Introduction

Dave Sear (born May 8, 1932) is a New York City-born American folk singer whose singing, 5-string banjo picking, radio career and political activism has spanned over 70 years. His career was inspired by his boyhood connections and inspiration with Woody Guthrie, the Almanac Singers and Pete Seeger, which led to his immersion into the great American folk song revival of the 1950s and 1960s.  He has performed all over North America including Alaska, led several folk singing groups, and performed solo in concert halls, night clubs, and just about everywhere, teaming with some of the greats of folk music including Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins and Jean Ritchie, and he collaborated with Oscar Brand in the infamous Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballad record series.

His personal style, ringing tenor voice, and driving banjo connected him deeply with audiences young and old throughout the USA and his radio shows on WNYC, especially The Folk Song Almanac (see External Links), became the gold standard for folk broadcasting. He had a radio career over 30 years in WNYC in New York City, playing his own music, interviewing important figures in folk music including Stan Rogers, Judy Collins and Pete Seeger, and presenting innovative combinations of music including folk music and baroque music. He has been a lifelong advocate for social justice and civil rights and has used his singing and music to further the cause. 

His early education at Black Mountain College led him to find great music in the rural south, but also to lead rural African Americans to pioneering literacy programs and voter registration in the 1940s.  He connected his large audiences to the beauty and social significance of American folk music, traditional and contemporary. 

His residency in the Berkshire mountains allowed him to organize a famous concert series in Spencertown NY, bringing the greatest of folk singers, including Pete Seeger and Stan Rogers, to a wonderful small concert hall. He has mentored many young performers and continues to do this today into his nineties.

Early Life, Education, and Activism

American folk singer Dave Sear was born on Mother’s Day, May 8, 1932 and lived in the Bronx as a child. His mother was Anna Alofsin Sear, daughter of immigrant parents, who spent her early childhood on a farm in Norwich CT, but later moved to New London where her mother became a peddler. She studied piano, was admitted to Smith College, graduated Phi Beta Kappa and taught at the Diller School of Music, Woodward and other prestigious schools in New York. Dave’s father was Isaac Sear, born of immigrant parents on the lower east side of New York City, where he was educated in music at settlement houses, and became a cellist, playing in New York City orchestras, including the NBC Symphony Orchestra, directed by Arturo Toscanini. 

Dave grew up immersed in music, listening to his father practicing and his mother giving piano lessons. This began his life-long love of music. A learning disability hampered his formal music education but did not prevent him from absorbing the music and learning by hearing and playing. His childhood schooling, first at the Walden School and then The Little Red School House infused him with folk music, including wonderful musicians including the Golden Gate Singers and, most importantly, the Almanac Singers, which included the seminal folk singers Woody Guthrie, Lee Hayes and Pete Seeger. He was taught at the LRSH and introduced to more folk music there by teachers Beatrice Landeck and Charity Baily, who later had a folk music radio program. The Almanac singers changed his life, and he joined a group of youngsters who surrounded and idolized Pete Seeger, who befriended Dave and became the influence on his further life and his pursuit of a career as a folk singer and activist.

Dave attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City and was already a part of the New York folk scene, attending the many hootenannies organized by Seeger and other folk musicians in New York. As a teenager, his counselor experience at summer camps in upstate New York and especially camp WoChiCa in New Jersey developed his banjo and folksinging skills. These camps had children of politically progressive families and were racially integrated, which was unusual for the 1940s. He also became aware of the new movement to bring folk music and songs of labor to working people and was at the founding meeting in 1945, where Pete Seeger and colleagues formed People’s Songs, and Sing Out. During High School Days, he was part of the Good Neighbor Chorus organized by Pete Seeger in New York City.

A momentous decision in 1949 took eighteen-year-old Dave to the rural South. As a teenager he was committed to folk music and he enrolled at Black Mountain College, a place where he could apply his creativity within its wide-ranging and very informal academic environment. He could travel to nearby towns and byways, finding churches where local African Americans sang true gospel music, but he could also see men in chain gangs and others working and straightening the railroad tracks as gandy-dancers, singing in time to their “dance” on the railroad bed, which leveled the ties.

A visit to a black church in Black Mountain NC, brought him in touch with the Daniels family, which sang beautiful gospel music, accompanied by piano. Pete Seeger had inspired Dave to find the “real” folk music of the south, and he was doing it! He soon befriended the Daniels family and was a regular visitor to their home. Young Betty Jean Daniels led a group called Betty Jean Daniels and the Gospel Stars. He was now hearing and seeing rural folk music in its native habitat and he brought this authentic music back to New York City to his early associates, including NYC folk music radio pioneer Oscar Brand.

His love of folk music led to a major step forward in social justice for blacks in rural North Carolina, aided by his affiliation with Black Mountain College. BMC linguistics professor Fiola Shepard was Dave’s advisor. Dave had befriended local African Americans in churches but also met Mr. Lawrence Daugherty, a local college-educated African American living and producing music in Swannanoa NC, which was near to Black Mountain. Dave teamed with Daugherty and the League of Women Voters in gathering a large number of local African Americans who had not been able to vote, owing to the local literacy laws, which had disenfranchised blacks in North Carolina since the demise of Reconstruction Days and the rise of Jim Crow. A North Carolina law passed in 1899 and installed in the state constitution in 1900 required blacks to pass a literacy test to qualify to vote, that was not required of whites. This law kept blacks from voting even up to the 1940s, and is still in the state constitution (but no longer enforced). Prof. Shepard agreed to organize a literacy course, which taught the local population, which in turn led to their passing of the local voting literacy test, and to voting. This was a major step forward, which was due to Dave Sear, Mr. Daugherty and Fiola Shepard’s efforts, under the benevolent environment at Black Mountain College. In effect, Dave Sear’s love for folk music led to a major advance in fundamental civil rights for African Americans. Afterwards, the gospel group was invited to perform at Black Mountain college, followed by a lunch where members of the gospel group spread out and socialized with BMC residents. Black Mountain College was therefore an early important force for African-American advancement of voting rights.

Early Music Career

Black Mountain was an important stop in Dave’s career, but less than two years later he was back in New York State, committed to a career in folk music. He sang with local folk singers including hootenannies, folk clubs in the West Village and became part of the folk scene. His performing career was launched at first with performing in the New York area, This included radio performances on Oscar Brand’s folk music show. Sear became a regular banjo and singing companion to Brand, who then collaborated on several record albums of the Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads series. Sear provided tenor voice and banjo accompaniment to add to the sound and the fun. Sear later collaborated with Brand and folksinger Jean Ritchie in a memorable 1959 Town Hall Concert, which was released as a record album (A Folk Concert in Town Hall, New York Folkways Records FA 2428). He performed with many in the Greenwich Village folk music scene, including Mary Travers, before she joined Peter, Paul and Mary.  At this time, Sear was approached by the National Organization Young Audiences to organize a tour of schools and other venues throughout the United States. Sear formed the American Folk Trio, which also included singer Sonja Savig and singer-guitarist Lee Kahn, who was eventually replaced by singer and folklorist Tony Salatan. The American Folk Trio transitioned from touring schools to tours of universities and concert halls throughout America.

Later Performing and Teaching

After the American Folk Trio tours, Sear returned to a life of performing in concerts in the New York area and teaching folk music, banjo and guitar to young and old, also focusing on his radio shows at WNYC. His banjo students included actor Paul Newman, who learned 5-string banjo playing in preparation for his film Cool Hand Luke. Sear sold an antique banjo to Newman after his teaching sessions.

Dave and Charlotte moved to Great Neck and Dave became active in town life, performing widely in venues like the Queens Museum and in outdoor summer concerts in Great Neck, Eisenhower Park and produced a record/tape album (1987) Dave Sear, Live. Dave and Charlotte Sear collaborated with folk music and paintings in the Sear Festival of the Arts, held at the Great Neck NY Library in 2016. For a number of years he was especially important in organizing a series of Folk music concerts in Steppingstone Park in Great Neck, New York. Concerts featured Sear, and other folk music stars such as Tom Paxton and Tom Chapin. He performed in his Spencertown Concert Series in Spencertown NY, alongside the great folk music stars of the United States and Canada. He was honored by a place in the Alaska Folk Festival at Fairbanks (1993), which was warmly reviewed in the Anchorage Daily News. He also became a U.S. cultural ambassador, performing for the State Department.

 Radio and Concert Master Career

Dave Sear was part of a tradition of radio broadcasters of Folk Music for New York’s premiere public radio station, WNYC. He started his career of nearly 40 (1959-1996) years at WNYC by collaborating with Henrietta Yurchenco in Adventures in Folk Music (year-year). He then took over with his own show, the Folk Music Almanac, which was followed for a few years by his unique Folk and Baroque, which featured alternating weeks of folk music performances and interviews and baroque music shows. But he then returned to his Folk Music Almanac format until 1996. The Dave Sear collection is available online (see afternote).His folk music shows featured interviews and recorded concerts of the greatest artists in folk music, including Guy and Candy Carawan, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Sonny Terry, Stan Rogers, Peter Shickele, Judy Collins, Rev. Gary Davis, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and many others. The Folk Music Almanac (see External Links) was broadcasted by WNYC, but also was syndicated through WAMU in Albany, and through other outlets in New England public radio.

He also conceived and organized an important folk music concert series for ten years in the 1970s at the Spencertown Academy in Spencertown, New York. Held in the fall, these concerts became well known as a center of excellence of folk performance and included artists such as Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger, Stan Rogers and, of course, Dave Sear himself. Dave’s daughter Bonnie Sear was sound and recording engineer for many of the concerts, which were often later broadcasted along with after-concert interviews on WNYC. His entire collection of 490 radio and concert tapes were contributed to the folk archives of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (see external links). He also became a noted music reviewer of concerts at Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts for Columbia-Greene Media (New York). He produced a record and tape, “Dave Sear Live” in 1987. Later in his career he fashioned special one-person concerts devoted to the musical lives of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Activism

Starting as a teenager, Dave Sear became an activist, supporting causes related to civil rights, world peace and candidates that represented his political point of view. This involved speaking and singing for candidates at rallies, ranging from Henry Wallace to Hillary Clinton, over many decades.

Personal Life and Family

Dave is married (25 December 1957) to Charlotte Levinton Sear (born 29 July 1930), daughter of Nathan and Lillian  Levinton, childhood in Bronx, B.A. from Brooklyn College, New York, M.A., Columbia University Teachers College. She went on to teach elementary school in Glen Cove NY for many decades, and then taught learning strategies at Long Island University.  Dave and Charlotte have one daughter, Bonnie Mann (born 27 February 1968) who is a speech pathologist, and a granddaughter Marissa (born 12 September 2000), who has gotten her Masters degree in Mathematics Education, but learned folk music from early childhood and has sung and played  with Dave Sear at many of his concerts.