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Dave Ruch

Dave Ruch
(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Dave Ruch is not a folk musician. While it’s true that he plays traditional folk tunes, he’s equal parts historian, anthropologist and teacher. Mostly, though, Dave just considers himself a musician. As a musician, he’s doing something that few others are doing locally—reviving and preserving our state’s musical heritage. Each time Ruch picks up his guitar and clears his throat to sing, you can almost hear the bawdy timbre of Adirondack lumbermen, the tidal lilt of the Great Lakes sailors, or the lone, careworn voice of an upstate farmer calling out of the past.

When did you first start playing music? “I started playing guitar in 1980. I play banjo, mandolin and jaw harp—those are probably my main instruments, but I also have a dulcimer that I fool around with, though I’m not great on it. When I first started playing guitar, I wanted to learn, “Stairway to Heaven,” like everyone else in 1980. At that time, I was in high school, listening to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin... mostly guitar-based music. When I started playing, I wanted to learn that and Neil Young, more acoustic things.”

How, then, did you get into folk music full-time? “Well, I never really considered myself a folk musician. I still really don’t, I guess.” Ruch’s path to his current work was winding, to say the least. From Buffalo-based Grateful Dead tribute band the Wild Knights, to a rockabilly band in Washington, DC, to jazz guitar, he’s been all over the board. Like all of the happiest musicians, he also tried a six-year stint as a marketing exec, before realizing, “I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.” Since he decided to indulge his interests in history and “rootsy” music, though, Ruch hasn’t looked back.

How do you track down old songs? “That’s the hard part. While the American South has always been thought of as a hot-bed of traditional music, because of bluegrass and blues, there were much older forms that came from settlers from the Old World. These people kept their traditional songs, because those were the only songs they knew and there was no other way to learn others. The tradition would be conveyed from one generation to the next, and the songs, in some cases, lasted for hundreds of years. Well, the same kinds of people and the same kinds of traditions were also happening here, and there were people who went out and tried to record it, but nothing big ever came of it. Nothing really got published, no great collection of Northern traditional songs ever was put forth. So the stuff that’s out there is in research libraries and folklore archives around the state, and finding it is like following a trail. It’s tracking music down and trying to get it out in the air again so people can hear it. It really is part of our heritage.”

Why do you think folk or traditional/historical music is important today? “Good question. I think for the most part it’s not (laughs). It doesn’t seem to be very important to people today. And I guess that’s as it should be, people will be interested in what they’re interested in. I think there’s a lot of value there, though. They tend to be songs of the average person, who used them to entertain himself. Before radio and everything else, if you wanted music you had to make it yourself. So more people back then sang out of the need for music that we all have, whether it be an iPod or whatever. The songs give us a glimpse of what was interesting to people, what was funny to people, what was important to people.”

Tell me about our region’s historical music. “Many of these old, traditional ballads and songs actually started here. Often they would talk about some sort of significant event that happened—a war, a murder... there are lots of American murder ballads. It’s hard to imagine, but that was television back then, these stories in song form. There are little deposits of songs that you can find around New York. For some reason, WNY is the least documented. In the Adirondacks you can find tons of stuff, because of the huge singing tradition in the lumber camps up there. Tons of those songs were passed down and recorded. The same thing is true for the Catskills. I tend to concentrate on upstate songs, and for whatever reason, there’s a scarcity of things that were documented out this way.”

You must come across some interesting stories and history in your work. “Oh yeah. Here’s one you don’t find in the history books. During that whole era on the Mississippi River when the big steamboats with paddle wheels were traveling back and forth—sort of that Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn era—there was a subculture of workers on the steamboats called roustabouts. They were largely African American guys, probably escaped slaves, or in some cases freed slaves, who did all the muscle work involved in getting containers and packages onto and off of these huge ships. They had a whole singing tradition to help them with their work, a whole repertoire of songs that were unique to that area, and unique to these roustabouts. That’s something I never would’ve known about, or heard about, but now by singing their songs we can come closer to understanding and feeling what life was like for them.”

Performances: Ruch performs over 300 school shows each year, along with fellow Hill Brothers, Jerry Raven and Judd Sunshine.

With that many shows, what do you do for fun outside of work? “I have two kids at home, seven and four years old. Anytime I’m not working, I’m basically spending time with them. There’s always homework to be done and games to be played, and our whole family just took up downhill skiing for the first time this winter—all four of us. We’ve been going every Saturday at Kissing Bridge. Other than that, I try to get a little exercise and keep my sanity between everything else that’s going on.”

You can catch Dave performing most Thursday nights at Allen Street Hardware… except, of course, when he has school in the morning.