For the Love of It

"There ain't no place around this holy town where a fella can get all them devils out of his throat," the expatriate folk singer complained--and he was right: for all its glories, Rome had no nightclub for folk singers. Such a cultural omission might have been easily endurable, but when an American Negro painter named Harold Bradley opened his II Folk Studio two years ago, Rome greeted it like springtime. Since then, the Studio has become a genuine academy of folkloric song and is fast becoming the most popular club in the city. Last week, noting the Studio's importance to the musical life of Rome, the Italian government even promised Bradley a subsidy.

The Studio's polyglot performers turn the dim basement room into a Cellar of Babel. Tennessee banjo pickers and American Negro folk singers take their turns with such musicians as a Sudanese oud player and a Japanese painter who sings improvised melodies to verses from Confucius. One night's program may include everything from a down-home treatment of Ballin' the Jack to a Yugoslavian dirge, and there is even one Italian folk singer whose songs are collected in the best ethnic tradition --from peasants, workmen, and lifers in an open-air prison in Sardinia.

Bradley, a 33-year-old former fullback for the Cleveland Browns, offers his audience as few comforts as possible. The Studio serves only hot wine and popcorn, and the customers are crowded unmercifully into a room scarcely larger than a pool table. The boss pays his performers only food and carfare, and the constantly changing program denies them even the salve of star billing. To pure folk singers, though, the problems are minor, and the Studio has become a shrine that wins the affectionate services of such stars as Odetta, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger when they pass through town. Bradley still has trouble explaining the source of his ambition. He gets a "re-truing" sense from folk songs, he says. But his success can be stated simply: for both audience and performers, the Studio offers the pleasure of making music for the love of it.

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