Richard Dyer-Bennett

Singer/songwriter Richard Dyer-Bennet was among the leading performers of the folk music renaissance of the early '40s; a classically-trained talent with a pitch-perfect, high lyric tenor, he was also an uncompromising proponent of creative rights, even founding his own highly-influential independent record label. Born October 6, 1913 in Leicester, England, Dyer-Bennet and his family soon moved to British Columbia, finally settling in Berkeley, California in 1923. Influenced by recordings of Caruso and McCormack, at the age of 13 he joined a local children's choir, essaying the role of Hansel in Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel; while in Germany between 1929 and 1931, he also taught himself to play guitar. His German experiences also proved highly influential on Dyer-Bennet's folk career by awakening his political awareness, and his horrified reactions to the emerging Nazi movement left a profound effect on his worldview. While studying English at the University of California, Berkeley, Dyer-Bennet began studying voice, later travelling to Sweden to meet the famed minstrel Sven Scholander, who became his mentor. Scholander gave Dyer-Bennet 100 songs from his own repertoire, complete with lute accompaniments; he soon left Sweden to return to the U.S., briefly stopping in South Wales to perform for out-of-work area miners. Their response was so encouraging that Dyer-Bennet quit school to focus on music full-time, singing whenever the opportunity arose and slowly adding material to his repertoire. All told, he learned over 600 songs over the course of his lifetime, an eclectic catalog including English sea chanties, spirituals, cowboy songs, French love ballads, American and European folk songs dating as far back as the 13th century, and more than 100 of his own...