Hootenanny Under Fire

We will sing it loud and strong, so everyone will know

That the road to freedom is a long way to go.

-- Road to Freedom by John Stewart The words rang with new meaning in the chill night air, and the two folk singers were understandably a little anxious. On either side of the makeshift stage, grim-faced soldiers stood guard with burp guns at the ready while a barrage of flares, tracer bullets and phosphorous shells exploded and flashed eerily in the distance. But the singers sang out lustily. The audience, Vietnamese troops with rifles cradled in their arms, listened intently to their next song, Raghupati, one of Mahatma Gandhi's favorite hymns.

On the first leg of a four-month, State-Department-sponsored tour of the Far East and Africa, Folk Singers Steve Addiss, 29, and Bill Crofut, 30, have spent the last month hopscotching around the outlying villages in war-torn Viet Nam. Armed with a banjo, two guitars, a flute, a French horn and a 16-string Vietnamese zither called a dan tranh, they sang in schools and hospitals, in the streets and rice fields. They sang American, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Cambodian folk songs, often to a thumping chorus of artillery and mortar fire, slept on wooden planks, hitchhiked rides on Air Force planes.

Sing Along with Gongs. In villages threatened by the advancing Viet Cong, Addiss and Crofut had to sing to a constantly shifting audience, a kind of music to flee by. The duo played in the imperial city of Hue and raised $1,400 for the nearly 1,000,000 homeless flood victims. In one remote mountain vil lage, their performance ended up in a woolly hootenanny with the loinclothed montagnard tribesmen chanting and playing along on gongs and flute. Faced by antagonistic students ready to argue politics, Addiss and Crofut always retreated to song. "As soon as they realized that all we were selling was music," explains Addiss, "they sang along with us and stayed up half the night teaching us their songs."

Addiss and Crofut, former classmates at Vermont's Putney prep school, teamed up in 1960 and spent one entire year on a State Department tour of Africa and the Far East "getting to the little villages where the big orchestras and ballet companies can't go." Surviving "the unspeakable pangs of dysentery," they traveled by Jeep, elephant, water buffalo, dugout canoe and bamboo raft, performed before a collective audience of half a million persons and collected hundreds of native songs and instruments.

Chinese Legs. The experience has made them true international troubadors. Their repertory of songs is staggering. They sing in 27 different languages, including Batak, Luo, Amharic and Kis-si, and play such native instruments as the Indonesian angklung and the Chinese ch'eng. The neck of Crofut's banjo is fashioned from a leg from a Chinese table, while the frets are made out of toy railroad tracks from Korea.

Crofut, a lanky and engaging native of Cleveland, was trained as a French horn player, and has a music degree from Allegheny College. His wife and nine-month-old daughter are traveling with him on the tour. Bachelor Addiss, a dark and more intense counterpart to Crofut, studied composition at Harvard under Composer Walter Piston, has written one opera and is at work on a second. Born in New York City, he was teaching at Mannes College of Music and editing a music magazine when he decided to strike out with Crofut.

Their mission, says Addiss, is not to propagandize but simply "to show through music that people are the same the world over, sharing the same yearnings and problems. We don't want to be lecturers; we want to be alive and fun." This week Addiss and Crofut were moving on to carry their message to Malaysia, with Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Kenya still to go.

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