Sue Draheim

Sue Draheim (August 17, 1949 – April 11, 2013) was an American fiddler, boasting a more than forty year musical career in the US and the UK.

Growing up in North Oakland, Draheim began her first private violin lessons at age eleven, having started public school violin instruction at age eight while attending North Oakland's Peralta Elementary School.

In the late 1960s, Draheim moved to a North Oakland house well known in the Bay Area music community and called simply "Colby Street".

This move proved to be a decisive one in terms of her musical career as it was where she changed from a "violinist" into a "fiddler".

She also attended Claremont Jr. High, and graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1967.

Originally trained as a classical violinist, Draheim became involved in many other genres and recorded albums with groups representing Cajun, Old Time, country, Zydeco, folk jazz, Irish and British folk music.

Early on in her career, Celtic fiddle became Draheim's major focus.

While Draheim was primarily a fiddler, she never lost touch with her classical training, and was a member of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic as well as UC Berkeley's University Chamber Chorus; Draheim, along with fiddler Kerry Parker, also "augmented" the harp trio "Trillium".

She also played in the US premiere of Frank Zappa's experimental orchestral piece A Zappa Affair.

She was described by Gael Alcock, cellist/composer with whom she performed one of Alcock's pieces, as "fiddler extraordinaire".

Draheim quickly got involved in American mountain string band music, forming a group called the "Diesel Duck Revue" in 1967 with Mac Benford, Hank Bradley, Sue Rosenberg, and Rick Shubb, performing with them at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage in 1968.

At about the same time she started playing with a Colby Street group that, when she performed with them at the Sky River Rock Festival (Tenino, Washington in 1968 and 1969), called themselves "Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band and Medicine Show".

Performing with the band, her photograph appeared on the poster for the 1968 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Draheim and Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band also appeared at the 1969 Third Annual San Diego State Folk Festival; links to recordings of their performance there are provided on folkartsrarerecords.com's website.

In writing her short biography in 1970 to accompany the album notes for Berkeley Farms, Draheim gives us some background on that transition:

The band consisted of Sue Draheim, Jim Bamford, Mac Benford, and Will Spires and owed its name to their manager and sound man Earl Crabb (aka "The Great Humbead"); by the time Mike Seeger arranged for them to be recorded for the Folkways Berkeley Farms album in 1970, they'd shortened the charming but cumbersome name to simply "The New Tranquility String Band".

Colby Street housed other groups as well, one of them being the "Golden Toad", featuring mandolinist and guitarist Will Spires; she joined them for the summer solstice concert at Grace Cathedral in 1970.

In 1970, Joe Cooley, Irish button accordion player who was living in San Francisco at the time, visited the Colby Street house and that was the beginning of Draheim's lifelong attachment to Irish music.

She and others joined Cooley to perform Saturday nights at San Francisco's long-standing Irish pub, the Harrington Bar, making up the band which they called "Gráinneog Céilidh."

Years later, Draheim's command of the Irish folk music idiom as well as her versatility in other genres would prompt one fan to comment: "And that is a very apt illustration of the point: Sue Draheim, a classically-trained violinist who has been mistaken for a real-deal Sligo fiddler who nowadays has a chair in a San Francisco symphony orchestra as well as playing in old timey bands".

In 1970 Draheim also got involved with several musicians at what was known as Sweets Mill Music Camp, about 200 miles east of Oakland on the edge of the Sierra National Forest.

From late 1970 to early 1977 Draheim lived in England, where her talents as a fiddler soon became so well recognized that Austrian music journalist Richard Schuberth counted her among the "crème de la crème of the English folk-rock scene".

She brought with her a background of US genres of folk music which blended well with the British folk-rock scene.

In one case at least, her influence on the British music scene rebounded to have an effect on the US music scene: American guitarist and author of several instructional manuals Duck Baker wrote that he had learned the Peacock Rag from John Renbourn "who would have gotten it from Sue Draheim".

Draheim had begun her association with John Renbourn in 1971, and joined the John Renbourn Group, cutting the album Faro Annie with John Renbourn, Keshav Sathe, and Jacqui McShee in 1972.

Impressed by Draheim's old West Clare style which she'd learned from Joe Cooley, John Renbourn observed: "I found out more about Irish music from Sue than I could ever have imagined."

That same year she also performed on Henry the Human Fly, an album by songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson.

1972 was a busy year for her as she and John Renbourn worked together with Wizz Jones to produce Wizz's album Right Now, in addition to recording albums with Scottish folksinger Marc Ellington.

In 1972, Draheim debuted live with the then unknown Albion Country Band.

The band (sometimes known as Albion Mk 1, and described by Spanish film and music critic Antonio Méndez as being "traditional British folk with an electric infusion"), appeared on John Peel's BBC Radio 1 program called "Peel Sessions" which introduced up-and-coming musicians.

In June 1972 Draheim and the Albion Country Band also recorded and had broadcast a piece (Four Hand Reel/St. Anne's Reel) for the BBC radio show called Top Gear, which also featured contemporary musicians; the recording was later released in 1994 on Ashley Hutchings's compilation The Guv'nor vol 1.

Not confining herself to the folk rock genre, she recorded the album Solid Air in 1973 with John Martyn, who has been described as blurring "...the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues".

When Draheim worked briefly in 1973-1974 with Albion's incarnation as the Albion Country Band which included Steve Ashley, they backed up Ashley on his first album Stroll On, which Folk Review named "Contemporary Folk Album of the Year" in 1974.

Just before leaving the UK to return to the US in 1977, Draheim recorded again with John Renbourn to produce the album A Maid in Bedlam.

In late 1977 she returned to Oakland where she joined the all-women group Any Old Time String Band and recorded two albums with them, Any Old Time String Band and Ladies Choice.

Two tracks on The Guv'nor vol 2 released in 1995 are from that same 1972 broadcast.

Also in Albion at this time was Steve Ashley, who later referred to Draheim as "the great American fiddle player".

(For a photo of Draheim with the Albion Country Band, see The Peel Sessions: The Albion Band).

Both albums were re-released in 1996 by Arhoolie on a single CD titled "I Bid You Goodnight".

It was there that she played with legendary Delta blues guitarist Sam Chatmon in a group called the "California Sheiks" (named after Chatmon's back-home group, the "Mississippi Sheiks". Some recordings of Draheim and Chatmon from that period are known to have survived: one, a 7-inch mono tape reel holding eighteen songs and labelled "Box 3, Item 2007.04sdff070" in the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive (which misspelled her name as "Drahiem"), and the other, one song (which is not found in UCLA's collection) which was released in CD form in 1999 as part of a Sam Chatmon retrospective.