July 4, 1977 Folk Transplant

NYC to Portland arrival, July 4, 1977, I pulled my red Impala convertible into Portland right across from the Franz Bakery. The air was full of the smell of warm bread fresh out of the oven. Home. My first trip across the river two weeks later was to Artichoke Music. I needed strings for my little Martin 00-21 NY guitar and hammers for my hammered dulcimer had been lost in the move west. I looked in the phone book (!) and called Portland Music to ask if they had hammers to which the voice on the other end replied, “Oh, you’ve got to go to Artichoke Music for that!” and that, as they say, was that. Back to the phone book, I looked up where to find it on NW 21st and Irving, got in the car and drove over the river. Part of me never came back. The tiny shop smacked of greenwich village and Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in a tiny space stuffed with stringed instruments from everywhere. Home run.

Everything about Portland was new to me but this little place had a familiar feel and I was glad to have found it. The quiet man behind the counter sold me strings and a pair of hammers from a kit, plain blanks (not the fancy hammers I had lost). I was a little disappointed but that was all he had that day, he was willing to part with them, and I had come all that way, so I bought them as a gesture of gratitude, a souvenir of my first encounter with a true folk music shop in Portland thousands of miles from MacDougal Street. My first Artichoke Musifc purchase. Little did I know that those blank hammers would still sit, stir-ready in a jar on my kitchen counter almost fifty years later. I never did learn how to play the hammered dulcimer, and sold it in a yard sale but those blank wooden hammers are still here, stirring daily.