Oberlin Folk Music and the Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse Collection

Oberlin College Folk Music Club

The club was originally organized as the Oberlin Folk Song Club in 1957, with Joe Hickerson ’57 as its first president. The idea for the formation of the club was sparked by the performance at Oberlin College by Pete Seeger in 1954. Hickerson organized or co-organized subsequent Seeger performances at Oberlin in 1955 and 1956. After the 1956 performances, Hickerson led a “folksing” with Seeger at a college house (Grey Gables Co-op), recorded and simultaneously aired by the student-operated college radio station, WOBC-FM. Hickerson had his own folk music show on the radio station. He co-directed the first Annual Oberlin Folk Festival in May, 1957.

Charted later as a student organization under the name Oberlin College Folk Music Club, it continued to present folk artists in concert and promoted other folk music activities on campus. The club was open to Oberlin community members, but at least half of the membership had to be made up of Oberlin students. An article of the charter states that “in the event of the disbanding of the OCFMC, the tape collection will be donated to the Ethnomusicology Department of the Conservatory.” This is the only mention in the charter of tape recordings of folk music performances and events, and their ultimate disposition. It is unclear how long the radio station taped the club’s events, or when the college established a policy for recording the club’s performances by another college entity. In recent decades the college recording office, Concert Sound, made recordings of all college events. In a project spearheaded by the Ethnomusicology Department and the Folk Music Club, Concert Sound digitized earlier folk music and other performance recordings on older analog media.

The Folk Music Club continued to be active, and still is today. Many club members were and still are folk musicians; Joe Hickerson’s group of eight Oberlin student musicians, The Folksmiths, made a recording on the Smithsonian Folkways Records label in 1957, the summer after Hickerson’s graduation. Regular club reunions are held, usually at college commencement time when alumni reunions are an important part of the celebrations. In the fall of 2004, the first Oberlin Alumni Folk Music Conference took place over a three-day weekend, featuring lectures, participatory singing, concerts, banjo and other workshops, open mics and informal jam sessions, and contra dance. The conference was supported by campus committees and departments, and the Alumni Association.

In 2007 Professor of Ethnomusicology Roderic Knight approached Deborah Campana, Director of the Conservatory Library, about an offer by Tom Reid (OC ’80), Associate Director of the Student Union, of a collection of 208 compact discs, featuring live performances by students and visiting artists held at The Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse from February 2000 to May 2007. The Conservatory Library cataloged and provides access onsite these discs, as well as recordings ranging from 2007-2015. The Archives holds unique CD-ROMs of recordings taken from 1984-2018. See Cat in the Cream Recordings in OBIS for access to materials from 2000-20015. Items marked as unique to the Archives may be accessed at the Archives reading room in the Terrell Main Library.

Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse

A student-run coffeehouse at Oberlin College opened on April 9, 1976 in the basement of Bosworth Hall under Fairchild Chapel. By September this was called “Cat in the Cream.” In 1980 the coffeehouse and free admission performance venue moved to the old game room in Hales Memorial Gym (former women’s gym), which offered more space, wood floors and a wall of mirrors. That year the student organization became independent of the Student Finance Committee. Performances at the Cat in the Cream include folk music, jazz, poetry readings, improv and sketch comedy, theater, dance, storytelling, and End-of-semester performances by [url=vhttp://www.oberlinsteelpan.com/]Oberlin Steel[/url] and the Dead Hear Footsteps radio program. The venue seats 325 persons.

In September 2017, Campana accepted Reid’s offer of a much larger collection of 693 CDs that he produced and stored in the Student Union. The collection consisted of digitized recordings from reel-to-reel tapes dating from the 1950s, ranging from Pete Seeger concerts in the 1950s up through the 2018 Oberlin Spring Folkfest. The recordings were received by the Conservatory Library as the “Oberlin College Folk Music Archive” in seventeen binders of CDs, with identifiers OFCD0001-OFCD0695 and an accompanying inventory spreadsheet with what is known about performer names, dates, and locations. Again, the Conservatory Library cataloged this collection and provides access. See the Oberlin Folk Music Archive OBIS catalog record for access.

Sources

“Cat Finds a New Home in Hales” by Owen Jones, Oberlin Review, 9/16/1980. Cat in the Cream website, accessed 1/26/2023.

Joe Hickerson Papers (RG 30/453): Biographical Sketch

Student Life: Musical and Dramatic Organizations (RG 19/3/3), Series 6.: Oberlin Folk Song Club/Folk Music Club.

Note written by Anne Cuyler Salsich.