Gardyloo: The Journal of Washington Square Folklore, 1959-1960

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10605/353022

Descriptive Summary

In April 1959 the writer and editor Lee (Hoffman) Shaw launched her third “folkmusic fanzine” to chronicle the burgeoning traditional music scene in New York’s Greenwich Village. She described it as “an amateur magazine edited and published by Lee Shaw, assisted by Barry Kornfeld”. (Kornfeld, a prominent guitarist and folksinger, was the one who drove Bob Dylan out to meet Woody Guthrie at the hospital where he was dying of Huntingdon’s disease.)

Biographical Sketch

Hoffman named “Gardyloo” after “the traditional cry of warning before one dumped a bucket of slops out of an upstairs window”. Eventually she adapted the publication to be a promotional vehicle for the New Lost City Ramblers, a string band comprising mathematics professor Tom Paley, photographer-filmmaker John Cohen, and Pete Seeger’s half-brother Mike, a multi-instrumentalist nominated for six Grammy awards.

Lee Hoffman edited many journals of science fiction, including the respected periodical “Quandry”. She went on to write more than twenty novels in the science fiction and Western genres. “The Valdez Horses” (Doubleday, 1967) won the Spur Award of the Western Writers of America and was adapted as a John Sturges film starring Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland in 1973.

Scope and Content

Our seven issues of “Gardyloo” came to the Crossroads of Music Archive as a gift from the famous five-string banjo picker Billy Faier before his death in Alpine, Texas in 2016. Due to public demand, we decided to put it and our holdings of “Chooog 2-5”, “Caravan”, and Hoffman’s “Gardyloo” on-line. Gary Ross Hoffman, Lee Hoffman’s nephew and executor of her estate, kindly gave permission to scan and reproduce them.