Larry Hanks
Larry Hanks is a Berkeley, California, folk singer known for his deep bass voice, spare guitar accompaniments and Jew’s harp playing, and for “Apple Picker’s Reel,” a song he wrote while picking apples in Sebastopol. His repertoire runs to cowboy and work songs, ballads and topical songs, and by 2019 he was touring the United States, Britain and Europe with his wife and musical partner, Deborah Robins.
Hanks was born in 1939 and has lived in Berkeley since he was six. His mother played piano, he sang in a church choir and played ukulele, drums and piano as a boy, and folk music reached him in college, where he learned guitar and sought out the records of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Oscar Brand and Pete Seeger. In the mid-1950s he began performing on the KPFA radio program Midnight Special, which many Berkeley musicians played on while still in high school, and he went on to sing at rallies and benefits. He got his first guitar in 1958. Returning from Europe in 1961 he moved to San Francisco and played coffeehouses, and in 1964 he performed with Roger Perkins. From 1965 he was involved with the San Francisco Folk Music Club, and from 1967 he worked at Lundberg’s music store, played the Freight and Salvage regularly and went to the Fox Hollow festival. He learned “White Cockade” from Kenny Hall.
In 1972 Folkways issued Berkeley Farms: Oldtime and Country Style Music of Berkeley, compiled by Mike Seeger, on which Hanks sings and plays guitar on “Apple Picker’s Reel,” plays Jew’s harp with Ron Tinkler on “Sally Goodin,” plays mandolin with the dulcimer player Holly Tannen on “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” and plays Jew’s harp with the New Tranquility String Band on “Sally in the Garden” and in a three-harp “White Cockade.” That summer he set off with other Bay Area musicians in a converted school bus as the Portable Folk Festival. “Apple Picker’s Reel” was later anthologized in the songbook Rise Up Singing and other folk collections. In 1977 he sang bass in the quartet behind Jody Stecher on Stecher’s Bay album Going Up on the Mountain, recorded at Bay Records in Alameda with John Herald on tenor and Frank Sokolow on baritone, on songs such as “Golden Vanity,” “Way Downtown,” “Don’t You Hear Jerusalem Moan” and “The Hills of Isle au Haut.” He also sang on recordings by John Herald, and he made a solo album in 1982.
Over his career he has performed with musicians including Gordon Bok, Utah Phillips, Michael Cooney, Geoff Muldaur, Malvina Reynolds, Kenny Hall and Mike Seeger, and his influences include Sam Hinton and Lead Belly as well as Guthrie. After a long break from performing he returned to touring and recording with Deborah Robins, who sings lead and harmony and plays guitar. Their first duo album, No Hiding Place (2010), mixes traditional songs with Jimmie Rodgers and Stephen Foster songs, a Utah Phillips song and the 1950s hit “Green Door”; it was followed by Old Days and The Wheel of Time, produced by Steven Strauss. In March 2019 the Seattle Folklore Society presented the duo in concert as “American Songsters.”
