. But he's workin' at it."

Working hard, at that, and long. If Camden, Me., has not yet fully accommodated Gordon Bok as one of its own, then Bok has assimilated the town, the state, the whole surf-sawed seacoast into his music. He has become the laureate of men who go down to the sea in ships, a saltwater mystic whose tales of treacherous tides and deadly storms tap into regional mythology and enlarge it.

Modest, resolute, scrupulous about sources and his own ambitions as well, Bok, 39, is the very model of a folk singer, a breed that passed from wide favor and fancy more than a decade ago. Yet Bok fans are ranged wide, across the country, over into Europe, and down into the classroom. One elementary school in Labrador energetically studied Bok's The Hills of Isle au Haut but somehow twisted the title into The Hills of Ivanhoe. He has never earned more than $1,800 for a concert, and his record sales (15,000 tops) would get him bounced off any major label. Still, he is the star of tiny Folk-Legacy Records (studios in a converted barn in Sharon, Conn.) and hoards his privacy like a bashful miser. "I have a friend who accuses me of stepping into an alley every time opportunity comes my way," Bok reflects. "But I say that's better than having footprints all over you."

Bok stays out of the mainstream now, after flirting with what fellow Folkie Utah Phillips calls "the folkscare" of the 1960s. It was then that he made a "disastrous" album that flung him up against the lower regions of the pop music business. "I saw the grass on its bottom and the rot in its timbers," he claims. "I decided I didn't want to be a part of that."

It is unlikely that the business would have taken great interest in Bok, anyhow. His voice is a warm bass baritone. His songs--some original, some traditional --are sober, a little lofty on occasion, and limited in appeal by theme as well as sound. Among Bok's prime efforts are Seal Djiril's Hymn and Peter Kagan and the Wind, a 15-minute narrative ballad about a fisherman who is, one might say, married to a fishwife: "She was a seal, you know/ Everyone knew that .../ But nobody would say it..."

"There is not a great tradition of music on the water in Maine," Bok points out. "If I wanted a song for a particular thing, I'd have to make it up if I couldn't find it." Although Bok can now play a lively fiddler's reel on the guitar, craft did not come easy. "All you really need to start with is love," Bok says. "I don't have a natural voice. I've worked hard at it." Bok picked up guitar at nine, and though he could work out the notes, timing escaped him entirely. A Camden shipbuilder took the matter in hand, collared the lad and made him listen to Dixieland on the phonograph while Gordon thumped his foot to the beat.

Dixieland no longer has a place in Bok's music or in the far-flung reveries he shapes into lyrics. "I don't know anything about the rest of the people in the world," Bok concedes. "I have a pretty good idea--I meet quite a few folks--but I can't judge what's relevant." He further fesses up: "I find it very difficult to sing songs I can't connect with." Bok, however, can make some arcane connections. Sources for songs include Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, "an acquaintance with a few local seals, and a series of very striking dreams" that provide Bok with images of burnt skies and a world ruled by wind. He seasons his shanties with Gaelic and Eskimo and has attempted a Mongolian tune now and again too. "I don't sing anything I don't understand," Bok says. "But the Mongolians I learned these songs from didn't understand them too well either."

This ecumenical approach to music --some might call it anthropological --probably came from his mother's side of the family. "They'd lost most of their Scottish-German traditions," Bok recalls. "But they'd sing anything. Scottish, South African, Jewish, anything." On his dad's side, there is the Curtis Institute of Music, founded by his grandmother. Grandfather Edward Bok was part of Curtis Publishing and longtime editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. He wrote an autobiography called The Americanization of Edward Bok, which Gordon had to read in school. His father Cary William, "a man of few words who once pitched semi-pro ball against Babe Ruth and Lou Geh-rig," left Curtis to run a shipyard in Camden. His uncle Curtis was a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice; his cousin Derek is now president of Harvard. Gordon, however, has declined the life of privilege, even though there are reminders of it all over town: several Camden landmarks were donated by his ancestors.

Bok lives with his wife Pat, a painter, in a cabin north of town. Next door is a two-story studio outfitted with recording apparatus, as well as tools for woodcarving, instrument making and boat designing. In his younger days, Bok earned his keep crewing on boats and working in the shipyards, but his voyages now are for recreation only. The long trips he reserves for his imagination. "A song is a vessel you fill with your living," Bok once wrote, a definition full of fancy homespun that suits a man who calls himself "a traditional folk singer," but whose craft and dreams are directed toward something a little grander. Toward being a folk artist. As an anthropologist might say.

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