I went to Passaic Valley Regional High School in Little Falls, New Jersey in the years 1956 to 1959. I loved Little Falls, as a town and as a state of mind, as soon as we moved there the summer before I was fifteen. We had lived in kind of congested and slummy neighborhoods in the Oranges, and suddenly it was countryish and quiet and there was a tree house in the back yard. There was a back yard, for God's sake. I was used to intense city living and everyone here seemed so relaxed and welcoming, especially after nine years of Catholic school.

I loved Little Falls and I still do. Oh do I ever. I go there often when I'm playing New Jersey dates, and I walk the streets so familiar to me from youth, and so different and new at the same time. It is a big emotional trip. People are going who's that guy? If Little Falls was Uma Thurman I'd be on trial right now.

Like anything you're moved to love for a long time it doesn't give you quick emotional return. I mean I don't feel particularly embraced by that town, it's not like I actually am up to speed on anyone who lives there anymore, except for Fred Hoonhout, who lived two doors from me, was in my class at PVHS, and still lives in the same house. Tho I haven't seen Fred much, I'm happy to say that I do hang out a lot with my best friend from PVHS, Dave Jeffreys, but that's usually down the shore, which is all right with me. It seems like everyone else I knew in Little Falls has moved away, or died, or both. Or they're avoiding emotionally unstable tourists.

So I don't know what it is I love, really, it's just the idea of Little Falls maybe and the way things seemed to me then in those lovely years 56 to 59. Stephen King said today on the radio that he didn't relate to people who had a good time in high school Oh man I gotta say I had a great time in high school, once I got outta Seton Hall.

Kingston Trio web site

This was a time when the Kingston Trio were getting very large. I had started to play the guitar to learn some Harry Belafonte calypso songs and I remember a classmate saying I heard something on the radio that sounds like you. It was "Tom Dooley" by the Kingstons, whose first album I heard at my friend Buzzy Swithers' house. Bob Shane sang lead on that tune, and that was the beginning of hearing some new and really great songs done in this hip, cool, mysterious and infectious style that the Kingston Trio had right from the start. I hadn't heard those songs before so the Trio, along with Belafonte, embodied the romance of folk music for me. Well, acoustic music with guitars. And they harmonized like buttah, innately musical guys. I got crazy about them, learned every song. Had I known about the Weavers and Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie I would have heard a lot of those songs before, but I went directly from Elvis and doowop to Belafonte and the Kingston Trio. The Trio went down awful easy and I loved what they did with guitars and harmonies. I'd never heard sixths before, or Pete Seeger style banjo, or minor ninths, or "Santy Anno".

I knew I couldn't be Belafonte, he was so singular...it was like wanting to be Piaf or Brando or Elvis, kind of out of the question; but I wanted to be theTrio, that seemed almost possible. That was their gift, they were like college kids and they didn't play rock and roll and they were still cool. And they were the Little Falls soundtrack for me for those happiest of years. And Shane's voice, man: "Scotch and Soda", "They Call The Wind Mariah", the first and best recording of "It Was A Very Good Year". Bob Shane had the perfect voice. Hip, cool, and mysterious. You heard that voice and it was all over. So I know this is getting to be a long story but there's a point...I have used my lovely life in Little Falls to fuel and construct a fair amount of songs. One of those constructions started out to be about Fred Hoonhout and my sister Margaret, who dated for a nanosecond in high school. The song went where it wanted to go and it became "The Dutchman" which is probably my most well known song.

Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio has recorded "The Dutchman" on his very first ever solo CD and it's coming out momentarily and I've heard it and he does it so good, it makes me cry. It is the definitive recording of "The Dutchman" as far as I'm concerned, and "The Dutchman" is a Kingston Trio song at last, fifty years after I first heard the Trio at Buzzy Swithers' house. I am so happy and grateful for this and some of these days when I'm walkin the streets of Little Falls with Bob Shane's recording on headphones I'll drop a copy off at Fred's and when I go past the Swithers' house I'll wave to Buzzy, though Buzzy's been gone for quite a while.