Ed Renehan
Managing Director, New Street Communications, LLC
Music
Recorded Summer 1976 in Woodstock, NY. Released by Folkways in October 1976. Now available as a CD from Smithsonian Folkways.
Happy Traum, Artie Traum (RIP, July 20th, 2008), and Ed Renehan performing at the WAMC/Linda Norris Auditorium in Albany, NY - March of 2008. Photograph by Jane Traum. Used by permission.
Click here for an August 2010 video performance of "Candy Man" as learned from Dave Van Ronk.
Click here for an August 2010 video performance of "Service Blues," in collaboration with my son Bill. I composed this in the early 1970s. Words & Music by Ed Renehan, © 2010, ASCAP.
Click here to listen to some sounds recorded summer/autumn 2008.
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I studied guitar with the great Gary Davis when I was a teenager. Not long after (age 20), I recorded with Pete Seeger for Folkways Records, now Smithsonian Folkways. Working out of the musically-rich Woodstock, NY area when in my mid-twenties, I also performed with Don McLean, Happy and Artie Traum, the tempestuous Phil Ochs, and many others.
My (long) past gigs include The Woodstock Playhouse, The Turning Point, Caffe Lena, Club Passim, and (more recently) WAMC Public Radio's Linda Norris Auditorium, (Albany, NY). Also many folk festivals across the Northeast. Folk festivals have included the Philadelphia Folk Fest, the good old Catskills Folk Festival, and Clearwater's Great Hudson River Revival.
Seeger and I did the soundtrack for the WMHT-Public Television program Hudson River Journeys (produced by Artie Traum in 2006).
Generally, I'm a roots-oriented player: unapologetically noncommercial and consciously rough around the edges. My primary influences are Gary Davis of course, as well as Dave van Ronk, Blind Willie McTell and the great Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. As he well knows, I also love and revere Levon Helm.
Along with Gary Davis, van Ronk and Terry were friends of mine, as are Seeger and Helm.
After a long hiatus (25 years), I returned to the concert stage in March of 2008 with Happy Traum and Artie Traum, and had a blast. I'm hoping to do a bit more of this in due course, just for the joy.
Note: Let it be recorded here that my son Bill is 47 times the guitarist I will ever be.
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"Ed Renehan is a superb traditional stylist with both his voice and his guitar."
- Pete Seeger, singer, songwriter, and activist
