Jack Landron - Jackie Washington

Jackie Washington

Born Juan Candido Washington y Landrón on June 2, 1938, in Puerto Rico, he grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Roxbury. He studied at Emerson College as a Theater Arts major. As part of the Cambridge/Boston folk music scene in the early and mid-1960s, he released four albums on Vanguard—Jackie Washington (1962), Jackie Washington/2 (1963), Jackie Washington at Club 47 (1965), and Morning Song (1967); this last LP consisted entirely of original compositions and was his first with a band. The live album, Jackie Washington at Club 47, featuring a cover collage by Eric Von Schmidt, is most representative of his act as he had a lot to say between numbers—not only setting up the contexts of the songs but also relating personal anecdotes; indeed, he could easily have worked as a stand-up comedian, and he fully appreciated the early records of Bill Cosby. Vanguard, however, tried to groom him as a male counterpart to Joan Baez.

Coming home in the wee hours of 3 Dec 1962 Washington was set upon by the Boston Police resulting in a cause célèbre exposing racist police brutality. In the summer of 1964 he participated in Freedom Schools conducted in the South, and three of his performances from his live album are included in the double-CD anthology Freedom Is A Constant Struggle (Songs of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement) (1994). At one point he was Dr. Martin Luther King's personal assistant in Mississippi. "Esta Navidad" from his first album is included in the 1995 Vanguard compilation A Folksinger's Christmas.

His version of the traditional English nonsense song "Nottamun Town" Nottamun town was the tune and arrangement used by Bob Dylan as the basis for "Masters of War", . Washington's role in the song's transmission is acknowledged in Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010 (Public Affairs, 2010, p. 410). Washington taught Joan Baez "There But For Fortune" by Phil Ochs, which provided Baez with her first appearance on the singles chart. (You can tell she learned it from him because he had made a lyric change; where Ochs had written "whose face is growing pale", Jackie, being black, had substituted "whose life has grown stale"—which is how Baez sings it.)

Originally managed by Manny Greenhill, Joan Baez's manager, Washington later did his own bookings.

On 25 July 1968 Jackie was master of ceremonies for a political rally supporting anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy held at the Red Sox' Fenway Park.

As the first performer to headline the Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1960, Jackie was invited back 22 January 2010 to perform as part of an ongoing celebration of the club's 5oth anniversary, with Bill Staines as the opening act.