I took lessons from Ian for two years (1972-1974). I was a mediocre student and Ian never failed to tell me at the end of each lesson to "just be a doctor," which I did. He was very patient with me and enjoyed seeing me make progress. Often he asked me to stay and "chunk out" chords for him so he could practice solos and arpeggios.

During those two years, he taught me all the Delta blues standards such as Good Morning Blues, Hesitation Blues, Cocaine Blues, Candy Man, How Long Blues, Whinin' Boy Blues, That'll Never Happen No More, etc. He was taking jazz guitar lessons at that time and taught me to read for guitar as well as some of the pieces he was studying such as The Shadow of Your Smile. Ian would play Bach inventions on his L-5 to warm up before he would start lessons. I still have those reel-to reel lesson tapes.

Ian liked the Broome Street Bar and sometimes, if his friends were over while I was taking a lesson, he would invite me to come along. I saw him perform at the Metro Bar a few times as well both solo and with some members of the Pigmeat Blues Band. He would warm up with Bach inventions the way he would in his apartment. He knew how to entertain the crowd.

I last spoke to Ian in early 1979 to let him know I was doing my residency training. He was happy to hear that I still could play the pieces he taught me and encouraged me to "sing the words" which I was always a bit shy to do. He invited me to stop by anytime. I never had the chance to do so with my residency schedule and hospital call being the way it was. I regret that.

Ian would be a bit more pleased with my guitar abilities today. I still remember and practice what he taught me frequently.

Ian was a sensitive, gifted individual who took pleasure in imparting his knowledge. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to study under him.

I went to Antioch at the same time Ian was there, entering in '57, dropping out in '59 and then returning in '61 until '63. When i was at Antioch, it was a different place than the "boot camp for the revolution" it has become. Partly a straight college where people went to study, partly a bastion of politics, the left and the right, and partly a bastion of the arts and also of misfits and the disaffected of the middle class, beats and bohemians, though there were plenty of frat boys as well. A center of the folk music scene was Ian, an adopted child (he and his brother Duck were there at the same time). Ian seemed better composed and better defined than most people there, and had, I now realize, a implacable block of depression, that was both unrecognized and immensely attractive to many, including me. He seemed unmoved by things around him, a calm port in the storm of growing up, focused on what he was about, whereas a lot of people like me were knocked about by every wind of fashion and feeling. The place was a beehive of guitar playing, in the dorms, and in the off-campus houses of married couples like Ken Jenkins. Ian was a center for blues players (like John Hammond and Jerry Kaukonen (he called himself at that time) but peripheral to the old-time music and bluegrass scene, though he flatpicked a very even and sardonic version of Sugar Hill.

Ian was a focal point for me. He was a bit of a romantic figure in Yellow Springs, with his guitar playing, his own car (a much-coveted rag-top Austin Healey 100 — he and Duck had a matched set — at a time when being a student meant you didn't have any money; I bought a '53 Chevy for $100 in '62) and the emotionally cut-off, bohemian, motorcyle-jacket manner which passed for cool in those days. Though I never was particularly friendly with him (he was a year ahead and in another dorm), I hung out around him as much as I could. He knew so much more than I did about some of the music I became interested in, notably, the blues. Really, what I learned in my 2-3 years at Antioch was to play the guitar and to know music from the oral traditions in the US and the British Isles. I learned all I could of what Ian played: there was a reel-to-reel tape circulating around the campus which I had a copy of, and I (and everyone else) eventually learned everything on it.

A few years later I was in Stockholm Sweden, playing with Tom Paley, and ran into Jerry Kaukonen's brother, Peter, who also was playing Ian's songs. By the time I saw Peter again, in '71, he'd taken Ian's music to a different level of proficiency, playing two notes to every one of mine.

His effect on the Michigan guitar-playing community was enormous, but it wasn’t just because of his technical skill as a player, prodigious as that was. It was about his musical ideas: he didn’t sound like anyone else, and he didn’t copy anyone. He was a major protégé of Gary Davis, but played few of Gary’s tunes. In other words he could, but he didn’t. Instead he’d employ parts of Gary’s and lots of other peoples’ techniques to make new ways of doing old songs. If he did a Scrapper Blackwell song, it might have fragments of Big Bill and Blind Blake in it, but it would sound nothing like Scrapper, it would sound like Ian. When he did a Jelly Roll Morton song, he’d have bit of Gary’s playing in it to suggest the piano, but he didn’t sing like anyone but Ian. His How Long Blues was distinctly his own version, and some of the songs he did, like Ramrod Daddy never were particularly traceable.

He never tried to imitate black guys. In fact I was struck by how the black artists who were still so common on the folk circuit back then uniformly regarded him as the Real Thing. When every other young white face with a guitar (like me, for instance) was clearly just a puppy or a poseur, artists like Brownie McGhee and Lightnin’ Hopkins watched Ian perform, riveted.

Ian brought Reverend Davis (or as Ian referred to him, Blind Gary) to Detroit and Ann Arbor a couple of times, which is how I was able to meet the old guy and take some lessons with him. Ian was thrilled to have me watch the Rev all day and make sure he got to meals and workshops on time at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, so he could go about his business. And I got Davis for days on end in exchange. Wow! Davis described Ian as the best student he ever had, ahead of Blind Boy Fuller, which was quite a pronouncement.

I have always felt it was unfortunate that we never got a decent recording out of that era. The closest was the lone Winin’ Boy track on the Blues Project, which just didn’t do him justice.

I also met Harold “Sonny Boy” McGrath (as he then called himself) at around the same time. He was hitchhiking hither and thither with his then-wife Gretchen, playing a Gibson 12-string using three (count ‘em: 3) fingerpicks plus a thumbpick. Like many others, Suni was under Ian’s spell.

The last time I saw Ian was in the spring of 1963, he’d come up from Antioch to Joe Fava’s music studio in Detroit to take delivery on a new Manuel Velazquez classical guitar that his wife had bought him as a graduation present. It was his intent at that time to concentrate on classical guitar. A month or so later I moved to Colorado and completely lost touch. But his effect on my musical perspectives still remains large.

And why didn't he? Davis was a remarkable man making remarkable music, and one of the ways his music was remarkable was the way he testified with his music-making. It was the playing of a joyous, fulfilled believer. He had the free-ness in his composing, playing and singing that often characterizes black musicians and does not characterize white musicians. If you've ever tried to sing black, or to sing Davis's songs the way he sang them (the way we try to play his songs as he played them) you run right up against the limitations of your voice's capacities. I hope I don't need to belabor this, but what I find for myself is that (Davis, and Ray Charles are the outstanding examples here for me) I can't give my voice the rich fullness and liberated color and character that Davis has. I know he sang for years on the street, but while that does something, it's not what I'm talking about.

My point here is NOT that I can't sing like Davis, It's that players who are into his music don't think that singing it with his manner is part of his music, just like the guitar notes are. That aforementioned CD has only a couple of examples of performers who succeed in sounding black, and even of approaching the freedom of expression Davis had.

I know some people don't think sounding black or sounding like a country person is important. Pete Seeger is famously scornful (and maybe a bit defensive) about people singing as well as playing the music of the people the way the people did it. But I don't see a similar interest or fervor among musicians to learn to sing the songs in the way they were sung. I work very hard at it, and have special training to do so, and a lifelong interest in it. And I see some musicians (Maria Muldaur, on the CD, isn't the only one, but she's a longtime instance of one) who devote themselves to that art. She's a singer, and maybe that's part of the answer right there. That’s been a big part of John Hammond’s distinctive approach as well.

I ask myself why not, and I'm thinking maybe this is a good forum to bat this around. Is it a racial thing? Or personally threatening in some way. I say racial because black music has been appropriated by whites for a long time. We don't like to think we're doing that, since (I don't think I'm presuming here) we feel probably more allied with African Americans than most people are. But maybe we use what we can use without changing ourselves very much. Singing like a black man is very different than playing like one.

I play a lot of old time country music, and the same thing is true there. Some musicians affect a country accent, some just drop a few g's and get a bit nasal, but I don't know anyone who has tried a full blown southern or mountain or western accent, except for bluegrass players who are singing a kind of streamlined accent anyway.

TheNewDeal.....like Ian, I'm another Cafe Bizarre expatriate.

Our raw emotion isn't the same as black musicians. (Our outrage, our joy, our release isn't the same. Their lives and their context isn't the same.)

To me, Ian's playing was compelling because his voice was matter of fact, kind of lifeless, almost tuneless,yet you had to listen. He didn't have any pretense about him (motorcycle jacket or no) and somehow you got the whole man, whatever he could muster.

Ian Buchanan: Too Close to Heaven
A Retrospective Collection, 1957-1982