PASSINGS – TRAVIS EDMONSON AND ROY BERKLEY
On May 9th, Travis Edmonson passed away following a lengthy battle with cancer.
Folk fans will remember Travis as part of the group “Bud & Travis”, a duo that recorded 8 albums on the Liberty Label between 1959 and 1965. Bud & Travis were known for their comedy as well as incorporating Latin songs in their repertoire – a folk genre that Edmonson fell in love with growing up in Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. Bud & Travis were not traditional folksingers, but entertainers who sang folk songs – and built a legion of fans before going their separate ways. Bud Dashiell passed away in 1989.
Travis began his career when Lou Gottlieb invited him to join the Gateway Singers in the early 1950’s. The group performed frequently at San Francisco’s Purple Onion nightclub, and it was there that Travis met one of his brother’s friends – Bud Dashiell.
hit its commercial stride, and Bud & Travis stood out among groups like the Kingston Trio and Limeliters. They performed all across the country including numerout television appearsnces during their years together. The voices of the duo blended beautifully, but the harmony did not exist offstage. Both men came from different backgrounds and idealogies, and the fighting became physical one night at Chicago’s Gate of Horn.
After Bud & Travis split up, Travis continued as a solo performer until he suffered a stroke in 1982. Travis recorded two classic albums of cowboy-folk songs: “The Liar’s Hour” and “Ten Thousand Goddamn Cattle”. Travis spent his later years in his beloved homestate of Arizona, where he passed away on May 9, 2009.
If you hung around Greenwich Village during the 1950’s and early 1960’s folk scene, you probably ran into Roy Berkeley. Roy was a good guitarist and vocalist, and in 1962 he formed the Old Reliable String Band with Tom Paley and Artie Rose. They recorded one album for Folkways. In his early days on the folk scene, Van Ronk called him “The Traveling Trotskyite Troubador” , but his prolitics would gradually change and he was known as a conservative Republican in his later years. There are reports that Roy was filmed for the Pete Seeger documentary and was highly critical of Seeger and his politics, but the footage was not used. Berekely wrote a songbook called “The Bosses’ Songbook” which was a satirical answer to the left-leaning classic “People’s Songbook”.
Berkeley passed away on April 29th at his home in Vermont.