Photo by Dan Fong
Audio By Carbonatix
At age 90, singer, multi-instrumentalist and Denver Folklore Center founder Harry Tuft is a living repository of Colorado music history — and he’s not done making history of his own.
A member of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame and a progenitor of the Swallow Hill Music nonprofit, Tuft recently released “Friends, Lovers & Other Strangers,” a deeply felt new CD he’ll celebrate by way of a live performance on Aug. 30. The album features performances by a slew of major contributors to the local folk, country and roots scene over the past half-century: Tim and Mollie O’Brien, Nick Forster, John Magnie of the Subdudes, the Queen City Jazz Band and many other notables. But Tuft is the undisputed star of the show, and although he’s battled a series of health challenges over recent years, including prostate cancer, he doesn’t see the new recording as a swan song.
“One of the best things about being chronologically 90 is that I only feel about 50,” he says. “For the most part, I’m okay physically. I tore my Achilles tendon a few years ago, so I don’t walk quite as well as I used to. But otherwise, I’m in good shape, and I’m happy for that.”
Tuft tends to “live in the moment” and tries not to reflect too often. “But when I do look back, I mostly think about the people who have been my friends, who have been my co-workers, who have been kind enough to help whatever I was doing be successful,” he explains.
The longtime musician found his calling early: “I’ve always loved to sing,” he says. “As far as I can remember, I’ve been singing. I grew up in Philadelphia, and as a kid, I was fortunate to have my own room on the third floor of our house, and I had a radio. I’m a late-night person, and I would stay up late, listening to a variety of stations. I would cycle back and forth between them and learned all kinds of songs, some of which I still know to this day. I’m just a sucker for a song, you might say.”
Just as important, Tuft had a natural affinity for all manner of music-making devices, eventually learning to play piano, clarinet, ukulele and the six-string guitar. His skills naturally led to his involvement in the folk-music movement that boomed in Philadelphia during the Eisenhower era. Among the players he met and befriended was New York-based Dick Weissman, who’d go on to achieve notoriety as a member of The Journeymen, a highly influential combo created in conjunction with John Phillips and Scott McKenzie.
In 1960, Tuft traveled with Weissman to Manhattan, where a visit to Izzy Young’s New York Folklore Center filled him with inspiration that would come to fruition after he moved to Colorado. At that time, he wasn’t planning on a career in music and was studying to become an architect. But with encouragement from Young and others, he decided instead to open and operate the Denver Folklore Center, which debuted in March 1962.
His timing couldn’t have been better. Denver had become folkified, too, and the Folklore Center provided budding performers with instruments, accessories and lessons to begin mastering the craft. Tuft also served as a liaison to touring artists.
“One time, when Bob Dylan had come to town, his manager had sent his mail to the Folklore Center,” he recalls. “I was sort of the American Express for Bob at the time. He was staying at a motel on West Colfax, and I drove over and delivered the mail to him.”
Another acquaintance Tuft made through the Folklore Center was future Colorado Gov. Richard “Dick” Lamm. They’d first met when Lamm dropped off some literature for the local Young Democrats organization, and eventually they even performed together. “Dick loved clipping paragraphs from papers, and he loved poetry. So we did a little show where he would read or recite something, and I would do a song related to it. That was in, like, 1964.”
Their friendship paid dividends a couple of years later. By then, Tuft had branched out into concert promotion, shepherding local appearances by Joan Baez. He subsequently had the opportunity to handle a gig on behalf of The Mamas & the Papas, a quartet assembled by Journeymen veteran Phillips, but to make it happen, he required some monetary assistance.
“I needed a $5,000 guarantee,” Tuft says. So he went to Lamm and proposed a 50-50 split if the future governor would front the money.
“He said, ‘Sure.’ Later, he admitted that he didn’t have the slightest idea who The Mamas & the Papas were,” Tuft says. “It was simply his trust that if I said I needed $5,000, it was going to be okay. And the week before the concert, ‘Monday Monday’ (one of the biggest hits of the 1960s) came out, and he immediately relaxed. Dick took his share of the profits, and they financed his run for the state House.”
The favor was returned a few years later: “When Dick was running for governor [in 1974], John Denver was willing to do a fundraising concert,” Tuft remembers. “I brought him to the Moby gym in Fort Collins and raised, I think, $45,000. Dick’s campaign manager told me years later that it was the bulk of what they used to fund his campaign for governor. I felt good about that, because Dick was a cherished friend.” Lamm died in 2021, and Tuft stresses that “I miss him a lot.”
When Tuft wasn’t concentrating on the business of music, he was playing and recording. His discography includes 1976’s “Across the Blue Mountains” and 2011’s “Treasures Untold,” plus “Favorite Folk Songs Minus Guitar,” a collaboration with Weissman (who’s also a Colorado Music Hall of Famer), and a batch of discs in conjunction with Grubstake, a group with Steve Abbott and Jack Stanesco.
“Friends, Lovers & Other Strangers,” produced by Rich Moore, joins that oeuvre — but completing it wasn’t an easy process.
“I experienced some illness and laryngitis,” Tuft divulges. “There was almost a year in between when I first started it and when I finished it. If you listen carefully to some of the songs, you’ll hear a different tonal quality. We accepted some things when my voice was not really back. It wasn’t a full, clear voice. But one way or another, we got it done, and I like it quite a lot.”
The Paul Simon composition “American Tune” opens the album on a bittersweet note. According to Tuft, “I’ve been doing that song for years, and it should have had its place in history. But if you listen to the words, it’s all too sadly contemporary these days.” Other highlights include the Dylan number “Boots of Spanish Leather,” Chris Smither’s “No Love Today,” Spencer Bohren’s “Travelin’,” and “Nature Boy,” a chestnut that Tuft associates with a favorite crooner from his youth, Nat King Cole.
A couple of the other numbers have an air of farewell about them. Of Jane Voss’s “To All My Friends in Farflung Places,” Tuft says, “I’ve sung it at memorials, particularly for musicians.” And then there’s Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues,” which is “a very interesting song that I do very slowly. I decided to consider the slow part as a jazz band in New Orleans accompanying a funeral procession to the grave. And then I asked Queen City to do a four count and then do it up-tempo at the end — because once the body is in the ground, the band returns to do it in double time, as if the spirit has gone up to heaven. That’s when it takes off.”
Tuft, though, isn’t planning on leaving anytime soon. “The fact that people enjoy the music I make is a cherished reward for me,” he says, “and I’ll keep singing up to the point where I embarrass myself. But I’m not at that point yet.”
Harry Tuft’s 90th Birthday Celebration and CD Release will be held on Aug. 30 at 2 p.m., Daniels Hall at Swallow Hill Music, 71 E. Yale Ave. Buy tickets and lear more at swallowhillmusic.org/events/harrytufts90thbirthdayandcdreleasecelebration.
