I feel I have a few words to say about Derroll, as no one else seems to tell what I feel and what I know about him, and how I came to think he's an important person, and every one of us here can enjoy deep feelings of love, happiness and serenity listening to his songs and his music.

Derroll's music, and his role in the music and folk song field, has showed a deep change from the beginnings (or at least the first known recordings in the late fifties), until the last preformances and recordings of the '90s.

The legend says that Jack and Derroll had so much success with these songs they were hired to perform as U.S. traditional musicians at the Brussels International Expo'58 and that it's the reason why Derroll started to live in Belgium.

Anyway, the main elements of interest in these early songs remain inside the tradition, that is, mostly old-time songs about love and death, gambling and rambling and drinking, and, kind of bluegrass-influenced singing, and the feelings are sometimes obscured by a rude, irreverent humour, as it is the style of protest songs or in many traditional songs of every country since ages ..

But Derroll's own very personal style came out of this old-time songs through some events in Derroll's life during the late sixties - early seventies. Some of these events are bad, some are good and the result was, in fact, quite good. A musician's life is often made of hard times, that's a well known song theme: A stage artist frequently has to live what he (she) sings to give the whole thing some credibility, and the best of singers are often the more sensitive and vulnerable to love and hate, to drugs and drunkenness, to some disapproved moods or behaviors like violence, depression or obscenity. And once he (she) is in on the stage, the artist is usually captured by the audience and becomes a public character some times very different from the one he or she really is .. The bad thing is, Derroll, as many others, could not escape from this trap, and it almost caused his death.

The good things are:

He met Danny, who was going to be his wife, and who saved him from illness and all the bad things of a musician's life.

This seems to have been for Derroll Adams like the beginning of a different life. He retired from the public appearances for some time, but came back in ... with a new record, "Feeling fine".

Fortunately, Derroll has stuck to that style until his last performances, and he gave us an unvaluable heritage of very heart-moving music and poetry.

There is a reason why, as I see, Derroll has been and still is someone very important in folk music, and I'm glad to see he is receiving recognition as such:

Maybe he would have enlarged his international popular reputation in Folk or Country music styles, had he returned to the United States in the seventies. But he did not. Maybe he had personal reasons that had nothing to do with what I'm talking about, but maybe he felt it more important, in a kind of spiritual way, that he stayed in Europe.

This is the point: living here in Antwerp, Derroll became a major personality in the process of creating the poetic and musical culture of the english-speaking continental europeans.

I know, as I'm one of them, there are lots of people in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, who think and speak english and make music and sing in english. This is where Derroll's personality and work still are important: the way he used to sing songs in his very personal way, and his songs themselves, are now part of a tradition that's not exclusively american.

He opened the way for, and influenced even unknowingly, many european musicians and poets - french, english, dutch, ...- in keeping on playing and composing songs in their native language as well as in english, and enjoying it and, finally, making a whole tradition of their own. That's why I think Derroll's name is forever engraved in the rock of Folk music history.

Allen J.Redman.

Some thoughts and truths about Derroll Adams and Folk Music in a surprising site by Elliott Murphy

Dirk is a belgian banjoist who built some well done pages about Derroll, featuring a very complete discography and an interesting photo gallery.

Derroll's discography part I

Click on the record titles to reach a summary page, then browse the page to fins the appropriate record (and enjoy Dirk's "Derroll Pages")

1. The collection of (more or less) Traditional songs Derroll made with Jack Elliott appeared as two LP's found under some different names, depending on the editors. The most frequent to encounter are the italian edition:

Derroll's discography part II

6. Tribute to Derroll Adams: a CD released in August 2002, more info on Dirk's pages.