Billy Faier’s Brief
Autobiography
I was born in Brooklyn New York on Dec. 21, 1930.
I hated every minute of it until we
moved to Woodstock, New York in 1945 at which time
and place I discovered that the world had good stuff
in it too. It was there I had my first intro to folk
music, except for the folk songs I had been singing
all my life and didn’t know that’s what
they were.
Many of the artists, writers and musicians, in Woodstock,
sang folk stuff and played the guitar. But my real
awakening to folk happened in Washington Square one
Sunday afternoon in October of 1947. There I saw all
sorts of people, kids like myself and adults, all
singing the songs we came to know as folk songs. It
was a weekly gathering which moved indoors to Gabe
Katz’s place when it got cold. This, for me,
was the beginning of the so-called Urban Folk Revival.
I started playing five string banjo at that time and
gave up a promising career in the world of business
to devote myself to banjo and women.
For the next ten years I did little but play the banjo
and guitar. In the late fifties and most of the sixties
I was a full time professional. I recorded for Riverside
Records in 1957 and 1958, producing two albums for
which I am mostly known, though I have done better
work. They are THE ART OF THE FIVE STRING BANJO
and TRAVELIN’ MAN. I think the best
music I have played on record is the album BANJO which
I did for Takoma in 1973. That LP consisted of nine
original compositions, no folk stuff. And I have produced
an album of my own songs, THE BEAST OF BILLY FAIER.
That was in 1964. there were only two numbers with
banjo on the BEAST because I wanted the messages
of the songs to be most important. I did more folk
and original music on BANJOS, BIRDSONG, AND MOTHER
EARTH, a cassette, with John Sebastian and Gilles
Malkine in the eighties. And I have recorded and performed
with many other folk singers though my main act was
always as a solo.
I have traveled all over the Western Hemisphere of
the Earth with my banjo on all levels from professional
concertizer to itinerant street musician. I live today
in Marathon, Texas where I run my website, billyfaier.com,
and try to sell CDs of my previously unavailable recordings
and tablature of my compositions.
