Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
The Focal Point started 30 years ago as a modest idea—“Let’s host some live folk music”—inside a modest music shop. It’s grown into an eclectic arts center with its own building, national touring musicians who love to stop by and audiences that know just how to listen
The hammered dulcimer is an instrument with a large number of strings stretched over a sounding board. As the strings are hit with mallets, the instrument produces a delightful ringing sound somewhat akin to that of a much tougher harpsichord. The name for this enduring instrument—versions of it have been played for perhaps 5,000 years—comes from the Latin and Greek words dulce and melos, which together mean “sweet tune.”
On an evening last November, that phrase was brought to life by Cathy Barton, who has been playing the dulcimer since the early 1970s. Onstage in the Focal Point, a cozy little building in Maplewood that hosts live music and other performances every week, she wore a beatific grin as she showed off the wide variety of traditional styles, from ragtime to Irish dance tunes, that she has transferred to the dulcimer’s strings.
Some 70 people, mostly middle-aged and older couples, were gathered to hear Barton and her husband, Dave Para, play folk music—a big term that encompasses basically everything that has been created by ordinary people without a commercial intention and anything else that has since been influenced by same. In addition to the dulcimer, Barton plays banjo and guitar, while Para plays various guitars and a mandolin. Both sing and harmonize beautifully. Whether performing songs written in the last 20 years or the last 150, Barton and Para are aware of the historical context of their music. As such, they are typical performers at Focal Point concerts, a place where time and tradition are not just lyrical concerns.
“There are a number of really nice places around the country like this,” Barton says, putting the Focal Point into the context of a touring musician’s world, “but a lot of them don’t last as long. I know it’s been in a lot of different places, but the fact that it has survived is somewhat unusual. This is a gem for the whole city of St. Louis, to know this kind of music is here. That’s something to celebrate.”
Over the years, there have been periodic revivals of interest in traditional music. In the early 1970s, St. Louis was a hotbed of folk music excitement. Norman Blake, then a virtually unknown beginner whose flat-picking guitar style would go on to be in high demand (by Alison Krauss, among others), performed at a 1971 Washington University concert that kick-started an entire generation of locals looking for the sounds and styles of the past. Shortly thereafter, listeners across the country followed along as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band released the platinum-selling Will the Circle Be Unbroken, on which they paid tribute to the legacy of American folk forms.
One St. Louis circle immersed in the folk tradition at the time was the Boyer family, whose musician-members had been playing music and attending concerts since the 1950s. “Bill Boyer was an installer of heating and air conditioning equipment,” explains Paul Stamler, who worked as Focal Point’s first manager. “He had a heart attack, and his doctor said he had to do something else. He and his wife, Janet, talked about it. For years they had had a dream of opening a store that would be about folk music. While he was still in the hospital, Janet and her four kids built Music Folk.”
They filled their Webster Groves store with acoustic, traditional instruments, from banjos to guitars to fiddles. (The store still stands on Big Bend, but under different ownership.) “I had been hanging out at Music Folk,” Stamler continues. “There was a continuous jam session going on every Saturday morning. All the music teachers would sit in the window, and it would be a 5-hour jam session.”
In the mid-1970s, just a few years into Music Folk’s life, the Boyers decided to pursue a second dream: to open a club where folk music could be played. As Janet recalled in a 20th-anniversary booklet for the organization, “We felt there was a need for a spot where local and traveling musicians on the coffeehouse circuit could perform in a warm friendly atmosphere to an audience of all ages.” Since Stamler was always in the store anyway and since he’d had experience managing a coffee shop, he was asked to be the manager of the Focal Point, as he chose to call it. He and a few volunteers set up in the building next door, armed with a roster of musicians they wanted to recruit to play. In spring 1976, the series officially opened with a lineup that included Bob Abrams and Steve Mote, Jim and Julie Olin, Southwinds and the Delmar Brothers. There was one snag, however, right out of the gate.
“We did something really stupid, and none of us realized it,” Stamler recalls. “We opened in the middle of April. Two months later, all the college students we were hoping to attract were gone, and everyone else was on vacation, and it was boiling hot. That summer, we came so close to closing and just giving it up and writing it off. Bill and Janet simply refused.”
While never much of a revenue-generator, the nonprofit Focal Point did survive, presenting traditional American music (from blues and jazz to ragtime and folk) three nights a week. “Parents were welcome to bring children, and small tykes often fell asleep on a beanbag chair or pew,” Janet recalled in her write-up.
Cathy Barton remembers her first performance there vividly. “I was in awe of the Boyer family, particularly Janet Boyer, who plays banjo, and her singing, which I wanted to emulate,” she says. “I wanted to make a good impression, because I knew they were coming to the concert. I walked up onstage, and there were some microphone cords there, so the first thing I did was trip and fall. It was an ugly fall, it was an ungraceful fall. That’s probably all you need to know, but it was about as bad as it could be. But it was my introduction. After that, everything was easy.”
Stamler decided to leave his role as manager in 1976, and a few years later, a woman named Roberta Hudlow—a nun who was studying in a convent—took the reins. Meanwhile, the oldest Boyer son was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident, and the family eventually had to sell the music store and the small shop next door. One of Hudlow’s strongest helpers during that time in the early 1980s was Judy Stein, who grew up in a housing project in East St. Louis, where she became enamored of folk music.
“I used to skip school, take my lunch money and buy a bus transfer to come over to St. Louis and go to the library,” she says. “There were all these
records. I found the Library of Congress recordings that had been done as a WPA project in the ’30s. I listened to all of them, straight through, one after the other. That was cool, cool stuff. Because of that, I sort of skipped things that everyone else was listening to. I didn’t find out about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones until later.”
Stein the assistant soon found herself charged with running the Focal Point when Hudlow made two big life decisions—leave the Focal Point, and leave the convent. “She had these two big cardboard boxes with concert records,” Stein recalls of the official changing of the guard. “She brought those over to my house and set them on my doorstep and said, ‘Here it is, do what you want with it.’”
Stein, who has been in charge of operations ever since, learned by doing. “I had no more notion how to give a concert, how to write a grant proposal,” she remembers. “It was really interesting there for a while. I was writing and printing the calendar, and finding halls to give concerts in, and hiring musicians, about which I knew nothing.”
With the lease at Music Folk gone when the Boyers left, Stein spent the next two decades finding new venues for Focal Point concerts. Over the years, shows have been held at the YMCA in Webster Groves, at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion in University City, at COCA, at the St. Louis Brewery and Tap Room and at a Webster antiques shop that is now home to a Racanelli’s Pizza joint.
Then came kismet. Stein had been hosting Family Reunion, a folk music radio show, on KDHX since the station came on the air back in 1987. Another long-time host, Jay Schober, of a show called The St. Louis Brain Sandwich, visited the antique-shop location just at the time the Focal Point needed to move again. “He looked around,” says Stein, “and said, ‘Wow, this is a cool old building. It looks like a building we just bought in Maplewood.’”
Schober turned out to be the perfect landlord, giving the Focal Point a 25-year lease in 2002 and helping remodel the room into a perfect small concert hall. What compelled him? “Because I love them,” he says simply. “And because I thought they’d be very good for the neighborhood, which they are. And I didn’t want them bouncing around anymore.”
Stein says that once they settled in, they made their home quickly. “We gutted the building and found it had a great hardwood floor,” she says. “We built the stage and soundproofed the room so it sounds perfect—or it sounds like we want it to sound, anyway.”
Stein’s husband, Eric, is responsible for the excellent sound system. Because of his expertise and the crack crew of sound technicians who work at the concerts, every note of every instrument, large and small, resonates precisely and clearly in the room.
With a permanent location in hand, the concept of the Focal Point has expanded to a place where many things happen. “There are more people than just me booking things now, and it has been wonderful,” she says. “Carol Koontz is now our business manager and building manager. Carol has found renters, people who can come in and do music concerts or other things. The Maya Café”—which Schober owns—“sponsors a few shows. Drum Headquarters comes in on Sundays. We’ve got dance groups who come in. Ellen Light has her songwriter’s series every Friday. And it all helps. From my point of view, that pays the rent for the people that I really want to hear. And I’m sure the others look at me that same way.”
As far as Stein’s approach to booking goes, it’s pretty straightforward: “I pick out my favorite people and invite them to St. Louis,” she says. “That’s what I do. That’s the fun part. Everybody else does what they want, and it seems to run pretty well.”
The music that has come to the Focal Point over the years has always been solid and often exhilarating. Stein’s personal taste has been responsible for some of the world’s most important folk musicians making regular stops in St. Louis—Martin Carthy, his wife, Norma Waterson, and their daughter Eliza Carthy; John Renbourn; the Battlefield Band; Norman and Nancy Blake; Chris Smither. The list goes on and on.
“We’re well known amongst American and foreign performers,” says Stein. “Partly because we have such a nice venue—and that’s luck—and partly because we go out of the way to treat them well. And we’ve trained an audience. The performers know whether it is two or 200, they’re going to have people there who know who they are and know what they’re doing. That sticks in musicians’ minds.”
Stamler, who still occasionally engineers sound at the club, says there are two things that make the Focal Point stand out from the pack of folk clubs around the United States. “The first is that the sound system is actually decent,” he says. “The second is that Focal Point audiences shut up. There is this rapt silence. People listen to the music. Over and over, I’ve heard performers tell me that they are not used to this. In most of the clubs they go to, people talk through their sets. They’ve gotten used to that, and it’s almost unnerving to have an audience actually listen to what you’re doing.”
Which brings us back to that wonderful performance by Cathy Barton and Dave Para in November. As these two singers harmonized for the umpteenth time under the Focal Point banner, it was easy to believe that traditional music will have a place here for a long, long time to come.
Generally, the Focal Point hosts open mics every Thursday and concerts every Friday and Saturday. Find upcoming schedules at thefocalpoint.org.
