BAF – Bluegrass in Boston before the BBU

BBU, however, was not the first organized community group to present bluegrass in the area. That honor perhaps rests with the Boston Area Friends of Bluegrass and Old-Time Country Music, often referred to by its initials as well – BAF. A look at that history seems in order before turning to BBU.

Boston Area Friends was started by Nancy Talbott and Fred Bartenstein. The two met in Cambridge, after Fred had arrived in September 1969 as a freshman at Harvard “driving my red VW squareback straight from the first Camp Springs Bluegrass Festival in North Carolina (I’d been in Camp Springs since July), stopping off at my parents’ house in north central New Jersey.” ¹

Fred had come to know and love bluegrass as a young child while visiting family in Virginia. Fiddler Tex Logan, who lived about five miles from his family’s home in New Jersey, became an inspiration and a mentor. Tex had lived for roughly 10 years in the Boston area, playing with the Lilly Brothers at the Hillbilly Ranch while getting both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at MIT (1946-1956). He later received his doctorate at Columbia and worked for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Fred recalled, “I’d jammed with him numerous times and traveled with him (before I was old enough to drive) to the Carter Stanley Memorial concert in Maryland and either the first or second festival at Bean Blossom. Tex had filled my head full of stories about the Lilly Brothers, Don Stover, and Joe Val.” That helped convince Fred to pursue an application to Harvard, after a stretch “moonlighting as a bluegrass DJ in Dover, New Jersey, and playing with Frank Wakefield and Joe Isaacs in NYC.” Fred played guitar.

When he arrived, he looked for a bluegrass community. “I joined the Saturday morning crew at WHRB’s Hillbilly at Harvard, visited the Old Joe Clark House, and regularly visited the Hillbilly Ranch. Somebody told me that Nancy [Talbott] was interested in bluegrass music and I went to see her. At that first meeting we cooked up Boston Area Friends (I borrowed the name from NYC’s Friends of Old-Time Music).” ²

Nancy Talbott worked for a professor in the Social Relations Department at Harvard. Fred thinks it may have been one of the hosts at the Hillbilly at Harvard radio show – Brian “Uncle Sinc” Sinclair – who first told him about Nancy, that very autumn of 1969. Fred visited her at the university office. “I was told that Nancy had ideas about promoting bluegrass events in Cambridge but had not executed any of them. With my experience working with Carlton Haney (starting in 1967) and contacts with the Southern bluegrass bands, we decided to team up. From almost the outset, we booked in conjunction with Doug Benson’s Toronto Area Bluegrass Committee and Loy Beaver, Dave Freeman, and Rob Fleder in the New York metro.”

Nancy had not grown up in the South, but in Baltimore as Nancy Perryclear. When she was 16 – in 1956 – friend Pete Huey took her to New River Ranch, a park in Pennsylvania on the border with Maryland. There she heard bluegrass for the first time. “It was an incredible crowd, farmers, truck drivers, college kids, a lot of Amish folks from Pennsylvania. I was 16 and I’d been totally sheltered, servants and nannies, boarding school up in Northampton [Massachusetts] and the whole thing, and when this friend took me there I was amazed. But what really hit me, I mean devastated me, was the banjo. I’d never seen one, and as soon as I heard it, I fell totally in love with the sound. The Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys were there that day. Mike Seeger, Reno and Smiley’s band, and people picking everywhere. That was it. I mean it. I was hooked for life.” ³

Nancy’s younger sister Barbara provided some of the family’s background. “Mother was raised in Northampton and was the dominant cultural influence. She comes from New England stock and eventually we all ended up here, except one brother. Our father was a southerner, and a strong influence—maybe that is where the bluegrass affinity has its origins. Everyone loved music that could be sung.” ⁴

Their father was a manufacturer’s representative for a furniture company. “My mother stayed at home, but later in life she became a secretary for…I don’t know, was it the Audubon Society? She developed the bluebird box program out of Maryland [North American Bluebird Society.] She became a birder from that point on.”

Nancy learned to play guitar and banjo, sang some, and married Bob Talbott. In her sister’s words, Bob was “a tall, handsome, pipe-smoking banjo player and best friend of Pete Huey. They played music and loved classic old cars, and they lived somewhere outside of Baltimore. Nan learned to play guitar and played and sang with them. She must have met Pete when she was a student at Roland Park Country School. I don’t think they did any gigs, but there was a coffeehouse in Baltimore where they played and hung out a lot. She really had an early interest.” 

After college, Bar (as Nancy’s seven-year-younger sister was known in bluegrass circles) came to Cambridge to work at Massachusetts General Hospital as a psychological research assistant. She was the first one to move to the Boston area. Bar herself later took up banjo.

Nancy took night courses at Johns Hopkins, but her marriage failed after around five years, and she moved to the Boston area, enrolling at Harvard Extension School and finding some work as a research analyst in Psychology. Nancy reminisced, “When I first came here and said the word bluegrass, a lot of people thought I was talking about a new kind of pot.” She ventured on her own to the Hillbilly Ranch near the Trailways bus station in downtown Boston and came to know Don Stover fairly well over a period of a few months, as well as others like Jim Rooney and Bill Keith and people like Sinc from Hillbilly at Harvard. And soon Fred Bartenstein came by, and Boston Area Friends was born.⁶

Footnotes –

1. Email to Bill Nowlin on February 25, 2025. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations attributed to Fred Bartenstein come from this email. 
2. Fred Bartenstein email, April 23, 2024.
3. Jeff McLaughlin, “Bluegrass changed Nancy Talbott’s life,” Boston Globe, December 8 ,1982: 45.
4. Email from Barbara Perryclear on March 3, 2025. Nancy Perryclear’s photo can be seen in the 1956 Northampton School for Girls yearbook. A graduating student – Stevie Ratner – “bequeathed her “Benzedrine to Nancy Perryclera, woo haggard body denotes an unfinished course theme.” https://issuu.com/williston/docs/nsfg_1956_yearbook, page 28. Nancy was “envied for” her “ability to talk.” (p. 35)
5. Steve Morse, “Nancy Talbott sowed bluegrass in Boston,” Boston Globe, September 14, 1976: 21. The article features a photograph of Nancy doing her early Saturday morning radio show on WNTN.
6. “I would run the food room at the concerts. Eventually, I got to playing the banjo. I took lessons from Dan Marcus. For her festival I was involved. I went back to school to get my MSW and I ran a hamburger and hot dog stand at her festivals to make money for that.” Interview with Barbara Perryclear on March 2, 2025. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations attributed to her come from this interview. Bar works in Massachusetts as a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW).