Folk Music Center in Tune with Claremont
By Tiana Doht and Misha Chellam
Staff Writers

It started with a man repairing his wife’s instruments in a small home workshop and has become a community hallmark of worldwide renown. It has been visited by the likes of Joan Baez and Reverend Gary Davis and has spawned national talents Tom Freund and Ben Harper. Walking by its modest storefront at 220 Yale Avenue in Claremont, California, you would never guess the history and import of the Folk Music Center.

The Folk Music Center is a musician’s Mecca among the boutiques and restaurants of the Village in downtown Claremont. Its unique blend of store and museum create a laid-back atmosphere, offering unusual, hands-on accessibility to many of its instruments from around the world. Although its rare and valuable collection draws music lovers from far and wide, the Center remains deeply entrenched in local life.

Ellen Chase-Verdries runs the store, founded by her parents, Charles and Dorothy Chase, and now owned by her son, Ben Harper. Growing up in a house that was, “filled with so many instruments that you couldn’t find a place to sit,” Chase-Verdries always thought of music-making as a collaborative process.

She gives her talk while surrounded by hundreds of instruments, making it easy to see how the Folk Music Center promotes the sharing of music. She describes the Center’s essential ideology as one that emphasizes music’s universal attraction. “Everyone is musical. We are born in rhythm. We walk in rhythm: one-two, one-two. The beginning of consciousness is the sound of a mother’s heartbeat,” said Chase-Verdries.

This attitude, grounded in her upbringing, has manifested itself in the store’s unusual policy of allowing hands-on interaction with the even the most rare and expensive instruments. Where else can a fourteen-year-old boy play a $3000 Martin guitar? While most of the museum artifacts are displayed on high shelves, a few are interspersed with instruments for sale and are accessible to visitors. Among the impressive array of authentic Western folk instruments are slide guitars, banjos, ukuleles, and dulcimers. World instruments ranging from Greek bazookis to Chinese yeh chins offer a glimpse of the music of different cultures from around the globe.

The store’s collection of diverse instrumental artifacts was accumulated over a number of years and has roots in the founding of the store. The Chases were forced to leave New England after being blacklisted by McCarthyites due to Charles’s former affiliation with the Communist Party. When they settled in Claremont, they started a music café called the Golden Ring, which essentially animated the folk scene in the area. In 1970 they opened the Folk Music Center after five years of running the café. In the meantime they had created credibility as serious supporters of folk music and began to host national musicians as they toured through the Los Angeles area. These musicians told their friends about the Chases, and soon visitors would come bearing instruments from foreign lands. Despite the museum’s international flavor, its founders were not big travelers themselves and relied on these donations as well as chance discoveries at thrift and antique shops.

The Center established roots in the community from the beginning, offering musical lessons with Dorothy and instrument repair instruction with Charles. The Folk Music Center Museum was officially opened in 1976 as a non-profit educational and cultural cooperation (according to the Center’s website). Its involvement in the local community has increased through Open Mic Nights on the fourth Sunday of every month, in-store shows performed by folk artists from around the world, weekly tours of the museum for local schools and organizations, and annual events such as the Claremont Spring Folk Festival and Village Venture.

Over the years the Center’s repair shop, located in the back of the store, has become known internationally among musicians, who send in their instruments from as far as Tokyo. Musicians who play more obscure instruments rely on the skills of the Folk Music Center’s workshop to make specialized repairs, and slide guitar players from all over the country come to the store to play on its rare collection of Weissenborn guitars.

More than just its physical resources, the Folk Music Center demonstrates a sense of family that appeals to everyone, regardless of their interest in music. The glass on the front counter holds the family picture album. All three of Ellen’s sons have worked in the store at one point or another, and the two skilled repairmen, who are brothers, have been coming to the store since they were children.