Paul Clayton's Birthday
Paul Clayton, born on this day in 1931, grew up on Summer Street in New Bedford’s West End. His grandfather Charles Hardy was a whaling ship outfitter who sang songs picked up from seafarers; his grandmother Lizzie contributed songs from Prince Edward Island. By his teens, Clayton was hosting folk music radio shows on WFMR and later WBSM, steeped in the music of the sea.
Clayton earned a master’s in folklore at the University of Virginia and cut over a dozen albums for Folkways, Tradition, and Elektra. His 1956 album Whaling and Sailing Songs remains an essential document of maritime folk song, and his 1959 collaboration with The Foc'sle Singers on Foc'sle Songs and Shanties drew on BBC field recordings of English shantymen. In Greenwich Village, where friends knew him as “Baby Blue,” Clayton was a commanding presence who could hold a room with his stories. Dave Van Ronk called him “one of the most delightful human beings I’ve ever met.” He mentored the young Bob Dylan (whose “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” owes a debt to Clayton’s “Who’s Going to Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone”).
Clayton struggled with depression and the burden of concealing his homosexuality in an era that punished it. He died by suicide on March 30, 1967, just weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday. Many hear Clayton in Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”:
The seasick sailors, they are rowing home / The vagabond who’s rapping at your door / Is standing in the clothes that you once wore / Strike another match, go start anew / It’s all over now, Baby Blue.
His recordings of shanties, whaling songs, and forebitters remain invaluable to the tradition.